Social platforms appeal to what has always been hardwired into humans: connection. Pairing connection with convenience only makes the expansion of this new medium obvious, and as it expands it concentrates around what works: easily digestible niche content. Communities are forming around even the smallest of interests, enabling creators to be big fish in small ponds as super creators and celebrity influencers lose power. Below are our tips for social media marketing. 

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1. Perform audience research:

‍‍ If you don’t understand your audience, the rest of your efforts will fall flat even if you follow all the social media tips for 2022. Learn who your audience is and where they hang out so that you can deliver the content they want at the right place at the right time. There’s a simple four-step trajectory to figuring out what makes your audience tick: 1. Collect demographic data 2. Identify their favorite social platforms 3. Analyze competitor strategy and 4. Confirm your hunches with surveys. 

• Analyze Competition: While your audience is valuable, you’re not the first one to tap them, so get a headstart on your research by seeing what your competitors have already unearthed. 
• How big is your audience? The audience doesn’t have to be big, but you do need to understand its size to market to it properly. The smaller an audience is, the more niche it becomes, meaning you have to have increased authority through a high level of relatability and insider knowledge. 
• What are your buyer personas? Your audience isn’t made up of one type of customer, so you need to figure out how to lump people into general customer types. Then you can dig deeper and find out more about each segment, or persona.
• How do they interact? All segments/audiences don’t act the same way. Some respond to surveys, some don’t; some comment on posts yet don’t buy, while others lurk but convert on your actual site. 
• Platform Analytics: Every social media platform has analytics—Twitter Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Instagram Business Tools, YouTube Studio. Leverage these built-in stats to understand how your content is performing.
• Third-Party Tools: While you can learn a lot from platforms themselves, third-party tools like Trendpop allow you to take insights and analytics further while saving you money over expensive team analytics services. 
• Web Research: Not all social media research should happen on social media platforms themselves. Once you’ve identified your audience, the rest of the internet can provide a lot of expanded insight: forums, reviews, blogs, news, Google trends, and surveys. Dig until you identify trends.‍

2. Connect with your audience: Once you’ve identified your audience and separated it into segments, it’s time to create a dialogue with segment-specific outreach, surveys, and quick responses.

3. Invest in smaller but fast-growing channels: Smaller channels have not done much in regards to ads, but new research is showing that users are becoming more receptive. TikTok is a good example. When channels are new, experimentation is high, but as they age and effective content methods are solidified, advertisements become viable.

4. Optimize content for each platform: Every social media platform has its own idiosyncrasies, meaning you need to tailor your content to each. Sometimes this means making entirely different content for each platform your users like, but other times this simply means tweaking a content idea. For example, TikTok and Snapchat content can sometimes be repurposed. Often tweaks are small, such as isolating a key line from a video and placing it on Twitter.

5. Develop a hashtag strategy: The number of hashtags you use depends on the platform, from 1-2 on Twitter, 2-3 on LinkedIn to 9-30 on Instagram. The fewer you can use, the more they need to count. Popular hashtags might seem like the way to go, but more competition means less opportunity to rank, so don’t throw out niche hashtags, just like with Google keywords. Also remember that people are performing longer searches largely due to voice-to-chat.

6. Leverage short-form videos: People want just the meat, stripped right off the bone, so give it to ‘em with short-form videos of your best content. Educational, explainer, jokes … find what bite-sized content matters most to your community and deliver it consistently.

7. Develop a social audio strategy: Audio-only social content is on the rise with apps like Clubhouse, so it’s important you develop a strategy to handle this new content medium. The big benefit of audio content is that you can listen to it while you do other things, like drive (that old device, the radio, must have been onto something).

8. Utilize brand-relevant trends: Stay on top of current trends, identify the ones that pertain to your brand, and tap into their power. Big influencers are losing power to communities where any creator can become a player, no matter how small. Social is where it’s at: ads and commerce are growing, marketers can now accurately measure social efforts, and customer service is shifting to social platforms because it’s faster and more personal.

9. Collaborate with creators & influencers: Anyone can be a creator now with a strong pull within a small community, meaning you don’t have to link with big social names not accessible to everyone. Identify which of your products or services would be best paired with which creator/influencer, then let the influencer market it as they see fit. Their opinions are what their audience wants, and they can simply walk away if they don’t like working with you.

10. Audit performance & strategize: Analyze your social efforts across all platforms and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. This is the simple essence of a social media audit. Remember your social media work is never done, so get into an audit schedule (usually quarterly works well).

‍Conclusion

These ten social media marketing tips for 2022 will put you well on your way to developing a solid foundation for social media success, no matter the platform or cross-platform strategy you choose. Most importantly, remember to have fun, tweak as you go, and be patient as you grow your audience organically. While accounts do blow up over night, many more grow steadily over time.

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