A new year, a new opportunity to go viral on social media, right? Well, whether or not you go viral is more a game of chance than anything else, but steady growth and success are always the product of hard work and continuous improvement.
And that’s what we are talking about today, essentially. We are talking about not what it takes to be a social media superstar, but what it takes to optimize your social media content to deliver results day in and day out, generate leads consistently, and make data-driven decisions.
Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
Is that too much to ask? We don’t think so.
So let’s get right into it, here are the things you should do to optimize your social media content in 2024 and take your business to new heights of success.
Review and Update Your 2024 Strategy
What worked last year won’t necessarily work this year. But it might.
The problem isn’t that you have to update your strategy for 2024, the problem is that most businesses don’t take the time to research emerging trends. Always keep in mind that content trends come and go pretty fast and that what was relevant and interesting in December of 2023 might be considered cringey and outdated if you use it in January of 2024.
If you want to develop a social media marketing strategy that will take you through the entire new year, then that strategy needs to be flexible and malleable. You need to review it constantly and course-correct with the evolving industry and content marketing trends.
Take meme culture as a prime example.
Corporate accounts like Ryanair have absolutely dominated the social media space in the past couple of years with their meme-first approach to social media marketing.
Not only are their photos and reels embracing meme culture, but so are their captions and generally the messaging they’re putting out into the social media world. Now, Ryanair and many other similar corporate accounts have their own tone of voice and their reasons for doing this, but it just goes to show that doing something different can pay off big time.
With that in mind, consider what you’re doing now and if you may need to start stepping out of your own comfort zone in 2024 to get more exposure and capture people’s attention.
Let’s Talk about AI Use Cases
Artificial intelligence has been talked to death in 2023 with the ChatGPT boom and the proliferation of generative AI tools in general. But that doesn’t make it any less important for our topic today.
In fact, as AI tools become more sophisticated over time, there’s even more reason for us to talk about AI applications in business and in social media marketing, especially if you want to create content at scale. Artificial intelligence is permeating every industry in the world nowadays, and its use cases range from Ecommerce to healthcare, from manufacturing to logistics and beyond.
At the center of it lies content creation, which serves to educate, elevate and push brands in all these industries forward in the online and offline realms.
First of all, AI tools are currently great for content and topic ideation. Don’t know what to talk about or what to post? Ask your generative AI tool, and it will probably give you some useful ideas.
On the other hand, more advanced AI tools like an Instagram caption generator can save you a ton of time in prepping your IG posts for publication, especially when you’re committed to posting every day. An AI tool like this can give you several caption ideas for every post that you can integrate seamlessly with the image or video so that your creatives can focus on actually creating the visuals.
Aside from helping you with ideation and content creation, some AI tools are just great for crunching the numbers and informing your strategy in general. In the paid version of ChatGPT, you have the Data Analyst tool that you can use to upload all your social media analytics, which the tool will then visualize, organize, and analyze for you.
Social Media Workflow: Optimize Your SOPs
Your typical social media workflow can be extremely chaotic if you don’t have some standard operating procedures in place.
Having concrete marketing SOP checklists in place will save you and your team a lot of time on a daily basis when it comes to everything from ideation to post-prepping and scheduling, all the way to follower communication, community management, and more. When every team member has an SOP checklist for their specific role and duties, there will be no guesswork as to how they should respond to a comment, gather feedback, or think about future posts.
That said, it’s important to always reevaluate your SOPs and analyze their performance.
As far as workflow is concerned, make sure that all your marketing team members have themed days throughout the week. Creatives should have a day for planning posts and analyzing trends, a day for creating posts, a day for editing and scheduling, and so on.
This will make it much easier to stay on top of work and not get overwhelmed at the end of the workweek.
Tap into Customer and Market Data with Surveys
The more information you can gather, the better. Luckily there are many passive and active ways you can gather relevant data about your social media audience, followers, leads, and customers.
You can always look into your social media analytics to monitor engagement and post-by-post performance, as well as weekly, monthly, and quarterly performances. This will allow you to analyze and reflect effectively.
That said, this is by no means the only data source you should be using. Real-life, user-generated data is equally important. This is another way in which AI is a useful tool, as you can use an AI survey creator to build on-brand surveys with your tone of voice and smart suggestions for questions and topics.
Posting surveys on social media is a great way to spark engagement with your followers and start meaningful conversations. Keep in mind that surveys can also be great lead-generation tools, as you can always ask them to share their email address with you at the end.
Consider changing things up by making the content even more interactive through quizzes as well. Promoting a quiz on social media is a great way to get people over to your website, and it’s an added incentive because they expect to get something out of it.
Make It Easy for People to Get in Touch
Whether you’re marketing predominantly on professional networks like LinkedIn or non-professional ones like TikTok, you always need to think about reducing customer effort.
What does that mean? Customer effort means how much effort (or steps) the customer needs to put in to achieve a certain result. If a customer decides they want to get in touch with you, then that should be as easy as writing you a direct message right there on the platform.
Many prospects will want to reach out via email, and the last thing you want is for them to have to go to your site to find your contact information. You want them to have your contact info at the ready immediately.
This is where something like a digital business card can come in handy because you can share it via social media, QR codes, and other communication channels. When you share it on social media, you’re giving people a direct way to contact you, in a way that suits them best.
The key is to make it easy for people to get in touch while capitalizing on the trends of the digital world. While physical business cards are still relevant, most professionals will prefer to have digital ones that they can store on their phones and computers.
Leverage Analytics for Targeted Content Creation
In order to create content that resonates with your audience, and to make your accounts relevant over time, you need to monitor post- and brand-performance on social media.
You also need to monitor your demographics data to see which types of audiences you’re engaging with the most, who are the people who are seeing your posts, and more. Social listening will allow you to monitor the conversations around your brand and the relevant topics in your industry so that you can spot upcoming trends and capitalize on them ahead of time.
Remember that forecasting and trend evaluation is half the battle on social media, and staying ahead of the curve will net you the highest amount of exposure and engagement early on. Once a trend starts to die down, you can quickly start forecasting again to hop on the next one before the competitors do.
Here are some things you need to cover through your analytics and research:
- Analyze your competitors’ accounts
- Define your ideal posting times
- Identify the most popular types of content
- Identify engagement patterns and how people interact with you
- Gather as much feedback as possible
- Analyze your social CTR and CTAs
- Track hashtags and improve your hashtag strategy
All of this data will allow you to personalize your content better and target your ideal customers and followers more efficiently. Most importantly, however, this information will help you stay relevant in 2024.
Visual Content: Building a Visual-Heavy Approach
Over the years, written content has become supplementary to visual content, at least on social media.
While written content bears tremendous value for audiences on any platform, whether it’s social media or your website or anywhere in between, it’s the visual content that will hook and reel them in upon first contact. This is why you need to focus on a visual-first approach when it comes to social marketing in 2024.
What does this mean? It means that videos are your first priority, images your second priority, and then written content should always be a strong supplement in the form of captions and video descriptions. This is a simple and effective way to frame your posting strategy.
Ideally, you want to post short-form videos every day on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and even LinkedIn. The creative possibilities here are endless, of course, ranging from educational videos to explainers and tutorials, all the way to UGC videos, snippets, interviews, memes, and more.
Social Media and SEO: Expanding Reach and Visibility
Social media and SEO share a wonderful symbiotic relationship, and this is your 2024 reminder to start combining the two whenever possible.
Incorporate your most relevant keywords into your social media posts. Integrate the keywords naturally into your profiles, image captions, and alt-text, and add them to your video descriptions to make them more searchable and visible on Google.
Next, work on shareability. Use personalized CTAs to incentivize people to share your content across their networks so that Google sees them as more relevant, and starts promoting them more in the search results.
Don’t forget to think locally, as well. Content localization is the best way for local businesses to gain exposure by talking about relevant topics in the community, promoting events and news, and sharing links that are relevant to the local people.
All of this drives engagement and improves brand visibility on social media.
Managing Brand-Follower Communication with Chatbots
Lastly, social channels can be a direct line of communication with your followers and customers.
This is your opportunity to generate leads effectively as well, as direct messaging allows you to reach out with a tempting offer or a heartfelt message of appreciation. This doesn’t mean that 2024 is the year you start spamming your followers in the DMs, but it does open an opportunity to start some conversations.
Now, handling communication volume can be tricky, so you can consider outsourcing some of the repetitive questions to a chatbot. This will eliminate the need to have someone always online to respond to a message because a chatbot can reply immediately to a simple query.
You can also use chatbots to deliver value-driven content, not just answer questions.
A trained chatbot can always follow up with one of your free eBooks or any valuable lead magnet that will keep your brand top of mind. This will turn them into a viable lead, which you can then follow up on and invite them for an introductory call, or send a personalized offer.
Over to You
Social media is way easier than businesses like to think, and if you’ve been overcomplicating it yourself, don’t worry, you’re not alone. The truth of the matter is that social media is about staying relevant and on topic, monitoring the trends, and capitalizing on the types of content that are relevant.
You can use AI for ideation and some help with content creation. You can use videos and the meme culture to your advantage to connect with the younger audiences. All of this becomes easy when you realize that successful social media means evolving with the trends and the tendencies in the market.
Now that you have the steps laid out in front of you, go ahead and make 2024 your best year yet!