Three Simple and Underrated Ways to Improve Your Social Media Game

When every business has a social media presence, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. You may spend hours perfecting that TikTok only to have it flop. You may spend half of your day creating and scheduling posts only to see you've lost followers. 

First - don't stress. You're just one of many feeling this way; even the best content can sometimes fail.

When it comes to a social media post's success, endless factors influence the outcome.

The good news is that if you stick with an effective strategy, your overall engagement will continue to grow, even if some of your posts don't get the reach you'd hoped for. 

The even better news is that there are some super simple, effective ways to boost your social media presence without sacrificing excessive time or overthinking your content.

In fact, here are three simple (and underrated) ways to improve your social media game without adding extra stress to your already busy life.

Use a URL Shortener to Increase Your Post Reach

Services like Bitly, TinyURL, and more can help improve your social media posts by shortening long links - pretty simple, right? But why take this extra step?

Having a shorter URL helps you in a few key ways.

First, it's just more aesthetically pleasing to view. You only have seconds to capture someone's attention while they're scrolling through social media. There's a good chance they'll skip right past that messy-looking post. So clean it up!

Second, using a URL shortener will prevent the risk of broken links if anyone copies and pastes your post text. Social media platforms don't always show the entire link in the post text when you have an excessively long link, so if someone copies and pastes, they won't always get the full link. 

Third, Instagram is an example of a platform that doesn't allow clickable links in your general post messages. A shorter URL makes it easier for someone to type into a browser if needed. It's not always the best idea to have a link in your Instagram posts, but when you need it - shorter is better!

Added bonus - many of these services also allow you to track the different links to see what posts result in clicks and which ones may need some tweaking! This is a great, easy tool to evaluate your social media strategy.

Make Your Followers Feel Like Insiders

Humans love to be in on a secret - we want to know what others don't. Use this to your advantage. 

Give your followers a behind-the-scenes look or share a pro tip with them. By doing this, your followers will feel like they have the upper hand compared to friends and family.

One of the best examples of this is In-N-Out's secret menu. It's not that secret anymore, but there is a little ego boost when you order something off this menu and the person next to you doesn't know about it!

As humans, many of us like to brag about knowing more than someone else (for better and often for worse). So, if you provide a "secret" to your followers, they will likely share it with a friend. 

Let Your Customers Do Some of the Work For You!

Let your customers do some of the marketing work for you! How often do you see someone you follow highlight a brand, product, or business? It could be anything from tagging their favorite coffee shop in a picture of their latte art to sharing a direct link to their favorite planner to kick off the new year. 

The best part about this is that most of the work is already done for you! Social media platforms make it easy to share content you are tagged into stories or pages. This can give you content for those days your creativity is zapped, or you just ran out of time.

You can keep this pretty simple by encouraging your customers to tag you in their posts or stories for you to re-share. Note: You may need to follow each other, or the individual may need a public profile for this to work.

But you can up your user-generated content game by offering a promotional competition where customers submit pictures of themselves at your business or use your product for you to use on social media. Be sure they know they have submitted it for this purpose. Give the winner a fabulous prize and post about that on social.

Think about it - you could run a month-long campaign where customers take the pictures for you, and all you have to do is put together a post (and give them photo credit). To make it even easier on you, have them create the post on their page, and you can share it!

Research shows people are more likely to take recommendations from someone they know. The of user-generated content is that people who aren't yet customers might see their friends or family on your page and start following you.

Social media is complex, but you can keep your online presence simple and manageable. We've all got enough going on in our lives; we don't need to make our social media marketing another stressor. 

Keep things simple and find ways to make your content (or user-generated content) work harder for you! In the long run, it'll be better for both your business and peace of mind.