You could poll followers, “Which type of post goes best with your coffee?” and link to two options in the next parts of your story. The first decade of the 2000s saw expansive social media growth with the addition of Friendster, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter. Not all of them survived as we all know, but they changed the internet landscape and marketing forever. Social media channels have different personalities just like people do. Choose influencers whose audience aligns with your brand and prioritize authenticity over follower count. This post provides actionable value, establishing the creator as an authority while encouraging audience engagement and follow-through.

Whether you’re posting too rarely or bombarding your followers with too many updates in a short period, inconsistency can hurt your engagement. Social media marketing can prove to be a great vehicle for brands to achieve visibility and engagement opportunities. Having the right control of social media marketing for the enhancement of a powerful, recognizable brand is all about having a grasp on your audience and staying updated through the use of the right strategy.

However, the more efficient way is to manage your boosted posts for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all from one place, alongside your organic content for all platforms in the Hootsuite dashboard. It’s no accident that we start each section of this guide by reviewing the business objectives each type of social media ad can help you achieve. It’s awfully hard to achieve your goals if you don’t know what your goals are in the first place. It’s a best practice to test several ads with small audiences to determine what works best. Cetaphil leaned into trending topics paired with the Pinterest Trend Badge to show Pinners that they were aligning their content (and new products) with statistically significant trends on the platform.

Try to avoid solely publishing promotional messages and strike a good balance with authentic content that emphasizes your brand’s voice and story. The Index further found consumers favor brands that post original content and interact regularly with their audience. Social media has transformed so many industries, and communications professionals are familiar with the impact of these online spaces. Brands aren’t limited to traditional mediums like radio and print newspapers—you can use social media to supercharge your media relations and investor relations strategies.

Create Community And Brand Loyalty

Your research will guide your content and ensure a receptive, engaged audience. Business.com aims to help business owners make informed decisions to support and grow their companies. We research and recommend products and services suitable for various business types, investing thousands of hours each year in this process. X is the perfect platform to allow your audience to contact you for customer support and engage with users in fun discussions.

Next, you need to identify the specific problems your audience is facing or the pressing desires they have. Once your target audience is defined clearly, you can develop digital marketing messaging that highlights how your business solves their top problems or satisfies their needs. You must have a well-defined audience in mind before selecting digital marketing channels and content marketing strategies. Otherwise, you risk creating messaging or using digital marketing tactics that are off the mark.

Step 4: Audit Your Current Social Media Efforts

In the third quarter of 2024, WhatsApp Business had 966.5 million monthly active users. While Instagram focuses on visuals, X (formerly Twitter) focuses on words. Social media is always evolving, so I think it’s important to periodically check in and make sure your strategy is still effective. This could be monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on your business needs and resources.

A winning social media strategy starts with clear objectives — without them, you can’t measure ROI. If you’re a social media or marketing manager looking for help with your strategy, you’re in the right place. Use a 4-pillar mix (educate, entertain, inspire, promote), batch content creation, and rely on scheduling tools to stay consistent without burnout. Metrics are the signals that tell you where attention spikes, where drop-offs happen, and which content is actually moving your audience closer to action.

Here’s a comprehensive guide to creating content pillars for social media (with a handy template). A clear picture of your ideal customer is crucial when building your social media marketing strategy. Your social media marketing strategy is not a one-and-done process — it’s a plan that should be regularly tweaked and iterated upon. So, instead of thinking of the above steps as a to-do list to move through, visualize them as a cycle, like the flywheel below. Sponsored content differs from traditional advertising because it aims to fit in with the regular content on a given social media platform. Once your social media marketing gets going, you might have trouble remembering what posts are going on what platforms and when they’re appearing.

This is usually high-quality imagery, video, user-generated content and interactive items like polls or quizzes. Engagement goes beyond just posting, it involves responding to comments, participating in discussions, and hosting an interactive campaign such as running a poll or Q&A sessions. This is what makes one feel part of a community and loyal to his followers. Dreamdata’s Laura Erdem, for instance, is quite active on LinkedIn, sharing her experiences and insights and garnering trust as well as showcasing the company culture through her own profile. Try out some of the Sprout Social features we shared in this article and explore how your business can advance with greater consistency and impact. This cohesive approach will also enable you to create benchmarks that you can lean on for future campaigns.

Section 3 synthesises the studies identified in the previous section and provides a detailed overview. Next section discusses the key aspects of the research, highlights any limitations within existing studies and explores the potential directions for future research. For more guidance, check out our social media management guide to build a strategy that keeps you ahead in 2025. If you’re already on the platform, make sure to watch your TikTok analytics and how to reach your audience. Threads is still finding its place, but its growth proves that users are interested in a new kind of text-based social experience.

You can see what’s performing well and apply those data-backed learnings to other projects to build your annual campaigns. Collaborate with brand advocates to extend your reach and infuse your social media with authentic, relatable content. Plus, encourage user participation through polls, Q&A and challenges.

So, you want your social media team to be actively involved in the process and not just rely on AI tools to do all the work. For example, CoSupport is an AI chatbot that supplements the efforts of customer support agents by providing query responses using your company’s knowledge base. It also collects and analyzes customer data for smart recommendations and insights. Similarly, you can use AI chatbots to create conversational AI experiences for your customers.

If you spot that a certain post is getting a lot of engagement, then you can know that crafting similar content can help you exceed expectations. Using Semrush’s Social Tracker, SMM Thai you can easily generate detailed reports for a variety of top social media platforms. Social media is the perfect place to tell your story and form a connection with people.

Luckily, the evolution of these social platforms has meant there are a host of tools and tactics at your disposal to make this easy — and rewarding, too. If you’re on social media, chances are your competitors are also there. Social media gives businesses a unique opportunity to see what competitors are doing and what’s working for them — and to learn from their mistakes. Duolingo (DUOL -2.34%) recently executed a successful, albeit unconventional, social media marketing campaign. Founded in 1993, The Motley Fool is a financial services company dedicated to making the world smarter, happier, and richer. The Motley Fool reaches millions of people every month through our premium investing solutions, free guidance and market analysis on Fool.com, top-rated podcasts, and non-profit The Motley Fool Foundation.

Use these reviews to determine what’s working, what needs improvement, and what new opportunities to explore. Social media trends are always coming up, especially on short-form video platforms like TikTok. Don’t be afraid to join in, but you still have to be intentional about how you do it. Time-saving tools to help you prioritize your social interactions — so you can connect with the people who matter most. Ollipop also posted “32 machines times $25K per machine yikes” on one of Poppi’s videos, feeding into the fire. Before the 2025 Super Bowl, probiotic soda brand Poppi sent 32 influencers vending machines for their gameday watch parties.

Future studies should focus on other industries and other types of cultural features in doing business. For example, Bhattacharjya and Ellison (2015) investigated the way companies build relationships with customers by using responsive customer relationship management. The study analysed customer relationship management activities from Twitter account of a Canadian company Shopify (B2B service provider). The company uses Twitter to engage with small business customers, develops and consumers. Jussila et al. (2011), by reviewing the literature, found that social media leads to increased customer focus and understanding, increased level of customer service and decreased time-to-market. Another study by Rossmann and Stei (2015) looked at the antecedents of social media use, social media use by B2B companies and their effect on customers.

Agencies and SMBs don’t have the luxury of throwing content at the wall and hoping something sticks. Clear, measurable goals help you focus your efforts, justify results to clients or execs, and avoid the burnout of posting for the sake of visibility alone. In his book, Vaynerchuk covers how to do this, as well as connect with your followers and customers on a deeper level through social media.

Some researchers argued that social media can influence brand awareness (Ancillai et al. 2019; Hsiao et al. 2020). For instance, Hsiao et al. (2020) investigated the effect of social media in the fashion industry. Another group of studies investigated the effect of social media on the level of sales and consumer purchase intention (Ancillai et al. 2019; Itani et al. 2017; Salo 2017; Hsiao et al. 2020; Mahrous 2013). For example, Itani et al. (2017) used the theory of reasoned actions to develop a model that tests the factors affecting the use of social media by salesperson and its impact. By collecting data from 120 salespersons from different industries and using SmartPLS to analyse the data, it was found that attitude towards social media usefulness did not affect the use of social media. It was found that social media use positively affects competitive intelligence collection, adaptive selling behaviour, which in turn influenced sales performance.

If you don’t have any criteria or key performance indicators (KPIs) to compare results to, it becomes challenging to evaluate performance of your social media marketing and the brand’s return on investment. Each social media platform attracts diverse audiences, and each has its advantages. Let’s break down the most popular social media marketing platforms and what they offer. This hyper-personalization means that brands will soon be able to launch campaigns that resonate on a deeper level, increasing both engagement and conversion rates. This continuous cycle of testing, learning, and optimizing means that your social media marketing strategy can flex when needed, and it’s less likely to start feeling stale. While organic growth is vital, supplementing it with paid social media marketing campaigns allows you to make the most of advanced targeting capabilities.

Content that resonates with your customers, including user-generated content and success stories, often goes hand-in-hand with higher engagement and conversion rates. Social gives you the advantage of curating this impactful content quickly. For example, you can monitor mentions and tags to uncover positive customer interactions and then share them on your social media channels to nurture brand trust.