Social media has become one of the most incredible marketing channels available. It gives you access to vast audiences that are self-segmented by interests. It offers two-way communication opportunities. And it’s easily accessible to any business.
With all that upside comes competition, as millions of businesses look to capture precious screen space.
So we’ve curated dozens of the absolute best social media tips to help you plan, produce, and promote content that gets more views and engagement.
These tips are all organized by steps in the process, from strategy to success tracking. Save this guide and jump right to the bit that could use a little boost.
Contents
- Social media tips for planning and strategy
- Social media tips for generating ideas
- Social media tips for content creation
- Social media tips to get found
- Social media tips for building your brand
- Social media tips for tracking results
Social media tips for planning and strategy
If you’re posting content on social media for a specific purpose—like generating leads and awareness for your business—it’ll help to have a strong social media strategy in place. These tips will help you develop a roadmap that starts you off right and keeps you on course.
1. Set SMART goals
Goals help you quantify what you’re trying to get out of social media. In fact, marketers who set objectives are 377% more likely to succeed than peers who don’t. But here’s the important part: Your goals need to be SMART.
A SMART goal is:
- Specific: They should be clear and detailed to eliminate ambiguity and provide direction.
- Measurable: You need a way to track progress and determine success.
- Achievable: Your goals should be realistic, considering your available bandwidth and resources.
- Relevant: Make them aligned with your broader objectives and long-term business goals.
- Time-bound: Have a deadline or time frame to encourage accountability.
With that in mind, consider these top social media goals:
- Increase your reach
- Gain new followers
- Increase audience engagement
- Drive website traffic
- Generate quality leads
Here’s an example of a SMART social media goal:
“Gain 5,000 new followers on Instagram from our target audience by the end of Q3.”
Follow the same pattern for each goal and record them for future reference.
2. Create a social media editorial calendar
Random acts of social media are fine for your personal account. But there are goals to achieve for your business, and that’ll take a more deliberate approach.
A social media editorial calendar is a visual representation of all the content you plan to post on various platforms over a set period of time.
An editorial calendar example in Trello.
What you put into your calendar is up to you. But consider adding details like your target audience, content type, connection to larger campaigns, and goals. This guide will help you create a useful editorial calendar.
🗓️ Fill your calendar fast! Download Your Copy & Paste Social Media Calendar
3. Plan to post at the right times
Posting content at the right time can help bolster your success for two reasons. First, most social media algorithms give some weight to the recency of content—newer posts have a better chance of being shown to more people.
Second, if you post when most of your followers are online, you could get an early engagement boost. That’s another signal to algorithms that your content needs to be distributed more widely.
You’ll see some general standards for the best time to post here, as well as tips to find the best time for your specific brand and audience.
4. Align social with other marketing channels
You can provide a seamless experience for your followers by being consistent across your online (and offline) presence.
That means things like making sure your profile pictures are the same across all your social sites by including your favicon or logo. It also means checking to make sure your business descriptions are consistent across all your social media profiles.
Remember that people will encounter your brand beyond social media. So you’ll also want your social profiles to be consistent with what you’re sharing across your other marketing channels.
For example, your targeted display ads across the web should follow your brand guidelines (more on creating brand guidelines in a bit). This will allow you to grow your following as people who see your business elsewhere online will easily be able to recognize your social media profiles’ posts.
Here’s an example of one business’s display ad versus its Instagram account:
The logo on the bottom left of the display ad above doesn’t fully match the one on this business’s Instagram page. The display ad also doesn’t touch on the main points mentioned in the brand’s bio. Meanwhile, the Instagram page doesn’t include any images of the apparel sold on the display ad. A consumer might be confused seeing this business on and off social media.
Social media tips for generating ideas
It can be tough to fill all those social media calendar slots with creative posts. This group of tips will help you generate a constant flow of great ideas.
5. Find trends…
Social media virality is all about trends. When there’s a groundswell of people taking the same challenge, doing the same dance, or talking about the same topic, you can jump in and ride the wave of visibility.
Luckily, many social platforms help you find what’s trending. TikTok, for example, offers several ways for you to find what’s gaining traction.
TikTok Trends tells you what’s getting popular on the platform.
You can also search hashtags in your social media app of choice to learn what type of content is the most popular for a particular topic.
6. …and know what they mean
While it can be tempting to jump on viral social media marketing trends in hopes of increasing your reach, you don’t want to sacrifice your tightly aligned branding in the process. Some trends may not be the best fit for your business’s social media accounts—and that’s okay. It’s better to be strategic about the social media trends you adopt.
Here’s an example of a brand hopping on a trending hashtag without understanding the intent. The trending hashtag was meant for domestic violence awareness, not as a fun conversation starter. This brand had to apologize for its tweet and eventually deleted it.
Take a beat when you spot a trend and make sure you understand the context around it.
7. Get ideas from your competitors
There are bound to be brands in your niche already having some success on social media. They’re a great source of ideas for your own accounts.
Now, we’re not suggesting you go and copy what your competitors do. Just take inspiration from their most popular content and riff off the ideas.
Hashtags are your friends again. If you run a dental practice, search #dentist to see what types of content other providers are posting.
8. Use all of the platforms’ features
It’s no secret that social media has evolved quite a bit since its rise in popularity. For example, Instagram started as a platform just to post static photos, but now there are multiple post and placement types like Instagram Reels, Stories, and more.
While it can be tempting to stick to what you’re familiar with, the introduction of various post types is a great way to spread your creative wings and get seen in more places.
If you’re unsure how to best execute a trendy new post type, like Instagram Live, try checking out other accounts in your industry again.
9. Repurpose content
Repurposing content means taking one asset and reusing it as other types of content and on different platforms.
Repurposing content has a double benefit. It helps you maintain brand consistency, and it’s an excellent way to publish more content in more places quickly.
Here’s an example: let’s say you posted a long-form video on how to solve plantar fasciitis to your physical therapy YouTube channel. You could break that up into smaller clips and post them on Instagram Reels and TikTok.
One common gold mine of sources for repurposing is your blog. All of those helpful articles can be broken up into social media posts and captions pretty quickly.
10. Mine Reddit for ideas
Reddit is where people go to share unfiltered ideas and opinions. It’s become a cultural nerve center that often exposes trending topics before they get shared on social media.
So if you’re searching for new Instagram or Facebook content ideas, do a little sleuthing through relevant subreddits. Try entering a topic into the search bar and see what discussions pop up.
Redditors will tell you exactly what they want from a business.
The cool part is that you’re not only getting new content ideas, you’re seeing the sentiment around a topic unfold in real-time. That’ll help you decide how to address the topic in your posts.
11. Use the 70-20-10 rule
While you’re ideating your next round of social content, consider this rule of thumb:
- 70% of your posts should be informational and focused on helping your followers.
- 20% of your posts should be emotional content that connects your audience with your culture and core values.
- 10% of your posts should be promotional content to directly promote your work, products, and services.
That’ll help you maintain a great reputation with your audience while still finding new customers for what you sell (which is probably one of your social media goals!).
12. Repost content from other accounts
Just about every social media platform has a repost feature of some type. TikTok goes even further, letting you create a stitch and duet to meld your video with existing content.
Reposting is a low-lift option to increase your posting frequency. It can also get you in front of the original poster’s audience—a fun way to gain awareness.
Keep reposts to no more than about 20% of your activity. And make sure that both the content and the creator you’re reposting align with your brand.
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Social media tips for content creation
It’s time to put ideas into action! Here, we’ll detail some ways you can make each post you publish a little more engaging.
13. Tailor your content to each platform
This is huge for social media management: Tailor your message to each platform.
Yes, we recommended repurposing content. But copy-and-pasting it across networks won’t work because of style, tone, format, and audience expectations.
Take the time to edit your posts for each channel to get the most engagement. It’ll be worth it.
For example:
- LinkedIn posts are long and lesson-y, often linking to the content in the first comment.
- X posts skew shorter, often including open-ended questions and eye-catching, space-saving emojis.
- The vibe on TikTok is altogether different. Fast-paced, fun videos are the winner there.
Review this description of the most popular social media platforms and shape your future posts to fit each one.
14. Make your content accessible
Making content accessible means adding features that help everyone understand and enjoy your social posts. When you do that, you’ll instantly expand your audience (a large portion of the world’s population has cognitive, vision, or neurological disabilities that make viewing online content difficult).
There are lots of ways you can make it easier for people to view and process your content, including:
- Offer accessible descriptions and captions
- Capitalize the first letter in each word of a hashtag
- Express diversity in your images
- Add captions to videos
This guide offers several more great digital accessibility ideas.
15. Use the correct image and video sizes
Each platform has its own guidelines for images and videos. Make sure you’re familiar with them so your content can be published smoothly (and it won’t look weird!).
We’ve published an updated guide to social media image and video specifications. This handy chart will get you started.
16. Try more video
Did you know that businesses that use video on marketing channels, such as social media, generate 66% more qualified leads per year and grow revenue nearly 50% faster than those that don’t?
Plus, your audience expects video content; 72% of consumers prefer watching videos to learn about new products or services over any other type of marketing collateral.
It can be tricky to hop on the video bandwagon since most businesses assume it needs to be a full-fledged production. While those types of videos are great if you have the bandwidth and budget to produce them, it’s important to note that videos quickly shot from your phone can be just as effective.
Try starting off small by brainstorming a few quick ideas you could pull off in-house, like employee or customer testimonial videos, behind-the-scenes footage of your business, product demos, and much more.
17. Post consistently, not constantly
There’s a balance between posting regularly on social media to maximize awareness and relevancy and flooding your followers’ feeds to the point of exhaustion.
The best publishing frequency is different for each platform. For example, we recently published a guide sharing how often you should post on TikTok (spoiler: the data says to post about once every other day).
Testing and following the analytics will tell you if you’re posting too much, so try a few different cadences and monitor the results. But mostly, just make sure everything you post has real value. Too much isn’t great, but poor quality of any amount is worse.
18. Add links wherever possible
One of your social media goals may be to drive traffic from your social platforms to your website. If so, try to maximize the number of places you place links.
Your bio is an important place for these links. That’s because many people will click on your account to learn more about you.
Some social platforms restrict how many links you can include. A Linktree is helpful here. When someone clicks it, they’ll see several links to different locations of your choosing.
A few other locations ripe for linking are:
- Post captions (if allowed)
- Instagram Stories
- YouTube video descriptions
19. Write engaging calls to action
Calls to action (CTAs) are those little blurbs of text that direct people to take an action like “Learn more,” “Download the guide,” or “Shop now.”
Whenever you want someone to do something beyond enjoying your social post, you should include a clear, concise, and compelling call to action.
Make your CTAs stand out and confirm what people get when they click.
This is the perfect place for some A/B testing. Try a few different CTAs, see which one motivates the most action, and double down on it.
Social media tips to get found
No matter how good your strategy or content is, you won’t hit your goals if people don’t see it. These tips are designed to help your content show up in more places and in front of more people on social.
20. Use hashtags strategically
Hashtags are the organizational tools of social media sites. When you add a hashtag to your post, people can see it when they search for that term.
The key is to use hashtags strategically. Research which ones are big in your industry or area. Find out what your competitors are using. Follow trending hashtags to see when your brand should jump in.
Once you have the right list of hashtags, include a few of them in your captions. If you want to add a bunch, try putting some in the first comment so your post doesn’t look like spam.
21. Understand each platform’s algorithm
Social media algorithms are complex systems that combine artificial intelligence and rules-based decision-making to decide what content users see when they visit the site.
The overall goal of most (maybe all) social media algorithms is to keep you on the platform longer. But they each have a little different focus on how to do it. And when you understand those nuances, you can tweak your content so it shows up more often on every social site.
Use these guides to learn about the biggest social media algorithms:
22. Optimize your bio
We talked about the importance of your bio as the de facto home page people can visit to learn more about your brand. Well, there are several things you can do to optimize your bio to make it easier to find and more helpful to visitors.
Nail the basics
Ensure that your social media profiles are complete, professional, and consistent across all platforms. Use your business logo as your profile picture and maintain a consistent color scheme and tone/voice. This creates a cohesive brand image that users can easily recognize.
Add your website URL
Don’t underestimate the power of a well-placed URL. Add your website URL to your Instagram and Facebook profiles. For platforms like Instagram, where clickable links in posts are limited, having a link in your bio is crucial.
Use link trees
For Instagram platforms and other platforms with limited linking options, consider using a link tree. This tool allows you to create a single link that leads to multiple destinations, such as different pages on your website, recent blog posts, or special offers. This makes it easier for followers to find what they’re interested in, ultimately driving more traffic to your site.
Chewy, an American online retailer for pet food and other pet-related products, does a phenomenal job at optimizing its social media profiles, such as using its logo, adding a linktree, and tagging associated accounts.
Here’s some inspiration for each of your bios:
23. Leverage UGC
We could have listed user-generated content (UGC) under the ideas section because it’s a clever tactic for letting your audience create content for you. But its even bigger benefit is that when you post UGC, you expand your network exponentially.
Here’s how one beauty brand does it. They created the hashtag #giftedyysl. People who use their product can add it to their posts, and the brand gets access to those users’ networks.
For an extra boost, try reposting that content to your page and tagging the original creator.
24. Launch contests and giveaways
Contests and giveaways are highly effective for boosting engagement and driving traffic to your website. They can also help you grow your account quickly.
One of the reasons they work so well is that you can set the rules to encourage all the actions you want to happen.
For example, if you want to attract new followers, simply include “follow this page” as one of the contest rules.
Here are a few more tips for running a successful social media contest or giveaway:
- Plan well: Plan your contest carefully, ensuring it aligns with your brand and appeals to your target audience.
- Pick the right prize: Decide on a prize that’s equal to the ask. If you’re asking people to take several steps and share information with you, such as an email address, then the prize should be substantial enough to warrant those steps.
- Promote your contest: Promote your contest across all your social media platforms.
- Announce the winner: Make sure to publish a post congratulating the winner so people know it was legit and to drum up a little extra buzz.
25. Work with influencers
Influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach a larger audience and drive traffic. Influencers have established trust with their audience, which you can tap into. Plus, their recommendations carry weight—so when they speak positively about your brand, people will listen.
The first step is to identify influencers who align with your brand and have an engaged following. Reach out to them with a proposal for collaboration. This could be a sponsored post, a takeover of your social media account, or a joint giveaway.
Always ensure that your collaboration feels authentic. Influencers should genuinely like and use your product or service. Authenticity resonates with audiences and is more likely to drive traffic to your website.
Vacation rental company Airbnb collaborates with many influencers to promote their brand, creating authentic partnerships that help build an audience and ultimately drive traffic and engagement. For example, the brand partnered with fashion designer Phillip Lim to entice a younger demographic who is all about purchasing luxury goods and traveling.
26. Create click-worthy video thumbnails
A thumbnail is the still image people see when they’re perusing videos on platforms like YouTube or the Instagram Explore page. They give viewers a quick snapshot of what’s in the video and why they should watch.
The more attention-grabbing and relevant you can make your thumbnails, the more people will click on them.
Here are a few tips:
- Create an emotional impact: Use bright colors, smiling faces, and a key moment from the video to get people excited about your contact.
- Build intrigue: Add a question to the thumbnail that people will want to learn the answer to.
- Be real: Avoid fake, click-baity images and titles that mislead people into clicking.
27. Engage with your audience
Social media is a conversation, not a lecture. Engaging with your audience through comments, likes, and shares is key. Start by replying to anyone who responds to your posts. Or try commenting on other business profiles. They’ll likely engage to boost their own posts.
These actions also help you rank with the algorithms. Most of them use engagement as a ranking factor, so when you continue a conversation, you’re simultaneously increasing engagement.
28. Invest in paid social media ads
The organic strategies we’ve listed so far build a strong foundation for your presence and growth on social media. Investing in paid social media advertising is a way to build on that success and significantly boost your reach and results.
Every major social media platform offers multiple types of targeted ads. That means you can send the perfect ad type to your ideal audience.
Here are guides to some of the best social media ad platforms available:
Social media tips for building your brand
Social media is the perfect channel to generate awareness and establish (and grow!) your brand’s digital presence. These tips will show you how to get the best brand building out of social platforms.
29. Stay consistent across channels
If you’ve noticed, we’ve mentioned consistency several times through this list of tips (we’re consistent about consistency!). In this case, it’s because it’s a crucial aspect of constructing a brand within an audience’s consciousness.
We’ve already talked about carrying over things like logos and color schemes across ads, your website, and social. Being consistent across social media also means maintaining a voice and tone.
What you want to avoid is giving your audience whiplash if they read your Facebook post and then stumble on an Instagram Reel, and they have vastly different tones and focus on wildly unrelated ideas.
30. Include NAP info
No, this isn’t about your afternoon sleeping schedule. NAP refers to your business’s name, address, and phone number. Those are the basic pieces of information you typically want included on your website and business listings.
It’s similar for your social media profiles, although your website will often replace your phone number there. Notice how this beauty salon uses a clickable pin instead of listing its address? This makes it easy for people to map its location.
Having your version of NAP so readily accessible removes some of the friction of contacting you. So when someone gets inspired by the gorgeous style you just posted, they can locate your studio in a jiffy.
31. Develop social media branding guidelines
Social media branding is the process of shaping and maintaining a consistent identity, voice, and visual style across social platforms to build recognition and trust. That consistency will help people remember your business and keep you apart from your competitors.
Your brand identity includes things like your logo, brand voice, colors, and fonts.
The job here is to list out the aspects of your brand that are important to you in a brand kit or set of guidelines. Then add instructions for how they’re to be used in social media content.
Use this brand kit template to organize your social media branding guidelines.
32. Publish thought leadership content
Thought leadership content is when you share your expertise, advice, or unique perspective to help people solve a problem or take a different view on a subject. This type of content should be a big part of your strategy because it positions you as the go-to expert—someone customers can trust when they’re ready to buy.
There are nearly endless options for thought leadership content. Try these for starters:
- Behind-the-scenes advice post: Like a local roofing company sharing a short video explaining “3 signs your roof needs repair before winter.”
- Industry insight commentary: For example, a physical therapy clinic shares a LinkedIn post breaking down a recent study on workplace posture and adds their take on how small daily stretches can prevent pain.
- Myth-busting post: A local accountant could post a quick Reel on “Top 3 tax myths that cost small businesses money.”
- Future trend prediction: Like a landscaping company posting“5 outdoor design trends we expect to see this spring.”
Social media tips for tracking results
Last but far from least, these tips will help you gain valuable insights from your social media analytics and apply them to make future content even better.
33. Pick the right metrics
Focus on the metrics that align with the goals you set. If boosting engagement was one of your objectives, then that’s a KPI you’ll track.
Over time, you’ll refine your list of measurements. These are common ones you may want to start with:
- Impressions: The total number of times your post shows up on people’s screens (even if the same person sees it more than once).
- Reach: The number of unique people who actually saw your post.
- Engagement rate: The percentage of people who liked, shared, commented, or interacted with your post out of everyone who saw it.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked on your link after seeing your post.
- Follower count: The number of people who have chosen to follow your business’s account.
34. Experiment often
Marketing is all about trial and error. The “flops” are just as valuable as the wins in regard to learning what works best.
That’s why experimentation belongs on a list of best social media tips. You have to try posting different types of content at various times on other platforms to home in on the perfect mix for your brand.
And then, you’ve got to do it again because technologies and behaviors are always on the move.
Try different content themes and types to see which works best.
35. Benchmark your performance
Change over time is the critical factor in measuring your social media performance. Saying you have 60,000 followers may be great, or it may be terrible if last month you had 70K and your competitor has 1 million.
Benchmarks provide a starting point when you begin. They also let you know if you’re keeping up with your industry as you progress.
Gathering your brand’s benchmarks is easy. Simply not where you are today for any given metric.
Finding competitive benchmarks takes a little sleuthing. You can find some metrics, like follower counts, in your competitors’ social profiles. For other measurements, it’ll be much easier to use a social media tool (think: Sprout Social or Sprinklr). They’ll let you create a dashboard of your competitors’ reach, impressions, and so on, as well as compare them to your own.
Our Facebook Advertising Benchmarks are a great place to measure your ad success against others in your industry.
36. Complete a social media audit
Performance audits are critical for your ongoing improvement. They expose what’s working and what’s not, and identify anything requiring immediate attention.
Use this social media audit process to make it easy. It includes a template that’ll help keep it all organized.
Here are a few of the things you’ll do:
- Check that all images and bios across your profiles feature the same brand colors, logo, and mission.
- Identify each channel’s best-performing posts and overall results
- Review content against your brand guidelines.
- Dig into your audience characteristics.
Most of this can be done within the platform itself or using social media management tools. Then set up an audit report in a spreadsheet and use it to adjust your strategy.
Grow with these social media tips
Billions of people go to social media apps to connect, search, and be entertained. They’re also open to learning about new brands, products, and providers. You can tap into this huge, segmented community with the right social media strategy.
The tips we’ve laid out here will help you plan, produce, and promote the type of content that stops scrollers and encourages them to learn more about your business. Refer to them often, especially when you see your social growth plateau.
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