How to Improve Your Social Media Marketing [+7 Tips]

Imagine you're the marketing manager of a growing e-commerce startup. Your brand has a social media account but your customer base seems disengaged. You post often and know how powerful social media marketing can be for your business. So why is your audience not engaging? The answer is quite simple. Fostering business growth involves smartly strategizing how to improve social media marketing to enhance brand visibility and engagement.  

You can't be flying blind. Enterprises need a definitive social media marketing blueprint. They need to know how to utilize social media platforms effectively to connect with their audience, build their brand, boost sales and drive traffic to their website. As of April 2024, there are 5.07 billion active social media users and 90% of them follow at least one brand online. That strongly indicates the importance of a strong social media presence. But how do you improve your social media marketing strategies? Where do you begin? 

We've got you covered. Here's a roadmap to help you craft a winning social media marketing strategy for your brand, packed with market trends you can leverage and actionable tips and insights. So let's get started. 

Current trends in social media marketing 

Social media marketing is very dynamic, but here are some of the hottest trends you should know about to improve social media marketing for your brand in 2024. 

• Convergence between B2B and B2C marketing

Your target audience wears multiple hats. They develop software at work and are doting parents at home. A person who’s casually browsing social media for personal entertainment could also seek B2B solutions for their professional needs. So, B2B and B2C marketing efforts are merging. For instance, memes, quizzes and polls were once considered content that’s primarily for D2C purposes. However, they are now being utilized by B2B marketers to generate engagement. Look at Atlassian Confluence, for example. The Australian software company shares relatable corporate-developer life content on social media. 

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• Partnership with micro/nano influencers with hyper-targeted reach 

With their dedicated and niche-focused followers, nano and micro-influencers sometimes tend to achieve higher engagement rates than celebrities on Instagram. Tie-ups with these individuals don’t dent your budget and mostly appear as “warm and authentic” conversations on your feed.

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Recommended Read: Influencer marketing strategies to improve engagement 

• Social media reviews as new word of mouth  

Currently, 84% of online buyers in the US review at least one social site before deciding to make a purchase. With many potential customers favoring social media over Google Maps, Apple Maps or Google Search for finding and buying products, businesses that aren't effectively utilizing social platforms are missing out on valuable opportunities. 

Why? Well, in the digital age, consumers are more active on social channels to access genuine, relatable content that better convinces them to purchase. Consumers actively seek authenticity and truth in product reviews to be informed buyers. 

Social media reviews offer validation, vouching for a product's quality before users buy. In response, marketers are allocating their budgets to optimizing their brand's social media presence so they can capture potential customers earlier in the buying journey, instead of solely relying on search engine optimization. 

Read More: 10 Methods for Building Social Media Presence in 2024  

• Community building before content marketing

Community-driven marketing is a hot trend today because it focuses on building your prospect funnel. It also deepens alignment with a ready user base that already believes in your offerings and might be using them.  

More than 76% of netizens engage with online forums, blogs or vlogs across all devices. Companies can utilize these focus groups of like-minded individuals, who are likely to influence others’ purchasing decisions, to grow their businesses and make their products more discoverable. Communities can help you cut costs, as businesses can outsource Q&As and important announcements. Answering a question via the community can be 72% cheaper for your business than traditional support channels. They also help you in understanding your target persona, in and out.

Look at Ford Focus, for instance. Their online community helps users choose their cars or find the best service centers for themselves. 

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Likewise, there’s Crunchyroll’s official Discord channel — it is a one-stop hub for all things anime, increasing the popularity, discoverability and discussions around the Japanese animation style.

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Learn More: How to build an online customer community in 2024 (+benefits) 

• DMs as a preferred customer service medium 

Attention spans are shrinking. Social media users crave instant gratification and negative customer service experiences can be dealbreakers. In fact, a staggering 69% of users stop purchasing from a brand if they have a single negative customer experience. 

The solution? Meeting customers where they are to resolve their grievances. Forward-thinking brands like Telfar are already capitalizing on this trend, actively integrating DM support into their customer service strategy.

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💡 Pro Tip: Responding to DMs at scale can be challenging, especially when you have limited personnel on your customer care team. This is where using an AI-powered chatbot software, like that of Sprinklr’s, can lighten the manual load. It makes for cost-effective, near-instant digital support across 30+ channels (including all major social channels) from a single unified platform. So, consider making the most of such software to cut response times, increase productivity and reduce service costs. 

AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL CARE NOW 

How to improve social media marketing 

Social media marketing may not be as straightforward as it seems. It can be challenging to navigate the landscape, requiring strategic adaptation to evolving trends, platform features and algorithms. So, to make it easier for you, here's a cheat sheet with 7 proven tips to improve your social media marketing game. 

1. Invest in social SEO  

A few years ago, social media was just about having a personalized feed. It comprised updates from your connections. Cut to 2024 and users are actively searching for product reviews, brand recommendations and local businesses on it. Social commerce is booming on these platforms. 

Social SEO involves optimizing your social media presence to rank prominently in searches related to your brand, industry or product niche. It’s often overlooked but can yield high ROI. Imagine a potential customer exploring a competitor and stumbling upon your brand. That's an ideal opportunity for conversion. Here’s how you can make that possible: 

1. Experiment with long-tail keywords 

Did you know the top search terms on TikTok among Gen Z-ers were “how to” queries followed by “what is” keywords in January 2023? That’s the power of long-tail keywords. They help you target specific user requests such as "natural skincare routine for oily skin" or “DIY gardening ideas.” Consider any e-commerce clothing store, for instance. On Facebook, they might target users with keywords like "summer outfit ideas," but on LinkedIn, they'd switch gears to attract professionals by using terms like "fashion career jobs." To get started, find a head keyword through a keyword planning tool. Then, customize your long-tail keyword as per your platform's requirements. 

2. Use follow links  

Embed follow links in your posts through pinned comments after posting a carousel/infographic or customer testimonial. Avoid embedding no-follow links in your social bios. While they may be suitable for comments and forum posts, using follow links in bios enhances the customer journey, potentially improving search rankings. 

3. Leverage the serial positioning effect 

Users tend to recall the first and last items in a list more easily than those in the middle. So leverage strategies like the serial positioning effect (SPE) effect in short-form content. Start with attention-grabbing questions or a strong statement. Provide context in the middle to build interest and include a clear CTA or a cliffhanger in the last sentence.  Here’s an example:

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Dive Deeper: 10+ Ideas for Social Media Posts That Move the Needle 

2. Automate workflows for efficiency gains 

Social media teams need creative space to grow and develop new social media campaign ideas. However, posting multichannel content and managing multiple inboxes can be a challenge.  The way forward? Automate workflows and repetitive tasks to boost engagement and save precious time and energy. By doing this, you can: 

• Capture leads from mentions and comments automatically to nurture those connections. 
• Automate pulling social suggestions to streamline product improvements while focusing on implementing the best ideas. 
• Set up automated responses to common issues for quick resolutions. 

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• Automate really simple syndication (RSS) feeds or online repositories that contain details about every piece of content your site has published for market research, social listening, competitor tracking and brand mentions. That way, you can brainstorm new ideas for social media whenever something new pops up on your feed.  
• Automate bidding strategies for social media advertising to optimize campaign performance and budget allocation so you can place ad development and delivery on autopilot. 
• Schedule and post content across channels at the ideal times for greater engagement. 

Read More: Social Media Automation: How to Get It Right? 

3. Strengthen your distribution strategy  

So you've crafted killer social media content. But that's only half the battle won. You need a strategic distribution plan to maximize the impact of your content efforts.  

To get started, create in-depth audience personas and customer journey maps for each platform. The content needed to engage Gen Z audience on TikTok differs significantly from what resonates with senior executives on LinkedIn. For instance, a fitness brand targeting young adults might create high-energy workout videos for Instagram and share images with healthy meal plans for women on Pinterest.  

You can also repurpose content for social media by transforming blog posts into infographics or video scripts. Create social media snippets from webinars and share bite-sized content across platforms. Again, the recycled content has to be platform-specific. Breathe new life into your ebooks through X’s threads, Meta’s threads and LinkedIn carousels. After webinars, extract key segments and create standalone explainer videos for YouTube or Facebook. And don’t forget to add a CTA link at the end of your post. It could be a "Learn More,” "Read Here" or a "Sign Up," depending on your social media goals.  

Here's a content distribution trifecta on content that can be used to repurpose and distribute on different channels: 

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Also Read: How to Cross-Promote on Social Media (+ Proven Strategies) 

4. Use social media analytics for business alignment  

A social media strategy is only as strong as its connection to your overall business objectives. To effectively align marketing efforts with business goals, it's crucial to communicate via social media metrics that matter most to your CMO and C-suite executives. 

Metrics like customer acquisition costs, social traffic, social ROAS and engagement rate can be captured to check the potential impact of your marketing engine on bottom lines.

To make the most out of your social analytics, utilize urchin tracking module (UTM) parameters in your social media links to track user behavior, like website visits and purchases. Identifying content that leads to conversions can help you optimize your social strategy for maximum impact. 

For multichannel marketing, try closed-loop analytics. It provides crucial information on prospects, leads and customers to understand individual channel performance, cross-channel influence and underperforming channels that might make a hole in your budget.  

As you analyze social media data, look for attribution models to track which social media touchpoints (e.g., post views, clicks, shares, etc.) contribute most to conversions. The linear attribution model credits all touchpoints equally for a sale, while the time-decay model emphasizes the most recent touchpoints, giving them higher credit for conversions. 

Dive Deeper: Social media attribution: How to measure correctly 

💡 Pro Tip: Keeping track of all the data from various social channels can seem impossible, but there is an easy fix to this. You can use Sprinklr’s social media analytics and reporting tool to monitor social campaigns across 30+ digital channels from one place, measure and analyze the performance of organic and paid content across major social platforms and even get reports on campaign performance, media monitoring and more.  

5. Start (social) listening to start winning  

Reports indicate that almost 61% of businesses actively use a social listening tool. Touching base with social listening helps you pivot your marketing strategy in a direction that resonates with user preference. Travel companies, for example, can listen in on trending online conversations to design their offerings. If they discover a surge in interest in sustainable travel, they can adjust their social content strategy to highlight eco-friendly destinations and experiences. 

A great way to maximize your social listening efforts is by supporting them with a CRM integration. This way you can inform your marketing strategy with more relevant user data. So every time a customer raves about your product, your social listening tool can be used to match user profiles with your existing customer data in CRM. You can then track their purchase history and send personalized messages — thanking them for their feedback, for instance. You can also create some upsell opportunities by offering complimentary products.  

Similarly, you can use social listening to create niche marketing campaigns and even stay one step ahead of your competitor’s social strategy. It can be leveraged to discover what your competitors focus on to cultivate engagement via informed polls, quizzes, celebrity endorsements or giveaways.  

💡 Pro Tip: You can take things a step further by using Sprinklr’s social listening tool to:  

• Collate, track and assess brand mentions across social media channels to identify what resonates with your audience 
• Perform sentiment analysis to gauge how users feel (positive, negative or neutral) about your brand and its products or services 
• Benchmark your social performance and influencer presence against competitors to optimize your marketing strategy 

FIND OUT HOW PEOPLE FEEL ABOUT YOUR BRAND NOW 

6. Launch ads to turn warm leads into hot prospects  

Warm leads are gold, but you must retarget these prospective customers before they turn cold or ghost your brand. While standard display ads may struggle to convert, retarget ads convert 76% more frequently than regular ads. Why? You're reaching warm leads already familiar with your brand, making them more likely to convert. In some instances, these dynamic ads actually improve brand recall so much that teams experience a 1,046% uptick in branded searches. 

Many marketers see a website visit without a purchase as a dead end. Savvy marketers see it as the best time to strike gold. Advertise to your leads again in a few days. Pique audience interest with irresistible offers, like exclusive BOGO deals or loyalty points redeemable on their next purchase. To save costs, retarget high-interest prospects first by filtering users who spent more time browsing or visiting specific product pages. Try discovery ads again after a few months for leads that haven't converted yet. 

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💡 Pro Tip: Turn your prospects into buyers by using a social advertising platform, like that of Sprinklr’s, to optimize your ad campaigns for greater conversions. You can use this tool to: 

• Manage paid social campaigns across more than 10 social channels, with reporting that covers paid, owned and earned media 
• Create custom ads for various audience groups and markets through dynamic image and video ad templates 
• Use actionable AI-powered insights for improved budget allocation, bidding, boosting and ad rotation 

 START CONVERTING YOUR LEADS NOW

7. Find and capitalize on what’s trending 

Remember the epic dance challenges that took TikTok by storm? Or how about the flawless transition videos on reels that kept everyone hooked? Such social media trends fuel interactions on those platforms. For brands, they are an opportunity to stay in the know-how of the latest buzz and capitalize on them. 

While you don’t have to jump on every trend bandwagon, strategically pursuing the more brand-specific trends can add more visitors to your profile and customers in your funnel. It could be a dance challenge with a product twist or a meme with a clever industry spin.  

For instance, DONK, a dancing trend might perfectly fit your profile if you run a clothing line. Create OOTD, GRWM or transition videos - the choices are endless. This way, you're part of the trend and showcasing your product in a natural and engaging way.

Don’t forget to add relevant trending hashtags to your videos to ensure your content reaches the right audience. The more you leverage popular hashtags, the more likely the algorithm features your brand. If you’re unsure about this, check out our dedicated guide on finding the right hashtags. 

Improve your social media marketing with Sprinklr 

Social media marketing can be difficult to manage, especially if your brand has a vast digital footprint. From tracking every customer interaction across social channels to executing marketing campaigns to monitoring social listening, creating a social media marketing engine can be overwhelming, especially for growing brands. 

That’s where Sprinklr steps in. Sprinklr’s unified social media management platform empowers you to create frictionless customer experiences across social channels. It frees up your team from heavy-lifting and boring, manual tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic matters. Microsoft did just this. The company analyzed 8.6 billion listening mentions by partnering with Sprinklr to turn data into actionable insights and delight customers. 

Brands like Microsoft, Cisco and Prada are using Sprinklr to:  

• Organize and publish content effortlessly via the social media scheduler and publisher at AI-recommended slots to save time while ensuring consistent brand messaging. 

• Have a single pane view of all social marketing activities with personalized dashboards to track performance, engagement, reach, website traffic, conversion rates and the ROI of their efforts. By closely monitoring performance against these metrics, they identify areas for optimization and ensure that their social media strategy stays relevant. 

• Track all their social media conversations across 30+ channels in a single place. The outcome? The brands offer exceptional customer support, launch ad campaigns, gain insights into audience sentiment through data analysis and build user-driven communities.   
• Manage their social media risks confidently by upholding globally accepted compliance frameworks such as GDPR and CPP for approvals, governance and content moderation. 
• Improve the ROAS of their paid marketing engines by 50% through automated workflows, AI-powered budget allocations and unified data reporting to gain complete visibility of their social media performance across organic, paid and social listening channels. 

Wrapping up

In 2024, social media marketing isn't a perk — it's a requirement. The good news? You can up your social presence and build a thriving online community with the right tools, such as Sprinklr Social and Sprinklr Insights, and achieve tangible business results. Enterprises can create powerful social media marketing strategies led by data-driven decisions with Sprinklr. They can leverage advanced capabilities such as comprehensive audience analysis, extensive channel coverage, customizable enterprise tools and cutting-edge AI to enhance their social media marketing initiatives.  

So transform your social media marketing game today. Optimize your processes by automating your social media management tasks. Want to know first-hand how Sprinklr can make a world of difference to your brand in all things social media?