Social media marketing is no longer an option but a must-do for businesses today. For marketers, social media is a goldmine, and whoever can tap its full potential is sure to be a winner.
The biggest perks of using social media as a digital marketing channel are how dynamic these platforms are and the sheer size of the audience you can reach, with nearly 4.62 billion social media users globally.
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But to make the best use of social media channels for marketing, you need to be on your feet all the time. Social media is a constantly changing landscape. What you did last year could have gained some considerable traction but there is no guarantee of the same social media marketing tactics to work this year as well.
Social media trends are always evolving and so are users.
Keeping up with these changes is the key to social media success. No matter how valuable your content is, unless you are up-to-date on tips, tricks, and tools, delivering a punch can be tough. It is best to have your social media strategy reviewed, updated, and ready at the start so that your marketing ship sails smoothly the rest of the year.
In this article, we will be discussing the top marketing trends and best practices for social media marketing in 2024. These insights should help you stay current with what’s in vogue and devise a fail-proof social media marketing plan for the year. So let’s dive into it.
1. Create and post diverse content
The most useful advice that anyone in social media marketing can give you right now is to diversify your content. Most social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram, are slowly shifting to newer content formats. While Instagram was once primarily an image-based platform, today carousels, reels, and short videos are being promoted more than ever. The same goes for Facebook which was once seen primarily as a text- and image-based platform. These changes are expected from time to time and also necessary. Users can get bored with the same kind of content being presented to them every time.
So for your content to remain relevant and visible on social media channels, your content strategy needs to focus on diverse content types. Instead of just creating short written posts or the usual images, you can look into more interesting options. Try to create infographics, GIFs, animated videos, interactive content, and so on. You don’t want to be a boring brand that simply posts on social media for the sake of it, putting in no effort to connect with the audience. If you put the same content in front of your audience every day, you are most likely to see your following dwindling. So take the time you need to plan and diversify your content and keep your audience hooked.
2. Spend more time and effort on live video
Another promising trend over the past year or two has been live video. According to reports, the live video streaming industry grew nearly 99% from April 2019 to April 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns probably had a part to play in this as well. But whatever the reason may be, live videos are here to stay. According to LinkedIn, Live Videos get 24x more engagement on the platform. So to connect with more people on the professional networking site, apart from a good bio and a catchy LinkedIn headline, the content you post matters too.
A big positive of live videos is that your audience gets to directly interact with someone from your organization. It gives a face to your brand and keeps the human angle alive. This helps build more connections and foster trust among your audience.
Live sessions can be an interview with an industry expert or a talk on any relevant topic. You can explore different ways to incorporate live videos in your social media strategy, as long as you know it will add value for the audience.
3. Post consistently to drive engagement
One of the major reasons why some brands see no success with social media marketing is because they are just not posting enough content. Posting consistently and regularly is key to engaging with your audience. If your social media posts are few and far between, your followers will likely forget about your brand on the platform faster than you think. But that does not mean that you need to spam their feed with post after post, as that can overwhelm your audience too. Hubspot shows that brands that post 1 to 5 posts a month on Facebook are found to have uniformly high engagement, irrespective of the number of followers. But when brands with a small following posted more than 30 posts a month, their engagement rates went down significantly.
Source: Hubspot
So finding the optimum posting frequency for all your social channels is going to be very important in 2024. To ensure that you maintain your consistency, use a social scheduling tool like Bulkly.
Bulkly lets you schedule and drip your social media posts on different channels multiple times in a day, week, or month. You can upload hundreds of posts to the platform in a CSV file and schedule. You can also randomize the sequence of the posts and automatically recycle your old posts for other channels too. If you don’t have any content to post at the moment, Bulkly can automatically create updates from your blog posts. You simply need to enter the blog URL and the tool will create dozens of social media statuses from the available content on its own.
4. Outsource some of your high-engagement pieces to freelance creators
One very useful piece of advice for any marketer who is struggling with content creation and management is to hire help. If you need to post frequently on social media, it also means that you need to create more social media content. Most content marketers usually juggle different responsibilities and may not always have the time to create content at this scale. This is where freelancers can help. Freelance content creators are probably one of the most economical options for small businesses and agencies that don’t have plans of investing in a large in-house content team. You can get quality social content created by social media specialists and freelance creators instead. There are reliable freelance platforms where you can hire skilled freelancers at affordable rates and get quality content delivered.
Narrato Marketplace is one such freelance content marketplace that has thousands of quality-vetted freelance writers specializing in different areas from blog writing to copywriting to social media. The platform employs Intelligent Writer Matching that uses smart algorithms to match your order with the best-suited freelancer based on their experience, skills, and quality. You can also request unlimited revisions until you are satisfied with the quality of the content. You may be eligible for discounts in case of high-volume orders too. Hiring freelance content creators on a dependable platform like Narrato can be a convenient way to have tons of social media content ready for your repository without much effort.
Narrato also has a content creation, collaboration, and workflow management platform, Narrato Workspace, that you can use to create impactful social content in-house.
5. Respond quickly to messages and comments
Over time people’s expectations from brands on social media have changed. They no longer expect to keep waiting for a response to their queries or comments on your posts. Successful brands are proactive and responsive on social media, so you ought to do the same. Quick responses are a sign that you care about your audience and are genuinely interested in helping them. If you are managing multiple social media accounts for your business, it can be difficult to keep track of all your inboxes and posts.
A social media management tool with a unified social inbox where you can monitor all your conversations from multiple social channels can be useful here. A platform like Radaar does that for you.
Radaar is a unified social inbox where you can have a single inbox for your social media accounts, reply to incoming messages and easily manage your conversations by filtering, reviewing, or archiving them. It also has translation capabilities, allowing you to translate a message in any language into your own language with just a click. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, so that’s almost all the social media channels covered.
6. Partner with influencers in your niche
If you haven’t tried influencer marketing on social media yet, it is high time. You may be missing out on some solid visibility by not including influencer marketing in your social media strategy. The influencer marketing industry is predicted to grow to almost $16.4 billion in 2024. So the sooner you get on the bandwagon the better it would be for your brand. For reaching a smaller but highly targeted audience, you may collaborate with micro-influencers. Micro-influencers have a following of more than 1,000 but fewer than 100,000.
But since they have a small following, it means that the people they have an influence on are genuinely interested in their niche. They are people who actually want news, information, and knowledge from their industry. So with micro-influencer marketing, you have a chance at reaching out to a highly interested audience. This can lead to stronger, deeper connections and actual conversions.
7. Invest in social commerce
As people are spending more and more time on social media today, they expect more conveniences and facilities to be available on these platforms. So, instead of looking at your content on social media and then going to your e-commerce store, they would rather prefer buying directly on the social channel. Statistics say that social commerce sales are likely to reach $2.9 trillion by 2026, growing from $560 billion in 2020. A simple buy button along with your social content on Instagram or Facebook can be an effective trigger for purchases.
So when you are planning your social media strategy for 2024, make sure to include shoppable posts as an integral part of it.
8. Maintain a consistent brand identity across channels
With so many social channels to manage, maintaining a brand voice and identity becomes extremely essential. For your social media followers to have trust in your brand it is important that you show consistency on all platforms. From the content you post to the causes you support to the brand elements that you use, uniformity must be visible across all channels. So you can’t choose to change your brand colors at your whim or use different tones for your posts on Facebook and LinkedIn. Of course, how you engage your audience on these multiple channels may vary slightly from one platform to another. But the overall look and feel of your social media pages should be the same.
So if you are creating a Facebook post for Christmas, for example, you need to create something similar for Instagram, LinkedIn, and other channels to post on the same day too. Or if you are promoting a social cause, like a children’s welfare fundraiser or highlighting an environmental issue, you must do that on all your channels. This helps build credibility and trust for your brand through social media and is going to be very important in 2024 and beyond.
To ensure consistency across channels, it is better to have someone solely looking over social media content for your business. Keep your social media accounts limited to a few or even a single employee, and assign them the responsibility of reviewing and posting social content.
9. Review your hashtags for 2024
Hashtags help your social content to be found in the ocean of content on these channels. Targeting the right hashtags is the key to gaining more visibility and traction with your posts. So it is a good practice to review your hashtags every year. Trends keep changing, new products, competitors, and markets may be added to your database. You need to do some research and decide which hashtags will be recurring in most of your social posts throughout the year. Find out trending, high-engagement hashtags that you can use. A social media analytics tool can help you figure out which hashtags are used often in your industry and which ones drive the most engagement.
Make sure to use these recurring hashtags with all your posts and include other relevant, timely hashtags as and when the need arises.
10. Explore new and upcoming social media spaces
Social media is growing and evolving very rapidly and new social media spaces are springing up every other year. The top platforms are still the same, of course, and everyone is on them. But newer spaces are something worth trying too. You never know when one of these becomes the next big thing in social media marketing changing the content marketing trends for good. Early adopters are always at an advantage in such cases. Some popular spaces include YouTube Shorts, Twitter Spaces, Facebook Live Audio, among others. Hubspot has ranked some of these emerging platforms in terms of their popularity among social media marketers, and the top three contenders were found to be Twitter Spaces, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Shops. So including these platforms in your social media strategy in 2024 could be a smart move.
Source: Hubspot
Final Thoughts on Social Media Best Practices This Year
After the ups and downs that businesses have seen over the past two years owing to the pandemic, 2024 finally seems to be a promising one. Social media marketing has stood with brands through the thick and thin of it. Having a solid social media plan for 2024 should be high on your priority list. And to start with it, knowing these social media best practices for 2024 is extremely crucial. Once you know the basics, building your SM strategy on this foundation should be a lot easier. Implement these best practices well, and social media success is sure to be yours this year.