“It is not the strongest who survive, nor the fittest, but the ones most adaptable to change.” This quote appears on the floor of the California Academy of Sciences, and it speaks to the nature of evolution. But it is also applicable to many areas of business, particularly marketing.
To survive and thrive in the new year, you’ll need to be willing to adapt and shift your marketing strategies. To stay ahead of the pack in 2024, check out these five social media strategy tips
1. Review and Fortify Your Existing Strategy
At the end of every year, you should review your existing social media strategy and figure out what needs to change. Hootsuite is a popular tool for tracking your social media metrics. Google Analytics will likewise help you track conversions from social media posts to your website. Once you figure out what’s working, double down on those approaches. And be willing to drop what has not worked over the last year and try something new.
One way to adjust your social media strategy for the upcoming year is to review and adjust your content pillars. Content pillars can be both the long-form, in-depth blog posts on your website and the central themes you discuss on social media. For example, NerdWallet has a pillar page on Credit Cards 101 that offers “everything you need to know” on the topic. Then they support that pillar with smaller blog and social media posts that address specific issues within that larger topic. In this way, they can both address their audience’s burning questions and provide comprehensive content that establishes them as a trusted source of information.
When you recognize what is and isn’t working in your social media strategy, update your content pillars. Make sure your website and blog posts address users’ search intent, and create social media posts that align with your longer-form content. Then, you can link back to your website from your social media posts via a “click the link below” message.
2. Compete and Collaborate
Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. The myth is that social media followers are a scarce resource, so you must “go it alone” — as if you can’t share followers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that you can do both — compete in your market and collaborate with like-minded content creators. Indeed, a collaborative approach can often help you reach new audiences and generate more sales.
To compete, identify your rivals in your market niche, watch what they do, and do it better. You can start by using a competitive analysis tool to understand your competitors’ successes. Look at factors like their number of interactions, volume of posts, and keyword and hashtag use. Essentially, you’re looking to gain insight and inspiration and then create your own fresh content.
To collaborate, reach out to creators in adjacent markets and invite them to do a shared post. Give them reasons to work with you. (Hint: You get access to each other’s followers!) In your collaborative post, employ storytelling to develop a more humanized experience for your audience. Share a bit about yourselves, tell your audience how you found each other, and connect that story to your brands.
3. Stay On-Trend and Innovate
A natural extension of competing and collaborating is paying attention to new trends. Make use of tools like Google Trends and Hootsuite to watch for up-and-coming keywords and hashtags. This approach will allow you to identify the latest innovations in your market. Then use that knowledge as raw material for creating original social media posts.
As you strive to innovate on social media, keep your target audience in mind. When you know to whom you’re speaking, you can create unique content that adds value to their lives. If your audience is women interested in self-care, for example, you can address their particular needs. Create a quiz that helps them pinpoint obstacles to getting high-quality sleep or incorporating movement into their day. When you use novel ways to address real concerns and offer concrete advice, you stand to gain more followers and even paying customers.
Knowing and understanding your audience allows you to join conversations critical to your business. You innovate by offering actionable, creative solutions. You stay on-trend by presenting your solutions in fresh ways, on appropriate social media platforms.
4. Leverage AI
AI is here to stay. Google is now tolerating AI-generated content, and website owners are finding themselves outranked. This reality means that, rather than shunning AI, you should leverage it to create helpful, valuable content that will rank highly.
AI can be an asset when it comes to generating keywords and ideas and scheduling and managing content. However, it can be a liability because it lacks empathy and the human ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Thus you should use AI to generate ideas and accomplish small tasks for you. Then humanize your content by inserting your voice and the story behind your brand and business.
Think of AI applications as your virtual assistants. You can use apps like ClickUp and Buffer to manage content creation and schedule your posts. Canva is great for designing graphics that will suit each social media platform. And tools like ChatGPT and Hootsuite will help you generate rough drafts for social media posts that you can then edit.
5. Keep It Real
As noted, don’t forget to humanize your content during the editing process. People want authenticity as much as they want help and value. Yes, you should know your audience, innovate, and offer solutions, but you should also be yourself. The intersection of these approaches in a content creator is what produces the real social media magic.
Increasingly, people on social media are looking for other humans they can relate to and connect with. Post images and videos of your brand’s “behind the scenes” experiences. Show your audience your process. Take off the masks and the filters every once in a while. These strategies engage your audience and give them a reason to fulfill your call to action.
Ultimately, the more authentic you are, the more likely you will connect with loyal clients and followers. Of course you want to have a strategy, to use the tools at your disposal, and to stay on-trend and competitive. But really, the goal is to locate the people who have been hoping to find you and to connect with them. These tips for your 2024 social media strategy will help you do just that.
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