This important feature has undergone countless changes and updates since Facebook first rolled it out in 2009, but it remains as crucial as ever. If you’re going to succeed on Facebook, your Business Page must align with your business values, goals, and broader marketing strategy.

Whether starting from scratch or looking to update an existing Business Page, read on for our top 10 steps to optimize yours!

1. Complete All the Sections of Your Facebook Business Page

Facebook Business Pages contain many different sections. Those sections are there for a reason, so filling them all in is in your best interests. The more information you provide, the better people will understand your business and the more likely you will appear in Facebook search results.

Start With the Basics

For starters, Facebook asks for the following details:

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• Page name: This will likely be your company’s name.
• Bio: Use this optional section to briefly explain your business, up to a limit of 255 characters.
• Category: Select up to three categories that describe what your business does. Try to be as specific as possible (e.g. if you fix laptops, choose “computer repair service” rather than “local business”).

2. Add Information To Help People Connect With You

Next, it’s time to fill out some basic details to help potential customers contact or buy from your business.

Specifically, you can add your:

• Website address
• Phone number
• Email address
• Street address
• Opening hours

All these details will appear in the Intro section of your Business Page:

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3. Add a Profile Picture, Cover Photo & CTA Button

Next, add some visual appeal to your Business Page by adding a profile picture—most likely your brand logo—and a cover photo that speaks to your products or services. (For more guidance on choosing appropriate imagery, check out the section on building a mobile-friendly page and read our article, 10 Tips For Creating Branded Social Graphics.)

At this point, you can also add an “Action Button” to your page. This is a call to action (CTA) that prompts page visitors to do something, such as:

• Clicking through to your website
• Completing a signup form
• Sending you a message through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or email
• Watching an explainer video
• Placing a reservation

To do it, just click Add Action Button in the left-hand menu.

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Then, choose the most relevant option and complete the onscreen options to drive your desired action.

Finally, you can connect your Business Page to WhatsApp so people can contact you via the messaging platform without leaving the comfort of Facebook. It’s simple: just enter your WhatsApp number and follow the prompts.

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4. Introduce Your Page To the World

Now that you’ve filled out all the critical information, it’s time for your shiny new page to go public. Give it a shot in the arm by inviting friends on your personal profile to follow your Business Page.

To do it, just click the button marked Invite Friends to switch to your personal profile.

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Then, scroll through your list of friends to invite all those who might be interested (or just click Select All to invite everyone).

Finally, write a welcome post introducing people to your Business Page. Try to highlight your value proposition and, if relevant, explain the topics you’ll post about. You can also add photos or videos to grab people’s attention.

5. Ensure Your Page Is Mobile-Friendly

Did you know that a whopping 98.5% of Facebook users sometimes visit the platform on mobile devices, while 81.8% only check Facebook on mobile?

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That means it’s essential your Facebook Business Page plays nice on mobile devices.

Here are a couple of tips to make that happen:

6. Create a “Mobile-Safe” Cover Image

Your cover image is the photo or graphic at the top of your Facebook Business Page, meaning it’ll be the first thing many people see when visiting your profile.

Chances are you’ll design your cover image on a desktop. Still, it’s important to remember that Facebook’s cover photo dimensions vary by device type. This can cause some real headaches when creating a cover image that looks good on every device.

To illustrate the problem, let’s look at the Business Page for Top HVAC NYC. Here’s how their cover image looks on a desktop.

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Now, here’s the same image displayed on an iPhone 12 Pro:

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Not so good, huh? The profile picture takes up a big chunk of the cover image, obscuring the business name and removing much of the visual detail. Plus, the phone number is hard to read.

Facebook uses the following dimensions for cover images:

• Desktop: 851 x 315 pixels
• Mobile: 640 x 360 pixels

In other words, your cover image will look taller and narrower on mobile, and your profile picture will block much of it. So your most important information — like your business name and most eye-catching imagery — should be toward the upper middle of your cover image.

7. Optimize Your Profile Picture for Mobile

Even more important than your cover image is your profile picture, which appears at the top of your Business Page and in every post you share.

As our friends at Top HVAC NYC demonstrated, Facebook has different dimensions for profile pictures on desktop and mobile. Specifically, it uses the following dimensions:

• Desktop: 170 x 170 pixels
• Mobile: 128 x 128 pixels

So, your profile picture will be smaller on mobile, but it’ll take up more of the screen proportionally. It needs to complement your cover image and be legible at 128 x 128 pixels, so your best bet is to keep it simple — just like New York City Tourism + Conventions.

Here’s how their profile image looks on desktop.

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Here’s the mobile version, again viewed on an iPhone 12 Pro:

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Both stand out beautifully and are legible, so if you’re searching for their Facebook Business Page, it’s immediately apparent you’re in the right place.

8. Set Up Automated Page Moderation

While we like to see the best in people, it’s worth remembering that plenty of trolls exist.

You don’t want their comments plastered all over your Business Page. But equally, there are only so many hours in the day, and you (probably) don’t want to spend them removing malicious replies.

Fortunately, Facebook has a simple solution: a Moderation Assistant. This assistant allows you to set criteria to automatically hide certain comments. To turn it on, click Moderation Assist in your Business Page’s Professional Dashboard, then add your desired criteria.

As standard, the Moderation Assistant will hide comments from authors without friends or followers.

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However, you can choose from a bunch of other options, such as auto-hiding comments:

• Containing links
• Written by authors who’ve had 3+ comments reported, hidden, or blocked by admins in the previous 30 days
• From authors who don’t have a profile picture

Once you’ve set up all your desired controls, you can spend less time moderating comments and more time creating quality content!

Learn more: 10 Tips for Navigating Negativity on Social Media

9. Add Links To Your Other Social Channels

Chances are, Facebook isn’t the only social network you use.

And we’re also guessing you’d like people who follow your Facebook Business Page to check you out on other platforms. Because the more places they see your content, the more likely they are to remember you (and, hopefully, buy from you).

Facebook lets you add links to 24 social platforms, including Instagram, X/Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok.

To do it, visit your Business Page, click the Edit button, scroll down to the Websites and social links section, choose your desired social channel from the drop-down menu, and paste your username or URL:

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10. Run a Video A/B Test

One of the newest and most exciting features for Facebook Business Pages is the ability to A/B test video content free of charge, which can help you better understand what works best with your audience.

To set up your first video A/B test, click A/B test in your Professional Dashboard menu, then upload the content you want to test. You can either test two different videos or the same video while varying other elements (like the thumbnail or title). For best results, only test one variable at a time.

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Give your AB test a name (and, optionally, a description so you can remember what you were testing), then tell Facebook which metric you’re optimizing for from the following list:

• Comments
• Shares
• Link clicks
• 1-minute video views
• Reactions
• People reached
• Average time watched

You can also set the duration of your A/B test up to a maximum of 24 hours. Check back at the end to see which video won!

11. Boost Your First Post

Inviting friends and relying on Facebook users to stumble upon your Business Page will only get you so far. At some point, if you want to speed up your page growth, you’re going to have to invest some ad dollars.

The best way to get started is to “boost” a post already generating a decent volume of engagements. To do it, find the post in question, then click Boost post:

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You’ll be transported to Facebook’s ad center, where you can choose:

• Which audiences you want to target
• Your daily ad budget
• Where you want your ad to appear
• Whether you want to track what happens when people click through from the ad to your website by setting up the Meta pixel
• How you want to pay for your ad campaign

When you’re satisfied with the results, click Publish to boost your post and check your analytics to see how many impressions and engagements you generate.

Learn more: 16 Stellar Examples of High-Converting Facebook Ads

Want to discover how successful marketers use Facebook to grow their audience and achieve their business goals? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Pexels.

But Instagram isn’t a silver bullet for your marketing strategy. If you’re going to deliver results, you need to constantly analyze your campaigns to understand what’s working (and what isn’t). In turn, you’ll need to identify the Instagram metrics that significantly impact your desired business outcomes.

To help you, we’ve rounded up the top 10 Instagram metrics you should be tracking right now, along with some context about what makes them valuable and — where possible — real-world benchmark data to help you understand your current performance.

Let’s get into it.

1. Total Impressions

What Does It Tell You?

The total number of times your content appeared on Instagram in a given period. If your posts appeared in 500 Insta feeds, you generated 500 impressions. Simple, right?

Why Does It Matter?

In isolation, impressions aren’t super useful because they don’t tell you how many people have actually seen your content. But they give you valuable insight into what the all-powerful algorithm thinks about your content: a sudden spike or downturn in impressions suggests that Insta is showing your posts to more (or fewer) people.

If your impressions go down, it’s a surefire sign that your Instagram strategy needs work.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

We can’t give you a specific benchmark because there are too many variables — from your post volume and frequency to the types of content you share. All we can say is that more is always better regarding impressions!

2. Total Reach

What Does It Tell You?

Whereas impressions speak to the number of accounts you’ve theoretically hit, reach tells you how many people actually saw your posts. Reach is based on the number of unique accounts that view your content, so if the same person sees a post multiple times, it still only counts as a single account reached.

Why Does It Matter?

The whole point of sharing content on Instagram is to reach as many (relevant) people as possible.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

Reach scales with follower count: the more people who follow you, the higher your reach will be (unless you fall foul of the Instagram algorithm and they start restricting your content). So you want the line on your reach chart heading up and to the right.

3. Engagement Rate

What Does It Tell You?

The number of engagements you generate is divided by your total number of impressions.

Why Does It Matter?

Reaching a large number of accounts is one thing; persuading those people to take action—such as liking or commenting on a post—is a far greater challenge. A high engagement rate is a good sign that your followers (and other Instagram users) are enjoying your content, which suggests you understand your audience and what resonates with them. Well done!

What Does “Good” Look Like?

Finally, we can give you a real benchmark to compare your performance against. Instagram has an average engagement rate of 0.7%. Or, a post that gets 1,000 impressions will typically generate seven engagements. Sure, that doesn’t sound great — but it’s way higher than the average engagement rates on Facebook and Twitter:

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4. Engagements By Follower

What Does It Tell You?

The average number of times your followers engage with your Instagram content.

Why Does It Matter?

This social media metric excludes all those other Instagram users who might stumble upon your content and focuses solely on the people who care about your brand enough to actually follow you. These people should love your content, so if they’re not engaging, it’s time to tweak your strategy.

Another key point: this metric is vital because engagement rates are closely tied to follower count, with smaller accounts typically enjoying higher engagement. So, if you’ve got 5,000 Insta followers, there’s little point comparing yourself to a brand like Coca-Cola or Nike.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

Generally, we recommend aiming for a by-follower engagement rate of at least double your regular engagement rate. In other words, if your account has an overall engagement rate of 0.7%, your engagement rate by followers should be 1.4%+.

5. Engagements By Reach

What Does It Tell You?

The number of engagements you generate is divided by the total number of people who saw your posts.

Why Does It Matter?

You might think, “Great, yet another way to analyze my engagement rate.” However, engagement by reach is arguably the most important of the three engagement metrics in this article because it shows what happens when people see your posts. If they aren’t liking, commenting, and saving, your content simply isn’t engaging enough.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

Once again, it’s hard to put a specific figure on this. But we can definitely say that your engagement rate by reach should be significantly higher than your engagement rate by followers. To continue our example from the previous section, if your by-follower engagement rate is 1.4%, we’d aim for a by-reach engagement rate of 2.8%+.

6. Comments Received

What Does It Tell You?

This simple metric tells you how many comments you’ve generated over a given timeframe.

Why Does It Matter?

Comments are arguably the most significant engagement type on Instagram. It only takes a fraction of a second to smash “like” or “save,” whereas it requires actual thought to reply with a comment. So, if you’re generating a bunch of comments, it’s a sure sign that your content is provoking some sort of emotional response from your audience.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

We can’t find a reliable comment rate benchmark — probably because most analytics platforms don’t provide separate figures for different types of engagement. So your best bet is to track the number of comments you receive. If it keeps going up, you’re doing something right.

7. Follower Growth Rate

What Does It Tell You?

What it sounds like: how much your follower count has grown (or declined) over a given period.

Why Does It Matter?

Follower count is often dismissed as a meaningless vanity metric. However, one thing’s certain: if your followers are dropping, your Instagram strategy needs work.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

From March 2023 to February 2024, Instagram’s average monthly follower growth rate ranged from 0.77% to 1.2%. However, as you can see, it’s been on a distinctly downward curve throughout that period.

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8. Click-Through Rate

What Does It Tell You?

On most social media platforms, click-through rate (CTR) refers to the proportion of people who click links in your posts, divided by your total reach or impressions. But, of course, Instagram doesn’t allow you to include links in posts (well, apart from Instagram Stories). So when we speak about CTR on Instagram, we’re referring to the proportion of people who click through from your bio link after visiting your profile.

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Why Does It Matter?

Instagram doesn’t exist in isolation. A high click-through rate suggests you’re posting interesting content on Instagram and inspiring people to learn more about your brand and products.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

Per social media marketing platform Flick, the average Instagram account saw a CTR of 4.7% in the year to February 2024.

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If 1,000 people visit your Instagram profile, about 50 should click through using your bio link.

9. Instagram Reels Shares

What Does It Tell You?

Your Instagram Reels share count is the sum of all the times your Reels were shared on Instagram in a given period, either as Stories or direct messages.

Why Does It Matter?

There are various Instagram Reels-specific metrics, from reach to plays to engagement rate. But we think the most critical measure of Reels’ success is the number of shares generated—because each individual share can have a massive impact on your total reach.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

We can tell you that Instagram Reels have an average engagement rate of 1.23% (that’s higher than any other type of Instagram content).

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However, we can’t give you a shares-specific benchmark. So your best bet is to track your shares over time, paying close attention to the total number of shares and specific Reels that perform much better (or worse) than average.

10. Instagram Story Completion Rate

What Does It Tell You?

The percentage of people who watch to the very end of your Instagram Stories.

Why Does It Matter?

It’s all too easy to start watching a brand’s Instagram Stories without even realizing it, but sticking around to the end is a clear sign that you enjoyed the content.

What Does “Good” Look Like?

The average Instagram Story completion rate remained pretty static between March 2023 and February 2024 at around 85%:

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In other words, if 100 people start watching your Instagram Stories, 85+ should watch the whole thing. If your completion rate is significantly below this benchmark, it may be worth examining your content.

Want to learn how smart marketers use metrics like these to improve their social media performance? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Pixabay.

LinkedIn has become essential to many organizations’ social media marketing strategies.

Whether you’re just starting on LinkedIn or looking to get more bang for your buck, you’re in the right place because we’re going to share our top tips and best practices on LinkedIn for Business, including how to:

• Create and optimize a LinkedIn Company Page
• Use your Company Page to generate leads
• Target your content to specific audiences (without any ad budget)

Let’s get into it.

Create Your LinkedIn Company Page

Okay, let’s begin with the basics:

The first step to boosting your business profile on LinkedIn is to create a Company Page. To do that, you first need to sign up for a personal LinkedIn profile.

Presuming you’ve already got a personal page, you can start building your Company Page by clicking the For Business menu at the top-right of the LinkedIn screen, then choosing Create a Company Page:

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Next, LinkedIn asks about the type of Company Page you want to create. Choose one of these three options:

1. Company: For small, medium, and large businesses
2. Showcase: For building a sub-page associated with an existing brand
3. Educational institution: For schools and universities

Each page type offers slightly different functionality, so the following steps will vary depending on which you choose. We’ll use option #1, a standard, business-themed company page, to walk you through the process.

LinkedIn wants to know some basic information about your company: who you are, what you do, that kind of thing. Complete the form to the best of your ability, verify that you’re an authorized representative of the organization, then click Create page:

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Pro tip: Your tagline is the first thing many people will read about your brand, so it should briefly summarize your value proposition. If you need inspiration, search LinkedIn for other brands in your industry.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

All being well, it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to launch your Company Page.

But your work has only just begun. Now it’s time to optimize your page. This will help you show up in relevant LinkedIn searches and ensure that people who visit your Company Page will leave with a good impression of your organization.

Helpfully, LinkedIn breaks down the various stages of optimizing a Company Page in the Today’s actions section:

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There are many different sections to complete — so many that it’s easy to get disheartened. But we’d urge you to knuckle down and power through because pages with complete information generate 30% more weekly views.

Most of the stuff is pretty self-explanatory (like adding your street address and contact details), but a few things are worth highlighting.

Add Keywords To Your LinkedIn Description

Remember, LinkedIn pages don’t just appear in searches on the platform — Google also indexes them. So, adding searchable phrases to your LinkedIn description can help get your brand in front of more potential customers, whether or not they actually use LinkedIn.

To write a new LinkedIn description, click Edit page, then navigate to Overview and enter your text in the Description box:

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As you’ll see, LinkedIn gives you 2,000 characters to play with. But we’d recommend limiting your description to 3 – 4 paragraphs discussing your value proposition and what you sell, interlaced with natural-sounding keywords related to your product or service.

Create a Custom CTA Button

Have you ever noticed how some LinkedIn Company Pages have their own call-to-action (CTA) buttons at the top of the page?

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The good news is that this feature is available to any brand with a Company Page. You can even edit the copy of the CTA button to promote the action that’s most relevant to your business.

To add a button to your Company Page, click Edit page > Buttons and select the button type from the drop-down menu.

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LinkedIn lets you choose from the following options:

• Contact us
• Learn more
• Register
• Sign up
• Visit website
• Visit portfolio
• Visit store

As a standard, LinkedIn also adds a separate CTA button for people to message your business directly on the platform. But if you’d prefer your custom call-to-action to stand out more, you can deactivate the message button by sliding the toggle from “On” to “Off.”

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Embed a Lead Capture Form

One of our favorite features of LinkedIn for Business is the ability to embed a lead capture form on your Company Page.

If someone visits your profile and likes what they see, you can encourage them to hand over their personal information in exchange for a product demo or valuable content.

To add a lead capture form to your Company Page, click Edit page > Lead gen form, then toggle the dial from “Off” to “On.”

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Like the previous example, LinkedIn lets you select the most appropriate CTA for your lead gen form. Choose from these four options:

• Contact Sales
• Request free demo
• Start free trial
• Get started

Then, write a headline and body copy for your form so people know what to expect after filling it in.

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Once you’ve filled in the details and hit Save, you’ll be able to see your new form CTA on your Company Page:

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When a potential customer clicks your lead form CTA, LinkedIn auto-completes the form based on information pulled from their profile. That makes for a super streamlined path to conversion: all they need to do is check the consent box and click Submit.

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Invite People To Follow Your Company Page

Now that you’ve created your LinkedIn Company Page, it’s time to start building a following.

We can’t give you a foolproof, one-size-fits-all LinkedIn strategy for growing your follower count here — there are simply too many moving parts, covering everything from what’s in your content calendar to how often you post and when you do (or don’t) tap into broader social media conversations.

But we can share one quick-and-dirty tip: take advantage of LinkedIn’s Invite connections feature.

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Remember, your Company Page is tied to your own personal LinkedIn account. Clicking Invite connections brings up a list of your personal followers, allowing you to scroll through the list and invite those you’d like to follow your Company Page.

Because LinkedIn doesn’t want you spamming people, it limits you to 100 invite credits per calendar month. But the credit gets returned to your allocation when someone accepts an invite request.

Add a Follow Button To Your Website

Another convenient way to grow your Company Page follower count is to embed a Follow button on your website. That way, when people land on your site, they can instantly click to follow you without even visiting LinkedIn.

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To set up your Follow button, add a snippet of JavaScript to your website. Read this Microsoft guide to learn how to do it.

Boost Your First Post To Reach a Broader Audience

Provided you consistently share interesting, relevant content, your Company Page following should grow organically over time.

But organic growth can be slow, especially in the early days when you’ve only got a few dozen followers. So it’s worth turbo-charging your growth by “boosting” your first post—in other words, paying for it to reach a wider audience. Hopefully, a bunch of people will like what you’re saying, visit your profile, and click Follow.

Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn makes it super simple to boost a post: just find the post you want to boost, then click the blue CTA button:

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Then, it’s just a case of setting your targeting options, choosing your budget, and providing your credit card information. (For a detailed walk-through, check out our article, A Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Ads.)

Pro tip: Boost posts that generate higher-than-average engagement. If your current followers like it, that’s a good sign that other LinkedIn members will, too!

Share Content With a Targeted Audience (for Free!)

Most social networks force you to pay for the ability to share content with people in specific demographics.

But not LinkedIn. When you create a new post, you can take advantage of (limited) targeting options without paying a cent. All you have to do is create a new post, then click the drop-down menu next to your company name:

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That brings you to the Post settings screen, where you can choose to post to anyone on or off LinkedIn or to a targeted audience:

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Then, you can simply experiment with the target audience settings—including language, job function, and location—until you’re reaching exactly the right people.

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As you can likely imagine, this feature is handy if you’re a global brand with an audience spanning multiple regions and languages.

Comment As Your Company

To succeed on LinkedIn, you need to get out there and (digitally) network with other thought leaders and brands in your space.

Chances are you’re already doing that from your personal profile. But did you know you can do the same with your Company Page?

It’s simple: when you find a post you want to comment on, click the drop-down menu next to your personal profile icon.

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Now, when you comment (or react or repost), you’ll do it as your brand rather than yourself.

Want to learn how top brands drive real results through social media marketing? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Freepik.

But, successfully reaching, engaging, and converting your audience via social networks necessitates a strategic approach. More importantly, it requires understanding the latest trends, especially considering a super-short trend cycle and an even shorter audience attention span.

So, whether you want to up your e-commerce social media game or ensure you’re getting the basics right, here are the tips and best practices you must follow in 2024 and onwards.

1. Recommit to Follower Interaction

Social media can be an incredible platform for any business. However, the one mistake brands make is using social networks to talk at their audience instead of communicating with their followers.

Ultimately, if you think about it, the point of social media is to foster connection. And if you look at why people go on these platforms, you’ll discover that maintaining connection motivates most users. Moreover, research shows that:

• 79% of consumers favor brand messaging that develops a relationship.
• 83% of people care as much about how a brand treats them as they do about the quality of its products.
• 84% of consumers say online communities directly impact how they feel about a business and whether they buy from and remain loyal to said organization.

So, how can you use this to improve your social media marketing strategy? One of the best practices you should start implementing immediately is to recommit to follower interaction.

Ensure you’re focused on using social media to engage with your followers. Produce posts that will encourage your audience to reach out and connect. Use social listening tools to discover opportunities to forge new connections. Finally, do your best to make your social media communication genuine and human — especially as people are so aware that AI is replacing humans in customer care that they’re more likely to appreciate real interaction.

How you implement this strategy is entirely up to you (and should depend on your brand’s personality).

For instance, if you check out Duolingo on X, you’ll notice that the brand employs social listening to connect with its followers and uncover engaging content opportunities.

Source: twitter.com

However, as Golf Cart Tire Supply does, you can also employ this tactic to improve customer satisfaction. This brand is active on YouTube and uses the platform to present prospects with high-quality educational content.

But it also makes maximum use of the comment section below each of its how-to videos to answer customer questions and show its audience it cares about them getting the most out of their purchase.

Source: youtube.com

2. Make Your Blog Content Links Pop with Video

There are many ways to elevate your e-commerce social media marketing strategy in 2024. But the one thing you must remember when tweaking your strategies is why you’re investing in socials in the first place.

Social media is an excellent platform for raising brand awareness and engaging your audience. But as an e-commerce brand, remember that your ultimate goal isn’t just capturing your target audience’s attention. Instead, to benefit from this type of marketing, you must invest your energy into converting leads into customers. One of the best ways to do this is to direct your followers to your website.

There are multiple ways to achieve this goal. Even something as basic as calling attention to a link in your bio — as Sherwin Williams does below — can be an excellent way to increase site traffic.

Source: instagram.com

Nonetheless, if you want to guarantee your posts stand out from the noise and genuinely capture your audience’s attention, you must use more engaging formats.

For instance, if you want your blog content links to pop, use video to introduce these articles. After all, the format was rated as the most effective type of content by 45% of marketers in Semrush’s latest State of Content Marketing Survey. So, it’s no surprise that brands that want to stand out, like Vivion, use short-form video clips to ensure their blog links stand out in a sea of similar posts.

Source: linkedin.com

3. Integrate Social Media Landing Pages for Instagram

If you employ Instagram in your social media marketing strategy, you already know the platform has much to offer. For starters, it has more than 2 billion monthly active users. It’s an exceptionally effective traffic generation tool due to the versatility of formats it supports, its interactive functionalities, and its potential for maximizing your reach.

However, Instagram can have one drawback that’s particularly impactful for e-commerce businesses. Given the app’s user interface design, the amount of real estate it offers for displaying bio content is extremely limited.

As a result, your profile visitors won’t always see the entire range of product page links you want to promote. This inconvenience is compounded by the fact that Instagram famously doesn’t allow links in post captions.

This combination of factors means that your account doesn’t have the power to direct web traffic to specific landing pages, reducing your ability to tailor your prospects’ shopping experience based on their position in the buyer’s journey.

Luckily, there’s an effective hack for removing this conversion obstacle. All you need to do is integrate social media landing pages with tools such as Linktree, Linkin.bio, Taplink, or Shorby.

For example, check out the Moto Machines Instagram profile. This brand utilizes a Linktree landing page to help its audience access the content/webpages relevant to their interest. By allowing followers to control their browsing journeys in this way, Moto Machines prevents high bounce rates on its website (which, in turn, benefits SEO). Plus, it actively shortens the sales cycle, ensuring prospects land on the content/product pages that correlate to what they intend to do.

Source: instagram.com

4. Repurpose Blog Content for Social Media

One of the downsides of primarily using social media to build brand awareness is that it necessitates a continually active posting schedule to see great results.

In 2024, the ideal posting frequency for all major platforms is higher than ever. For instance, TikTok recommends that brands post one to four times per day to see the best results. Yet, even if you align your schedule to the lower end of this number, you’ll find that pumping out that much new content demands an exorbitant amount of resources.

With this in mind, explore tactics to present your followers with new and engaging posts that will keep your business at the top of their minds. However, the trick is to do it without depleting your social marketing budget.

One of the easiest ways to overcome this challenge is to repurpose existing blog content for social media.

For example, if you check out Breaking Eighty, you’ll find that the business regularly publishes video versions of its most popular articles on YouTube. Considering that the platform is becoming one of the leading search engines for product research, this tactic makes perfect sense, allowing the brand to reach its audience in multiple ways without coming up with multiple content ideas per week.

The 8 Best Golf Shoes in Early 2024 (FOR EVERY BUDGET)

Source: youtube.com

5. Explore Lesser Used Social Media Platforms

Successfully employing social media marketing to grow your e-commerce business requires you to publish on the most popular platforms—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, and TikTok. However, to elevate your game in 2024, you must look beyond those five social networks.

If you want to reach new prospects and outperform your competitors, explore smaller social media players. Smaller networks may allow you to grab your target audience’s attention more effectively. Or, they may even play an integral role in converting new customers.

For starters, if your e-commerce business sells physical products that embody a particular aesthetic, vibe, or aspirational lifestyle, Pinterest represents a marvelous opportunity to maximize reach and inspire conversions.

Check out Sokisahtel for an excellent example of how to make this network work for your business. Knowing that many of its products depend on seasonal interest, this brand created multiple themed Pinterest boards, uploading and tagging visuals to showcase products and ensuring that each post leads prospects to a related product page on its website.

Source: pinterest.com

Or, if you want to employ social media marketing to build a community, why not add Reddit to your strategy? Reddit is the 8th-ranking website worldwide. It’s also an exceptional platform for sharing relevant news with your followers or even assisting customers in solving their issues.

Check out how Ikea does it on its IKEA Home Smart sub, where the brand posts everything related to its smart home product lines.

Source: reddit.com

Finally, if you’re prepared to take a more hands-on approach to product promotion and customer support, you could start playing around with Quora. Because this is a question-and-answer platform, it’s the perfect place to raise awareness about your products/brand and demonstrate competence in your niche, effectively maximizing brand trust.

Check out how the founder behind Waka Coffee uses Quora to educate potential buyers about coffeemaking. It’s an excellent strategy for growing an e-commerce business, and it’s not just because it introduces coffee lovers to a new product that could solve their pain points. Such answers benefit Quora users, improving their chances of getting an upvote and automatically enhancing the brand’s online visibility.

Source: quora.com

6. Implement Social Selling

Social selling is one of the social media trends you must embrace in 2024 — especially if you run an e-commerce business.

According to research, consumers don’t just find shopping inspiration on social networks. With the introduction of social selling functionalities, most platforms are becoming powerful sales channels.

In its State of Consumer Trends report, HubSpot revealed that 17% of people bought items directly from social media. And the practice is even more popular among younger generations, particularly Millennials (27%) and Gen Z (22%).

The best networks to implement social selling will be Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. However, in addition to creating a shop for your brand, do your best to actively tag any products in your posts. That way, you can capture your followers’ attention and use their tendency toward impulse shopping to turn them into customers.

For an excellent example of how you can do this, check out Foreo on Instagram. Understanding the popularity of skincare-related content on the platform, this brand decided to up its marketing game on this social media channel. However, in addition to presenting followers with high-quality, engaging, and educational content, Foreo also allowed in-app shopping. This effectively shortened the sales cycle and improved its customer acquisition process.

Source: instagram.com

7. Embrace TikTok

Another best practice for 2024 — especially if your business targets a younger audience — is to embrace TikTok.

Even though producing short-form videos for this platform may require you to widen your repertoire of content formats, the investment is guaranteed to pay off. TikTok saw an impressive 16% growth in user numbers last year, and it works wonders for e-commerce. It enables brands to bridge trust gaps, shorten sales cycles, and build communities all through the same app.

Naturally, if you decide to incorporate TikTok in your marketing strategy, explore ways to do so in the best possible way for your brand. Consider your social media goals and create content that aligns with the outcomes you want to reach.

For instance, check out how Fenty Beauty approaches the content creation for this network. Instead of only posting promotional videos and memes, this beauty brand enriches its content strategy with educational videos. By collaborating with make-up artists, it posts easy tips and tricks for end users to try with their Fenty products.

Such a social strategy results in more than just a large selection of videos that inspire purchases. More importantly, this content improves the customer experience by teaching buyers how to get the most out of their purchases, effectively inspiring customer loyalty.

Source: tiktok.com

8. Partner with Expert Influencers

Another best practice to adhere to in your e-commerce social media marketing strategy in 2024 is to work with influencers.

Data from the latest State of Influencer Marketing Report shows that influencer-generated content outperforms brand-directed posts in engagement. But, perhaps even more importantly, collaborating with content creators can be an excellent way to boost conversions, especially considering that affiliate sales that leveraged influencers increased by 2,200% over the past year.

With this in mind, you may want to jump at the first opportunity to reach out to creators who could boost your reach or conversions. But remember that the best way to employ influencers is to do it with your brand’s personality and audience’s values in mind.

For example, the latest Edelman Trust Barometer Report demonstrates that proof — particularly scientific evidence — could be the key to earning consumer trust. So, going forward, approach the influencer selection process by prioritizing collaborator credibility and trustworthiness.

For one of the best examples of a brand investing in the ideal type of influencer content for its audience, check out Madden NFL. This brand organized a Pro Bowl series on Twitch, where professional NFL players competed with each other in a video game.

This is a brilliant content idea for the Madden NFL brand, not just because the pros create hype for the product. Seeing real-life football players interact with the video game is inspirational. It is powerful in convincing sports fans that they can get the same exciting experience by buying the game.

Source: twitch.tv

9. Don’t Forget UGC

Finally, as you explore ways to up your e-commerce social media marketing game in 2024, remember to prioritize authenticity when producing posts to distribute on social platforms.

Yes, branded, sales-oriented content can be enough to boost sales or even widen your reach. However, if you want your audience to fall in love with your brand (and choose it over your competitors), you must do your best to incorporate UGC into your feed.

Explore ways to source and showcase this format in your social media marketing. The easiest way will be to employ social listening and repost user-generated posts mentioning your products, as Thonet does below.

Source: instagram.com

Remember that user-generated posts aren’t just something you can use to fill in the gaps in your content production schedule. UGC can be a wonderful addition to your e-commerce website, regardless of whether you use it on your homepage, product pages, or even your site’s blog.

Final Thoughts

There you have it: the top e-commerce social media marketing tips and best practices for 2024.

Hopefully, you’re already employing most of these methods in your strategy. However, if you see that you’re missing a step or recognize that you could elevate your game to better align with current tendencies, do your best not to delay.

Social media trends come and go. Staying relevant on most channels requires an agile approach and a commitment to continuous improvement. So, be bold about trying new formats.

Explore novel platforms. Do your best to keep in touch with your audience so that you can reap the benefits of social media marketing without wasting your budget on content that doesn’t resonate with them or drive conversions.

Featured image by freepik.

Why?

Because teens – in other words, the ideal target audience for most higher ed marketing campaigns – use social media a lot.

According to Common Sense Media, US teenagers average over 8.5 hours of screen time daily, with about one-sixth of that time spent browsing social media. A further 32% say they wouldn’t want to live without YouTube.

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It’s hardly surprising usage is so high, given that 95% of teens now have smartphones.

So, clearly, social media is a massive opportunity for higher education marketers.

Looking to get more from your own social media efforts? Check out these 30 top-notch campaigns from universities across North America.

1. University of Nebraska-Lincoln

A big piece of the higher education marketing puzzle is figuring out how best to position a given town, city, or state to prospective students.

Do you highlight the fantastic social life? The history and culture? The beautiful scenery? The friendly attitude toward students? Or something else entirely?

Rather than just discussing this in a few throwaway posts, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has built a whole social content campaign around it.

The Discover Nebraska series features native Instagram videos that combine clean, striking design, engaging imagery, and attractive graphics to showcase the best that the state has to offer.

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It also allows the university to promote highlights of its events calendar, feature profiles of former students, and get more eyes on its news stories.

2. University of Manitoba

Universities are some of our oldest institutions.

Take the University of Manitoba, which was founded back in 1877.

While all that heritage has many benefits from a higher education social media marketing perspective, it can also have its downsides. How on earth do you rebrand an organization that was around when Billy the Kid was still stalking the Old West?

The University of Manitoba decided to use social media to communicate and explain its recent rebranding:

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This campaign showcases visual elements of the new branding and directs viewers toward a dedicated landing page that explains in-depth the new logo and how it came about.

3. Baylor University

Baylor University tops the tree regarding its social media marketing strategy—or at least it did in 2016, according to research from Engagement Labs.

The study awarded Baylor a higher score than any other college for its Facebook presence and placed the university in third place for its X strategy.

In particular, Baylor was applauded for its “high-quality content,” which focused predominantly on campus life and the successes of its sporting teams. This helped it rack up the most likes and comments per 1,000 fans of any university.

This approach is clearly still central to Baylor’s higher ed marketing plans – and it still bags the university a ton of engagement:

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The lesson here? Once you’ve found what resonates with your audience, keep doing it!

4. University of Phoenix

The biggest reason for going to college is to get a better job.

That might sound obvious, but it’s important to remember what your audience actually wants to hear. What would persuade them to choose your institution over a rival?

The University of Phoenix recognizes this. It’s been running a Facebook ad campaign to promote its Career Optimism Index, which the university says was created to “address broad, persistent and systemic barriers to career advancement.” Potential students are obviously massively interested in this area.

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This whole campaign is a fantastic example of thought leadership on social media. Those ads are littered with juicy stats, all generated from original research.

The ads link to the Career Optimism Index landing page, which contains many additional insights on the theme of career progression.

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This paints the University of Phoenix as a real authority in career development and as an organization that genuinely cares about helping people get more from the world of work.

5. University of California Los Angeles

Want a simple example of how universities can tap into current events to boost brand awareness? Look no further than this higher education marketing campaign from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA):

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UCLA ran this ad campaign across Facebook and Instagram from late March to early April 2020, which, as you’ll likely remember, was right at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

This ad invited people to download images showcasing iconic UCLA buildings and locations to use as backgrounds for video calls.

The timing on this is perfect because late March was precisely the point when so many of us first started working (and learning) from home, causing search interest for the phrase “Zoom background” to spike through the roof:

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Think about it: whenever someone downloads one of those images and uses it as their video call background, they promote the university. It’s an amazing tactic!

6. Binghamton University

Humor is a powerful tool in higher ed marketing (provided you get it right).

That’s not just an opinion – it’s a scientific fact.

For instance, one study from the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice discovered that viewers receive humorous social video content more favorably than serious entertainment.

When you think of humor on social media, you naturally think of memes.

Whether memes are a good fit for your strategy depends heavily on your audience and tone of voice, but Binghamton University is comfortable with using them, such as when it jumped on the Bernie Sanders meme that blew up in January 2021:

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This post worked for a couple of reasons:

1. The university posted it before the meme format became played out.
2. There’s a legit reason for posting this – Bernie taught at the university in 1990, so it makes sense for Binghamton to get involved in the conversation.

In other words, this post managed to get the “funny” bit right while advancing the university’s message.

7. University of Michigan

Sticking with the humor theme is the following example from the University of Michigan.

Like Bernie’s example above, the University of Michigan proves that sometimes the best opportunities on social media are the ones you don’t plan for.

For anyone struggling to recall obscure moments in social media history, this Twitter post references how a picture of an egg became the most-liked image on Instagram back in January 2019:

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Not only does this video tap into something topical, it also showcases locations around the University of Michigan, which means it’s effectively a double win for the institution’s higher ed marketing team.

8. New York University

New York University (NYU) famously doesn’t have a football team.

That seems like a massive oversight when you consider college football is a huge deal, with the average fixture attracting more than 40,000 fans.

As such, the lack of a football program could put off potential students – not just would-be college athletes but regular students craving the social side of college sports.

However, the NYU marketing team has had plenty of time to accept this (the football program was discontinued in 1953, so it isn’t exactly a recent occurrence).

Rather than ducking the issue, the university leaned into it with a Facebook video series highlighting all the other incredible sports on offer at the university:

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Highlights include a World Archery competitor, an award-winning baton twirler, and a Nascar driver.

9. University of Central Missouri

This University of Central Missouri campaign demonstrates the value of understanding your audience’s pain points in higher education social media marketing.

So what are prospective students’ biggest concerns?

Well, according to research from Mission.org, their top two concerns are:

1. Choosing the right major
2. College fees and debt

This Facebook and Instagram ad speaks to both of these pain points while adding a third – the length of time taken to graduate:

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That’s a compelling piece of copywriting.

Furthermore, the ad reassures its audience by speaking to the university’s heritage: “Trust 150 years of quality education.”

It effectively says: “We understand your concerns, and we’re here to help you out.”

10.University of Iowa

According to RivalIQ’s Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, the University of Iowa has been America’s top university for social engagement for five successive years. So, we simply had to include it on our list of the best higher education social media accounts.

The institution performs strongly on Instagram and Twitter, but its Facebook presence is the true standout.

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So what’s it doing so well?

Lots of things. But one especially smart tactic is its use of high-profile alums to promote the university:

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Research from Common Sense and SurveyMonkey found that teens are just as likely to listen to celebrities, influencers, and personalities as friends, family, and news organizations.

Showcasing big-name former students can be a highly effective promotional tactic. If you can encourage them to tell their followers how much they loved their college experience, all the better!

11. James Madison University

According to RivalIQ, Virginia’s James Madison University (JMU) is the top dog in higher education Instagram.

Artsy campus shots are its specialty. But it’s not just about the images themselves; it’s about the format in which they’re posted.

Specifically, JMU is a big fan of Instagram carousels. In a highly unscientific review of the account’s 50 most recent Insta posts, we discovered that 42% were carousels.

For comparison, the University of Iowa—which RivalIQ ranked third for Instagram engagement and first overall—incorporated carousels in 34% of its 50 latest posts.

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Why does JMU lean so heavily into carousels?

When you add multiple images to a carousel post, Instagram re-serves those posts to users who didn’t interact with them the first time. That makes them a fantastic vehicle for driving social engagement.

12. University of Georgia

When it comes to higher ed social media, everyone loves a winner.

RivalIQ’s research discovered that posts featuring big “wins” produced engagement lifts across all the social platforms it studied.

As the home of the national championship-winning Bulldogs, the University of Georgia is more fortunate than most when it comes to winning big.

And it’s not afraid to shout about it, as a glance at its Instagram account will confirm.

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Of course, only one school a year can have the country’s top football team. Many institutions are far more renowned for their academic prowess than their sporting achievements (remember, NYU doesn’t even have a football program).

But “wins” don’t have to be confined to the sporting arena.

If one of your students has received a big art prize or you’ve won a significant award, that’s absolutely something to celebrate.

13. University of South Carolina

Despite having over 100 million users in the US, TikTok is still comparatively underutilized by higher ed institutions.

The University of South Carolina is one of relatively few schools to have developed a solid TikTok presence.

That’s because it takes time to create native content that resonates with users on TikTok. A great example is this cheer video, which has notched more than 270,000 views at the time of writing:

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14. Central Michigan University

Sticking with the TikTok theme, Central Michigan University (CMU) is another school that’s smashing it on the fun-sized video platform.

Despite having just 25,000 TikTok followers, the school has more than 1.3 million likes, with one of its videos generating a staggering 5.5 million views:

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This highlights TikTok’s strongest suit: its ability to help brands reach new audiences that don’t follow them and might never have heard of them.

Sure, not every video you produce will generate millions of views. CMU’s second-highest performer has a comparatively paltry 10,800 views. But the more you create, the more likely you will learn what works and bring in big numbers.

15. Brigham Young University

Another institution that excels at generating likes, shares, and comments is Utah’s Brigham Young University, which has over 88,000 followers on X/Twitter. Much of its success comes down to the school’s effective use of video.

Admittedly, X/Twitter isn’t known as a video platform, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be effective. The platform’s figures show that there are more than two billion video views daily, with video posts generating 10X more engagements than non-video posts.

Brigham Young is aware of this.

It regularly posts video content on Twitter, such as this bird’s eye view of LaVell Edwards Stadium, which has generated more than 12,000 views:

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That means roughly one-sixth of its Twitter followers have watched it.

16. Harvard University

Harvard is one of the most followed higher education institutions in the US, with 6.5 million followers on Facebook alone.

In reality, there’s no big mystery to Harvard’s success. It does what you’d expect a higher ed Facebook account to do: showcasing news and events from around the university.

A good example is this post, which highlights members of the class of 2026 during their first day on campus:

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This simple collection of images has generated 28,000 reactions and more than 7,000 shares at the time of writing, demonstrating the value of having “boots on the ground” creating content when anything important happens at your school.

17. Berry College

The phrase “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” applies to higher ed social media.

We’ve examined how the University of Georgia has happily showcased its sporting achievements.

Another Georgia institution, the tiny Berry College — with a total enrollment of just 2,200 students — might not have the country’s best football program.

However, few schools can compare to its campus’s sheer size and beauty, which covers an astonishing 27,000 acres and everything from rolling foothills to babbling rivers to forested parkland.

Unsurprisingly, this is a prominent feature of the school’s social media content, especially on visual platforms like Instagram:

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The message here is clear:

Every school is great at something. Figure out what you do better than most, and make that the focus of your social strategy.

18. University of San Diego

Another school that makes the most of its surroundings is the University of San Diego (USD), which is famed for the aesthetics of its campus.

Based on real student ratings, Princeton Review regularly names USD among the most beautiful campuses in the US.

As you might imagine, USD isn’t shy about highlighting this trait, particularly on Instagram:

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Who wouldn’t want to spend their time at college surrounded by palm trees and striking Spanish Renaissance architecture?

19. Tarleton State University

Social media can be a great leveler.

With some smart strategy and a little (okay, a lot) of effort, smaller institutions can totally outperform their larger rivals in engagement.

A great example is Tarleton State University (TSU), one of the smaller institutions that made RivalIQ’s list of the top 10 schools on social media.

Look at Tarleton State’s Facebook page, and it’s clear that the school’s marketing team has paid close attention to branding.

TSU’s purple-and-white color scheme is apparent across pretty much every image on its feed:

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This might seem like a minor point, but branding matters. It helps followers pick out your posts from their busy social feeds, which makes it easier to build an online community.

20. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) takes a different approach to many of the institutions in our roundup. Rather than showcasing campus life, its X/Twitter account is dedicated to highlighting the unique research conducted by its scientists.

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This approach generates plenty of reach and engagement and helps cement MIT as a world leader in science and technology.

It’s certainly worked hard to build that reputation, with many scientific and technological advances coming out of the college — including the discovery of quarks and the development of radar.

21. The Ohio State University

The Ohio State University (OSU) is regularly recognized as one of the top-performing higher education institutions in the US regarding TikTok content, generating over two million total engagements on the platform from June 2022 – May 2023.

OSU gets a lot of things right on TikTok. But it’s especially effective at showcasing the achievements and credentials of its faculty. (It’s fair to say that tasks get slightly easier when you’ve got a recent Nobel Prize winner on your staff!)

@theohiostateuniversityIt’s great to have you back, Dr. Agostini! Round of applause for this 2023 Nobel Prize winner! Learn more about this Buckeye’s incredible scientific achievements at the link in our bio.♬ space song sped up – autumn &lt3

22. Southern Connecticut State University

Getting your content mix right is essential to any social media strategy. Southern Connecticut State University’s Instagram does this better than most, sharing a relatively even split of post types with its audience of almost 13,000 followers.

You’ve got photo carousels showing off life on campus…​​

 

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A post shared by Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) (@southernscsu)

…Reels highlighting student achievements…

 

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A post shared by Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) (@southernscsu)

…and single-image posts promoting upcoming events:

 

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A post shared by Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) (@southernscsu)

Its posting strategy is satisfying the Instagram algorithm because, from June 2022 – May 2023, the school’s posts generated an average engagement rate of 5.71% — almost double the median for D2 institutions.

23. Texas A&M University

Texas A&M’s X/Twitter presence effectively showcases the school’s proud heritage of helping its local community by highlighting volunteer initiatives like the Big Event, America’s largest one-day, student-run service project.

Since it was established by six former Aggies in 1982, the project has racked up over 1.1 million total hours of service and expanded to include 130 events across the US. Hence, it’s the sort of thing any higher-ed social media marketer would love to promote.

In 1982, Joe Nussbaum ’84 led a group of 6 Aggies in cleaning up a local cemetery.

Since that first project, The Big Event has expanded to 2,250+ job sites in Bryan-College Station, 100+ universities across the nation, and internationally in Spain, Italy, and Germany. pic.twitter.com/JLkOFe7dw6

— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) March 23, 2024

But Texas A&M isn’t a one-trick pony.

Current and former students have been involved in many projects that have benefited the school’s local area and much further afield, from Nobel Peace Prize-winning alums…

On what would have been his 110th birthday, we celebrate the legacy of Norman Borlaug, a #TAMU Distinguished Professor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient!

His life dedication to agronomy has been estimated to have saved billions of lives, and his legacy continues at @BorlaugTAMU. pic.twitter.com/TyzdYzKAXD

— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) March 25, 2024

…to researchers striving to solve the next pandemic before it emerges:

Bats’ swarming behavior may hold the key to solving the next pandemic.

Researchers at @tamuvetmed shed light on how bats build up their immunity, which could help us beat the next deadly viruses. https://t.co/R99Bmoi30X

— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) March 25, 2024

All of which are perfect for sharing on social media.

24. Texas Christian University

Texas Christian University (TCU) takes a high-volume approach to Facebook, posting about twice as often as the average Division I school.

This strategy doesn’t guarantee results. In fact, many social media marketers find that the more often they post on Facebook, the fewer comments, likes, and shares they generate. But that’s not a problem for TCU, which saw a Facebook engagement rate of 0.63% from June 2022 – May 2023 — that’s about three times the average for a D1 school or college.

Part of TCU’s success stems from its ability to paint the university as one big, happy family, like in this post about its annual Easter egg hunt:

Amy Peterson, the school’s assistant director of social and multimedia strategy, explained, “Our social media strategy reflects the experience that our audiences expect from TCU—a celebratory focus on our campus experience, plus a deeper look at impactful academic research, service, and scholarly activity.”

25. Fayetteville State University

Like Texas Christian, Fayetteville State thrives on Facebook by sharing more content than its rivals. Between June 2022 and May 2023, the school posted about 2.5X as frequently as other Division II schools on Facebook while maintaining roughly three times the average D2 engagement rate.

So what, exactly, is it posting?

As with most higher ed institutions, there’s a ton of sports-themed content celebrating the successes of teams and individual students:

The school also does a great job at celebrating key announcements and milestones, like the third anniversary of Chancellor Darrell T Allison:

26. Northern Michigan University

Northern Michigan University (NMU) is more active on TikTok than most higher ed institutions, sharing an average of 2.2 videos per week.

This approach helped it earn over 4.8 million total views in the year to June 2023, compared to a median of just 336,000 views for all Division II schools.

Committing to posting all that content is challenging for any higher ed social media marketing team. But NMU gets it right by keeping a close eye on TikTok trends, like this montage of students attempting to guess each other’s majors:

@northernmichiganu Guess that major!!! #nmu #college #collegelife #univeristy #northernmichiganuniversity #wildcats #major #degree #getthatdegree ♬ nintendo wii (mii channel) song – julie on the internet

27. Stanford University

Stanford is one of the world’s most-followed higher ed institutions on Instagram, with a community of over 1.1 million followers.

The school’s stellar reputation stems from its long history as a leading research university, reflected in its Instagram content. Stanford’s social media marketing team regularly highlights the school’s most interesting and ground-breaking insights and innovations — like TidyBot, a robot that “learns to clean your space just the way you like it.”

 

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A post shared by Stanford University (@stanford)

At the time of writing, this Instagram Reel had notched up close to 400,000 views, demonstrating a huge audience eager to learn about the school’s latest research.

28. Colorado State University

One of the most effective ways for higher ed social media marketers to foster a sense of community is to discuss the shared experiences and characteristics that unite fellow students and alums.

Colorado State University does a great job of this on its Instagram account, where it regularly highlights (and sometimes pokes fun at) the realities of campus life. Just like in this Reel, which replicates the “of course we…” meme format seen across Insta and TikTok:

 

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A post shared by Colorado State University (@coloradostateuniversity)

This approach helps Colorado State build a real sense of belonging — an effective tactic for boosting social media engagement among current and former students and attracting future students to study at the institution.

29. Carson-Newman University

If you’re fortunate enough to have a well-known alum, you should shout about it on social media.

That’s doubly true for smaller, less famous institutions like Carson-Newman University, which can count Dolly Parton among its former students:

We want to wish a big happy birthday to a unique C-N alumna!

Did you know Dolly Parton holds a degree from Carson-Newman? On October 21, 1990, we conferred upon Dolly a Doctor of Letters Degree for her contributions to the educational and economic welfare of East Tennessee! pic.twitter.com/ieXmKnboui

— Carson-Newman University (@carson_newman_u) January 19, 2024

Posting about the Queen of Country Music (among many other things) helped Carson-Newman achieve more than 5X the median Division II engagement rate on X/Twitter from June 2022 – May 2023.

30. Louisiana State University

Posting about your sports teams is hardly the most revolutionary higher ed social media tactic, but Louisiana State University (LSU) does it better than most.

LSU posts a ton of TikTok content, much of which is themed around its various sporting programs — from showing off its packed football stadium to sharing clips of its basketball teams in action.

And, like many other institutions in our roundup, Louisiana State also takes the time to shout about famous sporting alums. And they don’t come much bigger than basketball Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal:

@lsu ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? #lsu #geauxtigers #collegelife #shaq #shaquilleoneal #mood #school #finals #test #exam #trending #meme #relatable #foryoupage #fyp ♬ original sound – LSU

Conclusion

This is a diverse selection of social campaigns despite them all coming from higher education institutions.

We have humor, heritage, sports, and an egg rolling along the ground in Ann Arbor.

This shows that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to social media in higher education marketing. What works for you might not work for anyone else—it all depends on your audience and brand.

That’s why it pays to research what your audience wants and to try a wide range of tactics to learn what resonates.

Are you interested in more content like this? Make sure to sign up for our social media conference.

Enter AI in marketing.

What Is Artificial Intelligence in Marketing?

Artificial intelligence marketing (AI Marketing) involves leveraging customer data and AI concepts like machine learning to anticipate customers’ next moves and improve the customer journey.

Advancements in artificial intelligence offer companies better ways to do that. AI can help build more effective marketing strategies, improve the customer journey, and change how businesses attract, nurture, and convert prospects. The graphic below shows how marketers can incorporate AI and machine learning into every customer lifecycle step:

Examples of AI in Marketing

Source: Smart Insights

AI in marketing may feel more science fiction than fact to many, but it’s not a far-off concept; it’s here right now.

Indeed, four in five marketers have already integrated some form of AI into their marketing activities — so it’s no surprise that the global value of AI marketing is set to climb from $12 billion in 2020 to an eye-watering $108 billion in 2028.

If you haven’t considered the power of AI for marketing, now’s the time to learn more. To help you get started, we’ve compiled ten impressive AI marketing examples.

1. Whole Foods Leverages AI for Tailored Messaging

Consumers might not love the idea of having their data harvested, but they’re increasingly receptive to the results of that data collection. 59% of respondents to a CI&T survey said they were “excited” at the prospect of brands using their purchase histories and preferences to personalize the shopping experience.

Unfortunately for them, just 13% of online retailers believe they deliver a completely personalized experience to shoppers.

To overcome this apparent expectation gap, grocery giant Whole Foods has opened 24 Just Walk Out stores across the US. Dotted with sensors and cameras, these outlets allow shoppers to pick up their items and leave without stopping at the register. Instead, orders are monitored and charged through AI.

Unsurprisingly, the whole “leave without paying” element of Just Walk Out has won all the headlines. However, from a marketing perspective, the most exciting part of the strategy revolves around data collection.

All purchases are tracked to an individual level, allowing Whole Foods to leverage AI to analyze shopping activity, identify patterns, and predict future behaviors.

This initiative also opens the door to hyper-personalized marketing: if a customer regularly buys pasta, basil, and tinned tomatoes, the retailer could serve them with a promo code for other Italian-related ingredients.

2. ClickUp Uses NLP AI to Boost Blog Traffic By 85%

There’s been no shortage of opinions (and controversy) about AI-powered content writing.

However, using artificial intelligence for content creation isn’t just about asking ChatGPT to churn out thousands of words of copy and post them straight to your blog.

For instance, project management solution ClickUp uses Surfer SEO’s natural language processing AI tools and machine learning technology to:

• Identify opportunities for content optimization;
• Understand which keywords to include in articles (and at what density);
• Gain insights into the ideal article structure, from the number of images included to the length of subheadings.

Source: Surfer SEO

The results have been striking. Since using Surfer SEO, ClickUp has seen an 85% upturn in organic, non-branded traffic.

Not only that, but the organization has also been able to produce more efficient content, completing over 130 optimizations and publishing more than 150 blogs.

3. BuzzFeed Personalizing Quiz Content With AI

Sticking with the content creation theme, BuzzFeed—one of the world’s best-known content websites, generating over 100 million monthly visits—is making its first foray into AI-driven content.

However, the publisher insists it isn’t looking to replace human writers with robots. Instead, it’s using tools from OpenAI to deliver personalized content at scale in a way that wouldn’t be possible without automation and artificial intelligence.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said the AI-driven approach will help with “enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content for our audience.”

We can see initial results through several quizzes in collaboration between staff writers and “Buzzy the Robot,” the website’s AI creative assistant. For instance, one quiz uses the answers to seven questions to craft a “new life” for the reader:

AI-generated results of BuzzFeed’s “Get a Fresh Start” quiz

Source: BuzzFeed

This surreal chunk of copy might not feel like “the future.” Still, it demonstrates how AI can help a website like BuzzFeed instantly craft unique content personalized to individual users’ behaviors.

4. Euroflorist Uses AI to Drive A/B Testing At Scale

Website A/B testing is highly effective for optimizing various on-page elements, from images to menu layouts to CTA buttons.

But there’s an obvious problem: as the name suggests, A/B testing involves pitching two variants against one another to find the winner. It could take you months of testing to arrive at the optimal result.

Once again, AI in marketing provides a solution. Unlike traditional A/B testing, platforms like Evolv AI use “massively multivariate testing” to find the perfect combo from thousands of variants. It divides experiments into “generations” and tests only the top-performing variants from each generation until it identifies the best possible combination.

One company to benefit from this AI-driven approach to A/B testing is Euroflorist, which ran an 11-week experiment that underwent four generations of testing.

Source: Evolv AI

The winning combo boosted website conversion rates by 4.3%, helping the florist generate more sales and revenue.

5. Interactive Investor Slashes CPAs With AI PPC Optimizations

Pay-per-click advertising is another digital marketing area ripe for AI input. In such a data-heavy environment, artificial intelligence can help make rapid optimizations to boost campaign performance.

Online investment service Interactive Investor is just one company to recognize the benefits of this approach. The brand wanted to drive more account signups and slash customer acquisition costs through paid search, so it turned to Albert, an AI tool capable of designing and managing self-optimizing campaigns across multiple marketing channels.

Interactive Investor provided a set of KPIs, which Albert used to improve real-time PPC campaigns with demographic targeting, converting keywords, ad copy, campaign timings, and more.

The tool created nearly 10,000 different text ads and delivered a 286% increase in keywords, helping Interactive Investor gain an impressive 89% share of voice across the top 10 branded terms. This, in turn, resulted in a significant drop in cost per acquisition.

6. Imagine Business Development Sees 100% Conversion Boost With AI-Led Email Timings

An estimated 360+ billion emails will be sent and received worldwide in 2024.

Image source

With so much noise, wouldn’t it be fantastic to send emails when individual recipients are most likely to open them?

Of course, if your marketing list includes more than a couple of dozen names, that sort of personalization simply wouldn’t be possible for mere humans. But AI tools can manage it with ease.

For example, HubSpot agency partner Imagine Business Development leveraged the Seventh Sense AI platform, which uses artificial intelligence to optimize and personalize email delivery times for every person in a database.

In other words, if one recipient is most likely to open an email at 9:30 am, that’s when they’ll receive it.

Email send time optimization

Source: HubSpot

Before working with Seventh Sense, Imagine Business Development saw average email open rates of around 20% and click-through rates of 2% – 3%. Not bad, but certainly not game-changing.

Seventh Sense changed all that, helping the agency double its open and click rates and increase total email conversions by a spectacular 100%.

7. Heinz Launches Its First Ad Campaign With Entirely AI-Generated Images

AI-generated images often get a bad rap (in fairness, the hands never look quite right). But Heinz — with the help of marketing agency Rethink Ideas — decided to launch what they described as “the first-ever ad campaign with visuals generated entirely by artificial intelligence.”

As is often the case, the campaign stemmed from a simple idea. After playing around with AI image generator DALL-E 2, Rethink Ideas noticed that prompts related to ketchup (like “ketchup in outer space” and “ketchup scuba diving”) frequently produced results that look just like bottles of Heinz.

So the agency urged consumers to get in on the act by sharing their own AI prompts for ketchup-based imagery, with the best creations appearing in social media posts and print ads:

What does AI think ketchup looks like?

Source: Rethink Ideas

As Rethink Ideas explained: “It turns out that just like humans, AI prefers Heinz.”

8. Dept and Hello Monday Create AI-Powered “Shoe Mirror”

Vacant shop fronts are a problem for city centers, landlords, and neighboring businesses. Digital agencies Dept and Hello Monday came up with a solution: creating an AI-powered “Shoe Mirror” to turn empty stores into interactive, revenue-generating ads.

Here’s the idea: the Shoe Mirror analyzes what passersby are wearing, finds shoes that match their outfits, and places them on their (digital) feet through augmented reality, creating an experience personalized to each viewer.

Source: Dept

The technology even uses motion capture to replicate the user’s movements — so when they walk past a store, the mirror matches their gait.

But this isn’t just a fancy creative piece; it also has a revenue-driving edge. The digital storefront incorporates a QR code, which users can scan to buy physical versions of their new digital shoes from within the display.

9. Coca-Cola Launches Creative AI Platform

Whereas other brands might be content with using existing AI technologies in their marketing, Coca-Cola launched its own AI platform, built exclusively for the brand by OpenAI and Bain & Company.

Dubbed “Create Real Magic,” the platform combines GPT-4 — used to produce human-like text from search engine queries — and DALL-E, which turns text prompts into images.

The resulting campaign saw Coca-Cola prompt fans to create their own digital artwork based on dozens of branded assets, such as the brand’s distinctive contour bottle and script logo.

Artists were allowed to download and submit their creations, with the best results appearing on digital billboards in New York’s Time Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus.

As sophisticated as it sounds, this campaign is just the beginning for Coca-Cola. Global chief marketing officer Manolo Arroyo explains, “We see many applications of AI — including content creation and rapid iteration, hyper-personalizing content and messaging for consumers and customers, and driving two-way conversations with consumers.”

10. Magnolia Market Bridges Online-to-Offline

Magnolia Market, the brick-and-mortar shop owned by Joanna and Chip Gaines, is known for its stellar customer experience. The mission of Magnolia’s physical location is to “inspire you to own the space you’re in.” They created an authentic brand experience combining food, games, shopping, and a garden to achieve this goal.

Because not everyone can visit the Magnolia Silos, the team felt that its e-commerce operation also needed to deliver the same experience. Magnolia worked with Shopify Plus to create a storefront and an augmented reality app that allows users to view products in 3D and “place” them in their homes. AR allowed Magnolia to render its products with the highest possible photo realism. The results set Magnolia apart from the competition and strengthened its e-commerce arm, a key driver for company growth.

11. Chase Achieves More Humanity in its Copywriting

Chase Pairs up with Persado

Source: Persado

Chase Bank signed a five-year deal with Persado, a New York-based company that applies artificial intelligence to marketing creative. After testing Persado’s solutions, Chase found that using machine learning in its copywriting helped the brand achieve more humanity in its marketing.

For example, one digital ad written by humans read: “Access cash from the equity in your home.” Persado’s version read: “It’s true—You can unlock cash from the equity in your home.” The latter version performed better with customers.

Chase is the first to engage in this type of large-scale machine learning copywriting, but other brands are planning to expand the use of Persado’s technology. Persado says the company already works with 250 marketers across retail, finance, and hospitality.

12. Starbucks Uses Predictive Analytics to Serve Personalized Recommendations

According to the research firm Aberdeen, companies that identify customer needs through predictive analytics can increase their organic revenue by 21% year over year, compared to an average of 12% without predictive analytics.

Starbucks is one example of a brand using its loyalty card and mobile app to collect and analyze customer data. They announced plans for personalization back in 2016.

Starbucks Personalized Recommendations

Source: GeekWire

Since then, they’ve built quite the app experience. It records purchases, including where they are made and at what time of day. Starbucks uses predictive analytics to serve customers with personalized marketing messages. They include recommendations when a user approaches a local store and special offers to increase the customer’s average order value.

13. Alibaba Opens a FashionAI Store

Retail giant Alibaba opened a physical “FashionAI” store in Hong Kong to streamline the fashion retail experience through Artificial Intelligence. Alibaba equipped its stores with intelligent garment tags that detect when the item is touched and smart mirrors that display clothing information and suggest coordinating items. Alibaba also plans to integrate the brick-and-mortar store with a virtual wardrobe app, allowing customers to see the outfits they tried on in-store.

Alibaba’s use of technology is a response to the consumers’ shifting expectations. According to a National Retail Federation survey, 80% of shoppers say retail technologies and innovations have enhanced their online buying experience, while 66% say the same about brick-and-mortar retail.

14. Ben & Jerry’s Identifies the Trend for “Ice Cream for Breakfast”

Unilever Uses AI in Marketing

Source: CampaignLive

Consumer goods company Unilever uses AI data centers worldwide to synthesize insights from various sources, including social listening, CRM, and traditional marketing research. Using this technology, Unilever discovered a link between ice cream and breakfast: at least 50 songs in the public domain include lyrics about “ice cream for breakfast,” and businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts are already selling ice cream in the morning.

Unilever took this insight and developed a range of cereal-flavored ice creams (including Fruit Loop and Frozen Flakes) for the Ben & Jerry’s brand.

15. Amazon Launches Personalize

Amazon was a pioneer in using machine learning to offer personalized product recommendations. Still, the brand has had difficulty extending these capabilities to companies running their sites on Amazon Web Services.

In June 2019, Amazon announced the general availability of Amazon Personalize, which brings Amazon.com’s same machine learning technology to AWS customers for use in their applications.

Since the initial rollout, the Amazon team has enhanced its functionality. Personalize can now deliver up to 50% better recommendations across various fast-changing product types, including books, movies, music, and news articles.

Amazon Personalize

Source: VentureBeat

Brands including Domino’s, Yamaha, Subway, and the wedding company Zola already use Personalize to highlight musical instruments and in-store catalogs, deliver ingredient and flavor recommendations, and devise individualized style combinations.

16. Sephora Chatbots

Sephora’s Chatbots

Source: Clickz

According to Drift’s latest State of Conversational Marketing report, chatbots are seeing faster growth than any other brand communication channel, with usage increasing by 92% between 2019 and 2020.

Beauty brand Sephora was an early adopter of AI. They began using a chatbot to dispense beauty advice on Kik in 2017.

Sephora’s chatbot helped consumers narrow choices, beginning with a quiz about their product preferences. Product preferences are beneficial in the cosmetics industry, where the options can be overwhelming and difficult to purchase without testing in person. Sephora gained valuable insights from its chatbot and saw enough engagement from that experiment that it’s since launched more chatbots on Messenger.

17. eBay Uses Brand Language Optimization to Drive Email Marketing Success

eBay, the global e-commerce marketplace, always strives to find new ways to engage customers. That means it has plenty of AI marketing examples to share.

Since 2016, the company has been working with the artificial intelligence-powered customer experience platform Phrasee to enhance its marketing copy, focusing on email.

For an average brand, optimizing email marketing performance is relatively simple: A/B-test a couple of different subject lines or CTAs, see which works best, and do more of it. But things get a little trickier for a company of eBay’s scale. With over 101 million email subscribers across the US, UK, and Germany alone, crafting impactful subject lines to drive open rates is a colossal undertaking.

Wanting to shift the creative burden away from its internal team, eBay turned to Phrasee. This company uses a combination of natural language generation and deep learning to create copy at scale while dynamically optimizing performance.

Phrasee’s approach to AI content creation & optimization

Source: Phrasee

Phrasee’s computational linguistics team built language models for eBay, allowing the e-commerce giant to generate custom copy tied to its brand tone, customer needs, and specific promotions at the click of a button.

In the years since it first teamed up with Phrasee, eBay has enjoyed substantial improvements in its key email marketing metrics, including:

• 16% average open uplift
• 700,000+ incremental opens per campaign
• 56,000+ incremental clicks per campaign
• 31% average click uplift

18. Marketing AI Helps AMA Boost Newsletter Engagement

Being a marketer at the American Marketing Association (AMA) can’t be easy. When marketing experts make up most of your audience, you simply can’t afford to send low-quality communications.

Everything needs to be personalized to the needs of individual members. However, given the diverse range of the AMA’s content –– covering everything from written content development to UX design –– it was near-impossible to do meaningful personalization for each of its 100,000+ newsletter subscribers.

Impossible without AI in marketing, that is. By teaming up with the artificial intelligence-driven personalization platform rasa.io, the AMA used an AI engine that generates individualized subject lines based on member interest data, highlighting the most relevant and interesting content to each newsletter recipient.

Since joining forces with rasa.io, the AMA has seen its monthly subscriber engagement rate increase by 42%. As editor-in-chief, Molly Soat explained: “Our members and readers span many industries and specialties, so not every post about marketing will be relevant to all of our subscribers. The ability to personalize this newsletter for individuals within such a massive audience is invaluable.”

19. Unilever Uses Generative AI for Consumer Engagement & Support

Unilever has almost 100 years of history behind it. Yet the consumer goods giant is very much focused on the future when it comes to harnessing the power of AI.

One of its most ambitious projects saw the launch of Alex (short for “Alexander the Great”), a consumer engagement application powered by GPT API. Alex’s job is to filter the vast volume of emails sent to the brand’s Consumer Engagement Center, sift the genuine consumer messages from the spam, and provide recommended responses to Unilever’s human support agents.

Not only can Alex understand what customers are asking, but it also detects the sentiment behind their messages and stores the results in Unilever’s CRM, freeing human agents to focus on what they do best — helping customers.

“Although Alex is good at what it does, it may lack a bit of a personal touch that instead our consumer engagement center agents have in big quantities,” explains Alessandro Ventura, CIO and vice president of analytics and business services for North America at Unilever.

“So, we let them decide whether they want to respond to our consumer as Alex suggested, or they want to add some personal recommendation. If the answer suggested by Alex is wrong or doesn’t have an answer, they can flag it so Alex can learn it the following time.”

According to Ventura, Alex has helped reduce the time agents spend drafting answers by over 90%.

20. PepsiCo Uses AI To Regain Market Share for Iconic Chip Brand

Like Unilever, PepsiCo has bolstered its marketing and customer engagement capabilities by launching a proprietary AI tool — in this case, Ada, named after 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace.

Ada has four main jobs:

• Exploring new product ideas
• Sourcing, sorting, and connecting consumer insights
• Increasing collaboration among PepsiCo teams
• Optimizing TV and digital ads

To date, one of Ada’s biggest success stories came with PepsiCo brand Walkers, one of the UK’s biggest chip makers. Despite its iconic status, Walkers had been losing market share for several years, and PepsiCo was struggling to get things moving in the right direction again.

After analyzing the market, Ada discovered that Walkers no longer resonated with British food culture. This inspired the brand’s “Crisp In or Crisp Out” campaign, highlighting the connection between crisps and lunchtime.

Having helped design the campaign, Ada was also used to test various versions of the TV ad on consumers.

“We found out how to fine-tune some of those executions to make them even more relevant and impactful,” explains Monica Tenorio, PepsiCo’s Vice President of insights, analytics, and marketing capabilities in Europe.

21. SimCorp Scales Product Explainer Video Creation Using AI

For investment management solutions company SimCorp, personalized product explainer videos are key to attracting and converting customers.

But there was a problem: creating all those videos fell on one person, senior branding specialist Mochie Cuyco. Mochie had to use multiple software programs during the design process — and even then, it was near-impossible to update finished videos down the line, forcing him to spend even longer creating new versions.

To make matters worse, many of Mochie’s colleagues didn’t feel comfortable starring in the videos.

Given all those challenges, producing a single video took up to two days.

This was becoming unsustainable, so SimCorp leveraged the AI video platform Synthesia to speed things up.

Mochie can now gather insights from his colleagues, add a script and scene elements, and even choose an on-screen avatar to present the video:

Image source

This means it now takes him just one day to produce two explainer videos lasting up to four minutes.

22. Grammarly AI Helps Zoom Scale Customer-Facing Comms

You won’t be shocked to learn that the pandemic sparked a ton of growth for the video conferencing platform Zoom. Inevitably, this massive uptick in usage saw the company hire many new staff members into its marketing and communications teams, which, in turn, posed consistency problems.

Zoom needed a tool capable of maintaining its style guide globally while reducing the time required to manually check content for clarity, correctness, and engagement.

It chose Grammarly, leveraging the platform’s AI-powered writing tool to speed up the writing and editing process through recommendations tailored to Zoom’s brand voice.

According to Grammarly, the decision has helped Zoom save an estimated 7,000+ hours on written communication, equivalent to approximately $210,000.

23. Bamboo Rose Doubles Content Output With Writer AI

Bamboo Rose is a product lifecycle management solution for retailers. The company has an aggressive growth plan — and content creation plays a key role.

In addition to producing demand-generating and product-focused content, Bamboo Rose needed to replace a lot of old, outdated content, which took time.

To help speed up the process, it started using Writer. Some of its top uses for the generative AI platform include:

• Uploading videos and webinar recordings, then using Writer to create transcripts, organize the key points, and pull out quotes to jumpstart blogs
• Acting as the company’s PR function by writing press releases based on a couple of facts, inputs, and quotes

Image source

In both cases, the results require some fine-tuning from actual humans, but it massively accelerates the content creation workflow. For instance, they can get a great first draft for a press release in an hour or less. Their content output has doubled since switching to Writer.

24. Gobi Cashmere Leverages AI for Personalized Experiences

Like many retailers, the pandemic forced apparel brand Gobi Cashmere to adjust its strategy radically.

The Mongolia-based company had previously relied on selling to tourists, but with the coronavirus putting travel on hold, it had to immediately target new acquisition channels.

Specifically, they decided to create localized websites using subdirectories for individual markets. However, the company quickly realized it needed an AI-powered tool to support onsite searches and recommendations, helping customers find the most suitable products.

Based on a recommendation from their e-commerce platform, Shopify, they chose a solution called Algolia.

The tool is implemented on every Gobi product and checkout page to point customers toward relevant upsells and cross-sells that can be customized by size, color, and other filters.

Image source

Gobi has seen conversions increase by 300 – 400% by delivering more relevant search results and product recommendations.

25. Mercedes-Benz Uses AI To Monitor 200k Social Media Mentions

As a global brand, Mercedes-Benz supports vehicle launches with localized ad campaigns in dozens — maybe even hundreds — of different markets.

Typically, these are based on selling points like luxury and speed. But this approach wasn’t possible for the T-Class, a premium small van targeted at young families with an emphasis on comfort and functionality.

In the Polish market, the brand’s solution was to emphasize how the new model sparks emotions like love and joy.

This prompted an out-of-home campaign that saw the company’s Warsaw HQ illuminated in ambient colors based on Polish audiences’ emotions through online conversations.

Image source

Manually monitoring all those conversions wasn’t an option, so they chose an AI-powered tool called Brand24 to handle the legwork.

Not only did the platform have to monitor dozens of emotion-based hashtags, but it also had to account for the fact that Polish social media users often post in Polish and English. Mercedes-Benz didn’t want to discount English results but didn’t want international voices to enter the conversation.

Brand24 has a solution: a language filter that excludes non-Polish results while capturing English hashtags like #love in Polish posts.

Image source

Throughout the two-week campaign, the tool gathered almost 200,000 mentions.

Fortunately, all that social media monitoring didn’t go to waste because the campaign drove a 4X increase in the average time spent on the T-Class web page.

26. Tea Collection Tests Landing Page Variants With AI

A/B testing is a vital marketing task for any online retailer, helping brands improve the customer experience and increase conversions.

However, kids’ fashion retailer Tea Collection struggled to test consistently, in part because it lacked the internal resources to create all the necessary assets. When it did launch tests, it could only run up to four variants at a time, slowing the process of gathering the data it needed to inform decisions.

That’s when they partnered with Evolv AI, which instantly solved their efficiency problems and resource constraints.

This opened up a world of continuous optimization, allowing Tea Collective to assess multiple variables across seven key pages on both desktop and mobile.

Image source

Tea Collection tested 341 combinations of unique experiences on their home page, product pages, and order review pages.

This helped them discover three variants with a 95% probability of boosting order volumes by 5%+.

From valuable insights to personalized product recommendations and technology-enabled assistance, AI in marketing is already driving some of the biggest advances in overall customer experience. What impressive AI in marketing examples have you seen lately?

If you want to learn more about how new technologies can help improve your customer engagement strategies, check out our social media strategy conference!

Obviously millions of people watched NASA’s Instagram Reel of two supermassive black holes colliding and liked Gucci’s picture of Ryan Gosling wearing a custom pink suit to the Oscars.

But that’s not much help if you’re trying to promote spreadsheet software, road safety, or public infrastructure.

Don’t worry; you’re in the right place because we’re going to share 10 of our favorite social media content examples from less-than-engaging niches like:

• Accounting and tax
• B2B software
• Patents and Trademarks
• Local government
• Regional sewerage

Exciting stuff, right?

Let’s get into it.

1. Transportation Security Administration

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is arguably the best example of a successful, highly engaging account in a stereotypically unexciting field.

Most of us only think about transport security when packing for a flight (or maybe when we’re already at the airport and realize we’ve got a bunch of liquids in our carry-on). There’s no reason for us to engage with transport security-themed content outside these times.

Yet the TSA has built a 1.4-million-strong Instagram following thanks to its long-term commitment to “travel tips and dad joke hits,” as its Insta bio explains.

Here’s one of many examples of what that looks like in practice:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Travel Tips & Dad Joke Hits (@tsa)

Notably, the TSA isn’t using (mild) humor for the sake of it.

Those dad jokes help them communicate the rules around what you can and can’t bring on a flight.

This strategy also makes the agency feel more approachable. So if someone has a question about transport security, there’s a good chance they’ll reach out online — potentially saving a lot of time for frontline TSA employees.

2. VDOT Northern Virginia

Virginia’s Department of Transportation (VDOT) certainly does crucial work building, maintaining, and operating the state’s roads, bridges, and tunnels. And it’s always helpful to know about incidents likely to delay our journeys. But it’s fair to say none of that stuff makes for highly engaging, shareable content.

Yet VDOT Northern Virginia has built an audience of 67,000+ followers on X (formerly Twitter), largely thanks to the popularity of their “MeeMaw” persona.

Confused?

To clear things up, MeeMaw is the brainchild of Assistant District Administrator for Communication Ellen Kamilakis.

During the early days of the pandemic, Ellen decided to take a more autobiographical approach to the agency’s posting strategy. Rather than acting like a Zoomer intern, she described herself as an “old lady,” which allowed her to “nag” followers into positive behaviors, like drinking plenty of water and wrapping up warm on cold days.

This strategy helps VDOT Northern Virginia regularly generate hundreds of engagements through content that isn’t strictly transported-related:

Ruby (yes, we named her) has been hanging around the I-395/I-95 Dale City Maintenance Yard for the past couple weeks, but Doug finally earned her trust today so that she could be rescued #DogRescue #KindnessMatters #PetsOfVDOT pic.twitter.com/El82BQBuJx

— VDOT Northern VA (@VaDOTNOVA) February 28, 2024

Learn more about the agency’s unconventional approach in our article: How “MeeMaw” Helped VDOT Northern Virginia Create a Highly-Engaged Social Media Community.

3. Xero

Accounting inevitably gets a mention whenever there’s a conversation about the world’s most boring jobs.

For instance, a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin discovered accounting is the second most common stereotypical occupation of people who are perceived to be boring:

Image source

Yikes.

So how can you create engaging content around a topic that most people perceive to be dull, dull, dull?

That’s the challenge facing the social media team at Xero, which sells accounting software for small businesses. Their approach is to humanize the subject matter by enlisting business-oriented influencers and thought leaders like Lisa Perese-Cullen:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Lisa Perese-Cullen (@lisaperesecullen)

Working with influencers helps Xero escape the unglamorous world of accounting and focus on the real entrepreneurs who rely on the company’s software.

There’s a key learning here: even if the product or service you sell or provide isn’t considered naturally “interesting,” we bet many people use it to do exciting stuff. And social media allows you to share those stories.

4. Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District

No one denies that sewerage is important, but most of us would prefer it to remain out of sight and out of mind. This poses a major challenge for the social media team at Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD). How on earth are you meant to create engaging content about sewers?

Their answer: do it with humor.

The agency’s pinned post on X/Twitter is a kind of manifesto that explains the types of content they share:

if you’re new here, please expect the following content at any time:
• infrastructure is important
• stormwater management
• warriors blew a 3-1 lead
• wipes are not flushable
• critical service announcements
• CLE sports memes
• pop culture
• poop culture
• bad tiktoks

— NE Ohio Regional Sewer District (@neorsd) June 5, 2022

That way, no one who visits their profile will be confused when they see posts about celebrity news and sports.

But whatever they share, they also find some way to link it back to sewers, like in this post about the Kate Middleton saga:

in the midst of royal photoshopping controversy, we will always be your trusted source for authentic throne content.

— NE Ohio Regional Sewer District (@neorsd) March 11, 2024

If NEORSD can find a way to make sewer maintenance funny and topical, there’s undoubtedly scope to create engaging content about any niche.

5. US Patent & Trademark Office

Every industry has something interesting going on that would appeal to the broader public.

The US Patent & Trademark Office does a fantastic job of sharing those juicy morsels through its Instagram account. For instance, this Instagram Reel discusses some of the more unexpected elements of life in the world of patents and trademarks:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (@uspto)

Who knew there was such a thing as trademark applications for celebrity couples?

As a social media professional, it’s your job to find unique topics that will help your brand resonate with customers or end users—even if they don’t understand all the complexities of your industry.

6. Oracle

Oracle is one of those huge software companies that most of us have heard of without having any idea what they actually do, as demonstrated by Google’s “People also ask” results:

Image source

Sure, most of us don’t need to know what Oracle does—it’s a B2B tech company, so it’s not trying to sell to the average person on the street. But building a brand on social media is hard if no one understands why your company exists.

That’s why Oracle’s social media strategy centers on more public-facing elements of its business, such as its relationship with Formula 1 team Red Bull Racing:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Oracle Red Bull Racing (@redbullracing)

Admittedly, most brands don’t have F1 sponsorship money.

But you can leverage the same approach (albeit on a much smaller scale) by supporting a local sports team or charity.

7. US Consumer Product Safety Commission

This article includes many examples of brands and agencies generating social media engagement by discussing topics that are only tangentially related (or even totally unrelated) to their actual niche.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission takes a different approach. It almost always posts about consumer safety, but its use of meme-style imagery and offbeat captions makes its content far more engaging than you’d imagine.

Just like this example about the importance of checking smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors:

It’s time.#DaylightSavings #DaylightSavingsTime pic.twitter.com/B9fY1DChrm

— US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) March 10, 2024

If you can bring an unusual perspective to your niche or communicate important but uninteresting information in an unexpected way, you can expect a bunch more likes, shares, and comments.

8. Lysol

The average American spends 300 hours a year cleaning their home. In fact, it’s such a time-sucker that 26% of people have missed an event—like hanging out with family, going for drinks with friends, and even attending their child’s recital or sports game—because they needed to clean instead.

So, you’d imagine most of us avoid cleaning-related content like the plague, which is a big problem for cleaning product brands like Lysol.

Despite this, Lysol regularly generates thousands of views on its Instagram Reels by taking a creative approach to social media content.

For instance, it enlisted the help of pop star Christina Milian to sing her favorite karaoke songs at the brand’s “Airaoke” booth during 2023’s Music Midtown festival in Atlanta:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Lysol US (@lysol)

We know what you’re thinking: what’s the connection between Christina Milian, karaoke, and Lysol?

According to Lysol, a single minute of singing produces 1,000 virus and bacteria-filled droplets, making this campaign a perfect fit for promoting its Air Sanitizer.

Sometimes, outside-the-box thinking is all it takes to make dull subjects engaging!

9. Internal Revenue Service

Like cleaning the house, taxes are one of those things that most of us don’t want to think about until we absolutely have to. They’re dull, stressful, and take a lot of time.

Yet the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has built a thriving Instagram community of 154,000+ followers. And it’s achieved all that without posting a bunch of memes.

The agency’s success shows the value of creating a clear theme for individual posts and aligning the copy and creative to communicate your desired message best.

For instance, rather than posting a simple (and unengaging) reminder to get your tax records in order, it shared this post inspired by the movie musical remake of Mean Girls:

 

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A post shared by Internal Revenue Service (@irsnews)

The imagery matches the theme perfectly and draws the eye without distracting from the core message, while the caption is packed with Mean Girls references — yet still contains all the essential information people need to know about filing their taxes.

There’s no point engaging your audience if they don’t take anything valuable from your content!

10. Adams County Government

Most people would agree that local government isn’t the most thrilling industry.

We’re glad they exist, but we don’t particularly want to learn about what happened at the latest council meeting. It’s just not very engaging.

Yet the Adams County Government in Colorado proves that your biggest weakness can sometimes be your greatest strength.

Rather than trying to glamorize their work, the Adams County team focuses on real, human success stories. Like the time they helped an unhoused former serviceman make a down payment on a car to help him save money through his delivery job:

In isolation, your audience might not be interested in reading about your products or services.

They’re far more likely to engage if you can demonstrate the results — especially if there’s a human interest angle.

Want to learn more strategies and tips for creating engaging social media content? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Freepik.

But, with the proper guidance and support, they can be one of your most powerful marketing assets.

How powerful? According to LinkedIn, the average employee network has 10X more connections than the company they work for. Moreover, content sees double the click-through rate when employees share rather than corporate accounts.

To leverage those benefits (and avoid the potential pitfalls), you need an internal social media policy to encourage advocacy and define how employees should represent themselves and your brand through their public-facing social profiles.

Read on for our top tips on creating an effective internal social media policy.

1. Set Objectives for Your Internal Social Media Policy

Different organizations have different employee advocacy goals. For instance, you might want your employees to:

• Discuss their working environment to support the company’s recruitment efforts
• Communicate their expertise to attract potential clients
• Share the brand’s content in their own words to boost your social media engagement and website traffic

Those are just three examples of potential goals for your employee advocacy program, and they all require very different approaches to drafting a social media policy.

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If it’s all about recruitment, your policy document should focus on issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion (and how to discuss them online). If leads and sales are your ultimate goals, you’d want to explain the types of clients you’re trying to reach and the areas of expertise that would most likely engage them.

It’s important to define the objective(s) before you start working on your social media policy to give yourself the best chance of achieving the desired results.

2. Lay Out the Purpose of Your Social Media Policy & Who It Applies To

If your employees don’t understand why you’re creating an internal social media policy, they’re unlikely to adopt it, which means you’ve wasted your time.

When communicating the purpose to staff, be as open and honest as possible. Ensure they understand you’re not trying to stop them from posting on social media—quite the opposite. Instead, you’re striving to ensure that when they do discuss work online, they do it in a way that supports your business goals, benefits your current and future customers, and doesn’t leave you open to any potential legal or PR headaches.

At this stage, it also makes sense to define who your social media policy applies to. Is it just for senior leaders, or does it extend to all permanent employees? How about interns, freelancers, and contractors?

3. Define Ownership of Your Social Media Policy

Like any new workplace initiative, employees will have questions about your internal social media policy.

Ease potential confusion by setting a central point of contact for any policy-related queries. It could be a shared email address or Slack channel manned by a whole team of policy leaders or a single person who’s happy to shoulder the responsibility.

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Whoever is in charge should be aware that they play an essential role in the success or failure of your employee advocacy efforts. Ensure they’re genuinely passionate about leading your advocacy program rather than treating it as another distraction from their “day job” and have all the necessary tools and resources to achieve your goals.

4. Set (Loose) Tone of Voice Parameters

This is one of the most challenging steps in building an effective internal social media policy.

On the one hand, you don’t want to stifle your employees’ creative flair or force them all to speak like mindless corporate drones on social media. Chances are that’ll have the exact opposite effect you want to create from your advocacy program.

However, it’s sensible to have guardrails in place to mitigate the risks of reputational damage to your brand.

These parameters will inevitably look different from one brand to the next. If you’re an edgy brand like Liquid Death, you probably don’t mind your team members being outspoken on social media (in fact, you’d positively encourage it). However, if you work for a Big Four consulting firm, you’d expect your employees always to be professional.

@liquiddeath Next time you lose your temper at your stepdad, just remember he didn’t choose you, either.. Repost from // @vflow_xo // #liquiddeath #murderyourthirst #deathtoplastic ♬ original sound – Liquid Death

Consider outlining specific topics or types of information that employees should definitely avoid posting, such as:

• Derogatory, defamatory, or inflammatory posts
• Secure company information, like passwords, email addresses, or intellectual property
• Crisis response plans

Or, if you don’t want to get so granular with your guidelines, a good rule of thumb for explaining what counts as acceptable (or unacceptable) behavior is: if you wouldn’t say it in front of your boss, don’t post it.

5. Explain Expectations for Personal Social Media Activity

Unless your employees are creating (or already own) work-specific social media accounts, there’s a good chance they’ll share a combination of personal and professional content.

This creates another tricky gray area for developing a social media policy.

You can’t control everything your employees say and do online, nor should you want to. But they must understand that their actions can affect your company. If they say something hideously offensive or spread misinformation on a public profile (or even a private one), it could also reflect poorly on your brand.

You’ll want to outline basic behavioral expectations, such as avoiding negative comments about your brand, competitors, or industry and checking their facts via reputable sources.

You might also want employees to add a disclaimer to their social media profiles stating that their opinions are theirs alone and don’t necessarily align with their employer’s perspective.

6. Discuss Fair Sharing of Third-Party Content

Some of the content your employees share online will be “owned” assets, such as blog posts you’ve written, videos you’ve created, or recordings of webinars you organized and hosted. But they’ll invariably also post content they found from third-party sources like government agencies, media organizations, and rival brands.

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It’s important they understand not to rip off copyrighted or trademarked content or misrepresent other people’s hard work as their own. If you don’t have permission to use a specific piece of content, your best bet is to simply “repost” it rather than share it in a whole new post.

7. Share the Consequences of Policy Violations

Creating an internal social media policy isn’t about scaring employees away from posting about work. That’d be counterintuitive, given the wide-ranging benefits of employee advocacy. But at the same time, they need to understand what will happen if they deliberately infringe on your policies.

Most violations require nothing more than editing or deleting an individual post. However, occasionally, you might force an employee to issue a public apology for their social media actions. If their infringement involved publishing sensitive company information, it could even cost them their job.

8. Encourage Accessible, Inclusive Posting

Chances are, your brand has a broad audience. And you don’t want any of them to feel attacked or excluded by your employees’ social media posts.

That’s why you should take the time to share best practices around inclusive and accessible posting. For instance, you might encourage staff members to:

• Avoid gendered pronouns (and respect other people’s preferred pronouns)
• Steer clear of gender or race-specific emoji
• Add descriptive captions to images and subtitles to videos
• Consider issues of representation when choosing social media imagery
• Never make assumptions based on protected characteristics like age, gender, or race

9. Offer Advice for Dealing With Negativity

Social media can be a wonderful place but can also be intensely negative.

If your employees post online regularly, they will eventually encounter some criticism. A friendly disagreement is fine, but if it gets personal or abusive in any way, they need to know how to handle it. Should they block the offending troll and move on? Report the incident to their team leader? Or simply ignore it?

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Providing clear guidance for dealing with online abuse reassures your staff that you have their best interests at heart. As a bonus, it also reduces the risk of reputational damage to your brand from employees getting involved in ever-escalating online arguments.

For more advice on this issue, check out our top tips for navigating negativity on social media.

10. Define How To Interact With Customers

For many companies, encouraging staff to discuss work online can help them reach more potential customers. But what happens when a current or future customer contacts a team member with a question or complaint?

You might decide the best course of action is for the employee to simply say “thanks” for the query and then pass the matter on to the most relevant department (like your social media or customer support team).

Other organizations will be perfectly happy for employees to speak to customers on their behalf. If you’re in that boat, you should set some behavioral guidelines. What tone of voice do you want them to adopt? Are you happy for them to apologize on the company’s behalf? How about confidentiality — is there any internal information they shouldn’t give away?

The more clarity you provide (and the clearer you communicate it with your team), the more mutually beneficial your employees’ social media efforts will be.

Want to discover how top brands and social media leaders encourage effective employee advocacy? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Pexels.

This is a massive issue for many brands. When HubSpot asked social media marketers about their biggest challenges, “reaching our target audience” came in second place, only behind “creating engaging content.”

Sound familiar?

Read on for all the tactics, tips, and tools you need to find the right audience on social media.

1. Define Your Social Media Target Audience Demographics

The first step to reaching your target audience is to define who they are.

Have you already developed buyer personas for your business? Your work here is done — you can use them for your target audience on social media, too.

If not, you’ll need to profile them and determine what makes them tick. Start with the basic stuff: demographic information. Specifically, think about things like:

• Where they live
• What job they do
• How old they are
• How much they earn
• Their education level

You should get much of this from your social media analytics platform or from analyzing your existing customer base.

2. Consider the Total Size of Your Target Audience

Whether you’re just getting started on social media or already have tens of thousands of followers, it’s essential to understand the total size of your target audience.

That way, you know how many people you can reach who are actively interested in your product or service, which helps you gauge the success of your campaigns.

The simplest way to measure the size of your audience is to use Facebook Ads Manager.

Log in to your ad account, create a new saved audience, and add age, location, and interest-related filters to build the most accurate picture of the people you’re targeting on social media.

For instance, imagine you’re the social media manager at an organic kombucha brand that predominantly sells to Gen Z and Millennial customers in New York. We’d add the following filters:

• Location: New York
• Age: 18 – 40
• Interests: Kombucha AND organic products

Facebook then takes over, using its wealth of data to estimate how many of its users are interested in your product:

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If the total audience you’re currently targeting is smaller than you expected, this might be the time to consider expanding your offering to address new audiences. Maybe you could launch a new product, or perhaps you simply have to adjust your messaging to promote your brand slightly differently.

Alternatively, you might find your audience is far larger than anticipated — in which case it might be worth investing more in your social media marketing to capitalize on the opportunity.

3. Understand Interests and Pain Points

Now you know the basics of your audience — who they are and how many exist.

Next, let’s put some meat on the bones of that information by considering their pain points: What keeps them up at night? And what can you do to make their life that little bit easier?

Speak to your accounts, sales, or customer support teams here. They’ll understand better than anyone why people choose your product or service. You’ll also want to consider their broader interests — because they don’t spend every waking moment thinking about your brand. Knowing their interests will help you craft more engaging social media content.

Google Analytics can be an unlikely ally here. Click through to the Demographics and Interests tabs, and you’ll find a bunch of (estimated) information about the types of people who visit your website, which is presumably at least somewhat aligned with the audiences you’re trying to reach on social media.

For instance, this brand’s Google Analytics shows that a decent chunk of its audience works in or is interested in technology. So we might try discussing some tech-related topics on social.

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Remember that if you sell more than one product or service or serve customers in different locations, you likely have more than one target audience. Try to pick out your 2 – 3 most important audience segments, profile each, and then prioritize them in your content planning.

For instance, if one group makes up 50% of your business, half your social content should be aimed at them.

4. Know Which Social Media Platforms They Use

An obvious but important point: you need to focus your social media marketing efforts on the platforms your target audience is most likely to use.

Again, Google Analytics (or whatever web analytics tool you use) can help you here, showing you which social networks are bringing visitors to your site.

Of course, this doesn’t tell you the whole story.

If LinkedIn is your top social traffic source, that could be because it’s the most popular social channel among your audience. Or maybe you’ve been putting way more effort (and money) into LinkedIn than any other channel. Maybe you’d generate more traffic if you switched focus to Instagram and TikTok.

That’s why you shouldn’t entirely rely on historical data to inform future decision-making.

Use a little educated guesswork, too. If your demographic analysis revealed that your target audience skews female and Millennial, there’s a decent chance they use Pinterest — and they probably love Instagram Reels.

5. Speak To Your Existing Customers

We’ve looked at various ways to use data (and your intuition) to hone in on your social media target audience.

At this point, it’s worth stopping to sense-check your findings by surveying your existing customers.

Their insights will be invaluable in figuring out how to reach more people like them, making this a crucial step in the research process — unless you’re planning to ditch your current audience and chase a different customer segment going forward.

If you’ve got a reasonably sized email list, survey your subscribers about the platforms they use and the content they engage with.

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If not, consider embedding a survey on your website or promoting it via on-site popups or chatbots.

6. Study the Competition

As with so much in the marketing world, you can save a bunch of time on defining and locating your target audience by analyzing what your competitors are doing.

Hopefully, you’ve got a decent idea of who your competitors are.

If not, it’s no big deal: you can find out by simply Googling the main product or service you sell and seeing which brands appear in the search results. For instance, it’s a fair bet that Better Booch Kombucha is one of the biggest rivals of our imaginary organic kombucha brand.

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A post shared by Better Booch Kombucha | Sparkling Probiotic Goodness (@betterbooch)

Repeat this process for 3 – 5 of your top competitors.

Of course, we’re not suggesting you replicate their entire social media strategy — you’ve got your own value proposition and unique selling points.

But it always helps to better understand how other businesses in your space find, reach, and engage their target audiences.

Read more: How to Run a Social Media Competitive Analysis

7. Use Social Media Listening To Identify Industry Trends

Having dug into your analytics tools, spoken to your existing customers, and researched your competition, you should know the topics your audience is most likely to talk about.

Now, it’s time to gather even more data through social listening.

Social listening is about looking at relevant online conversations and trends. Some will specifically be about your brand — like people “@-ing” you on social media to ask a question, praise your product or service, or report an issue — but most will be far broader.

Given the amount of noise on social media, you’ll almost certainly need to invest in a social media listening tool to do the hard yards for you.

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With the right toolkit in place, you can analyze what people are talking about in your industry, such as:

• Common problems that your potential customers are facing
• Trending conversations that you can get involved in
• Disruptive events, like new laws, products, or competitors

Tapping into these broad, industry-level themes will help you create content that resonates with people in your target audience (even if they’ve never heard of you) and join the right social media conversations.

Read more: Best Practices for Using Social Media Listening to Improve Your Marketing Strategy

8. Bring It All Together in Your Content Strategy

By this point, you should have a clear understanding of:

• What your target audience looks like (in terms of demographics, size, and interests)
• Which social media platforms they use
• What topics they’re most likely to engage with

That’s pretty much everything you need to pack your social media content calendar with the types of posts your existing (and future) customers will love.

Focus on the right topics and join the right conversations, and your target audience will come to you.

Want to know how top brands find and engage their audiences on social media? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Pixabay.

But video isn’t a silver bullet. If you’re going to see success from video marketing, you need to know what works (and what doesn’t) — and the landscape changes fast. To make your life easier, we’ve rounded up ten essential video marketing trends for 2024, covering everything from AI video tools to user-generated content.

Let’s get into it.

1. Continued Popularity of Short-Form Video

Many of us feel that our attention spans are getting shorter.

Whether or not that’s true, it’s essentially self-perpetuating: if we think we have a short attention span, we will naturally favor shorter content. This is playing out in the video marketing world, where short-form content will continue dominating in 2024.

While there’s no hard-and-fast definition of “short-form” or “long-form,” short-form video is generally considered anything from 5 – 90 seconds long.

Consumers say they find this type of video content to be 2.5X more engaging than longer videos, while 66% agree that short-form video is the most engaging of all in-feed social media content formats.

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Actions for Marketers

Succeeding in a world dominated by short-form video is about communicating your branding and message as quickly as possible. Nike gets it right in this example:

 

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A post shared by Nike (@nike)

From the very first shot, viewers see the Nike branding alongside Megan Thee Stallion’s name and the title of their collaboration, Hot Girl Systems.

Even if you stop watching after a couple of seconds, there’s still a chance you’ll retain some (or maybe even all) of that information.

2. AI Tools To Ease Video Creation Process

Among businesses that don’t currently “do” video marketing, 33% say they’re being held back by a lack of time, 20% think video is too expensive, and 15% simply don’t know where to start.

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These are issues that marketers can mitigate or entirely overcome through AI-powered video technology.

No wonder that “content creation” continues to be the #1 use case for AI in marketing.

Actions for Marketers

If you’re new to AI video tech, now’s the time to familiarize yourself with tools to streamline the video content creation process. Examples include:

• Synthesia: This platform lets you turn text into studio-quality video content in minutes using AI voiceovers and avatars. It’s capable of creating videos in over 130 languages.
• VEED.IO: Another text-to-video tool that uses AI to generate video content fast, complete with voiceovers, captions, music, and animations.
• Lumen5: Described as the “PowerPoint of video making,” Lumen5 features a point-and-click video creator and can transform blog posts and Zoom recordings into video clips.

3. Shift Toward Vertical Video

Over the past five years, mobile devices have accounted for more than half of global internet traffic, peaking at almost three-fifths of traffic in mid-2022.

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For video marketers, the upshot is a continued shift away from landscape videos, which simply don’t play nice within social media apps when viewed on mobile.

Even YouTube, which still has a standard aspect ratio of 16:9 (i.e., landscape), now generates the lion’s share of its traffic from mobile. So it’s no surprise the world’s most-watched video platform has begun shifting toward portrait-oriented videos — not least through the launch of YouTube Shorts, its answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Actions for Marketers

This is a simple one: if you aren’t already prioritizing vertical video, now’s the time to start. We expect the 9:16 aspect ratio to dominate in 2024.

4. Growth of Video in Email Marketing

Email is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels.

You can engage a user via social media, persuade them to sign up for your email list, and then reach out to them in their email inbox — one of the few places on the internet that isn’t governed by an algorithm.

Up until now, video and email haven’t exactly been natural bedfellows. Quite the opposite: major email clients like Gmail and Outlook often don’t allow users to play video content within an email.

Despite this, including videos in emails has been shown to boost click-through rates by 65%, while Superoffice found that simply adding the word “video” to email subject lines increased its open rates by 6%.

So we’re definitely expecting to see more crossover between video and email in 2024.

Actions for Marketers

Due to the technical limitations of some email clients, you need to get smart about using video in email.

One of the best (and simplest) tactics is to include a static image with a “play” button in your email, just like this example from Warner Bros. Games:

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Then, you can link to the actual video on YouTube or a dedicated landing page. Easy!

5. More CGI Effects in Social Media Videos

Only a few years ago, social media video content was still something of a novelty.

Today, our social feeds are packed full of videos, which means they no longer have the same built-in “wow” factor. So brands are forced to push the boundaries with ever more outlandish lenses, filters, and other effects.

This Maybelline mascara campaign is an eye-catching example:

Actions for Marketers

Sure, most of us don’t have access to the same marketing budget as Maybelline. But we can still get creative by playing around with the built-in augmented reality features and special effects on TikTok and Instagram Reels.

6. Fewer Influencers, More User-Generated Content

Influencer videos have been a mainstay of social media marketing strategies for years.

But there are plenty of signs that audiences are craving more authentic voices. Indeed, 81% of consumers say that influencer partnerships either have no impact or have a negative impact on how they perceive a brand — while 51% simply scroll straight past influencer posts.

For that reason, in 2024, we’re expecting more and more marketers to move away from influencer collaborations and toward user-generated video content, like this example from Michigan State University:

 

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A post shared by Michigan State University (@michiganstateu)

Actions for Marketers

Are you struggling to capture enough user-generated content to meet your marketing needs? Try offering an incentive (like a gift card or a product discount) to encourage people to share video content with you.

Don’t think of it as a bribe — think of it as a simple “thank you” for their hard work.

7. Turning Employees into Brand Advocates

Another way to get more “real people” (and fewer influencers) into your video content is through employee advocacy — encouraging people who work at your organization to contribute to your marketing strategies.

Employee advocacy programs offer significant benefits to brands, with one study revealing they can increase total social media engagement by 25% – 40%.

It’s not hard to see why: when your employees are prepared to speak publicly (and positively) about your organization, it makes your brand look more attractive, credible, and trustworthy.

Which, in turn, means people are more likely to engage with your content.

We’re expecting to see more employees appearing in marketing videos in 2024.

Actions for Marketers

To be clear, employee advocacy doesn’t (necessarily) involve a bunch of people saying how much they love their jobs. That can feel pretty forced. Instead, showcase your team members through day-in-the-life videos, like this example from South Metro Fire Rescue:

That way, you allow their enthusiasm to shine through naturally.

8. More Brands To Leverage Live Video

Live video streaming isn’t a new trend.

Social media features like Instagram Live have existed for almost a decade (where does the time go?). Yet marketers have been surprisingly slow to get on board, with just 36% saying they’ve published live video content on social media channels.

However, the upsides are significant. One in four US livestream attendees have bought products during a live shopping show, while 34% went on to buy the featured product post-event.

Given those impression conversion rates, we’re going to stick our necks out and say that 2024 will be the year live video finally goes mainstream.

Actions for Marketers

A lot of stuff can go wrong during a live video stream, so your best bet is to keep things simple.

Not all topics are a good fit for live video. It’s a perfect platform for showcasing a new, physical product — but we wouldn’t recommend it for anything that requires a lot of explanation, like communicating the rules of a competition.

9. Simpler, Cheaper Video Production

Once upon a time, creating video content meant hiring a whole production team and expensive equipment. But today, smartphones are so advanced that you don’t need a fancy video camera.

This isn’t just true for tiny marketing teams with small budgets; even huge, global organizations are ditching the high-end tech in favor of the devices in their pockets. For instance, the official video for Olivia Rodrigo’s Get Him Back was shot entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro:

Actions for Marketers

Don’t just ditch the costly cameras — say “no” to expensive video software by editing footage on your phone using apps like iMovie and LumaFusion.

10. Silence (in Videos) is Golden

The ever-increasing availability of 5G mobile data speeds means more of us are watching video content on our mobile devices while out of the house — on the bus, at the hairdresser, in a cafe.

Fortunately, most people don’t watch those videos with the volume cranked up to maximum. Quite the opposite: 92% of consumers now watch videos on mute.

All of this means the most effective videos in 2024 will be able to convey their message even with the sound switched off.

Actions for Marketers

There’s an obvious solution here: always add captions to your videos.

Not only does this ensure that viewers will understand what’s going on even if they’re watching on mute, but it also makes your content more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

As a bonus, captions can also make your messaging more memorable, even to people who watched with the sound on. What’s not to like?

Want to know how top brands plan to stay at the top of the social media marketing game in 2024? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Pexels.

But, because we’re naturally optimistic people, we prefer to see it as an opportunity: handle those comments effectively, and your audience could even end up liking you more. In fact, 83% of customers say they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints.

Read on for our top tips on navigating negativity on social media.

1. Share Behavior Guidelines for Your Followers

Some negative comments require a response from your brand.

Others, however, are designed to offend for no good reason. Rather than replying to these online trolls, your best bet is to block them and move on — they’re not the type of people you want to be engaging.

But how do you sort the “bad actors” from the legit customers simply having a bad day?

Your best bet is to draw up guidelines for how you expect your audience to behave. Let them know that you won’t tolerate anyone abusing your social media team, attacking your followers, or using inappropriate or hateful language. And, of course, don’t forget to share those guidelines via a pinned post or your social media bio.

For example, Instant Pot has published rules for anyone planning to join its 3.2 million-strong Facebook Group, the Instant Pot Community.

It includes easy-to-understand guidelines around what is (and isn’t) acceptable and clarifies that people breaching these guidelines will have their posts removed and their profiles blocked.

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This ensures the Instant Pot team doesn’t waste time and emotional energy negotiating with trolls, freeing them to focus on genuine customer complaints.

2. Respond To All Customer Complaints

Dealing with complaints is a key factor in the life of any social media professional.

Sure, it might not be the most fun part of the job, but it’s a crucial element of customer support. As we’ve already noted, when you get it right, you can turn dissatisfied customers into happy ones — but if you ignore them, you leave yourself open to negative reviews. This is a big problem given that 98% of consumers say reviews are an “essential resource” for informing their purchase decisions.

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Unless you can deal with a complaint in a single reply (unlikely), your goal should generally be to shift the conversation toward a non-public-facing channel — like email, live chat, or your social media inbox.

GEICO got it right here by sympathizing with the customer, then urging them to follow up by providing more specific information via DM:

Hi, I’m sorry for the difficulty with your policy. Please DM us your policy number, state, and full name, so I can get you connected with an agent.
-Liz

— GEICO Service Team (@GEICO_Service) February 18, 2024

That way, they can discuss the matter privately while also making it clear to the rest of their audience that they’re dealing with the problem.

3. Use Social Media Monitoring To Find Non-Mentions

Frustratingly, not all unhappy customers will speak to you directly via your mentions.

Some will simply sound off about you without tagging you in the post. Or they might intend to “@” you but misspell your brand name. Either way, you could receive a ton of negative publicity without even realizing it.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: social media monitoring.

Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social can crawl multiple social platforms, seek out untagged mentions of your brand, and even analyze the sentiment behind each post. That way, if someone is making a fuss about your organization, you can respond before the matter gets out of hand.

4. Create Templated Responses

Speed is of the essence when answering negative comments, with 44% of US consumers — and 46% of consumers globally — expecting to receive a response to social media questions or complaints within an hour.

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That’s a tough task.

But it gets (a little) easier if your social media team can lean on a bunch of templated responses to frequently asked questions.

Follow these best practices when creating your templates:

• Identify common questions: Understand the types of queries you receive most often by speaking to your sales team, account managers, and customer support agents and analyzing your website’s live chat logs.
• Consider negative scenarios: Think about potential customer issues that might crop up down the line. For instance, if you’re launching a new product and expect demand to be high, you might face a lot of questions about stock availability.
• Keep responses up to date: Once you’ve crafted a bunch of templated replies to common questions, schedule time to update your responses so they don’t get stale. You don’t want customers to feel like they’re receiving a stock message.

5. Provide a Personalized Response

Boilerplate replies will only get you so far. Customers with complaints want to feel like you’re taking them seriously, not trying to silence them with generic platitudes.

At the very minimum, you should be referring to them by name — provided you know their name from their social media presence.

Ideally, take things a step further by personalizing specific elements of your response based on the customer’s message, just like in this example from Nike:

Hey there! It looks like those are an older style of ours, but we’d be happy to send over some recommendations! Meet us in DM with your location and what size you’re after, and we’ll go from there. https://t.co/klmMF0Q8Tn

— Nike (@Nike) January 21, 2024

Essentially, this response still says: “DM us more information.” But Nike specifically references the customer’s issue and offers recommendations, so it all feels more personal.

6. Use the BIFF Framework

When writing responses to negative social media messages, one effective approach is to use the BIFF framework.

BIFF stands for “Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm.” Here’s how it applies to handling complaints:

• Brief: Keeping your replies short and to the point will reduce the chances of starting a prolonged, back-and-forth dialog full of angry messages.
• Informative: Concentrate on making accurate, factual statements — and avoid making sarcastic or negative comments yourself.
• Friendly: The more personable you are, the more likely the customer will respond in a friendly — or at least neutral — manner. Remember: you catch more flies with honey than vinegar!
• Firm: Set out your organization’s position in a clear, non-aggressive manner. Again, being firm and factual makes it less likely that you’ll end up in a long, drawn-out conversation.

7. Avoid Overpromising

The simplest way to deal with negative comments on social media is to simply give the customer what they want. They spilled Diet Coke on their new laptop, and now they’re unhappy it wasn’t waterproof. Send them a new one — problem solved!

Of course, this approach has an obvious downside: it sets a precedent, which means you’ll likely have to give other dissatisfied customers the same over-generous offer in the future.

So rather than promising to do whatever the customer demands simply because they’re unhappy, take the time to understand their complaint — then explain how you can fix it in line with your standard policies.

For instance, in this example, Amazon was confronted by a customer who was upset at not being able to claim a special offer:

Please be informed that when the promotions are available for the product, you can place a new order using the promotion.
-Juhi

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) February 19, 2024

No doubt it would have been quicker and simpler just to give the customer the discount again — but that would open up a whole can of worms. Instead, Amazon’s support agent stood firm and clearly explained the company’s policy.

8. Apologize When Necessary

Dealing with negative comments on social media is often about placating customers and being empathetic without accepting that the brand did anything wrong.

That’s hardly surprising in a world where admitting liability could open you up to legal action.

But sometimes, a simple apology is the only correct response.

Want an example? We’ll need to start by providing some context:

If you’ve spent enough time on X/Twitter, you’ll likely have encountered the Gender Pay Gap Bot, which calls out organizations for failing to back up their words around equality and inclusivity with action.

The bot responded to an International Women’s Day campaign from Imperial College London (ICL) — one of the UK’s most prestigious higher education institutions — by pointing out that the college pays women less than men on average.

That’s the recipe for a PR nightmare, right?

However, ICL handled the negative comment well by accepting its failings, promising to do better, and — most importantly — sharing information about its efforts to close the pay gap:

Thanks Gender Pay Gap Bot, you’re right and we agree this isn’t good enough.

We’re working to address this and to eliminate our ethnicity pay gap too. There’s more information about our work here: https://t.co/2FuGLrfQRy

We’ve still got a lot of work to do.

— Imperial College London (@imperialcollege) March 8, 2022

9. Be Transparent

Saying “no” to customers is never easy. But it gets easier if you can back up your response with a transparent explanation.

Sure, it might not turn the unhappy customer’s frown upside down. Still, it will at least let other people in your audience know that this isn’t just some arbitrary decision: you explored the cause of the problem, did your best to solve it, and communicated everything that happened.

For instance, IKEA sent this response to a customer who was unhappy they couldn’t order a specific dish at one of its in-store restaurants:

Image source

The support agent can’t magically fix the issue in a scenario like this — but they can provide valuable extra context.

10. Thank Customers for Their Feedback

While your life would be a lot easier if customers never complained, the fact is that each negative comment you receive is an opportunity to improve your brand’s product or service.

Because if one customer experiences an issue, it’s a safe bet that others will, too. The sooner you know about it, the sooner you can resolve it.

As such, it pays to thank customers for taking the time to get in touch and point out the problem they’re facing. Tell them you appreciate their feedback, you’ll try your hardest to fix it, and you’ll share the outcome with them.

That’s how you turn angry customers into loyal brand advocates.

Want to learn more about how to build an engaged brand community through social media? Sign up for one of our upcoming social media conferences.

Featured image by Freepik.