Social Media Tips for Beginners: Complete Roadmap to Success in 2024

Social media marketing has been a staple channel for reaching new customers, building brand awareness, and engaging with followers.

This tried-and-true tactic has helped businesses grow significantly, enhancing customer interactions by enabling compelling communication between the brand and the consumer.

From the inception of the first official social media platform in 1997, a company called Six Degrees founded by Andrew Weinrich, to short-form, bite-sized emerging platforms like TikTok and Threads, social engagement has long been a popular method for improving visibility and driving conversions.

Customers are looking for your business across myriad digital social media platforms. With the wide range of social media choices, success on social media goes beyond appearing on and engaging with customers on a few platforms.

To truly maximize search visibility, businesses must be prepared to meet their customers wherever they’re looking for them, whether that be on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more.

However, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work for every social media platform. Each platform has its own unique nuances and best practices.

Building a strategic social media presence requires a multi-step approach, and in this post we’ll explore our social media tips for beginners to help your business master social media success across numerous platforms.

By following each of these steps, your brand will be able to not only maximize performance but also show up where it matters, any time a potential customer is looking for your business.

Keep in mind, UNmiss is a great resource for all your content needs. From crafting long-form content to short-form social media posts, we offer a wide range of tools to facilitate your content needs and improve search engine visibility.

How to Craft a Winning Narrative

Executing a seamless social media strategy entails more than just writing short-form content. Posting a few days a week, and mindlessly promoting your latest product or article won’t capture the attention of your customers.

Storytelling is often the best method for creating content that resonates with your audience.

However, effective storytelling starts with knowing your target audience such as who they are, their age range, preferences, and hobbies to ensure your messaging aligns with their interests and the challenges they’re looking to solve.

After you’ve identified your audience and who they are at their core, there are several other strategies for hooking their attention and getting them to engage with your business.

Use a Hook

Sales-centric text and AI-prompted text won’t win the hearts of your customers. 

Instead, you need to grab your customer’s attention in a meaningful and authentic way such as asking a thought-provoking question or sharing insightful research conducted by your company. The hook typically takes place in the first sentence so it’s the first thing a social media user reads.

Here are some detailed examples of hooks for various industries, incorporating thought-provoking questions and insights from research. Each example aims to capture attention in a meaningful and authentic way.

See this short article of hook examples!

Keep Your Content Relatable

Consider that most customers will find your business by seeking a solution for a problem they have. It may seem as though the best way to get your social media visitors to convert is to craft sales-focused content, encouraging them to buy your product or service.

The best way to win customers’ attention and hearts is to create a relatable narrative, sharing how others have solved a challenge and triumphantly overcame hurdles by doing business with your brand. 

Keep in mind this intriguing statistic: Almost half of marketers report significant improvements in conversions (over 25%) by using customer testimonials in their social media campaigns.

Employ Amazing Visuals

In an era where platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram reign supreme, visual content is changing the game. Embracing and deploying amazing visuals is a must to capture the attention of mindless scrollers.

Truly creative content is the best and easiest way to encourage likes, shares, and other forms of interaction on social media. Consider what it takes to make a post go viral. Only the most interesting, relatable, and trendy posts will encourage audience participation.

Sample social media post on X that uses captivating visuals

Focus on Your Tone and Voice

Your brand should maintain a consistent tone and voice anywhere customers can find you. Whether they’re on your website or on your Facebook page, your content should look and sound the same. This helps build both trust and reliability.

Be Genuine and Real

In an era where customers feel cautious engaging with overly positive influencers who come off as disingenuous or facetious, the same can be said for brands that don’t effectively convey their imperfections.

Authenticity is key to winning trust and credibility with your audience. Don’t be afraid to share both the good and bad moments of your business experiences. The more genuine your business can be the better.

Keep it Consistent

Customers become accustomed to how often you post. For example, if you post 5 times one week and 1 the next, this may create a negative customer experience as customers may expect and want to hear from you more often.

Consistency is also crucial to help build brand recognition on social media. Keep and maintain a realistic schedule of social media posting.

Choose the Right Platform

Know the social media channels where your customers prefer to spend their time. Different businesses have different audiences, some are active on Facebook, but others are on TikTok. You have to research your audience and which platform they use most.

Instagram, for example, is a great platform for sharing creative images and reels, making it an excellent choice for brands targeting millennial or Gen Z demographics. Instagram can also be beneficial for businesses that are trying to reach a luxury consumer audience.

On the other hand, LinkedIn is a prime channel for reaching a more professional audience and can be a great choice for business-to-business network marketing. This circles back to the importance of truly understanding your audience and knowing the networks they love.

Add Hashtags

Hashtags are a crucial element of social media storytelling. They’re a succinct way to tell the audience exactly what your content is trying to communicate.

Use relevant hashtags and keywords that relate to your content to help improve discoverability and reach. Research trending keywords around a topic to incorporate the best hashtags possible in your post.

Ahref’s Hashtag Generator tool is a great resource for generating quality keywords for a specific topic.

Source: Ahref’s Hashtag Generator Tool example

How to Grow on Social Media

At the end of the day, every business’ core goal for social media marketing is to expand and grow. Without a healthy following, your business is essentially shouting into a void; all of your hard work brainstorming, editing, and drafting content goes to waste.

To make social media marketing a worthwhile investment, it’s essential to have a growth plan in place.

Some marketers think simply posting a few times a week on Facebook will garner relevant, motivated traffic. These marketers end up being met with disappointment, frustrated at the algorithms for not highlighting their content. Social media growth can be looked at in a similar way as SEO.

You can write the highest quality and most unique content, but without a plan in place your content may never be seen.

As with any marketing endeavor, growth is the key metric for success. If your social following and engagement numbers are stagnant, consider the following tips for achieving a more dominant social media presence.

Leverage Data to Inform Future Content

Every business has to start somewhere when it comes to social media content creation.

Your first social post likely won’t become a viral hit. It’s crucial to have goals identified and key performance indicators in place to ensure you can effectively measure your social media performance. Otherwise, you won’t know which content is performing best and what’s attracting your audience’s attention most.

Review your highest-performing and lowest-performing content every month. Identify any common themes or trends to gauge what’s working and what isn’t.

It may also be helpful to test different content types to see what garners the most attention such as video, short-form content, or visuals. Continue to test and try different methods to determine the formula for social media success for your business.

LinkedIn performance dashboard example

Run Giveaways

Giveaways have been a solid way to encourage customers to engage with your business. Not only are they great for improving brand recognition, but giveaways also can attract new customers too.

Research has shown that giveaways have a conversion rate of nearly 34%, which is higher than other types of content. Additionally, social media contests give many marketers a good return on investment, with 45% of marketers agreeing to this statement.

Another study found that giveaways are a significant revenue-generating marketing tactic, boasting a conversion rate of 34% higher than other content campaigns.

More conversions typically leads to more chances of gaining customers and encouraging them to come back for more. Many social media giveaways also encourage sharing, furthering a brand’s exposure and reach.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of giveaways is their ability to attract more followers and, in turn, more growth.

Many contests ask entrants to share the post or tag friends in the comments. They may also require potential customers to follow the business for an entry. This can lead to a large spike in followers, helping your business grow your social media presence.

Use Paid Ads

Social media advertising is an effective approach to attract the attention of your target audience and appear more prominently in user’s feeds. 

In fact, over a quarter (26.8%) of internet users between the ages of 16 and 65 discover brands, products, and services from ads on social media.

Marketers are seeing the value of social media advertising too, as it ranks the second largest digital advertising market. It’s a money-making marketing endeavor, generating $226 billion in 2022, and predicted to grow to $385 billion by 2027.

Despite social media advertising’s growing popularity and ability to prove return on investment, it’s still crucial to have a plan in place to maximize revenue.

Given the nature of social media usage—scrolling quickly and mindlessly until a post or story attracts someone’s attention—your message can be easily missed.

Additionally, many consumers turn to social media as a distraction, looking for engaging content rather than being sold to.

To mitigate frustrating customers with sales-driven messaging while simultaneously delivering a creative ad, paid advertising requires a strategic approach to ensure its value.

Nearly every social media platform offers paid advertising from LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, X, TikTok, and more. Determining where to advertise requires an analysis of your audience to figure out where they prefer to spend their time and for what purpose.

For example, your target demographic may spend ample time on TikTok, but they may not be looking to convert there.

However, they feel more willing to see your messaging on YouTube where they can consume longer-form video content that provides more context into why your business is the best choice.

Once you know where your audience is most engaged, you not only have a better chance of resonating with them but also can better segment your paid campaigns.

This ensures your dollars are well spent and you are reaching the right people. Segmenting can be based on age, income, gender, and more to ensure precision.

Meta Business Suite ad creation dashboard example

Avoid Bots and Buying Followers

When considering how to grow your social media following, it may seem like a simple fix to purchase bots and fake Instagram followers.

By doing so, you can instantly boost your following and appear as though you have many more followers than you have. Additionally, bots can like and comment on your Instagram account increasing your engagement.

Despite appearing as a harmless growth tactic, buying bots and followers should be avoided at all costs. Instagram, for example, can shadowban an account if it recognizes it’s paying for comments, likes, or followers.

They may even suspend your account, thwarting your social media endeavors. Organic growth will likely be slower, but slow and steady wins the race when it comes to follower count and engagement.

Partner with Influential Voices in Your Space

Influencer marketing is a relatively newer form of social media and can be a powerful ally in growing your business’ social media presence. 

Influencers typically have large followings they can tap into for sharing products and services. They’ve worked hard to build trust and credibility with their audiences to remain a valuable resource.

Additionally, they’ve likely established an emotional connection with their audience, where their followers see them as a friend rather than a stranger. This parasocial dynamic is complex but can be worthwhile for brands to tap into to reach new potential customers.

Marketers are seeing the benefit of using influencers within their niche to spread the word about their business, with 85% of marketers saying they believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing.

In terms of channels where it makes the most sense to use influencer marketing, marketers are leaning towards TikTok (used by 69% of brands using influencer marketing) most often, followed by Instagram (47%), YouTube (33%) and Facebook (28%).

To find the right influencer to market your business, it’s essential to perform the following steps:

• Research: Search for influencers that align with your company’s values and identity. It’s also important to have similar target demographics to ensure you’re reaching the right audience.
• Determine Your Budget: Your budget will be a large factor in how you choose the influencers you want to partner with. For example, micro-influencers typically have between 1,000 to 100,000 followers yet can have close relationships with the followers due to having a smaller follower count. They will also typically charge much less than a celebrity/mega influencer who boasts more than 1 million followers.
• Use an Influencer Marketing Platform: Finding the right influencer for your campaign becomes much easier when leveraging technology. Influencer marketing platforms take the guesswork out of finding the right influencer for you, helping brands by using filters to refine and match you with an appropriate influencer partner.
• Look at Hashtags: An easy, free way to find influencers that align with your business is by looking up keywords or hashtags. Influencers with the most engagement will appear at the top of the search results page for the specified keyword or hashtag.
• Monitor Your Competition: Look at the influencers your competitors are using. This can help you eliminate influencers within your niche in order to differentiate yourself from your competition. Remember that followers typically have a close relationship with the influencers they follow and may find it disingenuous and inauthentic if the influencer works with multiple brands promoting the same exact product, damaging your business’ perception.
• Ask Your Team: Consider reaching out to your own personal and professional network for influencer recommendations. They may have recommendations or personal contacts for the ideal influencer.
• Ask For a Media Kit: Most influencers will come to the conversation prepared with a media kit. A media kit showcases their hard work and backs it with tangible figures such as their follower demographics, engagement metrics, pricing, and previous clients they’ve worked with.
• Consider the Campaign: Know the type of influencer marketing campaign you want to run such as a giveaway, product collaboration, or sponsored post to ensure the influencer can complete the type of campaign you’re looking for.

Key Takeaways

The world of social media may seem daunting, however with the right approach it can be a seamless marketing tactic that drives the right audience to your website and stores.

It’s also a powerful tool for growing your business’s online presence and shaping consumer perceptions. To do it right, follow our social media tips for beginners to facilitate success across every digital social network your business appears on, from TikTok to LinkedIn.

Keep in mind the following tips as you grow and establish your social media presence:

• Use thoughtful storytelling in your posts
• Be concise and include an actionable next step
• Deliver value in every post
• Understand your audience and where they spend their time
• Post frequently and consistently
• Use a variety of distribution tactics to grow your presence
• Consider utilizing influencers to share your product or service
• Be strategic with your social media strategy