The last couple of years were pretty hectic for the marketing world. With the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions on gatherings and movement, most businesses were forced to quickly adapt to a world where almost everything had to be done online.
This accelerated shift into the digital space brought about by the pandemic has resulted in increased competition in the digital space, especially when it comes to social media marketing.
In 2024, businesses and brands will have to be very strategic with their social media efforts if they want to get their message heard amidst all the noise on social platforms.
In this article, we are going to look at 19 social media hacks that will help your business to stand out from the crowd in 2024. Let’s jump in.
1. Take a Less-Is-More Posting Approach
Before 2021, social media was more of a quality over quantity thing. Brands were focused on making sure that they were top of their audience’s minds, which meant constantly sending out social media posts, sometimes several times in a day.
But now, with almost every business shifting their attention to social media, customers are starting to get overwhelmed with messages from brands.
If you want your brand to stand out on social media in 2024, you will need to adopt a less is more posting approach. Rather than posting simply because you need to, you should focus on sending out thoughtful posts that add value to your audience, even if this means posting less frequently.
Ideally, you should aim for one post a day. According to a study by Hubspot, posting more than twice a day can lead to a reduction in engagement. However, the optimal posting frequency for you will depend on your followers, their age groups, their browsing habits, and so on.
The aim here is to avoid overwhelming your audience. You don’t want to get to a point where your audience is tired of your posts.
2. Place Greater Emphasis on Videos
Today, the demand for video is insatiable. In 2024, there will be an even greater demand for video. Estimates by the Cisco Visual Networking index predict that video content will make up about 80% of the world’s internet traffic in 2024.
Other reports also show that video is the most preferred content type for social media users, with 81% of internet users saying they prefer video over other types of social media content.
What’s more, videos are very effective for driving conversions. 60% of shoppers report that they have decided to purchase as a result of viewing an online video.
With such statistics, it is not surprising that social media platforms are giving greater priority to video over other kinds of content.
For instance, Facebook gives greater priority to videos shared natively on the platform over other kinds of content. Videos natively shared on the platform achieve 86% higher reach compared to other kinds of content, including YouTube videos shared on the platform.
Also, videos shared on Facebook drive greater engagement – comments and shares – than any kind of content shared on the platform.
Other platforms like Instagram are also giving greater priority to video content over other kinds of content.
If you want your brand to perform well on social media in 2022, therefore, you will need to start putting greater emphasis on video content.
So, what kinds of videos should you post on social media?
There are several kinds of videos that you can post on your social media pages. Here are a few ideas:
- Explainer videos
- Tutorial videos
- Behind the scenes looks into your brand
- Product information videos
- User-generated videos
Mashable is a great example of a company that’s putting great emphasis on video.
If you look at Mashable’s Twitter handle, you’ll notice that they post video content more than any other kind of content. Doing this has made it possible for them to grow their following, increase their reach, and boost their engagement, all this without having to pay for sponsored tweets.
3. Automate your social media activity
At times, pushing your brand on social media can become overwhelming, especially for small businesses that do not have a dedicated social media team.
You might feel like you’re spending all your time on social media, creating posts, creating captions for your videos and images, interacting with followers, and so on.
If you want to make your social media efforts more effective, start automating your social media activity using some of the best social media automation tools in 2024.
Social media automation allows you to schedule your social media posts, which are then automatically posted on your social profiles at the scheduled time. For instance, if you’re marketing on Facebook, SocialPilot allows you to create Facebook posts in advance and then schedule them to be published at specific times on specific days.
Automating your social media activity will free up your time and allow you to focus on other equally important aspects of your business.
Of course, even with social media automation, you will need to check in once in a while to interact with your followers and monitor brand sentiment.
4. Take advantage of humanized chatbots
Unless you have a dedicated social media team, it is impossible to promptly respond to all social media inquiries from your audience.
Even with a dedicated social media team, this can still be a challenge, especially for businesses that serve a global audience across different time zones.
This becomes a problem because your customers are not ready to wait until you’re ready to respond to their inquiries. They want you to respond to their questions immediately. If you take more than a few minutes to respond, they’ll quickly move on to your competitors.
Instead of letting these potential sales opportunities get lost because you do not have a dedicated social media team, you can take advantage of chatbots to capture these leads and add them to your sales funnel.
For instance, when you visit the Facebook page of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, they have a Messenger chatbot that is ready to answer any questions you might have.
This chatbot keeps visitors engaged and answers the most basic questions. However, if it cannot handle your request, it will hand you over to a human customer service agent who will be able to handle your request.
The beauty of having chatbots installed on your social platforms is that they work tirelessly around the clock, responding to customer inquiries and getting their details until you’re ready to take over in person.
Some of the benefits of using humanized chatbots to respond to your social media leads include:
- Immediacy: Chatbots allow your business to respond to customer inquiries promptly at all times. Whether it is the middle of the night or a public holiday, you don’t have to lose customers because you didn’t have someone manning your social media at that moment.
- Personalization: Another great benefit of chatbots is its ability to give personalized responses. This, coupled with the immediacy of chatbot responses, makes your customers feel that they’re highly valued.
- Neutrality: Chatbots do not have emotions, and therefore, they can maintain a professional and unbiased demeanor with your customers regardless of the situation.
5. Take advantage of the reach of stories
Stories started as a feature that was only available on Snapchat. However, other social platforms realized how popular Stories are, and today, many of the top social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter have their own version of stories.
Story is a feature that allows users to post content – either images or videos – that appear at the top of the app and disappear after 24 hours.
Instagram’s internal reports show that Instagram Stories are viewed by over 500 million users every single day. Facebook also reports a similar of daily Stories users view across the main app and Messenger.
Many big brands have already taken note of the extensive reach of Stories and are already taking advantage of this feature. For instance, in the image below, KFC is using the Stories feature to tell their followers about their partnership with Uber Eats.
If you have not been taking advantage of the Stories feature on different platforms, and particularly Facebook and Instagram, should start leveraging this trend in 2024 to expand your reach.
The best part about Stories is that they allow your followers to take actions such as responding to polls and swiping up on the story to visit a webpage.
6. Start sharing more snackable content
The attention spans of internet users have been steadily decreasing. Today, the average internet user has an attention span of just 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds 20 years ago.
Source: Muck Ruck
Realizing this change in internet users, most social media platforms are now focusing on shorter, snackable content. These are pieces of content that can be consumed in about 30 seconds or so.
A good example of platforms taking advantage of short, snackable pieces of content is TikTok, which rose to prominence in 2020. Despite having been created just seven years ago, TikTok already has over 500 million active monthly users.
Seeing the success of short-form pieces of content on TikTok, Instagram has also introduced a similar feature, which came to be known as Reels.
Even big companies like Apple have taken to using the feature and are robustly sharing Reels with their followers.. This shows that even big brands realize the power of creating snackable content.
As the attention spans of internet users continue dwindling, demand for these short-form pieces of content will increase.
7. Turn your social platforms into shopping channels
In the past, most businesses have been using social media solely as a marketing tool. Basically, this involved promoting your products on social media, and then directing interested customers to your online store to complete the purchase.
Lately, however, the tide has been changing. In an attempt to keep users on their platforms, some popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have come up with features that allow people to complete purchases without ever leaving the respective platforms.
For instance, if you’re browsing through Facebook and come across a jacket you like, you can order and pay for the jacket without leaving Facebook or interrupting your browsing session. This feature offers unprecedented levels of convenience for social media users.
One of the brands that is taking advantage of this hack is Ink Meets Paper. The custom cards brand has set up a Facebook shop and added the Facebook “Buy Now” button, allowing its customers to order cards and complete the checkout right from their Facebook page.
While this feature is not entirely new, there has been an increased uptake of it among online businesses over the last couple of years.
If you want to provide a seamless experience for your customers in 2024, you should start using this feature to turn your social media platforms into shopping channels.
8. Make your marketing conversational
The rise of social media marketing turned marketing into a two-way street. Before social media, marketing was a one way street, with brands pushing out their messaging to consumers, who didn’t have much in the way of getting heard by brands.
With social media, it became possible for consumers to connect with and get heard by brands. Even then, marketing has still carried some level of bias. So far, much of social media marketing has been centered on pushing products and promotions.
As we head into 2022, however, this has started changing. Rather than using social media to only tell consumers about your products, brands that want to remain relevant on social media will have to make the conversation more meaningful to consumers.
Making the conversation more meaningful to consumers means putting greater focus on helping them with the challenges they’re facing, educating them about effective solutions for their problem, and gradually nurturing them until they’re ready to become buyers.
This will be a significant change from the current approach where the sole focus of brands is getting consumers to spend their money, whether they find a solution to their problem or not.
A good example of a brand that has mastered the art of conversation marketing is Dove.
Dove regularly holds social media campaigns meant to help its followers overcome some of their challenges. For instance, in the campaign shown below, Dove uses its social media to drive a project whose aim is to help girls get confident about their bodies.
This campaign by Dove didn’t directly promote any of its products, yet it helped the brand gain more customers by showing it truly cares.
Following in Dove’s footsteps, you should start prioritizing meaningful engagement on social media for your audience, rather than focusing solely on marketing your products and services.
9. Don’t forget your competitors
The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed almost every business into the online sphere, making the space more competitive. As we head into 2024, if you want your business to thrive on social media, you must start keeping an eye on your competition, if you’ve not been doing it already.
Even as you focus on pushing your brand, constantly watch your competitors and see what they’re doing on social media. Perform a social media competitor analysis, map out their strengths and weaknesses, and then use these to come up with a strategy to help your business gain an edge in social media.
10. Recycle & Reshare Your Content
Social media is populated with an incredible number of posts regularly. According to statistics on Twitter, 350,000 tweets are being tweeted on the platform every minute, making the count 200 billion tweets annually.
In this vast pool of content, ensuring your posts reach your audience can be very challenging.
One sureshot way to achieve this goal is resharing and reposting. This hack works in two ways.
First, creating new content for social media regularly is a monumental task. And if we’re talking about a platform where you have to post 4-5 times daily to be noticed, that’s more challenging. Reusing content can lighten the burden for marketers significantly.
Secondly, resharing valuable content increases the chances of better impressions and engagement.
Social media tools like SocialPilot allow you to set the frequency of resharing a post while you schedule it for publishing.
11. Ready, Set, Reddit!
Reddit is quite the uncharted realm among social media platforms. It is not your everyday marketing platform, and few dare to use it like they would Facebook or Instagram.
But the people on Reddit make for an exclusive crowd. According to Reddit’s research, 23% of their users are not on Facebook, and 47% are not on Instagram.
If you learn the dos and don’ts of using Reddit, it can bring you some very high-quality traffic.
You can run paid ads on Reddit, including takeover ads, first-view ads, and promoted ads.
But there’s a catch. When using Reddit for advertising, targeting options are limited, unlike other platforms. You can filter your target demographics based only on location, interests, subreddits, device type, and time of day. Therefore, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of your target audience before advertising on Reddit.
If we talk about organic marketing, there is no creating a business account and publishing content on Reddit. Instead, you have to find niche-specific communities or subreddits and get active on them. Whatever category your business might be related to, chances are, you will find a couple (or a hundred) subreddits on it.
Or you can create a brand-new subreddit of your own. This could be a dedicated space where your users or potential customers can ask you anything.
But a piece of advice for all marketers: don’t start any new campaign on Reddit without exploring the platform. Join some relevant subreddits, preferably with your target audience in them, and engage with the community, to begin with.
Another tip for all of those who are unfamiliar with the platform is to read the subreddit rules. Some of them don’t allow marketing at all.
12. Polls
Using polls has been deemed a very effective hack for anyone on social media to get way better engagement than usual.
Typically, people don’t need much prompting to participate in online polls.
Other than the simple goal of boosting engagements, online polls also help you feel the pulse of your target audience and get to know your followers’ opinions. Not only is their feedback crucial to your brand, but it might also help you make the right decisions.
The poll feature is available on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. But conducting a poll on Twitter and LinkedIn is the easiest, directly from the timeline.
The above screenshot shows a poll conducted by a data science professional on LinkedIn. His regular posts receive 200-300 engagements on average, whereas this poll received nearly four times that.
Remember, it’s great to ask brand-relevant questions in polls to get your audience’s opinions, but it should not always be business with them.
A poll could pose mundane questions like “What do you prefer – Cats or Dogs?” or “Which superpower do you want?” Or something a bit more relevant such as a fashion brand asking, “Which fashion influencer inspires you the most?”
As a small business owner or solo entrepreneur, building a relationship with your audience is crucial. Utilizing polls is a helpful way to encourage engagement and foster natural conversations, as they make it easy for people to respond.
13. Quizzes
Like polls, quizzes are also effective means to garner engagement through responses. They are as clickable as polls and even more intriguing to users if you ask the right questions to your target audience.
According to a study, interactive content is 93% effective in educating customers, while passive content is only 70% in comparison.
According to Buzzsumo’s research, an average social media quiz gets shared 2000 times, and 82% of the audience engaged with quizzes that came up on their feeds. This, in turn, proves how effective a tool social media quizzes are for drawing engagement.
And if a prize is involved, it sweetens the deal even more. An added incentive never hurts.
But here’s a noteworthy hack. When creating a quiz, always remember to keep the questions relatively simple.
People are more likely to answer the quiz if they can make a strong guess. If they have to try too hard, they might just scroll past the question.
14. Cross-Platform Promotion
For a regular social media user or even a creator, it’s enough to establish themselves and concentrate on a single platform. But this is never going to work for the purpose of marketing. The main objective of a business’s social media marketing is to widen its reach to the target audience as much as possible.
So it is essential that the high-quality content you create be shared across platforms, as it’s not always possible to create brand-new content for each of them. This practice, called cross-posting, saves time and helps you engage your followers.
For instance, if you have created an article and published it on LinkedIn, you can recycle it into a short series of Twitter threads.
Popular marketing platform Hubspot is cross-promoting its podcast on a Twitter thread. This will generate traffic for the brand’s website and generate ample exposure for its content.
However, cross-posting on multiple social platforms can be successful only when you know your strengths and weaknesses. You might be tailoring your content for LinkedIn, where most of your audience is. But you can promote the same content on Facebook to get more exposure.
Hence you should carefully think about which platform to make fresh content for and which one to promote it on.
15. Influencer Collaboration
When it comes to social media marketing, building brand awareness is necessary. However, it can be particularly difficult to achieve when there are a lot of competitors in the market already.
In such scenarios, you must consider establishing a connection with someone with a strong online presence who has authority in your niche and a substantial follower count. Yes, we are talking about influencers.
Influencer marketing is one of the quickest ways to establish your brand in the minds of your target group. Bringing on board a well-known personality to promote your brand can bring on a substantial increase in your revenue, as 49% of consumers depend on recommendations from influencers on social media to make their purchase decisions.
The best move for start-ups or smaller businesses with this social media hack is to go for niche-specific micro-influencers.
See what Meller, a sunglasses and watches brand based out of Barcelona, is doing. The brand has gained popularity on Instagram due to regular collaborations with travel, fashion, and leisure influencers.
Meller shares posts of their products worn by micro-influencers on their Instagram page. They also tag these influencers in their posts, encouraging them to interact with the content, thereby increasing the brand’s visibility.
16. Repurpose Existing Content
In order to maintain a strong presence in the minds of your audience, it is important to consistently produce social media content. And it becomes tedious pretty soon if you have to keep creating new content for numerous accounts and multiple social media channels. Don’t worry, we have the ideal social media hack for this.
You may be surprised to know that it’s your own content that can form the solution.
A large chunk of a brand’s digital marketing efforts is today geared toward a library of blog posts on their website, targeting keywords and ranks in the SERPs.
Writing an SEO-optimized blog takes a lot of time and effort. Why not leverage the content to reduce the effort in creating social media posts for different platforms?
Repurposing this content into new social media posts isn’t very complicated. Simply break it down into sections, adhering to each platform’s character limit and tweak the language while being mindful of the platform. Customize each section with appropriate visuals and calls-to-action (CTAs). Don’t forget to take advantage of targeting options to reach the right audience for your message. With these steps, you’ll be ready to go.
Turning blogs into perfectly crafted Twitter threads is a widely used and bankable social media technique nowadays. And you can place a link to the same blog in your thread so there are higher chances of traffic being funneled to your website.
You can do something similar with your Instagram posts, too. Include quotes from your blog in the caption or the first comment of the post. But remember, Instagram is more of a visual platform than Twitter. The image for your repurposed blog should be impactful for the reader to stop and read your caption.
Another approach you can consider with Facebook and Instagram is incorporating an infographic with your message to supplement your content with visual elements. All social media marketers know infographics work way better as they are processed 60 times faster than text posts by the human mind.
Cross-posting is thus a smart way of utilizing your resources to their fullest. And this increases the lifespan of quality content and gives it more exposure. Just make sure to tweak older recycled content so that it does not look repetitive and is relevant to the current time.
17. Post at the Best Times
Whenever you post on social media, you must make it count. A simple way to do this is to track when your target audience is online. Posting in those time slots will get you the highest chances of maximizing impressions and engagement on your posts.
Getting into the details of what demographics are active at what time can be a rigorous task. This is where research can prove helpful, with the average best times to post as established for every major platform.
According to the said research, 6 PM to 9 PM and 12 PM to 3 PM are the best times of the day to post on social media, with Friday being the best day. But these are standardized estimates that might not work in every scenario.
We have curated for you the best times to post, platform-wise:
Best times to post on Facebook
- Weekdays: 1 PM to 4 PM
- Saturday and Sunday: 12 PM to 1 PM
You should avoid posting on Facebook from 8 PM to 8 AM, as this has been deemed the slowest period for engagement.
Best times to post on Instagram
- Weekdays: 6 AM to 9 AM; 12 PM to 2 PM; 5 PM to 6 PM
- Saturday and Sunday: 9 AM to 2 PM
It is recommended that you don’t go for the slot of 3 PM to 4 PM when posting on Instagram.
Best times to post on Twitter
- Weekdays: 9 AM to 3 PM
- Sunday: 9 AM to 11 AM
People usually avoid tweeting on weekends, although a brief window on Sunday can be used if you really want to.
Best times to post on LinkedIn
- Tuesdays to Thursdays: 7.30 AM to 8.30 AM; 10 AM to 12 PM; 5 PM to 6 PM
- Tuesdays: 10 AM to 11 AM
LinkedIn, being a professional platform, is not ideal for posting anything new on the weekends, as all users typically take a break from their work.
You can also know the best times to post on YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok. It is best to incorporate all these platforms into your social media content strategy.
18. Create Branded Hashtag Campaigns
Again, creating brand awareness takes a lot of work on social media. And even if you are an established brand, constantly refreshing your online presence is crucial to stay in the customer’s recall.
So you will need to do something out of the box once in a while. It may be with a specific goal or purely for entertainment, but you have to try different social media hacks for content branding. One such successful hack is branded hashtag campaigns.
Hashtag campaigns can either have a clear marketing objective or support a social cause.
The campaign #worthsaying was started by Loreal so people could talk about issues that matter to them. Celebrities to ordinary people, everyone has been posting under this hashtag.
Branded hashtags are thus thematic campaigns started and promoted by particular brands. The primary purpose of these campaigns is to draw their audience’s attention and not be overtly sales-y.
These campaigns can be run on a single social platform or can be a cross-platform undertaking. You just have to be sure of the objective to be fulfilled by the campaign.
Hashtag campaigns are also an excellent way of generating UGC with the audience participating and uploading their content while tagging the brand.
Disney’s collaboration with the Make-a-Wish Foundation was a perfect example of how a marketing campaign can also be spun for a cause. The entertainment giant asked fans to share pictures of themselves with the Mickey Mouse ear-headbands with the hashtag #ShareYourEars. For every post, Disney donated $5 to Make-A-Wish.
19. Twitter Lists
Twitter has a nifty feature that social media marketers should use: Twitter lists. Using them, people can sort Twitter accounts according to their needs and streamline their experience of using the social media platform.
Users can create their own Twitter lists, which is straightforward and quick. Or they can hop onto the public lists created by other users that are visible on anyone’s profile.
And yes, you can set the privacy settings on the lists you create.
You can add the biggest of brands on Twitter to your list or choose small flourishing businesses specific to your needs.
You can make a list around a specific theme or topic or even group all your competitors into a single one and keep track of their social media performance. If you look at this the other way around, following others’ public lists will lead to discovering new accounts that might present new business opportunities.
You will have total control over your own Twitter list, including adding or removing members. As a brand, you can even list your most active fans and monitor and interact with them regularly.
One way to enhance your experience with Twitter to a great extent is the categorization and management of your Twitter feed, and you can do this with Twitter list.
Wrapping up
Social media is a constantly changing landscape, and every year, what worked for you before might not be as useful tomorrow. Therefore, it is a good idea to look ahead and start preparing yourself for the changes that will come in the next year.
In this article, we have shared with you 19 social media hacks that will help you stay a step ahead of your competitors in 2022. All you need to do now is tweak your social media strategy to take advantage of these hacks and ensure you stay ahead of your competitors.
