Your social media marketing game could use a reboot. Don’t feel bad. Social marketing changes so fast that regular reboots are necessary to maintain relevance. You or your marketing team, if you have one, should plan to revisit and revamp (as necessary) your social media marketing activities at least once per year.
That doesn’t mean you should throw out your entire social marketing strategy every year and start from scratch. Some best practices remain relevant long past others’ expiration dates. A few have endured since the early days of social media prospecting, when the game looked nothing like the one marketers play today.
You’ll find some of those super long-lasting social media marketing tips on this list, along with others that haven’t been around quite as long but appear to have staying power nonetheless. Don’t be afraid to use them to create a durable foundation for your marketing efforts — one that serves you this year, next year, and for years to come.
- Link Out to a Subpage You Want Your Audience to Visit (And Rank Well)
You should always link to your top domain (yourcompany.com) from your Twitter profile, right?
Not necessarily. Twitter has a lot of “authority” (ranking power) with search engines like Google. That means the link you feature in your profile could (but isn’t guaranteed to) get a notable visibility boost as a result. If there’s a particular subpage on your website that you want your audience to see (and to rank well), consider adding it as a permanent Twitter profile link.
Looking for an example? The Twitter handle for Yieldstreet, an alternative investment platform, doesn’t link out to yieldstreet.com. Instead, it links to the platform’s passive income subpage, an apparently important ingredient in its content marketing strategy. Your company can find a similar candidate for Twitter linking, no doubt.
- Stay Organized with a Content Calendar
Plan before you tweet.
This is universal advice for social media users but especially important for businesses that rely on the platform for organic marketing. Work at least two weeks ahead, leaving space in your calendar for opportunistic (news-based) tweets and shares.
Share your content calendar with anyone directly involved in your social media marketing operation, but don’t disseminate it widely. Like all content strategy, your publishing plans should stay close to the vest.
- Use a Scheduling Tool to Execute When You Have Better Things to Do
If your preferred social media platform’s built-in scheduler isn’t robust enough, or you prefer an all-in-one scheduling tool that incorporates your entire social media footprint, use a free or paid product to execute your content calendar. Look for tools that make it easy to deploy a variety of content formats (including multimedia tweets) and offer scalable automation tools for multiple accounts.
- Don’t Outsource Your Social Media Content to Just Anyone
You’re keeping your content calendar under wraps, which is good. But you should think carefully about who you trust to execute it in the first place.
Outsourcing social media management to a virtual assistant or low-paid freelancer is tempting for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, social media is not as easy to do right as it seems from the outside. If you don’t have an in-house expert capable of managing and growing multiple social accounts, consider hiring one, or retain a legitimate outside agency that offers social media management as part of a larger suite of services.
- A/B Test Your Paid and Organic Social Media Messages
A/B testing is useful in a huge range of situations, many of which have nothing to do with social media or marketing in general. But it’s especially useful for high-frequency exercises like active social media use, where you might have dozens of opportunities to test competing messages each week. Successful marketers have done this for more than a decade and the results speak for themselves.
So, don’t let those opportunities go unused. Make it a policy to A/B test each new messaging strategy and double down on the more successful one.
Stop Using Yesterday’s Social Media Marketing Tactics
In such a fast-changing space, can a social media marketing campaign ever truly call itself “optimized”? At the very least, “optimized” social media marketing is a moving target. The tactics that work brilliantly today might not hold up next year, or even next quarter.
Yet we’ve seen that the foundations of a social media marketing strategy don’t have to change all the time. The tactics on this list are all more durable than tips that only seem to work until the next algorithm change. They’ve endured through countless ups and downs, many since social media marketing was in its infancy.
That’s strong evidence that they’ll continue to endure in the future. And that they belong at the core of your company’s social media marketing efforts.
