[New] Get Lucky With These Top 7 Social Media Marketing Tips

Follow these strategies to achieve greater overall business success in 2023

BY SCORE, SPECIAL TO NATIONAL MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL MAGAZINE

Social media is an everchanging landscape, ripe with possibility. In 2023, in order to best leverage social media for your business, you’ll need to prepare for what’s on the horizon.

According to multiple published sources, 30.57 million businesses in the U.S. alone used social media for marketing in 2022, and that number is only expected to increase in 2023. How can you best utilize social media marketing in the new year to stand out from the other 30 million businesses?

How can you be certain you’ll be prepared for the changes 2023 brings with social media? Whether you have created an account on every social media platform already or you’re just starting out, the following tips will help you achieve success with your social media marketing efforts in 2023.

1. AUDIT YOUR CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

It may be time to do an inventory of the platforms you are using. Many companies think they need to make accounts on every social platform, giving them all equal attention. If that sounds like your company, take stock of performance on each platform over the last year. For example, if you’ve been posting tweets on the company’s Twitter account consistently but have seen no indication of growth, engagement, or sales from Twitter, it may be time to phase that out and redirect that energy and attention to a platform that is actually working for you. It’s OK not to be everywhere all at once, all of the time. Prioritizing the best platforms for your business can help you free up the time and energy to make content that will actually convert.

According to a 2022 study by Sprout Social, platforms like Facebook and Instagram tend to be more popular with millennials, gen-X, and baby boomers and see slightly more males than females using those apps. Meanwhile, TikTok’s users skew younger, with 25% being between the ages of 10-19, and a whopping 61% of users are female. Dig into the numbers of each platform and see if this aligns with your customer base before determining how much attention to give it.

2. PRIORITIZE VIDEO CONTENT

At the forefront of your content planning should be video content, short-form, or long-form. Every social media platform has video capability, and with TikTok speedily rising in the ranks to become the most popular app, all other social media platforms are trying to follow suit. On Instagram and Facebook, Reels are being pushed to users above all other types of content, and in 2023 we can expect to see this continue. This year, brands overall earned nearly 40% more engagement using Reels on Instagram than they did with other types of posts.

We know that video ads consistently

However, doing so may be a mistake that’s costing you. If you’re posting on social media for your business, you need to be consistently using social media on a personal basis.

Many businesses are missing the mark when it comes to successful social media, and the key reason is that they are approaching it like traditional marketing and not from the viewpoint of the user. Anyone on your team that has the power to influence your social media marketing must interact with social media personally daily. You would never sell a product that you yourself haven’t used and can attest to its value; why would you create content average use time being around 90 minutes a day. With impressive statistics like this, it’s surprising that many businesses are slow to make the jump over to TikTok for their marketing efforts. outperform static ads, and the same can be said for organic content. However, with short-form content gaining so much traction over the past two years, we may see people growing fatigued with 10-second videos and instead opting for things that are 3 minutes or longer in length. Recently, TikTok updated its maximum video length from 3 minutes to 10 minutes, and other platforms may follow suit. If it makes sense for your business to use long-form video as a marketing strategy, you may want to consider producing content like this. Either way, video content will still be more popular and effective in 2023 so long as the algorithms continue to prioritize it.

Brands are seeing immense growth on TikTok and are even tapping into new audiences completely organically. In fact, it’s likely you may already have supporters on TikTok, who are ready to support and engage with your content as soon as you join. While TikTok is a favorite of Gen-Z, they are not the only users of the app. In fact, the vast majority (73%) of users are between the ages of 18-35.

Nearly half of Gen-Z is using TikTok for search instead of Google, according to Google’s own data. On top of that, not only is TikTok’s algorithm powerful, but its SEO is huge with tens of millions of searches per day. By simply having a presence on TikTok, your brand awareness could increase exponentially, bringing with it more valuable and genuine social listening than you’ll even know what to do with!

3. USE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALLY

As a businessperson, you may feel that you don’t have time to engage with social media on a personal level, and you only interact with it while using it for marketing purposes.

if you’re not a content consumer as well? Pencil in time to unwind on Instagram or TikTok and try your best to approach it with a consumer mindset, not a marketer’s mindset.

In using social media apps, you will not only keep up with trends that your company could follow, but you will also be able to gain priceless insights from your customer base by seeing how they interact with competitors or even other businesses in different industries. Your algorithm will become personalized the more you use these apps. With that, you will pick up on what makes social media marketing successful. You’ll soon begin to notice how bad social media marketing sticks out like a sore thumb. Finding success on social media can sometimes be as simple as jumping in at the right time or understanding the hard-to-describe “it” factor.

4. MAKE THE JUMP TO TIKTOK

TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users and counting, with the

Do you have to dance to be on TikTok? Absolutely not. In 2023, social media is trending toward being more about the value it brings to the consumer rather than purely entertainment factor. This means that you could create content that highlights your products, your brand story, and behind-the-scenes footage of your facilities without anyone on your team ever having to learn a single dance move. That being said, keeping your finger on the pulse of what is trending will give you a leg-up on TikTok, but that doesn’t mean you have to participate in every single trend, either.

5. USE THE RESOURCES YOU HAVE

You may be a small operation, but when it comes to marketing on social media if you want to do it well, it might be all hands on deck. A few years ago, a small business could easily manage