Like most people do this time of year, your resident SMSS team have been taking a look at the events of the past year, and are planning for the year to come. As we make our own marketing resolutions for 2018, we thought our readers might also benefit from some suggestions.

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Below you’ll find our Top 7 Social Media Resolutions for marketers and anyone who wants to make 2018 their best year yet on social. 

Refine your ads

With so many brands and so many ads on Facebook, it is getting harder and harder for brands to reach their target audiences. And even if you do reach your audience brands struggle with grabbing their audience’s attention with organic content. So, you can either put more money into Facebook and see if that helps to grow your reach or work to create content that engages your audience. Take a look at keywords and what ads people are clicking on and who is clicking.

Take a look at our mini-Facebook series on how you can see more results from your Facebook Ads.

Update your look

Has it been awhile since you took a look at the visual aspects of your social profiles? The beginning of the year is a great time to freshen up your look, check for consistency across profiles, and put your best foot forward on social. Try a new engaging image that shows off a new product, or make a cover photo that shows more of your brand’s personality.

Be creative and see if it draws any engagement since the update links into your feed and your followers can “like” your new updated look.

Master your social analytics (If you haven’t already).

Analytics is everything! You don’t want to schedule all of your content and then not see what is working and what isn’t. Find out what your audience wants and what they react to. Draw from that, instead of posting content that they don’t want to see.

Your analytics are your key to success at #SMSsummit we try to do analytics break down every week to see where we can improve and where we should focus our efforts.

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Try something new!

Do you have a social media account that seemed like a good idea at the time but you have not touched it since signing up? Maybe it is time to show a little love to that platform you didn’t have time for in 2017.

This year we are going to try out twitter ads and see if we generate any engagement. We also want to focus on creating unique messaging for each platform. Since each social media platform has its own audience we don’t want to just repost what we are posting on other channels. We want them to be segmented and reach that specific audience.

Comment, Like, and Share Back

You know that little burst of excitement that comes when you get an alert that someone has retweeted you, liked your post, or shared with their network? As marketers, we strive for it and feed off engagement, and we aren’t alone. We do so much work to create engagement content and forget to engage with our audience.

Try to like, comment, or retweet a post from your followers or people in your industry that are influential. I know that everyone is super busy and we can’t spend all day looking at our profiles. But, don’t forget the social part of social media and throw a heart their way from time to time.

You never know what will come from a conversation with a follower. You might learn a little something about your audience you didn’t know before.

Go back and actually read your Facebook ‘save this link’ articles

Saved Articles are a beautiful thing, if you remember to look back at them. I think I have at least 20 articles that I had every intention of reading but never got to them because I forgot about them.

So, go back every week and read through the content that caught your eye. This doesn’t just apply to Facebook either. I flag articles online to my reading list and forget about them, too.

Go through the content that you have seen and want to read but simply forgot about!

Solidify your social media goals for 2018

Make sure that you have a clear-cut strategy for 2018 and execute it. In a perfect world, we make goals and then lose track of what we are doing and don’t see the results that we want to. (It’s not really a perfect world if we lose track, etc.) Suggest: We often make goals, then lost track of them and don’t see the results we hoped for.

But, if we have a strategy and a plan that we can stick to and just make tweaks as we check out our analytics, we are more likely to see changes. Make specific goals and lay out a set of steps that can be trackable. For example, our #SMSsummit goal to “increase our customer engagement,” will be tracked through shares, comments, and likes on our posts; and we have a plan to create specific content for each social media platform.

Make sure that your team is all on the same page and can all work together with the strategy.

We hope you find this list helpful as we start off the first month of 2018. Share with us below your New Year’s resolution and how you are going to track your successes. Also, make sure that you check out our Social Media Strategies Summit coming up in San Francisco. We have an entire track dedicated to successful innovations and how brands can implement them. Maybe one of them will help you integrate a new technology that can help your new year’s resolution!

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