2024 has been a whirlwind of a year so far, to say the least, especially in the realm of social media marketing.

AI integrations have led the way among the most talked about topics of the year, whether the conversation touches on platform updates, algorithm woes, or connections and controversies between brands — of which Reddit’s 60 million dollar AI training deal with Google is only one. The future of TikTok in the US is still precarious with a ban on the horizon, lo-fi content has replaced high production value in terms of the best way to engage your audience, and the creator economy reached global status of importance at this year’s Cannes Lions. We could go on.

At the end of the day, what still matters most is the social media strategy you implement to guide your efforts. We’ve broken down some powerful, fundamental social media techniques and social marketing methods to help you develop a social-first plan that will not only build an authentic and always-on brand presence but also drive your bottom line by increasing ROI and social commerce.

1. Create a consistent content cadence

When you maintain a consistent posting schedule, you can enhance your presence as a top-of-mind brand across social media, foster stronger connections with your audience, and ultimately drive better business results through that engagement. Here’s why posting consistently is a must-have piece of your social media strategy:

  • Work with the Algorithm: Facebook and Instagram algorithms reward accounts that post regularly. Consistent posting helps your content appear more frequently in your followers’ feeds, which increases your visibility and potential for engagement. But that’s not to say you should be posting every day — different platforms have their own best practices for posting techniques: you might post four times a day every day on TikTok, but only twice per week on Instagram.
  • Prioritize Engagement: Regular posts keep your audience engaged and interested. When you post consistently, you stay top of mind with your followers, which helps build a loyal community. In turn, community-building drives your ROI by increasing trust and positive brand sentiment.
  • Build a Brand Identity: Social media methods that are consistent naturally establish and reinforce your brand’s identity across your platforms. That reliability allows your audience to understand your brand’s voice, style, and values, making your content more recognizable and relatable.
  • Increase Reach: The help you’ll gain from the algorithm and the likely increased frequency of your posts mean more opportunities to reach your audience.
  • Measure More Accurately: Regular posting is a terrific social media technique for performance measurement. You’ll have more and cleaner data to analyze, helping you understand what content resonates best with your audience. This insight allows you to refine your strategy and improve your overall social media performance.

2. Make your content shareable

The phrase “content is king” has never been more true than when it comes to your social media strategy. If your goal is to build a strong brand reputation, you should focus your efforts on the cultural resonance and community potential — aka shareability — of your content.

Remember the accompanying standards as you produce content for social media platforms: Whether it be from case studies or A/B testing, figure out which content is likely to achieve the most visibility. It’s imperative that your content strongly supports the humanized, authentic brand persona you’ve established. For example, it can be tough for certain brands to authentically pull off an approach built around entertainment. However, if you have a strong creative team and a finger on the pulse of trends in social, assets like memes can be highly effective brand-building content.

3. Use different forms of content with a unified message

You want to deliver a unified message or brand voice with your content for maximum impact. But it’s a mistake to apply the same concept to the forms of content you post. In 2024, short-form video content continues to rule. But, the power of text-based posts is growing. Carousel posts on Instagram are seeing more updates this year with the additions of music and the ability to add more than 10 images per post. And on TikTok and YouTube, the ideal length of short-form videos to not only grab attention but capitalize on engagement and conversion is now over one minute long.

So what forms of content make for the strongest social media techniques? The answer is, all of them.

With different forms of content making up your social media strategy, here’s what you stand to gain:

  1. Engage a diverse audience: Different types of content appeal to different segments of your audience — more content types means broader reach.
  2. Enhance the resonance and consistency of your brand voice by reinforcing it: this keeps your core message top of mind.
  3. Improve reach, engagement, and SEO: different types of content offer different strengths, as they offer different opportunities to engage, and are treated differently by algorithms and search functions.

4. Practice Platform Diversification

Just as different types of content offer different strengths and pitfalls, different platforms have the potential to build your brand in different ways. While you should do your research to understand what platforms are the best fit for reaching your target audience, it’s a wise social media technique to diversify and tap into the potential of multiple platforms. Ultimately, when it comes to social media strategy, you want you avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.

5. Analyze your competitors

Prior to creating your social media marketing strategy, you should have a good understanding of what your competitors are doing in your vertical. Doing so may only require a bit of surface-level analysis. Brands can also utilize third-party competitor analysis tools to dig deeper into their competitors’ data.

Analyzing your competitor’s online presence directly informs your own brand’s social strategy. This is not to say you want to copy what your competitors are doing. Rather, use this practice to determine what is or isn’t working for them and how you can adapt your own strategies accordingly.

6. Elevate your community management

When you embrace the naturally occurring community that lives on social media platforms, you harness a powerful opportunity to cultivate sustainable growth by meeting consumers where they organically engage with content. Often, where your consumers are engaging is often where they convert to a sale: This year, Deloitte reported that 84% of marketers say consumers will buy products directly in social apps more often than on brand or third-party websites.

What does that mean? Simply put, a successful social media strategy isn’t just about what you post and when: community management is a key social media technique for boosting your ROI.

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8. Influence your audience

While it’s possible to build your audience by creating amazing owned social content, relying on your in-house content team takes time, expertise, and money. A more effective way to maximize your return is to connect with influencers: UGC, sponsored content, and brand ambassador partnerships are only three examples of the potential of influencer marketing as a game-changing social media method. Working with influencers on partnered content creation not only expands your reach and boosts your brand’s influence, it’s a social media technique that can act as a foundation across your wider marketing strategy. Targeted paid boosting, experiential marketing and in-person activations that tie in influencer presence… the possibilities are as endless as the number of influencers in the creator economy.

9. Focus on telling a compelling story

Storytelling is a central element of communication between humans. When you tell someone a story it can have the powerful effect of convincing them or getting them on board with an idea. A great story causes the listener to internalize the story, and personify it into their own idea and experience. When you can tell a compelling story and involve customers in that brand story, you incentivize your customers to engage with it.

Keep in mind — when you’re telling a story through creative content, it should be clearly rooted in your brand identity, focused on your audience, and backed up research that confirms its value.

10. Minimize the time you spend promoting

Of course, social selling has become increasingly popular among salespeople and marketers over the past few years. However, the actual process of utilizing social networks to drive growth for a brand is often much different than what most people are accustomed to. Ideal social selling is less about using social media as an active promotional platform, and more about using it as a tool for communication and engagement.

11. Develop a consistent brand voice

Social media is ideal for brand building and recognition, so it’s crucial that every post you make is in line with your brand and image. This can become difficult at times, especially if you have multiple people assigned to the task of managing your brand’s social. Everybody tends to bring their own personality to their individual posts.

For this reason, it’s best practice to limit the number of people who post for your brand on social, and ensure everybody is on the same page as it pertains to both the voice and image your brand wants to present online.

12. Take advantage of Instagram Stories

Users are increasingly watching Instagram Stories. Instagram Stories offer a wide range of great features like polls, interactive live broadcasts, etc. You can run ad campaigns, teach how to use your product, give discounts and special offers, create contests and giveaways, highlight new and featured products. That doesn’t take much time and preparation to record your story. You can use a mixture of photos and videos, give a link to certain blog posts, websites or profiles.

Instagram Stories are a great tool to tell your story and spark interest in your brand. The advantage is to tell more than you can do through written posts. It looks like a first-class ticket that sits at the top of the feed, so followers can easily notice them. Update your stories once per day if you want to keep your followers engaged with your brand.

13. Utilize social listening tools and engage with your audience

Social listening tools are exceptionally powerful. They allow you to see what people are saying about your brand, which may be very different from what they’re saying to your brand.

Use social listening tools to monitor the impact of your campaigns and see what people are talking about. Tools like Talkwalker can help you find out what conversations are occurring around your brand, how positive or negative the sentiment is, brand mentions, and a number of other critical data points.

Additionally, discover what questions consumers have about your brand, product, and industry. These questions can offer valuable ideas for content and insight into creating your social strategy.

14. Occasionally post user-generated content

A great way to build both your brand and your social presence is by periodically reposting user-generated content. Doing so both rewards and recognizes your fans, and you may see a pronounced uptick in follower growth and engagement. It also makes your brand come across genuine and relatable to your followers.

15. Collaborate with influencers!

We said it before and we’ll say it again, because this social media technique is worth it. When you get down to brass tacks, Influencer marketing is the strategy that tends to earn the most engagement for businesses on social media.

Decide how you want to expose your brand — be it a product review, a giveaway, or even a special event — to reach new followers. From there, you can select influencers whose values align with those of your brand, and those who have a strong engagement rate with their followers. Deploying a well-thought-out influencer marketing campaign can skyrocket your brand awareness, enhance positive brand sentiment, and produce astounding conversions. So what are you waiting for?