101 Social Media Tips For 2018 – Your Road to Success

Social media platforms have become extremely powerful tools for businesses these days, which make it necessary for businesses to know about some effective social media tips. Nowadays, consumers continually interact with brands as well as with each other through social media, which has a significant impact on their purchasing decisions. If you fail to communicate with your audience through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+, you’re actually missing out on something that has the ability of make or break your business. So, to attain success in your entrepreneurial endeavor, you’ve to keep a comprehensive handbook of social media tips for business handy. Now, let me walk you through the actual steps of boosting your online presence. With the help of these 101 social media tips, you can master the art of becoming a social media expert. These tips will not only help expand and strengthen your social media presence but will also make the road to success a seamless one for you.

1. When starting out, you should stick with only major social media platforms. Don’t be tempted to be on every platform available or you’ll simply be overwhelmed. Ideally, you should begin with 4 to 5 social media accounts.
2. Choose a good profile picture and keep it same for every social media account. That way, people will be able to start recognizing you soon and may start following you. You can use a high-resolution picture or your brand logo or a specific color to advocate your brand recognition.
3. Whatever platforms you choose to register an account, don’t ever leave the description section incomplete. Make sure that you have a minimum of 200 words of impeccable original content there that talks about you and your brand. Remember that every platform has its own audience and voice. Hence, your content has to be in accordance with that. Don’t copy and paste someone else’s content as that might leave a severe detrimental effect on the rank of your public profile.
4. Having a proper plan with respect to social media marketing tips and tricks is crucial for attaining your business goals. Perform thorough competitive research and keyword research to brainstorm great content ideas, which will interest your target audience.
5. When it comes to social media marketing, any compilation of great social media tips is sure to have a mention of great social content. Ensure that you post regularly and your content actually offers valuable information that your target audience will find interesting and helpful. Your content can include videos, images, how-to guides, or infographics – just to name a few.
6. Apart from using social media marketing to leverage your own original, unique content to increase the number of your followers and fans, you can also benefit by curating and linking to third-party articles. Obviously, those pieces should provide great and really valuable information that your audience will enjoy. Remember- curating and linking to third-party sources enhances your trust and reliability factor.
7. It’s always crucial to monitor the performance of your competitors. In fact, they can actually provide you with valuable data for your keyword research and other marketing insight. If they are using certain social media marketing tips and tricks and are benefitting from them, don’t hesitate to apply those tips for yourself after making some tweaks, as and where necessary.
8. Share your expertise through your website content and let the power of social sharing be uncovered. The viral impact of sharing valuable content plays an immensely crucial role, which is probably bigger than anything else. Remember that you’ve to have good traffic first before you start monetizing it.
9. The content piece that you will be writing for the web should not sound extremely serious. Instead, incorporate some funny elements in it like a comic scene or cartoon. Your audience wants to be informed as well as entertained.
10. Find relevant communities related to your niche and join them. They could be on any platform – from Facebook, Google+ to LinkedIn –just join them to increase your brand awareness. Most importantly, participate actively and make useful contributions.
11. Become an authority in your community – one of those persons who people want to follow. Consider the communities you’ve joined. Who are the persons you follow? Why do you follow them? Become one of those.
12. Always keep on tracking the end results coming out of the implementation of social media marketing tips. If Facebook isn’t beneficial for you and Twitter brings more effective results, work harder on the latter.
13. One of the most important social media marketing tips is to learn how to automate things in the social media realm. In this domain, many individuals still create their social media updates manually or selectively automate tasks. Study such aspects thoroughly to become a social media guru and learn to automate social media tasks, where possible.
14. Stay focused only on the social media platforms where your consumers are. There are a significant numbers of platforms out there but it would be wastage of time if you concentrate on all of them simultaneously, especially when your target audience doesn’t remain active on most of them.

Facebook

15. Running Facebook ads has almost become an inherent part of most social media tips these days. However, running ads straight to your products can make them seem like an irritating thumb on a user’s News Feed. Instead, you should run ads to content to make them look like more ‘native’ to the platform. If everything goes well, this strategy can greatly increase the number of your website visitors as well as your subscribers.
16. Real-time interaction with your followers adds another quotient to your authenticity and honesty, which will help strengthen your social media strategy. For instance, you can conduct a live session on Facebook to answer fan queries, or share previews of your latest line of products. This will engage the audience right away while driving interest in the product.
17. Like any business owner, your end goal is most likely to increase conversion rates. You can introduce Facebook-only coupons, which may help to increase your social engagement and turn fans into consumers. They can also prove effective in spreading awareness about a certain product and give an additional boost to your sales.
18. Facebook recently introduced an additional range of ‘reactions’ that can be used instead of that standard ‘Like’. Some of these are ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘haha’, ‘love’ etc. You can increase user engagement by posting a picture of your product and asking your fans to vote for a certain option using those reaction buttons. It will also help you gain some useful insight about that product.
19. One of the biggest social media marketing tips is to remove any probability of losing prospective leads when they’re at your landing page. You can accomplish this by utilizing Facebook ‘Call’ buttons in the Facebook ads. This empowers users to call you directly by hitting your Facebook ad.

Twitter

20. Twitter Polls is a great yet less-used feature to engage and interact with your followers. You can run a poll to increase engagement and begin a discussion with the customers. Let the followers vote for an upcoming product or take decisions for you. If you can play it right, you’ll most likely notice a positive impact on your engagement.
21. Like Facebook Live, you must try Periscope owned by Twitter. You can embed this popular live streaming app in your Twitter Feed. You may even have a Q&A after your live streaming comes to an end as this will let your audience ask questions, debate on answers given or views shared by you and others, thus stirring up conversation among themselves and with you.
22. If you conduct a little research, you’ll be able to find that the finest brands on Twitter always take time to engage with their fans and followers. You don’t need to respond to each and every Tweet but retweeting your brand-related content from the followers or answering queries is an excellent way to show your audience that you care about their feedback and comments.
23. Your brand’s Twitter account has to be separate from your personal one – this is another key element of any social media marketing tips handbook. Whenever it comes to your brand, you must use the business-specific account for all your activities.
24. Many businesses fail to increase engagement in spite of implementing several social media strategy tips because they don’t focus on narrowing their target. Remember – the wider your proverbial net is, the less you’re prone to attaining higher engagement rates. You can use the strong geo targeting feature of Twitter to limit display of your tweets to targeted users who work or live in the vicinity of an event.

Some Additional Tips

25. YouTube is an incredible social media marketing tool for sharing video content. Though many businesses try to create viral video content and fail miserably, if you can focus on creating beneficial, instructive how-to videos, chances will be much higher for them to go viral.
26. Create and upload useful and relevant presentations to Scribd and SlideShare. Don’t forget to embed links to your business website.
27. Influencer marketing shouldn’t be forgotten when we talk about social media marketing tips. In that context, Instagram users religiously follow influencers in areas like lifestyle, food and fashion. You can partner with an influencer, who has a huge following in your niche, to create a sponsored post. It’s a great way to share your products with new prospective customers and increase brand awareness.
28. Instagram now allows posting of longer videos and you can leverage this for social media marketing. Create demonstration video of one of your unique products. Show users the best ways to use the product. These types of videos are not only beneficial for viewers but help to increase user engagement as well.
29. Just like Facebook and Twitter, you can use YouTube to increase your subscription rate. Again, remember to post informative videos consistently to keep your audience engaged and provide the new users with some incentives when they subscribe to your channel. Such incentives might include promise of a continual stream of valuable content.
30. If you are looking for social media marketing tips for YouTube, do it with the simple step of adding an intro to the videos to instantaneously bring your brand name to the forefront, which new viewers will take note of. Also, remember to add an outro featuring all your social handles and links to your other videos. Add comments to the intro and outro to make them more interactive.
31. Who says you have to be confined to the big platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter only? While these networks provide you with the widest reach, you should not overlook the power of smaller networks. For example, you can explore ‘Medium’ that has a big enough audience.
32. LinkedIn Publisher is a free content publishing feature that you should use to enhance your exposure to the target audience and develop your credibility in your niche. Every time you publish a piece, all of your followers and connections will receive a notification and you might experience a rise in your web traffic.
33. Try to post some valuable content in the Reddit community. Be sure about not to spam in Reddit. If you do, you’ll simply be thrown out.
34. When we talk about social media strategy tips, Snapchat definitely needs a mention because of its uniqueness. Here, content only lasts for a few seconds, as a result of which your video or photo doesn’t need to be absolutely perfect. You can use Snapchat to provide the users with a sneak peek of your upcoming products to raise awareness.
35. Most of the social media platforms allow you to incorporate your website’s URL, your promotional materials and your email signature in the profiles. Hence, it would be wise to incorporate the same, wherever you can, to let people find you easily.
36. Quick response is often stressed upon by effective social media marketing tips. If your customers feel that you don’t respond quickly (or within an acceptable period of time) to their inquiries, it could harm your brand’s reputation significantly. Ideally, you should try to respond to the queries within 1 hour.
37. Thank anyone who leaves a positive comment about your brand. If they repeatedly appreciate your business for their great experience, offer some freebies to them. That way, you can be rest assured of having them as your brand ambassadors.
38. Listening to the customers is another important part of any social media marketing tips and tricks. They can come up with valuable insights about your business as well as its shortcomings. Based on these feedbacks, you can chalk out your future marketing plans.
39. At times, businesses unintentionally do something wrong. If you have done something like that, acknowledge it and simply apologize. Don’t deny or remain silent as these will worsen the impact.
40. Put your brand at the last place when it comes to promotions. If you go to social media sites and start promoting just your brand without adding any value to the content you share, your audience may feel annoyed and soon wander away.
41. Follow the 90/10 rule, which means 90% of the content you share on social media sites should be other people’s content and 10% created by you. It may sound a little awkward, but it helps.
42. Don’t spam the audience. Remember that if you post excessive updates within a short tenure, they will be considered as spam.
43. Make sure that your social media sharing buttons can be easily found on your website. It will help visitors to share your site’s valuable content and increase the number of your followers and fans.
44. Regular interaction with your followers is a key element when we talk about useful social media tips. Don’t just share links every time you visit the platform. Instead, engage with your audience as well as other users on a regular basis.
45. There is always something useful to learn from highly appraised social media blogs. Hence, always continue reading top social media blogs to understand how to implement great social media tips.
46. The crucial part of enhancing your social media presence is developing partnerships. For instance, people are less likely to follow a company with only 20 followers compared to a brand that has 20,000 followers and hundreds of likes and comments on each post.
47. If your business is related to the service providing industry, it is crucial that you exhibit social proof for your service. You can accomplish this by sharing customer testimonials, ratings and reviews, badges and honors won etc.
48. If you are thinking of developing a service or product for your company, reap the benefits of social media platforms by conducting surveys. That way, you will be gaining more ideas and even end up creating awareness about your upcoming service or product.
49. Get your business team involved. Encourage your employees to actively participate in the implementation of social media marketing tips and tricks. It could be anything – from sharing your blog content on their personal social media accounts to following your company’s social media profile.
50. Conduct split testing to find out which content is working the best and which is not. Build upon the former content.
51. You can’t measure the success arising out from the implementation of social media marketing tips unless you track data. You can use Google Analytics to find out the same.
52. Changing content formats plays a crucial role when it comes to engaging your audience. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve videos only. You can convert snippets from existing articles into images and post them on social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to boost engagement.
53. In today’s age of short attention spans and information overload, you must not miss any chance to convey your message in an engaging manner. Create some effective visual content and post them on visual social media platforms such as Pinterest to obtain traffic.
54. While I emphasize on publishing content consistently, you also need to remember that in the social media realm, quality beats quantity. Hence, you have to be choosy about your content and strive to share only the best content, not something that’s immediately available or has been created in a great hurry.
55. When we talk about social media tips for business, less productivity is an important issue faced by many beginners. You can take the help of social media management tools such as Sprout Social to schedule the posts in advance, or publish content throughout multiple platforms, amongst others.
56. If you want to make the most out of the implementation of social media marketing tips and tricks and are willing to shell out some money for it, you should explore paid advertising. The costs are usually lower than other platforms such as Google Adwords or media buying.
57. What would you do if there is not any existing community related to your niche? Well, it’s the best time for you to become proactive and create one. Assuming that your niche has a significant amount of people active on social media platforms, you can reach out to them and let them know that you’re starting a LinkedIn Group, a Facebook Group, or Twitter Chat, and invite the interested ones to join.
58. Another key component of any social media tips guide is to find out the reason why people should follow you or your brand. You should think of it from the viewpoint of the customers. Since they have lots of people to follow, you need to stand out of the crowd. So, try to create some kind of value propositions typically for your social media platforms.
59. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness and power of social search. Social sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter etc come equipped with search features that act just like the search engines. Get into the habit of using relevant keywords to increase your chances of being found by the users looking for topics related to your niche.
60. Using hashtags is definitely one of the best ways to expand your reach organically on social media. Start incorporating hashtags today to obtain more impressions for your Tweets and posts and expand your reach. Don’t just insert hashtags randomly. Instead, research popular hashtags related to your niche and incorporate them to increase your SERP ranking.
61. Targeting your social media posts to address specific group of users is an integral part of any good social media strategy tips handbook. Your business can address a specific demographic, but your audience comprises of individuals who may follow your brand for different reasons. In order to cater to these different audiences, you need to create and share specific content for each of these groups.
62. Posting of visually-appealing infographics occasionally is greatly helpful when it comes to increasing user engagement. Take valuable statistics and make interesting and easily sharable inforgraphics about a product that is yet to be launched. It is an excellent way to inform the consumers about the product as well as keep the industry posted.
63. Once you’ve managed to build a solid relationship with some influencers, it’s time to proceed further with an influencer takeover. Let your chosen influencer manage your social media account like posting images, valuable content etc. Make sure that the influencer mirrors this in his/her own account so that his/her fans start following your brand as well.
64. Giveaways can greatly increase your brand awareness and social media engagement. Run contests on different social media channels, partner up with another brand in your niche and offer a decent prize package of some enticing products. For instance, you can run a photo contest that will help you to gather user-generated content which you may use in the future.
65. Tagging influential accounts in your photos is another great way to get your profile noticed. Identify high-profile accounts in your niche and directly tag them in your images. This puts the image on the feed of pictures they’ve been tagged in. As you’re only tagging profiles related to yours, users who come across them might become interested in your brand.
66. If developing videos or big articles is part of your social media marketing strategy, you can push the followers or fans toward it by previewing it in your story. For instance, post a short piece of content or part of a video to generate some hype and insert a CTA like ‘click on (your website link) to view the rest’.
67. Assuming your final goal is to drive the viewers to your website or blog, incorporate link of your content or website within the video using video description. Make sure your comment is something like ‘visit this link in the description to….’ to accomplish your goal.
68. Instead of incorporating discount coupons within your video description, you can put them at the end of the videos to get more YouTube traffic. In that case, you must add a CTA at the starting of the videos like ‘watch it till the end and claim your special offer’. This will increase the number of viewers who actually watch the video, rather than finding the coupon in the description and navigating away.
69. Analytics help you to measure the end result coming out of the implementation of social media marketing tips and tricks and YouTube does that quite well. With the help of YouTube analytics, you can identify the videos that are doing the best, major traffic sources of the videos, and how long the videos are being watched, amongst others. You need to meticulously study these reports and shape your content marketing strategy accordingly.
70. When you post a new video on your YouTube channel, feature it on your site’s homepage and write a new blog post mentioning it. Now, share the video link on other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc or upload a short preview with link to the full content. This way, you’ll be able to generate more traffic from your YouTube channel.
71. Ideas can be found anywhere. It’s important to monitor what other companies or businesses (apart from your competitors) are doing that grabs your attention. Sign up for high-value articles and different types of social media tips from authorities so you can receive their emails consisting of social updates and new information on a regular basis.
72. As social media marketers, we all understand the importance of target audience. But how would you narrow down your specific target audience? Well, developing buyer personas can make the job much easier for you. Remember that your product or service isn’t for everyone. So, it’s immensely crucial that you’re addressing the right people to attain success.
73. Read a few social media marketing tips and tricks and you’ll notice most proclaiming images to be the key. According to researches, crisp and high-quality visuals can increase social media engagement significantly. You can use resources such as Canva to create custom images.
74. Search for local businesses with whom your brand bears a natural affinity. Follow those organizations and engage with them. Repost their content, retweet and wait for opportunities to have them featured in your content. If you can make the connection authentic, their audience will become your audience soon.
75. Use email to encourage social media engagement. Include your social links or icons in the footer of the emails to develop an audience. Make sure that the social share icons on your webpage are functioning properly. Your article or blog pages should have icons with ‘share’ functionality.
76. Most businesses solely concentrate on vanity metrics such as number of likes, followers and retweets to measure their success. Apart from that, you also need to figure out the actions you actually want your fans or followers to make. For instance, do you want them to visit your website? Do you want them to subscribe to your email list? Define the action and start tracking it.
77. Constant testing is one of the key elements to make most out of the implementation of social media business tips. In addition, you should have weekly or monthly discussion with the entire social media marketing team to measure the performance of your social media campaigns. If they are performing poorly, you can consider remedial actions like curation of content, placing more powerful call to actions, tweaking content ratio to focus more on visual elements etc.
78. Change your content formats from time to time. Don’t make it boring and predictable by using only videos or sticking just to images. Share listicles, industry tips, animations, quote graphics, interactive games based on your products’ features etc to spice up your content. You may even create funny memes to bring some humor in your content. If you’re not switching formats, you’re not fully optimizing the power of your content.
79. Use your social updates to craft blog posts. For instance, take your most popular Facebook posts or tweets and use them to create blog posts. You don’t need to write a couple of pages. Write a couple of paragraphs instead. Just make sure that the pieces are easy to read and thought-provoking to engage your audience.
80. Assuming you’re a small business owner, curating or creating content consistently can become an uphill task at times. There are a number of tools that you can use to schedule a baseline for content curation. With a steady flow of post, you will stay in front of your target audience even when you’re busy writing proposals or making sales calls.
81. Creating a library of social updates is significantly useful when we talk about effective social media tips. Many businesses fall behind in their social media marketing due to lack of ideas. If you don’t want to be in that league, try to come up with 15 to 20 ideas of social media posts before you actually start developing your content.
82. Whenever you create a piece of content, use great titles that create curiosity or tempt. Or else, the visitors may simply bounce off. If you need high social media traffic, you’ve to find titles that trigger emotions such as curiosity, eagerness, anger, empathy etc.
83. Never craft a content that you want your audience to read. Instead, write content that your audience wants to read. If required, spend a good amount of time to research on catchy titles and subject to develop high-value content.
84. Some specialists offering social media strategy tips suggest that a bit of controversy or weirdness can help your content to go viral if it’s done the right way. So, don’t be afraid to go against established trends (of course, with good reasons) if you have a solid plan to back it up. Since such publicity often brings some brickbats too, be ready to face them as well.
85. Author a high-value ebook around your niche and embed links of your ‘sales’ page into it. Give it to your audience for free or for something minimal like joining your subscription list, liking your brand’s Facebook page etc.
86. It’s crucial to keep your visitors happily browsing your web pages and drive new visitors to increase user engagement. Include something like ‘you might also like’ in the footer of your content that you intend to post on social media platforms and incorporate links to other related content.
87. If you have budget, focus on developing a mobile app for your site. As smartphones have become almost ubiquitous these days and most people use them to surf social media platforms, promoting your apps on social media and offering incentives for downloads can help you tap into a sizable population of the mobile-friendly generation.
88. People, by nature, love to showcase their knowledge in respective fields. When it comes to leveraging social media tips, you can benefit from asking pertinent questions on social platforms. Wait for others’ replies and then reply back with useful advice.
89. For the sake of your brand’s credibility on social media platforms, don’t beat your drum always. Rather than focusing on “ME”, focus on “YOU”- your readers. Don’t post contents that are completely irrelevant to your niche. If you don’t have anything relevant to post, just post a joke to amuse your audience instead of irritating them.
90. Post a detailed review on your social media platforms of something great you’ve used and then place an offer in front of that brand to become an official testimonial provider. They might approve you and link you to their product’s pages and you might get some more traffic.
91. Whenever you conduct a survey or competition on social media platforms, never forget to showcase the results and the rewards. This will not only establish your brand’s trust in its audience but increase user engagement as well.
92. For making the most out of your social media marketing efforts, sometimes you need to forget the sales pitch completely. Remember that people want to engage with someone who can have solutions to their problems. Make sure that you, your brand and your products are focused towards solving problems.
93. Remember that the ultimate goal of implementing a diverse range of social media marketing tips and tricks is not to increase your sales directly. Instead, it’s to develop an army of people who’ll advocate your brand over and over again.
94. Social media has completely changed the way customers shop and the way customers generally view the web. This applies to the look of your ads and the accompanying landing pages. To make the most out of your social media marketing efforts, you’ve to provide the consumers with a seamless, cohesive visual experience.
95. No matter how many social media tips you deploy in your social media campaign, it can result in a disorganized, messy affair if you don’t structure it around your business goals. You’ve to pay close attention to your objectives before actually launching a campaign and you’ll be just fine.
96. Both Twitter and Facebook’s targeting options are extremely granular. While launching a campaign, be highly cautious with this specificity because if your target audience is too broad, you may end up with reduced engagement rates while extremely narrow demographic can bring down the campaign’s performance.
97. If you want others in your niche to read your social media posts or share them, it’s crucial that you read their content too. Also, don’t forget to leave your impression by sharing your views or thoughts on that content or leaving your comment.
98. Make sure to develop a network of quality friends in your industry. It means if you’re n social media for strengthening and expanding your business, you’ve to make a circle of friends from your niche. It’ll help you to get more updates, know the latest trends etc based on which you can make informed decisions.
99. This has to be one of the key pointers of any social media tips guide – create different channel plans for different social media platforms. Your aims have to be different for different channels because each social media platform offers a different exposure. Hence, you need to create content in accordance with the channels’ nature of work.
100. Always appreciate those people who promote and share your articles or blog posts, or even those who share their comments or write product/service reviews. This applies to even the negative reviews and complaints. Just thank them for their feedback and promise to fix the issues. Responding this way would improve your trust factor and show that you genuinely want to offer the customers a better experience by fixing the flaws.
101. Keep patience! It’s quite natural if you don’t know everything about a platform’s capabilities or become frustrated when you don’t see a grand following or high engagement rate. Take your time and go back to the basics. Read and research a lot to educate yourself and keep implementing various social media tips to arrive at the right mix that will bring you the desired results.

Well, it’s over to you now. With these 101 social media tips for business, you’ll be able to develop a pool of engaged audience and establish the presence of your brand across all your social media platforms.

Good luck!!