Looking for ways to refine and improve your social media marketing efforts in 2023?

We've published a range of key tips and pointers to help you maximize your efforts, as well as essential tools and processes that you can use to connect with a broader, more receptive audience online.

In the first post of the series, we looked at how to define your brand purpose statement, and how that can then guide your process moving forward.

With that established, we move onto the next element - researching key queries in your industry, in order to map out a more effective content approach, both for SEO and social posting purposes.

Understanding what your audience wants to know, and how you can meet them in their search process

The key to getting your brand and products in front of your target customers is to understand where people are looking, and what they’re looking for in relation to your business.

Optimizing for search is the core consideration here, but increasingly, people are also searching on social platforms for more information about products and businesses. And then there are ads, and meeting demand that people didn’t even realize they had. All of this requires research, and understanding both the common queries and questions, along with competitor insight, and how they’re delivering (or not) on the same.

So first off, at a high level, you need to get some measure of the most common queries relative to your brand, products and region.

The best starting point here is Google’s Keyword Planner tool, which provides key insight on search trends relative to whatever term you enter.

So you need to have at least some idea of the key search terms for your business to begin with, but from there, you can build a large corpus of potential search terms, queries, questions to be answered in blog posts, inspiration for social polls, and more.

As you can see in these examples, if I’m looking to sell basketball shoes, I can enter ‘basketball shoes’ as a search term and get a full listing of related searches, which I can then sort by popularity, competition, trending interest and more.

I’ve removed all of the directly branded searches in this second listing, in order to provide a clearer idea of generalized trends for content ideas.

As you can see, there are some good notes of inspiration in there, including ‘best basketball shoes’, ‘league basketball shoes’ (i.e. what sneakers NBA players are wearing), and ‘best basketball shoes for jumping’.

Building on this, I can start to get an idea of certain content directions - like, for example, creating my own video reviews of new sneakers, rundowns of the most popular shoes worn by NBA stars, feature overviews based on purpose (running, jumping) and more.

If you’re looking for the most common questions specifically, Answer the Public is another handy resource.

Enter a search term, and Answer the Public will provide an overview of all the most commonly asked questions about it, based on Google autocomplete data.  

Another tool to consider here is Google Trends, and checking in with the latest trending topics, to see if there’s anything of relevance for your brand.

You can search by key terms to get a gauge of interest, and related queries, while you can also browse through popular trends to see if any might relate to your business. If there’s an angle there for your promotions, it could be a good tie-in opportunity, which could be another way to gain traction on social networks.

You can also use ChatGPT to assist in your research efforts.

ChatGPT’s data isn’t updated in real time (OpenAI notes that it can only access data up to 2021), so it can’t, for example, give you up-to-the-minute insights on search trends.

But it can give you some notes on common questions, for a specific region, which could give you some more food for thought.

A key limitation of AI-based systems is that they are just that, systematic responses to the outputs you enter. They can’t qualify the results, so you can’t know, for certain, that all of the info they provide is accurate. But as a starting point, when trying to uncover key angles and notes, it can be a handy, and more intuitive way to dig into topics of interest by region, and you can also prompt it to provide more answers, with different qualifiers, based on the initial query.

Or you can ask it to show you the top questions on a given subject, with whatever qualifiers you want to add, including region, audience, etc.

You can then ask ChatGPT to put these questions about a product into a table, which you can then add to your Google/Answer the Public lists.

In combination, you can build up a pretty big collection of prompts and notes to guide your content strategy, which at the least will give you a means to build connection with your audience, in various ways.

Can you use ChatGPT to create posts on these topics?

Yes, you can, though I would exercise a level of caution here also.

For the most part, it depends on the purpose of the posts that you’re looking to create, and the experience you want to provide visitors on your site.

So yes, a simple, cheap and time-saving strategy, in expansion of this, could be to enter the questions you list as prompts for posts in ChatGPT, with further instructions to optimize these posts for certain key terms.

ChatGPT can do this, and legally, you can use it on your site. Kind of.

Google has explicit rules against the use of AI-generated content, and there are tools being created that can detect ChatGPT-originated material. There are also various legal debates underway around the use of such tools, and who essentially owns the rights, and all of these are developing areas that you need to keep an eye on if you are going to use AI-originated material.

Also, the copy that you’ll get from ChatGPT is based on the inputs that it has access to - which, in most cases, is a lot of average website copy from all across the internet.

So, if you don’t mind your website reading like everybody else’s, and you’re okay with the potential risks (which are difficult to measure at this point), then using this content for SEO purposes could be a way to go.

But as you can read in the example above, it’s pretty generic, pretty bland - I personally haven’t found ChatGPT’s outputs engaging or rich enough to actually use, beyond basic summaries and overviews.

You could use them as a guide, and freshen them up with your own editorial flair and input. That’s possible, but in most cases, you will find that you need to rewrite a lot, to the point where you might be better off creating something from scratch, in your unique voice.

That, in itself can be a challenge, so there may be ways to use a hybrid approach to save time in building an SEO foundation on your site.

Basically, ChatGPT outputs are the median of everything else you read online, and as more businesses pump out more ChatGPT summaries, it’s only going to get more bland and generic. I personally think you’d be better off taking a fresh approach - but there may be options that you can find which incorporate its current outputs with your own additions.

Another option - enter part of your own writing, then ask ChatGPT to follow the same style.

It’s not always great, and you always need to fact-check and edit each piece that the app gives you.

In my view, it’s an additive tool, which requires some experimentation, and can provide a range of benefits. But it’s not the singular solution to all your content needs.

AI for images

While we’re on blog posts, you’ll also need visuals to go along with your updates, both for your social posts and your blog and website updates.

AI-based tools like DALL-E and Midjourney can also be used for this purpose, with both producing some pretty good results based on specific prompts.

A lot of them do, however, come out looking a bit weird, and you may have to try a few times to get something that you actually want to use, but you can also edit and refine them yourself, and enhance the AI creations.

But here’s where they could be particularly valuable in a brand marketing sense:

Using a DALL-E, you can upload your own product images, then use AI tools to iterate on them, by editing, for example, the background, which can reduce the focus on the computer-created visuals, and limit the impact of the weirdness at the edges. 

The example prompt that I’ve used here is pretty average, and you’ll get better results with more specific guidance (some pointers on how to best write AI prompts here). Try enough times and you could end up with some pretty good product images – but do note that the free version of DALL-E uses a credits system, and you only have a limited amount of free usage (you can buy more credits if you need).

Legally, you can use AI created images for commercial purposes, so long as you don’t upload images of people without their consent, you don’t upload images to which you do not hold usage rights, and you don’t create images of public figures.

You should also provide a transparency note - something like ‘Main image created by DALL-E’, as per the respective usage terms.

Do these tools replace stock image libraries wholesale? No, as there’s generally some customization and editing required to get what you’re after, while specific use cases will still work better with actual photos - either your own or via a third-party source. But as with ChatGPT, they can be handy tools to have in your creative arsenal to help improve your process as a complimentary element.

At the least, it’s worth experimenting with these evolving systems as you go, and seeing what results you get.

Use them or not, it costs nothing to try them out. For now, at least.

Looking to map out your social media approach for the new year?

This will help – the team from Statusbrew have put together a new ‘social media holidays’ calendar for 2023, which highlights all the key dates and events that you might want to use for campaign tie-ins and messages throughout the year.

As you can see in this example, the calendar highlights all of the major days and celebratory events, which could be of relevance for your planning.

And there are always random days happening, which could provide some much-needed thematic inspiration for your posts.

And let’s face it – mapping out a year’s worth of content is hard, even for the most experienced social media pros.

These notes and tips could be hugely valuable in this respect, giving you the little nudges and prompts you need to help fill up your planner, while also reinforcing your brand messaging with relevant promotional events.

It’s a handy overview – you can download Statusbrew’s full 2023 social media holidays calendar here (with email sign-up), where you can also learn more about the listings, and what’s included.

In addition, you may want to check out this infographic on the best days and times to post on each platform.

Looking to update your visual content approach in 2023?

This might help - the team from Depositphotos have put together a new overview of the key visual trends that they think will gain big traction throughout the year, which could give you some guidance on where you should be looking, in order to being a fresh perspective to your images.

There are some good tips here, which align with broader industry trends, based on Depositphotos usage and expert insight.

There’s also a full mini-site where you can take a deeper dive into each trend, or you can check out the infographic below for quick inspiration.

Looking to update your social media marketing process in 2023?

We've published a series of articles tips and notes on how to maximize your online efforts. Here, we will cover the social platform of the moment - the compulsive, controversial and hugely engaging TikTok.

If you're interested in checking out our content posting tips and guidelines for other major social media platforms, you can click on the links below.

• Facebook posting tips
• Twitter posting tips
• Instagram posting tips
• LinkedIn posting tips
• Snapchat posting tips
• Pinterest posting tips

Looking to up your TikTok game? Read on for some key tips and pointers.

TikTok posting tips

Despite lingering concerns around a possible ban of the app in the US, TikTok is inarguably the social network of the moment, especially among younger audiences. Its addictive algorithm, and never-ending stream of content can be hard to escape once it’s sucked you in, and its approach has inspired a whole new shift in the broader social media landscape, as competitors work to keep up with TikTok-originated habits and trends.

Which, logically, now has marketers questioning how they can tap into the popularity of the app - and for the best notes on this, I generally defer to someone who has for more experience TikTok marketing than I.

Savannah Sanchez is my go-to expert on TikTok promotions, with her fast-growing agency generating millions in profit for a broad range of brands.

Based on Savannah’s experience, and notes from TikTok, here are some key tips to help you maximize your TikTok marketing approach in 2023.

Content approach

The key to successful TikTok marketing is creating content that aligns with organic posts in user feeds. TikTok users are on the platform for entertainment, and they don’t have to sit through ads like they would on traditional TV. If you don’t grab attention, and give them a reason to keep watching, they’ll scroll on by - so you need to create eye-catching videos that are similar in style to other content in the app.

But that doesn’t mean you need to latch onto the latest trend, or show yourself dancing to the latest trending track.

Ads are still ads, you just need to be conscious of how you’re framing them - because again, overt promotions repurposed from other apps or mediums likely won’t work.

Hooks

Your first point of call in drafting your brand TikTok video will be your hook, as it’s these types of narrative-aligned clips that are repeatable and engaging.

So how do you find the right hook for your post? You can check out TikTok’s Ad Library to glean more insight into the ads that are working.

From there, you’ll start to get an idea of hooks that work - things like:

‘I wish someone had told me about this sooner…’

‘If you aren’t using [product], you’re missing out’

‘3 reasons why [product] is the best [problem to be solved]’

Get a list together, then test them out with your products/services and see if they feel like a good fit, or inspire video ideas.

You can also use ChatGPT to come up with additional ideas and variants.

As you can see here, if you feed a list of hooks into ChatGPT, it’ll give you a range of additional examples. Some of which will be not so great, but it could be a quick and easy way to iterate in the concept, and come up with more options for your TikTok creative.

Creating clips

Now that you have your hooks, you can build your videos around them, using whatever talent you choose, or have access to, in order to bring them to life.

It’s important to use real people (or maybe animals, depending on the product), while Savannah also advises that you should also look ‘do something visually interesting in the first three seconds’.

In terms of presentation and style, again, visually interesting edits and creative formats will help you grab attention, while you should also look to highlight the benefits of your product, and how it will solve the viewers’ challenges, as opposed to lingering product shots, packaging, etc.

It’s important to get the right person for your clips, which is why many brands are using TikTok influencers and those more native to the platform, and creating organic-style promotions. This is not beyond most people - watch a few example clips and you’ll get the gist of what this entails. But if you do want to explore influencer partnerships, TikTok does have its Creator Marketplace for this purpose.

You can create and edit your videos in CapCut, which is TikTok’s own video editing tool, or in TikTok itself, and with a little experimentation, you can come up with something pretty good, and not so polished that it feels like a blatant ad

Captions and hashtags

Savannah recommends keeping your video captions short, around five words in total. Your main aim is to guide attention towards your video, so you don’t want your caption to distract too much from the main event.

Hashtags do also serve a purpose on TikTok, but as always, try to keep them targeted and specifically aligned with your target audience.

You can search for relevant hashtags in the app (enter a keyword or term then tap over to the ‘Hashtags’ page for a full overview of related tags, and their usage), while TikTok also has a real-time trends display to highlight emerging topics.

Also, despite many people still doing it, you don’t actually need to include hashtags like #FYP, #ForYou, and #ForYouPage, as they won’t necessarily help you get more attention.

As per TikTok:

“Hashtags like #FYP, #ForYou, and #ForYouPage work just like all other hashtags on TikTok, so adding these to your caption won’t necessarily improve your chances of getting on someone’s For You feed. Instead, we recommend using the space in your caption to add context to your video along with hashtags that are relevant to your content.”

Testing creative

Once you’ve got a few ideas down, you can map out a launch schedule for your TikTok push.

Savannah has a three-step formula for paid campaigns, which includes additional iterations in a single concept. And even if you’re only posting organic content, the process may still assist in mapping out your content.

• First off, you launch your new ad content - a new idea, new concept, etc. This is the first step, so don’t get too caught up on the results - but if you’ve done your homework and you’re happy with the concept and execution, it should help you gain some traction in the app.
• Next, if you’re happy with the ad concept, test a secondary iteration of your original ad, by using the same concept and script, and testing it with a new talent or a new hook.
• Savannah then recommends creating a multi-UGC ad featuring many different people using the product. ‘I usually find that showing multiple people in the product performs better than just showing one’.

That will give you multiple variations on a single theme, with testing at each stage to weed out bad ideas, and maximize the best.

Algorithmic considerations

TikTok’s almighty feed algorithm is the key element that pushes more relevant content to each user. But because it is so personalized, it’s not so easy to come up with key, generic lessons or notes, as it takes a wide range of personal interactive elements into account.

But there are some guide notes to consider:

• Recency is a factor - TikTok says that its ‘For You’ feed recommendations generally pull from videos posted within the last 90 days, while newly uploaded videos will generally see a peak in engagement soon after they’ve been published. As such, uploading new content regularly will increase your potential of maximizing your reach. 
• Posting more won’t impact reach - Somewhat aligned to the previous point, TikTok also says that the amount of videos you post does not impact how your content is recommended in the For You feed. So, theoretically, if all of your videos were hits, you could dominate the For You feed by uploading lots of them - while conversely, this may also suggest that engagement with your past content is not a significant factor in future reach
• Keep people watching - TikTok also says that watch time factors into how a video gets recommended, “so capturing viewers’ attention early and maintaining it throughout makes for watchable, shareable content”. 

These are similar points to the algorithms on other apps – the more engaging your content is, among your initial viewers, the better it will perform.

But again, TikTok’s algorithm is very good at taking in a range of factors and considerations, and showing users more specific content relevant to their interests.

In other words, you need to learn what your target audience wants, then iterate on that, which will help you reach that specific audience subset.

Additional notes:

• Videos under 30 seconds work best
• Captions are useful - but don’t include more than 5-10 words per second
• Showing products in use will enhance credibility and response

Also, be wary of the safe zones for your videos – i.e. where your need to avoid putting important detail as it could be obscured by the app’s UI buttons:

The key element that you need to get right in TikTok is creative, and putting together interesting videos based around the above-noted framework. Which isn’t necessarily easy. Experts like Savannah make it look simple, but creating TikTok-specific promotions like these takes time and practice, and a lot of scrolling through the top-performing ads for additional inspiration and notes.

Which is the part that a lot of people fail on. Social media marketing is a skill, and while anyone can post a video online, being actually good at it does require learning and patience. There’s a reason that so few YouTubers become big stars, even though they all post similar content. Attention to detail is the difference between good and great, and the more time you take to test and learn, the better you’ll be.

Which is also why so many businesses are looking to work with influencers instead, rather than committing the time to learning for themselves. It’s easier, in many cases, to lean on those who are already attuned to the key trends and formats - and if you are looking for an agency partner, Savannah’s own firm regularly generates solid results.

But it can be learned, if you have the time, you can make TikTok work for your business. But truly understanding the platform, and why people use it, is the key step to optimal creative, and strong results.

Looking to get more attention for your business in 2023?

We’ve covered the following elements in previous articles:

• Defining your brand and content mission
• Researching keywords and queries among your target market
• Analyzing your competitors and their approaches

So, with knowledge of the key topics, approaches and benchmarks currently at play in your sector, you now have a good understanding of the likely direction that your digital marketing approach is headed.

But that still won’t get you attention - for that, you need to understand where your target audience is looking, and how to get your brand messages in front of them, at the right place and time.

Your competitor research will provide some valuable pointers on this - if your key competition is seeing good engagement on Instagram, that’s a pretty good indicator that you should be looking at IG too.

But in order to get maximum attention, you need to consider which publications your audience is reading, what influencers they follow, and what types of content approaches resonate best.

Meeting your audience where they’re engaging

So on the first point - what publications is your audience reading. There are few different ways to determine this, and you likely already have some idea of the top publications or sites that your target market is engaging with.

If you can get mentioned in these publications, that’s an immediate win, as your brand will be presented where they’re looking - which is a key tenet of Google Ads and display as placement.

Paid promotion is one way to go, but you may also be able to get into these publications via guest posting, or get mentioned by a relevant influencer, or in relevant Facebook groups, Reddit communities, etc.

One way of researching the most influential people and publications for a given topic is to use Followerwonk’s audience comparison tool, which enables you to find follows in common among Twitter profiles.

As you can see here, using this tool, you can enter in three different profiles and get a display of who all three follow (FYI - Ryan Seacrest is the only one followed by all three).

Go through the audience listings of your competitors, compare who those users all follow in common, and you’ll get a fair idea of the most influential Twitter profiles in your sector, which should then be a target for your outreach.

Of course, Twitter is not the most popular social platform, and sees nowhere the usage of Facebook or TikTok. As such, you may think that this insight is less valuable, but the most passionate and active social media users are generally also connected via Twitter, to ensure that they keep up to date with the latest.

That’s why people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump view Twitter as so important, because even though it has far fewer users, Twitter remains the source of many major news stories and trends. Influential users take info from Twitter, then redistribute it to other platforms - and as such, it just may be that reaching these users plays a key role in maximizing brand awareness in your niche.

Another tool that can come in handy here is BuzzSumo, which can highlight all the most relevant Twitter, YouTube and TikTok profiles on a given subject.

Understanding who the most influential voices are in your niche can guide you towards the key people for influencer marketing partnerships. Make a list of the top voices, take the time to look through their content, then reach out to them with free samples, proposals or other offers to partner up on awareness campaigns.

There’s a range of key tips for reaching out to influencers (some valuable pointers here), and if you can get it right, and match up the right influencers who can actually connect you through to your target market, it’s definitely worth investing the time and effort into such partnerships to further your marketing opportunities.

For local businesses, it may also be worth examining local publications, and understanding their key areas of focus.

For this analysis, I manually tagged the 100 most shared social media articles from a publication by topic (extracted via BuzzSumo), then mapped the key areas of focus in this chart.

That provides some additional perspective on what their audience is most interested in, which may help in your assessment of potential ad placements, story pitches, and topical angles to appeal to this specific group.

There are also creator marketplace listings for Facebook, IG and TikTok (in selected markets), which enable you to find influencers by topic, and get an idea of their work and interests, while you can also use Pinterest’s Trends tool to assess the relative popularity of any topic, and related ideas.

You can also search for topic-rated Facebook Groups, which you can join to monitor key discussion trends.

There are also opportunities for promotional approaches within FB groups, but I would recommend against pushing promotions within direct group chats. There may be ways to partner with admins on promotions or giveaways, or even ads, if they’re running group placements. But your primary goal here, as it should be with relative Reddit communities, is to listen and learn what people are interested in, and what they’re looking for, which can then inform your other promotional pushes.

Run through the various options and tools, and in the end, you’ll have a listing of potential publications and influencers that you can reach out to, or target with paid campaigns, to connect with the right people, in order to raise awareness of your brand.

Follow the key profiles on Twitter, reach out to key influencers, and join relevant Facebook groups to help boost your understanding of what people are looking for, and you can then start to formulate a more effective outreach process, aligned more specifically to your target market.