BEST Social Media Marketing Tips for 2023
I'm gonna give you some of my best social media marketing tips to help you get more reach, more engagement and more followers on social media. And I'll walk you through, step by step, a social media marketing strategy that's working better than anything else right now. And it all starts by first understanding that things have changed and they're never going back.
So if you've been trying to to use social media to grow your business or get more customers or get more followers and things just haven't been working out the way that you were hoping for, it's not your fault. It's just that there have been a lot of very big changes to the different social media algorithms.
How the platforms decide what content gets promoted and prioritized and what gets buried and most important of all, how all of these changes are impacting and influencing your audience and your customers and the people that you're actually trying to reach.
So with that said, the very first thing that you need to do today in order to succeed on social media is to make sure that you get in the right boat.
One of my favorite quotes and principles is by Ware Buffett and he says that "A good management record is far more a function of what business boat you get into than it is how effectively you wrote.”
What this means when we apply it to social media and to business and marketing in general, is that the key to success is to bet on the right platform, right channel or the right app, rather than spending all your time and money and energy just trying to row harder in a leaky boat that isn't rewarding you for your efforts.
For example, it's no secret that Instagram has been messing around with their algorithm for the past little while now and people aren't happy.
A report by the Wall Street Journal shows engagement on Instagram is declining. Instagram users are spending less than one 10th the amount of time on the platform compared to TikTok. And many Instagram users are leaving the app, including some of its biggest creators and influencers, saying how it's feeling?
Less and less like it's a good fit for-me personally and from a business perspective now a bunch of influencers and creators just leaving an app doesn't sound like that much of a big deal.
But I assure you, at least from a social media marketing perspective, this is huge. Because when they go well, often their multimillion follower audience goes with them.
Youtube
It's not all doom and gloom though. Got some good news. YouTube, for example, continues to adapt and evolve and it's a favorite among Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Gen-Alpha being those born after 2010 or 2012. YouTube is also the second most visited website in the entire world. That's right, the entire world.
And even though Facebook still has more users overall, twitter has the most active and passionate user base of them all.
And TikTok is still currently ranked as more popular among younger generations. YouTube is offering up something that the others just can't compete with.
I'm talking cash money, dollars, de niro, bread loot, tenda and pesos, the green stuff, the gold stuff, the good stuff, the bank rolls. I'm not really sure where that came from. The point is though, that YouTube has been paying out big boatloads of cash for years now. In fact, over the past three years
The YouTube partner program has paid out $30 billion. Yeah, that's billion with a B, which is enough to buy the Miami Marlins baseball team, the most expensive house in America, leonardo DA Vinci's, Salvatore Mundi, this boat, I mean yacht, private island, castle, and a trip to space for you and all your friends and still have quite a few billion dollars left over.
And this is one of the reasons that I believe that the social media platform with the biggest potential this year and at least for the next few years, is YouTube. But I appreciate if you've never made a YouTube video before, you just don't know where to start. Telling you to just go out there and make longform videos is a pretty big ask.
So next,
let me give you a strategy that's not only working on YouTube, but also Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn and TikTok.
So basically all of them. Which is why I'm calling this the best strategy for every platform ever. Here's the deal. Winning on social media all comes down to just two simple things, the audience and the algorithms. And in both cases, the key to getting more reach, more engagement and more followers is to focus on just giving them exactly what they want.
Now the real good news here is that they both pretty much want the exact same things your audience wants content that's interesting, entertaining, educational or valuable. And the algorithms want you to create content that's interesting, entertaining, educational or valuable. Because this is the kind of thing that's going to keep your audience on the platform for as long as.
Humanly possible, which is going to allow the social media platforms to make a whole lot more money. So how do you do this?
Well, my friend, I'm glad you asked. The secret to creating content that both your audience and the algorithm wants to see comes down to combining two different parts. Part one is the message and the content itself. And part two is the way that that content and that message get packaged and presented when they get published on social media.
Now, I've got some very cool stuff to show you in just a minute when it comes to part one and how you can create a viral message and viral content that's far more likely to get massive amounts of reach and engagement and shares basically with everything you post. But first, we actually need to talk about part two,which is how you're going to wrap all this up And package and present it so you can get it out there and people actually see it.
After all, it doesn't matter how great your message or your content is if nobody sees it. And right now there's a certain format or certain style or type of content that's working best across pretty much every kind of social media platform out there,
which is short vertical video. Now, Facebook and Instagram call these reals, YouTube calls them shorts. LinkedIn has native video which doesn't actually have to be vertical or short, so who knows what's going on there. And Twitter also appears to still kind of be figuring this out with their video carousels that offer an immersive viewing experience, which is basically just a TikTok copy, which, funny enough, is actually kind of.
what all of these have in common.
They're all just basically TikTok copies.
As this headline from Gizmodo says, twitter cloned Instagram Reels which cloned TikTok because that's what everybody does now. But I'm not here to judge, just to identify and capitalize on whatever is working best right now and then making sure to pass that information on to you.
That said, there are a couple of things that you need to be aware of when
you're launching a short vertical video strategy.
The first is that you want to record these videos directly into your phone or camera and not inside any one app in particular. This is going to make it a lot easier to take that same piece of content and then upload it natively to each social media platform separately, rather than trying to say record it in TikTok, then download it, remove the watermark, upload it again somewhere else, and repeat the process
Next is you want to play around with different lengths of short vertical videos. This is because short is subjective. So what you'll likely find is that there's a certain length of short that works best for you and your audience, which could be 15 seconds, or 30 seconds, or 45 seconds, or 60 seconds, or anywhere in between. And maybe most important of all, I want you to think of short vertical video as the package, the wrapping, the outside container for what actually matters, which is the content inside and what you're actually saying .
So let's go over how to create viral content now, which is going to give not just your short vertical videos a better chance, but every single piece of social media content you create from today forward.
If you ask most people why they think certain pieces of content or certain ideas or themes or messages go viral while others get completely ignored, you're likely to hear some kind of a reason around it being on luck or fate or just chance. Some freak occurrence that caused a certain piece of content to get millions or maybe even billions of views. But while the fact is that nobody can consistently guarantee that a certain piece of content is going to get a hundred million views every single time.
There are certain elements and characteristics that all pieces of viral content seem to have in common. Elements and characteristics that you can learn and use and
apply in your social media content in order to make sure it has the highest likelihood of success. So, to show you what those elements and characteristics are,
I want to introduce you to one of my favorite books on the topic of creating viral content in this special section that I'm calling Marketing Book Club.
Welcome to Marketing Book Club for people who like marketing and People who like book clubs, too. All right, so the title of today's Marketing Book Club book is Contagious by Jonah Berger, and in it he shares what makes things popular and get shared and essentially go viral. And there are a few practical and actionable takeaways that I want to share with you.
Now, starting with emotion, you see, most viral content delivers some kind of emotional charge, whether through positive emotions like awe or excitement or humor, or negative emotions like fear or anger or anxiety.
Now, I'm not saying that you need to go out there and get people all fired up all the time, but it is important to understand that emotions are a significantly more powerful driver in getting someone to respond and take action and essentially share things than logic and facts could ever hope to be.
Okay, the next element is practical value. And this really all comes down to the fact that people share things that help other people. Not only does this make them feel good by helping other people, but it also makes them look good through a psychological principle known as the Halo effect, where essentially by sharing good things, people are more likely to associate those good things with you.
Next is triggers, which personally, I find one of the most interesting and powerful of them. All triggers are essentially just sites and sounds and stimuli that remind us of other products or offers or services or ideas. The perfect example of this is when NASA landed a rover on Mars the planet. And Mars the chocolate bar saw a significant increase in sales, all because of all of the increased attention that Mars the planet was getting.
Now, I appreciate you may not own a business that's named after a planet, but this doesn't mean that you can't find some other way to relate your product or your service or your offer or your message to something else in order to invoke a trigger with your audience. A practical marketing example of this is what CRN did when they introduced KitKat and coffee to consumers to get them to enjoy a KitKat bar whenever they take a coffee break. But as cool as this is, this is just the tip of the iceberg. And you have so, so many other psychological triggers that you can push in order to get someone to do, well, essentially anything you want.