11 Surprising Social Media Tips That Really Work For Businesses

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Expert Panel, Young Entrepreneur Council


Social media continues to surge as a channel for businesses to market themselves and engage with customers. And with its continued growth and popularity, there’s no shortage of social media “how-to” advice out there directed at businesses trying to scale up.

If you make it a point to keep up with social media trends, you’ve likely found at least some overlap in these tips—but every so often, there are unconventional or uncommon practices that can lead to great results. As experts in social media marketing, the members of Young Entrepreneur Council shared their most surprising social media tips—that truly work—and how you can take advantage for your business.

Photos courtesy of the individual members.

1. Interact With Your Followers

It may seem obvious, but many businesses focus only on promoting their products or services and sharing content and forget to interact with their followers. Interacting with your followers will help you increase engagement and help you to build stronger relationships with your customers and target audience. One of the coolest parts of social media is that it gives you the opportunity to speak directly to your target audience, so take advantage of it. You can find out directly from your audience what they think of your business, what their goals are, what their biggest struggles are and so on. All of this is information that can help you build a better business. So, be sure to start conversations with users in your posts, likes and comments, and reply to them as well. - Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

2. Work With Micro-Influencers

We are attracted to the idea of our product reaching a broad audience through influencers. However, micro-influencers are much more effective at creating a long-tail ROI. Instead of focusing on big-name influencers, look for smaller channels with an audience that aligns with your customer personas. The people following micro-influencers are much more engaged with the creator and, in turn, are more likely to check out your website when it pops up in their feed. For instance, if you run a business that sells makeup, you're going to want to look for niche health and beauty micro-influencers. - Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

3. Pay Attention To What Your Audience Wants

As a business owner, I use Pinterest daily to connect with my audience. Pinning between 30 to 50 times per day with 20% of my own blog content and 80% from other profiles has helped me build an engaged email list. In fact, I generate anywhere between 30 and 35 email subscribers daily from Pinterest alone by pinning relevant content that my audience wants. Creating visually aesthetic pins with strong text overlay headlines and calls to action is the best way to attract website traffic and generate email subscribers. - Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC

4. Choose The Right Channel

One surprising social media tip is to stick to the best platform. While having Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn pages may seem beneficial, odds are that not all of these platforms are giving businesses the same amount of web traffic or sales. When you stick to the best platform for you, the one that’s performing the most and reaching goals, you can bring in even more sales. Some businesses don’t benefit from Facebook, and that’s okay, but spending more money trying to make something work that isn’t can be detrimental to businesses.  - Richard Fong, Bliss Drive

5. Cross-Promote Your Social Profiles

Promoting your social media is just as important as creating valuable content and posting regularly. Algorithms change too often, so you cannot rely on people’s feed. You must promote your social media channels. Here’s one thing people tend to ignore: If somebody watches your YouTube videos, that doesn’t mean they visit your blog or follow you on Instagram. Cross-promoting your social media profiles is a real opportunity, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort. You can add links to your other social media profiles in your YouTube video description or add a link to your blog in your Instagram bio. This really worked for our business. - Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS

6. Remarket Via Social Media

Social media and remarketing are powerful. Are you spending on targeting new clients on search, calls and offline media? This is also for you. New client targeting will never achieve the pinpoint accuracy of those who have already expressed on your site. If you have a lot of traffic already, this is amplified. Build a remarketing list even if it's not ready to launch. Later, you'll want to have that remarketing data for Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. The advertising you spend on one platform will build remarketing lists for other platforms with every visitor. 4LegalLeads is results-focused, but there is huge brand uplift when visitors continue to see you as they scroll Instagram feeds or browse CNN. Conversion is better. Costs are lower. Segments by user behavior offer endless potential. - Vince Wingerter, 4LegalLeads.com

7. 'Spy' On Your Competitors

Social media is a great way to keep an eye on your competitors. You can see what is working or not working for them, how they are interacting with their customers and what trends they are creating and following. While you don't want to copy them under any circumstances, it helps to see what the other team is doing sometimes. Specifically, I will often conduct a competitor analysis to learn from my competitor's successes and failures. I use it as a type of self-analysis to see what I can work on to reach my own specific goals. There are some great competitor tools out there, too—for example, Social Blade, Sprout Social, SEMRush and Ahrefs (which I personally use). In short, "spying" on your competition can help you fine-tune your own marketing strategy in fun and dynamic ways. - Shu Saito, Godai

8. Take A Unique Approach To Each Platform

It's important to recognize that every social media platform attracts a distinct crowd that's unique to it. That means something that works really well on Twitter isn't likely to achieve similar results on other platforms like Pinterest, for instance. I learned early on that in order to maximize returns from investments in social media, it's crucial to deal with each space in a different way to match its unique vibe, and the good news is, it doesn't take too long to understand what that is. Things like character limit and multimedia restrictions are built-in and will give you a good idea of where to start, and how to proceed. But it also helps to study industry leaders to see what works for them and think of ways to customize and optimize your posts in a different way, for each platform. - Abeer Raza, TekRevol

9. Focus On Building A Personal Brand

Customer preferences have changed, and brands are no longer viewed as brick-and-mortar entities. Personification of brands leads to higher engagement across the different social media channels, and the best way to achieve that is by building a strong, value-based personal brand. It helps the consumers connect with the brand in an organic manner. Knowing the faces behind the brand helps forge more intimate connections. Giving behind-the-scenes glimpses into what goes into building your brand makes it relatable and appealing to the audience. Personal branding as a means of establishing thought leadership also serves to skyrocket yourself as an industry expert. It builds your network as well as your credibility. When you share content that adds value, reach and engagement grow organically. - Rahul Varshneya, CurveBreak

10. Market With Authenticity And Passion

Social media is part of nearly everyone's daily lives, and entrepreneurs and businesses alike have latched onto it in order to market themselves and engage with customers—some more successfully than others. I have found that the best way to use social media marketing is to be authentic and passionate about what I post. Everything I put up on my pages needs to reflect me. Showing off my products, ideas and lifestyle is good, but when those things are your passions as well, it's not difficult to be authentic, which is what your followers want. They want a window into your life; it makes what I have and what I do attainable and allows me to create consistently good content. Additionally, across my social media, I keep my branding uniform. This helps me cross-promote myself on platforms. - David Chen, Sharebert

11. Forget 'Best Practices' And Just Be Yourself

I actually teach social media strategies because I took all of the courses and went to all of the seminars and learned very quickly what was missing. Social media is a place to grow together, build communities and leverage our own strengths to help each other. Forget the need to be perfect 100% of the time. Forget the flawless wall aesthetic on Instagram and the rehearsed videos that are supposedly "live." Be your most authentic self and showcase your brand in a way that invites the community in, instead of going to the likes and comments. Every few posts, post something that you can't measure the ROI on, because that's what grows your account and connects your target market to your brand. Forget everything you know and focus on the relationship, not the metrics. - Klyn Elsbury, Shark School
