51 Social Media Strategies to Get the Most Out of Your Social Media Plan

There is a huge difference between“Doing Social” and “Being Social”. Doing social is easy but being social isn’t. There’s a lot more to social media marketing strategies and plan than simply posting a few posts on Facebook and Instagram in a month. 82 percent of business owners are using social media to market their business.

With the growing competition and emerging new social media platforms, you need to think about social media through a strategic prism. Let’s take a look at the best way to create a winning social media plan with these 51 social media marketing strategies:

#1. Do Social Listening

Social media marketing starts with listening. You can’t just randomly post anything that people aren’t even interested in. You need to pay attention to what people are talking about in your industry, products or services.

What are their needs and what they are saying through social media? Are they reaching out to you or your competitors? When do they use the social media channels the most?

– Identify what topics your potential customers are talking about.
– Keep a pulse on the industry, where it’s going, how it’s being perceived.
– Perform customer research
– Conduct competitive research

#2. Select Your SMART Social Goals

Your goals will be customized to your business niche, needs, and budget. The goals should complement your overarching business objectives. However, typical types of social media goals you could consider (in a suitable SMART-style) include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing sales
• Improving your ROI
• Driving people to your website
• Grow your fan/follower base

#3. Understand Your Social Media Audience

There are 2.27 billion monthly active Facebook users and 111.54 million users use Instagram monthly. Look at your social media marketing goals you have set previously.

Which social media channel do you think will help you meet those goals?

To better identify the relevant channels, you will have to understand the demographics and psychographics of your target audience. Find out which social channels your intended audience spends most of their time on.

If research does not help you find the relevant channel, conduct a survey to identify what are the most preferred social accounts of your potential customers. Another way to find if a channel fits your industry is to look into the demographics. We are sharing the demographics details for top social media channels:

Facebook demographics and usage:
• # of monthly active users: 2.7 billion
• Largest age group: 25-34 (26.3%)
• Gender: 44% female, 56% male
• Time spent per day: 38 minutes

Instagram demographics and usage:
• # of monthly active users: 1 billion
• Largest age group: 25-34 (33.1%)
• Gender: 57% female, 43% male
• Average time spent per day: 29 minutes

Twitter demographics and usage
• # of daily active users: 187 million
• Largest age group: 30-49 (44%)
• Gender: 32% female, 68% male
• Time spent per day/week: 3.53 minutes per session

LinkedIn demographics and usage
• # of total users: 738 million
• Largest age group: 46-55
• Gender: 51% male, 49% female
• 63% of LinkedIn users access the network monthly, and 22% weekly.

TikTok demographics and usage
• # of monthly active users: 100 million
• Largest age group: 18-24
• Gender: 59% female, 41% male
• Time spent per day: 45+ minutes

Pinterest demographics and usage
• # of monthly active users: 400+ million
• Largest age group: 30-49
• Gender: 78% female, 22% male
• Time spent per day: 14.2 minutes

#4. What your competitors are doing?

Unless you operate in a monopoly market, you need to know what your competitors are doing in order to do better than them. Whom are they targeting? What kind of posts they are posting? How they are communicating with their customers?

A social media competitor analysis can help you find answers to these questions. You could use a tool like Buzzsumo to discover what your competitors are doing and their most successful social pieces of content.

#5. Create a social media playbook

A social media playbook is a strategic plan that includes the smallest details of how you should execute your social media marketing plans. A playbook typically contains the following components:

Audience-Target audience lists by age, industry, location, job role, etc.

Channels-Write down the channels you want to focus on right now based on your goals.

Tone and style-What should be your brand’s social media voice or personality? For example, be more playful on Twitter and more professional on LinkedIn.

Core messages-What is the primary message that will convey your brand’s value?

Content themes-Write down the main themes and topics you want to engage in on social channels.

Posting mix-Types of posts you will create, such as videos, images, e-books, infographics, articles etc.

Posting frequency-How often do you plan to post and at what times of the day? This varies with social channels and audience.

Guidelines-Policies and processes to guide social media use (if any).

#6. Create a social media plan

When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. A lack of social media plan gives an advantage to your competitors because they will do what they do best without having one extra competition from your company. You need a good social media plan to jot down what to prioritize when to execute, and how to measure to get better ROI.

#7. Find out the social media challenges

Once you start posting on social media, you will come to a point when you will say “Although we consistently post on social, we are not achieving ideal engagement levels.” According to SproutSocial, the top social media marketing challenges are reaching out to the target audience, measuring ROI, publishing content, and more.

List down your social marketing challenges with simple explanations of how these barriers are impacting your marketing efforts. Once you write down the challenges, brainstorm possible solutions to the challenges you previously listed.

#8. What Types of Content You Intend to Post

The only way to be successful on social media is to create and post high-quality contents that are worthy to be shared by people. If you just share promotional materials, people won’t bother to even see your post. Remember, social networks are meant to be social.

Before you sell, try to gain their confidence and trust. Engage and communicate with them. If you know the interests of your followers, you can easily identify what type of content they like the most. Here are the 11types of social media content you can create:

1. Written posts, blogs, articles, guides, and more
2. Electronic books (eBooks)
3. Links to external content
4. Images
5. Videos
6. Video Stories
7. Live Videos
8. Infographics
9. Contests
10. Announcements
11. Reviews

#9. Use Social Media Tools

If you’re serious about turning social media marketing into a profitable funnel, you need to start using social media management tools. If you’re targeting 6 channels and post three times in a day, imagine how much time it will take to post on every platform.

Even if you can manage your posting process well, do you or your staff will have time to engage the audience, do social listening, create content, or track results. Some of the popular social media tools are:
• Buffer
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Agora Pulse
• Sendible
• eClincher
• Social Pilot
• CoSchedule
• Crowdfire
• Post Planner
• falcon.io
• Salesforce Social Studio
• Zoho Social
• Likeable Hub

#10. Get your account optimized properly

Social media is about humanizing your brand. Your social profiles are the face of your business. You don’t want to have the wrong first impressions on people. You must have a consistent visual look across all of your social channels. Use high-quality colors, logos, and graphics on each network.

Complete your bios and profiles. Tag or list your profile with the proper location and address. Once you’re done, check your social profile as a viewer and check whether it interests you?

#11. Customize Each of Your Social Network

Every social channel is different and unique. You should customize your content for each network.

For instance, you can’t write more than 280 characters in a tweet. You must include hashtags. And, remember tweets with images perform far better than those without.

Facebook posts can be longer than tweets, but don’t forget to add images or videos. Short videos perform well on Facebook. Instagram is an image-based social network, so make sure to share photos and short videos often.

LinkedIn is a professional network, so post content to educate people and audiences. Post at least one video per week on YouTube and avoid simply uploading your existing television ads.

#12. Get Creative with Videos

YouTube is huge right now, but we can’t deny the power of video marketing on Instagram and TikTok. Visuals are powerful ways to drive more engagement and get immediate reactions. People love “raw” quality and “realness” of social media videos.

That’s why posting videos on social media can help your brand make a deeper connection. Check out this video post by Guess. Guess’ #inmydenim campaign targeting Generation Z went viral with 41.3M views.

#13. Consider Working with Brand Advocates

You should take leverage of your customers who are happy and eager to promote your brand on social media. These are your brand advocates. Whether they are influencers or not, what they do have is a solid reputation among peers and that gives you the added advantage.

Share their generated content on your social channels and let them know you respect them. Their word-of-mouth marketing can drive new business.

#14. Timing is crucial in social media

You’ve got the best content to post on social media but if those pieces of content are not reaching the audience at the right time, your social campaigns don’t perform well.

When you share your posts on social media depends on the time when customers actually spend time browsing the specific platform at that particular time.

The best times to post on social media overall is 10:00 AM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. However, if you’re using multiple social channels, this time varies, such as

• The best time to post on Facebook is 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• The best time to post on Instagram is 11:00 AM on Wednesdays.
• The best time to post on Twitter is 8:00 AM on Mondays and Thursdays.
• The best time to post on LinkedIn is 9:00 AM on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

#15. Know the art of storytelling

It’s the stories that sell, not the products! People connect to stories. They connect emotionally with a brand and then make a purchase based on how strong that connection is.

For example, Airbnb uploaded a super cool animated video that garnered millions of views. Break your story into parts and share successive posts to relate the whole story from the beginning to the end.

#16. Humanize your brand

We always suggest our clients go beyond the glass screens of digital devices and think like their audience. You can’t just keep promoting your products and services and ignore what your customers want.

Your business is established by people for people. Show the humans behind your brand. Tell their stories, tell what you stand for, and display your culture as well as your values.

#17. Dig deeper into social media analytics

All social media channels have their own in-built analysts tool that helps you learn what generates more traffic, clicks, shares, etc. You can effectively use social media analytics data to drive performance.

Review what type of posts garner the maximum number of likes, shares, impressions, clicks, etc.

Optimize your social campaigns based on those data and improve your results over time. Check these analytics data to optimize your next campaigns:

• Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post.
• Clicks. The number of clicks on your content. Tracking clicks per campaign.
• Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions.
• Organic and paid likes: Compare organic versus paid campaign performance.
• Sentiment. Do sentiment analysis to know how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag.

#19. Start conversations, don’t just post

Social media is a platform where people interact with each other digitally. So, you should post content that encourages engagement. Don’t just post content for the sake of posting. Ask questions to your audience and tag other users.

Engage users through comments. A leading project management tool, Asana, used videos to show their users and potential customers ways to use their tool to improve productivity. This helped the brand to generate more views per video and get more leads.

#20. Leverage the Power of User Generated Content

You have to divide your social media contents into three parts – 3 parts branding, 1 part promotional and 6 parts what others share with you. If your customers are already producing content related to your brand, don’t hesitate to share them on social media channels.

This process will help you encourage other customers to share their photos and images, thus helping you generate more user generate content.

#21. Don’t forget your employees in social media marketing

When it comes to user generated content, no one knows your company better than your employees. These are the people behind your success. So leverage their strength and encourage them to share brand-related content on their social media channels while tagging your brand.

They can be your big brand advocates. Remember, to offer incentives for employees that post the most.

#22. Memes and GIFs, try them

GIFs and memes are a great way to add humor to your social media marketing. Research shows that memes drive more engagement than static images and text-based social contents.

There is a tool called MemeGenerator and GIPHY where you can find memes and GIFs. Try them and you will see how this modern form of communication drive more engagement on your social media.

#23. Start Doing Facebook and Instagram Carousel Ads

Facebook and Instagram are great places to advertise your products and services, but there is huge competition. Try advertising your business through carousel ads with captivating images and ad copy.

You can even add transitions, music, or narration. Carousel ads are known to drive potential engagement of your content.

#24. Live Video Broadcasting Can Be Beneficial

Live video has become incredibly popular on Facebook and Instagram. Live video broadcasting allows brands to reach consumers directly with an interactive session. Companies such as Benefit Cosmetics that use live platforms to market their products and services have seen much success.

Benefit Cosmetics started creating a weekly live show called “Tipsy Tricks with Benefit!”. The live videos have become popular and the company is generating more sales for their products.

#25. Start a Facebook group

Now is the time to create a Facebook group. With the change in Facebook’s algorithm, people will now be seeing more content from friends than brands. – now is the time.

Benefits of running a Facebook group include an increase in your website traffic, promotion of your products and services in a non-salesy way, better engagement with your audience and growth of your business.

#26. Stay up to date with the latest trends

Social media algorithms keep on changing and so do their features. Keep yourself abreast of the latest trends and changes in social media.

For example, right now, live video content is only climbing and is continuing to grow. Instagram stories are becoming a go-to thing for businesses.

Influencer marketing is all the rage right now. Virtual reality in eCommerce social media marketing is becoming more popular day by day.

#27. Hashtags work

Using proper hashtags with each social media post help your page gain visibility when people search for the same hashtag on platforms. It encourages people to share on social media in ways that you can track.

#28. Use a mix of diverse types of content

Publishing promotional posts non-stop will turn your audience off to your brand. If you want to showcase that you care for your customers, use a diverse mix of contents.

In order to avoid those promotional posting schedules, try posting job postings, company culture posts, community news, industry news, branded content, informative blog posts, and much more.

#29. Try contests and free giveaways

Social media contests are a big hit because people do like to get free stuff. You will notice a huge growth in followers with a free giveaway contest. Just pick the channel that you want to focus your growth or engagement on, create good quality graphics, and set a deadline to enter the contest.

Keep track of the names of entrants in a spreadsheet and announce the winner in the end.

#30. Keep a check on word count on each social media channel

It’s not always good to use the maximum word count on social media channels as people don’t have time to read lengthy posts. Keep your posts tight and concise.

For example, CoSchedule found that Facebook posts with 111 character count perform the best. The same goes for other social media channels.

#31. Be authentic, always

Always strive to create posts that inspire and entertain your potential customers. People come to social media platforms to gain knowledge, inspiration, and entertain themselves. If your brand fulfils these requirements, you will see a sharp growth in your followers and page likes as well as post engagement.

#32. Look to Generation Z

If millennials are your biggest marketing target, social media platforms are the right channels for marketing your business. Millennials are gaining in buying power and it’ll only grow larger in the next few years.

Therefore, it’s important to tweak your messaging to entice these generation Z people.

They want to see only what’s relevant to them and resonate with their personal experiences. Know their pain points and map your product or service to those pain points.

#33. CTA matters even in social media marketing

Whether you’re doing paid ads on social media or posting entertaining posts, nothing will be successful without a call-to-action button. A strategically placed CTA helps you direct your followers to take the right direction.

Tell them whether you want them to share, like, or visit your site to complete a particular action.

#34. Be consistent

We have said it billion times to brands looking to generate engagement through social media. Get on a consistent posting schedule. Post on social media every day.

Each time you post is a good opportunity to connect with your audience. Posting each day consistently maximizes your organic reach.

#35. Use emoticons

92% of the online population use emojis. Emoticons enable you to speak the same language as your customer base. When your social media posts contain emojis, they become much more noticeable. You can add a bit of fun to your marketing.

Make sure to use appropriate emojis to convey the emotions with the desired tone and proper message. Stick with your brand messaging and don’t try to force emojis anywhere. Now that you have some tips, it’s time to hit the ground running.

#36. Virtual reality can help
As far as social media marketing is concerned, you could use virtual reality (VR) features to produce interactive posts for your audience.

Facebook supports 360 videos and photos. Snapchat filters are also an example of virtual reality.

Instagram also offers the virtual reality feature and that is beneficial for brands selling products online as people can try before they buy through the VR feature.

Check out this video by Coachella and you will understand how important it is for your own marketing strategy.

#37. Conduct polls on social media

Conducting polls regularly can help you get an insight into your customers’ preferences and likes. Just like online reviews, many businesses believe in the power of polls and surveys.

Conducting polls help in two ways: you get to know your audience and you get to engage with your customers.

Do it strategically with well-defined questions and make it interesting so users participate in the polls.

#38. Engage commenters as quickly as possible

One major form of engagement on social media is comments. Posts that receive more comments are displayed on the top of social media feeds. Facebook and Instagram use “engagement” as a primary factor in determining what content should or should not be displayed.

Engage your commenters as quickly as possible. The faster you react to the comments, the more likely it is that other users will comment on your post.

#39. Build relationships, don’t just focus on follower count

The entire process of marketing your business through social media will go in vain if you don’t start to build relationships with your audience. Customer relationships stay longer, but followers just leave you. around the world.

Here is what you can do:
• Answer the questions people ask you on social media.
• @Mention people when you post on social media.
• Participate in group conversations.
• Provide insights and information that interest users
• Reply when people mention you.
• Start a conversation with a reply.

#40. Keep your posts positive and motivating

People appreciate brands that convey positive messaging and motivational posts. You cannot just go on posting branding content. You need to convey a positive impression of your social media branding.

Your social media voice reflects your business’s overall personality and professional attitude.

If you take a stand on a topic, people will adore your brand. Here is what Sprout Social found when it asked customers “Issues you want brands to take a stand on”:

#41. Celebrate “National Whatever Day!”

In a world full of busy schedules, people do celebrate national holidays to bring joy into their lives. You will find a trillion quirky holidays.

Post content and wish people on these days for a bit of inspiration. Take this, for example, Hootsuite celebrated International Dog Day with this post.

#42. Go behind the scenes

Another thing that people love is “behind the scenes”. Whether it’s a live video or an edited one, show your audience what’s happening behind the scenes.

You can share these behind the scenes videos: an office tour, people working and laughing together, people working on a project together, office celebrations, and much more.

#43. Improve on competitors’ past content

Your competitors are allocating time, resources, and money to social media marketing now more than ever before. A smart way to stay ahead of your competitors is to find the best performing posts of your competitors and improve their past content with something better. Now your posts will have a higher chance of success.

#44. Create a realistic social media budget

To get good returns from social media marketing, you need to invest money. Set a realistic budget to get better ROI from your marketing efforts. Most successful companies are spending 15% to 25% of their digital marketing budget on social media marketing, both organic and paid.

This is going to increase in the coming years with the growing popularity of social media channels. Also, remember to be realistic about what you can produce. Based upon your budget, create balanced content that your target audience most enjoy and you’re most comfortable making.

#45. Make a slow-motion video

Slow-motion videos look cool and entice users. Whether you’re promoting your services, products, or showing the office environment, create action shots with music to capture emotions in action with a slow-motion effect.

#46. Do cross-campaign promotion

Don’t just copy and paste the same content to all your different networks. If you’re posting an Instagram image to Twitter the quality might be poor. Similarly, a funny video on LinkedIn won’t work. LinkedIn users are on the network with the goal of improvement.

First, determine your social media metrics for each network. Then create campaigns based on those metrics. Prepare a social media plan for each channel and design images, videos, and posts specifically for each network.

#47. Share hacks, tips, tricks, and secrets

What tips and tricks can you share with your audience? If you want to make your brand an industry expert, share tips and hacks that people don’t know. These types of content perform well.

Check this post by Supergoof. They shared SPF hacks and their Instagram stories showed a higher level of interaction.

#48. Ask your followers for advice

People love to share what they know. Influencer Jillian Harris asked for some advice about getting her kids to eat vegetarian lunches and worked the responses that poured into some educational content.

#49. Post your real reviews

If people are talking about you and posting reviews on review sites or other channels, don’t forget to brag about it. Testimonials from real clients can be used in social media posts in enticing ways. Tag the person who shared the reviews to get even more clicks, likes, and shares.

#50. Focus on getting reactions

The main feature of top social media networks is the capability to add reactions. Instead of getting more likes and shares, create a post wherein users can choose from “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry” emojis as comments in your post.

This way you can even engage your followers and gauge interest in a certain topic.

#51. Partner with another brand

Choose a brand that is not a direct competitor to your band but you have similar audience demographics. Cross-promote your products or services may also benefit from your products or services so you both can benefit from exposure in new markets.

Bottom Line

There you have it: 51 Social Media Strategies that can help you get the most out of your social media plan. If you want to promote your company, we have hundreds of other social strategies to grow your visibility, audience base, and business. Contact our social media experts and get your social media wheel spinning.

And, don’t forget to share with us which strategy you liked the most. Stay tuned to learn more of such tips for social media marketing to get your business to the next level of success.

About the Author

Naveen Gupta is the founder and CEO of Fuel4Media Technologies. Fuel4Media is India’s fastest growing Social Media Marketing Company, App Store Optimization, Mobile App Marketing, and Digital Marketing company.

His forte lies in developing and executing innovative mobile and web technologies, digital marketing and mobile marketing strategies, and everything related to digital.

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