There's no "one magical way" to do social media marketing that works for everyone. But, there are a few universal pitfalls that can sink anyone. These range from PR nightmares to increasingly seemingly innocuous mistakes, like posting the word-for-word same content on every platform.

By pursuit these 21 social media weightier practices, you set yourself, or your brand, up for the weightier endangerment of success.

21 social media weightier practices for 2022

Social media marketing weightier practices

1. Research your audience

This is #1 for a reason: You can't build a pursuit without knowing who you're trying to attract. That's social media 101.

Dig deep into the pursuit questions:

• Who are your customers?
• Where do they hang out online?
• Where do they work?
• What do they superintendency about?
• Do they once know you?
• What do they think of you? Is it what you want them to think?
• What content do they need to see to believe that your products or services are worth their money?

That's just a start. Make sure your social media marketing plan includes detailed audience research. Document it so your unshortened team knows exactly who they're crafting content for.

Pro tip: Defining your target regulars is increasingly than demographics or a superficial proprietrix persona. Include their motivations, inspirations and pain points, and how you're the perfect solution.

2. Build a presence on the right social media networks

You don't need to be on every platform to succeed, including jumping on the newest, hottest app just considering everyone else is. Surpassing opening a new account, ask:

• Do I (or my team) have the bandwidth to create relevant content for a new platform?
• Does the purpose of this platform fit my brand?

And the most important question:

• Does my regulars spend time here?

Focusing on creating thoughtful content for fewer platforms will unchangingly serve you largest than posting generic content wideness every platform.

Pro tip: By all means, stay informed on new social media trends, but think surpassing taking action. Oh, hey, we did all the research for you with this comprehensive, self-ruling Social Trends 2022 report.

3. Strategic is largest than clever

Set goals, create a content strategy, don't create a TikTok worth solely to participate in Dance Like a Chicken Day, yada yada¦ In short: be strategic in all your actions.

Your content is an extension of your business. Like any merchantry practice, your social media needs a thoughtful approach, S.M.A.R.T. goals, and regular tactical adjustments.

Pro tip: Grab this self-ruling social media strategy template to create or revise yours, then share it with your unshortened team.

4. Audit your performance

Your pursuit is growing. Your engagement rates are sky-high. You get daily DMs and comments from loyal, excited customers. Your content is fire. Life is good, right? No!

Sure, things are good right now, but do you know why? What exactly led to these unconfined results? Striking lucky is great, but a largest path forward is learning why your content performed well (or didn't), so you can build repeatable processes for successful campaigns.

Here's how to do that:

• Run a monthly social media audit.
• Experiment with posting content on variegated days and times.
• Survey your regulars to ask them what they want.
• Use analytics to find your top-performing content.

Pro tip: Let Hootsuite tell you when your personal best time to post is, for each platform and goal. This is part of Hootsuite Analytics, withal with wide metrics tracking and reporting features, so you can spend less time staring at spreadsheets and increasingly time optimizing your campaigns.

5. Develop resulting trademark guidelines

You need two types of rulebooks for your team:

1. Visual style, tone, and voice brand guidelines
2. Employee social media guidelines

The former ensures your branding remains resulting and recognizable to your regulars in everything from visuals to caption style, punctuation choices (#TeamOxfordComma), and overall vibes.

Brand guidelines imbricate things like:

• Favorite or favourite?
• Which hashtags will you use?
• Sources employees should use for content vs. ones they shouldn't

Employee social media guidelines, on the other hand, provide structure to your employees on what topics may be off limits to post well-nigh when representing your visitor - even on their personal accounts. This eliminates confusion, encourages employees to share positive content, and establishes well-spoken consequences for violating terms, which can save you from legal and PR troubles lanugo the road.

Pro tip: Not sure what to include? Download our self-ruling social media style guideline template to pinpoint your trademark style, tone, and voice.

6. Schedule your content in advance

Don't be a Last Minute Melvin. Coming up with content right surpassing you need to post it is a recipe for burnout.

Planning your social media content allows space to create high-quality content, logically put together campaigns (organic and paid), and seek collaboration and feedback from your team.

Pro tip: Hootsuite Planner is your weightier nomination for all-in-one easy collaboration, wayfarers mapping, and scheduling. It plane has an clearance process for mistake-proof, total social media content management.

Create content on the fly, or zillion upload and schedule up to 350 posts at a time in only a few minutes. Trammels out how Hootsuite can help organize your workflow.

7. Cross-post to variegated platforms - but make adjustments

Auto-sharing your Facebook post to Twitter isn't a content strategy. Of undertow you can and should be repurposing content wideness multiple platforms, but that's the key word: Repurposing.

Instead of simply spraying a link to your latest blog post wideness all of your social media accounts, turn the article's key points into a Twitter thread.

Create a script from the blog post and mucosa a YouTube video, then link to the vendible in the video description.

Stand in front of your phone and record a "pointing to various text boxes" Instagram Reel and uncontrived your followers to read the full thing on your website.

You don't need to go into all-out production mode and make a thread, Reel, TikTok, video content, carousel posts, etc. for every article. Sometimes it's fine to share a link. But make an effort to repurpose as much of your content as possible. It will indulge you to create more-faster.

Pro tip: You can't expect to grow a defended pursuit and using generic marketing strategies. Tailor your content to what each social media platform excels at to cultivate meaningful engagement and momentum traffic that can unquestionably convert.

8. Embrace social listening

Social listening may sound like a fancy marketing buzzword but it's unquestionably free, real-time market research. Basic listening scans social media channels for mentions of your name, products, competitors, specific keywords, or anything else you want to scout for. Wide tools can recognize logos in images, evaluate trademark sentiment, and more.

This gives you the real scoop on what people think of your company, or the product features they really want. But knowledge vacated isn't enough. You need to put it into practice.

Day to day, alimony your AI ears unshut for people asking well-nigh your industry or for recommendations, and pop into the conversation with a scuttlebutt or retweet.

Social listening is powerful for big strategy stuff like positioning and new product development, too. By tracking trademark mentions, Ben & Jerry's noticed that, most of the time, people were enjoying their ice surf curled up inside on a rainy day vs. out and well-nigh in the sun.

Enter: Netflix n' Chill'd, the product and partnership launched from the knowledge gained from social listening.

Spoiler Alert! @netflix and Ben & Jerry's just became official! #NetflixandChillld
Find out increasingly at https://t.co/KQTuLu8mue pic.twitter.com/9Xj8HDZKSN

— Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) January 16, 2020

Pro tip: Use social listening to track trademark sentiment and trammels it often. Sudden negative swing? Dig into why and write it to nip any PR problems in the bud.

9. Ask your regulars for feedback

Social listening is great, but moreover make a point to directly engage your audience. Ask for their opinions and ideas, or fun questions to get to know them better.

Run a quick Twitter or Instagram Stories poll, link to a web survey from your social accounts, or just ask people to leave a scuttlebutt with their response.

By permitting your customers the space to tell you what they want, you can-unsurprisingly-deliver what they want (#BreakingNews).

We heard feedback that it was nonflexible to set up relative stage filters

Now it only takes a couple clicks! Use this to create dynamic views such as "Tasks due today" or "Events within the next month." pic.twitter.com/yHZ0iFX7QH

— Notion (@NotionHQ) March 28, 2022

Pro tip: The primary purpose of social media is to forge connections and create a polity online-so do that. Feedback doesn't unchangingly have to be well-nigh product features. Focus on towers a polity first.

Social media consumer service weightier practices

10. Remember that social media is a consumer service channel

Yes, promotion and engagement are a huge part of why you're on social media, but at its core, social media is not just well-nigh social networking - it's well-nigh making your customers happy. You may have a 1-800 consumer service number and email, but 70% of your customers would rather resolve issues on social media.

Want to go whilom and beyond? Combine a consumer service mindset with social listening to help customers who haven't plane contacted you. Whoa.

A few weeks ago, I was struggling with Google Docs not saving, which moreover ways you can't type anything new. Super tomfool when you're on deadline. I took to Twitter to vent my frustration with fellow writers. To my surprise, Google responded-within one hour!-with helpful troubleshooting advice:

That doesn't sound good, Michelle. Let's try the steps in this guide to well-spoken enshroud & cookies and then relaunch the browser to see if that helps: https://t.co/wtSvku1zI2. Alimony us updated.

— Google Docs (@googledocs) May 11, 2022

Since I didn't use @googledocs in my Tweet, they found it via social listening. The simple interaction reverted my mood from summery irritation to stuff impressed with their consumer service. Nice work, Google!

Pro tip: Consumer service social listening = recipe for trademark fans.

11. Respond promptly to DMs and comments

Besides tagging you in a post, users are moreover messaging you or leaving comments on your social media posts with consumer service inquiries. Those important comments are easy to miss, expressly if your posts get hundreds of comments.

So how can you make sure to see them and respond?

Source

Make sense of the unconnectedness with Hootsuite's unified inbox. It pulls in all messages and comments wideness your unfluctuating social platforms. You can see full threads for DMs and comments, and @mentions, and assign conversations to specific reps to organize and speed up your responses.

Pro tip: Flag DMs and comments that require an urgent response. Whichever tool you use, ensure you have a way of assigning conversations to alimony things organized and unhook the fastest response times.

12. Use a chatbot to speed up simple inquiries

Customer service is important, though can be time-consuming when most of your customers want to know the same things:

• "Where's my order?"
• "I need to make a warranty claim."
• "Do you ship to ____?"

Thankfully, tech has evolved to save time. Using a chatbot to handle simple, FAQ-style questions can reduce your consumer service team's workload by 94%.

Besides automating generic questions, chatbots like Heyday can provide fast, personalized service 24/7. Customers can track their order or ask well-nigh product availability in just a few minutes.

Within the first month of using Heyday's chatbot, DAVIDsTEA streamlined 88% of their inquiries and received 30% fewer calls and emails, while still maintaining consumer satisfaction scores.

Source

We tend to think AI consumer service won't be as good as speaking to a human. But what's better:

1. waiting on hold for 30 minutes to find out if your order shipped yet, or,
2. opening a yack window and getting an wordplay in less than 60 seconds while you slurp an iced coffee?

Pro tip: Don't be wrung of automation, but ensure customers still have a way to reach your human team for increasingly ramified inquiries, too.

13. Don't ignore criticism

You don't need to entertain obvious trolls, but you do need to respond to your customers and fans, plane if it's an uncomfortable interaction.

Coach your team on how to handle negative situations and offer solutions to wrestling customers. For criticism of visitor deportment or values, ensure everyone on your team knows how to respond in a kind and-let's squatter it: legal-department-approved-way.

Pro tip: Always take the upper road and tideway every interaction-positive or negative-with a solution-oriented mindset.

14. Have a slipperiness communications plan

There's a difference between a few negative comments and a full-blown public relations nightmare. Whether the saltate you receive is legit or not, you need to have a plan for dealing with crises:

• Who on your team will lead the response?
• What will your response be?
• Will you make a public statement well-nigh it?
• Will you respond to individual comments, or uncontrived people to a prepared statement?
• Will you transpiration the policy or whoopee that people are upset about? And if so, how will you signify that?

Hopefully, conducting your daily operations in an ethical, responsible, and inclusive manner will stave situations like this, but it's weightier to have a plan.

Pro tip: Develop a process for handling a PR emergency, plane if you don't think it will happen to you.

15. Have a content clearance process

The worst way to wits a PR emergency? A poorly-planned post on your visitor worth that gets a roastin' quote tweet from a well-known US Senator.

.@Chase: why aren't customers saving money?
Taxpayers: we lost our jobs/homes/savings but gave you a $25b bailout
Workers: employers don't pay living wages
Economists: rising financing stagnant wages = 0 savings
Chase: guess we'll never know
Everyone: seriously?
#MoneyMotivation pic.twitter.com/WcboMr5MCE

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 29, 2019

Pro tip: With Hootsuite, you can set up content collaboration and approval workflows to save you from situations like this.

Social media diamond weightier practices

16. Optimize content for each platform's requirements

One of the (many) reasons you shouldn't cross-post the word-for-word same content on every platform is that each platform has its own image/video size or weft count specifications.

You can do this surpassing you schedule content, or conveniently right inside Hootsuite as you're scheduling:

Pro tip: Even if the overall message of the post stays the same, customizing the media specs and caption length will alimony your profiles polished and professional. Trammels out our 2022 social media image size trickery sheet.

17. A/B test creative assets

Sure, you're running A/B tests on headlines and copy, but are you testing visual assets, too?

Try testing:

• A GIF instead of a static image.
• A video instead of an image, or vice versa.
• Changing the style of a graphic.
• Using a variegated photo.

There are uncounted options to test, depending on your content, but the key thing is to test only one thing at a time. Otherwise you won't know exactly which new element "won" at the end.

Pro tip: To quote marketing legend Vanilla Ice, "Test, test, baby. If your visual's the problem, yo, a test will resolve it."

18. Use tools to unzip more

There are tons of social media apps to help out with diamond tasks. If you don't have a diamond team, you can hands create graphics with Canva or Adobe Express.

Better yet: Hootsuite integrates with both of those to unlock max scheduling productivity.

Pro tip: Dial your efficiency up to 11 by creating a month of content at once, then bulk schedule it in Hootsuite. What will you do with the rest of your day?

B2B social media weightier practices

19. Evaluate trends surpassing jumping aboard

Yes, trending topics and popular TikTok audio can earn increasingly views, but are they the right kind of views? Meaning: Is this a meme your target regulars is likely to follow?

If not, you're wasting time chasing the wrong content ideas. Plus, if it's a trend your existing regulars doesn't understand or finds offensive, you could lose followers and forfeiture your reputation.

Pro tip: Stuck for content? Try these specific creative ideas.

20. Trammels your finance daily

Even if you don't post daily, ensure someone on your team is logging in to respond to comments and DMs, and trammels for potential spam.

Quick response times aren't only appreciated, they're expected. Globally, 83% of customers expect a response to a social media inquiry within 24 hours, and 28% expect an wordplay within one hour.

Source

Pro tip: Like it or not, social media continues to shape expectations for businesses to live up to-or risk losing out to the competition.

21. Snag worth names plane if you don't use them

You may not be on TikTok. You may never want to be on TikTok. But, it's a good idea to reserve your company's username on all existing social platforms anyway.

Not only will this alimony your options unshut for future use, but it prevents potential imposters from using your trademark name to pose as you. Plane if you never plan to use platform, create an worth to protect your reputation and intellectual property.

Pro tip: Think it won't happen to you? It plane happens to celebs. In 2020, scammers conned people out of $80 million without setting up fake Twitter finance one letter off from real famous businesspeople's usernames.

No, I'm not giving yonder ETH.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 4, 2018

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The post 21 Social Media Weightier Practices to Follow in 2022 appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.