Last Updated 7 months by Emily Standley-Allard
If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur looking for proven social media hacks that will help grow your business, you aren’t alone. In fact, every company is trying it’s best to stay ahead of their competitors and keep their business afloat. Social media is literally the lifeblood of today’s marketing strategy. Today we’re bringing you 11 Social Media marketing hacks your business needs today.
Nowadays businesses must run multiple social media accounts and reach out to the right people at the right time. Simultaneously, you have to keep up with the latest trends that will keep you ahead in the social media game.
This can be accomplished by establishing and nurturing good relationships with your target audience and creating the most authentic content possible.
Kim Garst, an American businesswoman, author, and online business strategist, has said, “Successful social media marketing isn’t built on impressions but relationships”.
Since the novel coronavirus hit the world in December 2019, businesses worldwide have been facing unprecedented hardships.
Social media has proven to be a lifeline for businesses to stay connected with their customers online.
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Fortunately, some agencies and companies have risen to their rescue, each in very helpful ways.
If you want to take your branding efforts to the next level through social media hacks, keep on reading!
We’ve rounded up some of the key 11 social media hacks in 2022 that can help your business build up your social media presence by leaps and bounds.
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Top 11 Social Media Hacks for Businesses
Since society and our way of life has drastically changed, this has forced us to change our marketing strategies to stay connected with our target audience.
People are still spending more time indoors, working from home and maintaining social distancing.
Social media has become more important than ever before to your business success. Managing your social accounts can be both thrilling and frightening, especially in the time when you’re working from home.
But the best part of social media marketing is that you can build a significant following to your business.
Here are 11 essential hacks you need to increase your social media presence.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #1: Talk about trending topics
In the realm of the Internet where information is no sooner floated on different platforms than it’s rendered, trends have the ability to draw the attention of millions of people instantly and hold for a more extended period.
So, publish posts related to hot topics, and trends including using appropriate hashtags to reach out to more and more audiences. You’d be surprised how many businesses forget this!
Through retweets, shares and likes, your posts will explode across social media channels in a matter of no time.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #2: Invite people to like your page
It may seem painfully obvious, but you’d be surprised how many individuals and businesses skip over this.
Create a list of people you like, do business with or have engaged actively with your posts and then invite them to further like your page.
The trick is to not just send a bland and boring invite. Mention something personal that you like about their page that you find valuable and offer to invite them to yours as an incentive to help them out with a specific problem.
Karie Lance—a renowned social media consultant—describes this little hack as one of her favorite Facebook business page tricks.
“This less-known social media hack is now something I do once a week, and it has helped me consistently grow my Facebook likes,” she says.
Naturally this can also be done on Instagram, TikTok and your other social platforms.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #3: Boost traffic by sharing content everywhere
This is a highly effective social media hack, but surprisingly another one that business owners ignore.
Post your well-written relevant content across multiple social accounts at once.
You can use content curation tools to do this. The best feature of such tools is build-in scheduling that makes content creation an incredibly effortless task.
“Content is king” is an adage, and it’s true, but even great content won’t work well if it’s not posted strategically.
If you own multiple accounts, posting content manually after a regular interval may not be possible for you. Sometimes, according to the audience’s time zone, you may need to publish some posts in the early morning while others may be at midnight.
An inexpensive and simple social media management tool is the perfect solution to this problem.
You’ll find plenty of social scheduling apps, choose one that fits your need and budget the best and automate your content posting across various accounts.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #4: Grow conversions using emojis/emoticons/gifs/memes
Using emoticons in communication is a wonderful way to connect with your target audience on a more personal level.
As part of a company’s marketing strategy, Neil Patel — a marketer, blogger, entrepreneur, an author—has dedicated one of his blog posts to the use of emoticons. Patel found that nearly 92% of online people use emoticons and emojis, and businesses use this information to build relationships with their audience on a more human level.
Growing business with social media is modern marketing strategies. And emoticons, emojis and also gifs or memes are most important in communication and in caption makes it more engaging!
So, make sure to include smiley faces, animals, hearts, gifs, funny memes etc. to get a message across effectively and engagingly.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #5: Identify the best posting time.
Does posting timings real matter? If yes, what are the ideal times to publish your posts?
These are some of the questions that should strike every marketer when scheduling their posts.
No matter how engaging your content is, how enticing your Instagram photos are, but their success directly relates to the posting times.
Each social media platform has a specific audience and time when most users scroll through.
So, determine the right time to publish your content on different platforms by looking at your analytics.
Gather information—find out the time slot that most audiences visit on each platform, such as the morning coffee breaks, lunch time, or before snooze time.
Based on this, build your marketing strategy, and schedule your social postings.
But is it fixed? Of course not! This changes during festive seasons and holidays.
Pay heed to these changes and seasons before you schedule your social media posting to optimize your marketing success.
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Social Media Hacks for Businesses #6: Pay more attention to engagement, less to vanity.
Vanity metrics are nothing but the number of likes you get on social platforms. These may look nice but don’t actually DO anything worthwhile for your business.
Is it an accurate measure of your campaign’s success? Not really. What should be measured is how your content engages your audience.
Business metrics
Business metrics are the overarching goals for social media that align with your brand’s business objectives.
Business metrics provide the structure from which marketing is going to be defined – by identifying and understanding what drives the bottom line of your brand, you can begin to tie your marketing efforts to it. In doing so, you’ll also be able to make the case for your marketing efforts in quantifiable and real terms in how they are providing value back to the brand.
Moreover, these business metrics are the larger concepts that set your channel-specific goals, from which the rest of the metrics structure branches. Social media certainly can’t address all business goals, but it can serve as a means to address specified business needs.
In most instances business metrics will come down to elements that represent healthy business operations that directly or indirectly lead to making more money, saving money, or both.
Examples: Market share, revenue, brand equity, net promoter score, brand awareness, share of voice, customer lifetime value, and brand affinity
Performance Metrics
The layer beneath the business metrics are the performance metrics, or your key performance indicators (KPIs).
These numbers signal how your marketing is performing by tracking progress against the goals established through the business metrics. Performance metrics are typically defined by absolutes or hard numbers and are the building blocks that set the foundation for your larger business metrics.
With the performance metrics, you’re essentially trying to answer the question: are we reaching our goals?
One popular framework for setting goals to define performance metrics is the SMART method, meaning that goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Another is the OKR method, which establishes an objective and then the key results that feed that objective.
Performance metrics should feed business objectives with measurable key results over defined sets of time. Regardless of the method applied, these metrics need to be clear, defined, measurable, and have set timeframes.
Examples: Raising brand awareness, which then translates into key results of a certain social media reach over a specific range of time.
That specified reach then can be broken down into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals to support the larger objective. This metric would then be one piece of the overall collection of performance metrics that create reporting dashboards.
Optimization Metrics
The last set of metrics needed for an effective measurement system are optimization metrics. Optimization metrics are those that provide insights on how to improve your social media marketing or indicate what needs to change.
Arguably, these metrics are the most important and valuable – they provide the catalyst for the best actionable insights you need to take.
Optimization metrics take the form of rates or ratios and help answer the question: how can we reach our goals better?
Examples: Clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), cost per interaction (CPI), cost per acquisition (CPA), conversion rate, engagement rate, active audience percentage, engagement per post, reach per post, retention rate, and growth rate.
While social media likes denote that your posts are performing well, engagement like comments and conversation shows that the audience is really interested in your products/services and the information you share.
Several social channels such as Facebook (Meta), Instagram, and Twitter, offer analytics tools for free that can provide you with complete information, such as what types of content draws more attention on your page.
These tools will let you figure out what the audiences are actually responding to. As you would do for posting times, find out the types of content that perform well, and tweak them that match your audiences’ choice.
For more detailed insights try Sprout Social FREE for 30 days.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #7: Exploit the power of Instagram/Facebook Stories
Instagram stories let users post their photos and videos that appear at the top of your feed and automatically vanish within 24 hours of posting.
They’re great for communicating with followers, gathering feedback, and stimulating customers for your business on social platforms in a fresh and fun way. And the best part of this is that it’s absolutely free.
So, it’s a wise idea to add the Instagram frames and Meta (Facebook) Stories to your social media toolkit and try to post your stories and include things that viewers can potentially interact with.
You can add polls, questions, or other stickers to stories for making them more engaging and helpful to increase Instagram followers.
But make sure you don’t post too much as they may frustrate your audience.
Also, make sure your social graphics are attractive enough that can draw audiences’ attention instantly.
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Social Media Hacks for Businesses #8: Check out Instagram stickers to add to your story.
The corona pandemic has brought many small businesses in hardship, and to help them out, many firms/organizations have come up with helping hands to help them sail through the crisis.
In view of this, Instagram has developed unique stickers to bring more traffic to your website when you add to your Instagram Stories.
Now small businesses have the option to add stickers when publishing an Instagram Story. These stickers include buttons for shopping gift cards, ordering meals, or donating to a fundraiser.
Each of the buttons lets users link a partner website to complete the required action, like donating to a fundraiser, ordering food. These stickers could prove to be a great help to stay your business connected with your social media community.
Social Media Hacks for Businesses #9: Edit Social Media Photos
Quality of images is everything. We are a vanity influenced world! Get your social media photos ready before you publish. Edit them by adding text, graphics and frames.
There are many wonderful free online tools such as Canva, etc. that let you house them in your dashboard and make your photos all set for posting at any time.
These design tools also have 1,000s of templates and video tools that you can use for making them more personal, compelling and more appealing.
By optimizing open graph tags on Facebook, you can control how your content will look in social feeds if they’re shared or liked by users.
Open Graph meta tags are snippets of code that control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media. They’re part of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and are also used by other social media sites, including LinkedIn and Twitter.
Facebook’s OpenGraph metadata allows users to share web pages on Facebook. If you add OpenGraph meta tags to your posts and pages, Facebook will display a preview with images and an excerpt when a link to your site is shared.
This can make a massive difference to the overall success of your campaigns.
#11: Don’t Ignore TikTok
In a very short time, TikTok has become one, if not the most popular social media platform in the world.
It’s even surpassing Google as the #1 website platform!
It has launched influencers and celebrities who have become household names in under a year.
It has also started a plethora of trends, challenges, and dances that almost every user is catching on.
If you’re thinking this platform could benefit your business, in this post we go over some TikTok marketing tactics you need to know.
Bonus – Use effective paid advertising practices.
Another effective social strategy is to use paid advertising to focus on boosting engagement and creating content that has a visual appeal.
This will help you create an effective paid strategy that boosts brand awareness and social media engagement.
Here are the top three strategies to help boost your paid strategy:
- Introducing new content. Creating new content is an easy way to stay fresh and interesting on social media. It also gives you another opportunity to create high-quality content that boosts your social media presence.
- Highlighting social proof. Social proof, also known as endorsement and testimonial, is when you use other people’s success to boost your social media presence. People trust what other people say, so having endorsements and testimonials on your social media channels will help boost your presence.
- Promoting contests or sweepstakes. Promoting contests and sweepstakes on your social media channels will help you boost brand awareness and social media engagement.
Conclusion
If you’re a business owner and worried about your social media campaigns’ success, these social media hacks will help you a lot.
While it may seem quite challenging to stay connected to your community during hard times, incorporating these hacks to your strategy, you can stay connected and engaged. Your followers will respond to your post and support your business.
Just don’t try to incorporate too many changes at once. It takes time to build and manage a successful social media strategy.
With Sprout Social, you can find an all-in-one social media management platform unlocks the full potential of social to transform not just your marketing strategy—but every area of your organization. SIGN UP FOR 30 DAYS FREE!