Should you spend your time building a TikTok following? Are your potential customers on Snap? And is Twitter/X still a thing?
The social media landscape is constantly changing. So building a strategy for your business on these platforms can feel impossible.
We asked social media experts to break down what’s working for companies looking for views on their social media pages. Here’s what they had to say about what’s trending in 20024:
Focus On Authenticity
Brands that manage to break through the noise of the internet have focused on entertaining ways to engage their specific audience and potential customers.
“In my reporting, there have been a few brands that have been able to authentically build community or provide enough entertainment to keep users engaged,” said Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday. She pointed to language learning app Duolingo as a good example of a brand building up an authentic message on its TikTok account.
“Gone are the days of spending your way into a shopper’s peripheral view,” McCoy added.
Rachel Johnston is founder and CEO of Sunset Social, a social media marketing agency that works with many Atlanta startups. Her suggestion to startups: Share your founder’s story.
“Founders need to share about their journeys. Especially for earlier stage startups, much of their identity is first wrapped up with the founders. So, it is important to not only market the business, but also yourself,” Johnston told Hypepotamus.
Know Where Your People Are
Filming a video based on the microtrend of the day can be fun. But is it necessary for your business?
The experts we talked to said startups and brands need to really understand where their target audience is living online, be it Snap, Facebook, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
“While cove.tool maintains a strong presence across most social media platforms, we have found LinkedIn better connects us with our target audience of architecture, engineering, and construction professionals. However, we enjoy utilizing Instagram stories for additional, quippy promotion,” Krystl Black, SVP of Marketing & Strategic Communications at Atlanta-based cove.tool, told Hypepotamus.
Cove.tool has also found video to be particularly helpful for getting the ClimateTech’s vision out to more people online. Black said that CEO and Co-Founder Sandeep Ahuja has been making videos to walk through the startup’s product offerings, talk about success stories.
“Additionally, to help promote webinars and other long-form video content, we break the videos into shorter videos to help promote the content. We also implement day-of videos to encourage live participation,” she added.
McCoy said brands should focus on being “culture makers” on the platforms that most resonate with their audience.
“From my reporting, TikTok has become the cultural town square for Gen Z. Meanwhile, Instagram still has millennials’ attention. Even X, formerly Twitter, still has a role,” she added. “It’s important to note, however, that more conversations are happening out of the public eye, in group chats, Discord servers and the comments of livestreams. Seemingly, companies and brands need to be everywhere at once, tapped into cultural moments as they’re happening. Reading trade pub news also helps.”
Get To Be An AI Expert
If you think social media marketing is all about creative production, think again. More and more, marketing roles are about analytics and artificial intelligence.
“We saw a huge uptick in AI startups in 2023. Statistics show that 25% of all investments in 2023 went to AI-related companies. Even just while attending tech events in Atlanta, we saw a huge majority of the startups showcased as AI-related. Marketing / social media teams should be prioritizing how they can use AI too. Whether it be to help with video creation, photo editing, copywriting, or anything else, using AI can help with your efficiency and overall keeping up with the latest tech solutions,” Johnston told Hypepotamus.
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Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash
