7 Tips and Tools to Create Perfect Social Media Posts

Many social media marketers manage and share social media posts across multiple social platforms.

However, social media marketing is NO “one size fits all”.

There are 3.7 billion people worldwide who are actively using social media. They are using it for personal relationships and entertainment, for work and research, and business communication.

For corporate communications strategy, social media has grown from a “nice to have” to a “must-have” discipline.But, the world of social media is fast and highly diversified. Social platforms and technologies are developing at breakneck speed. New social networks arise while other loose members and significance.

You don’t need to jump on every bandwagon to reach out to your targets. However, it is wise not to capitalize on just one social platform for promoting your brand.

For corporate communication, social media marketing has grown from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” discipline, and social media skills are no longer considered as a “niche competence”. With the growing number of marketing channels, cross-media marketing has become another task for most social media workers.

However, each social network has particular features and a specific community.

Things that work fine on Twitter might be ignored on Facebook, and vice versa. Business contacts in LinkedIn might need to be addressed in a different way to Twitter or Instagram followers. So, blowing out the same content in the same way across multiple social channels, might not be a good idea.

Don’t get me wrong. If you have something to share that concerns and benefits all your social communities, you can cross-post your content on all networks and across all your communities.

However, to successfully cross-promote your content and messages, don’t just blatantly copy and paste the same link, image, and comment in exactly the same way.

Here are 7 tips to create perfect social media posts & tools that help you get your work done in no time.

1. Tailor your social media posts for each network

Each social network offers different options for presenting your content. Social platforms not only differ in the number of characters, image formats and sizes they provide for your posts. Also, communities engage differently with content and post formats. The better you know your audience and know the way they are engaging on each social platform, the better you can address them.Tailor the message for your posts to fit each social media platform and audience:

• Adapt your comment to the number of characters allowed on each platform. Take a look at the number of characters displayed in the preview to make your meaning come through.
• Make sure your images correspond to the images sizes the networks provide. Consider adapting your images to create specific images for Pinterest and Instagram to make sure your message will be presented in the best way to fit these platforms.
• Share your posts to your social media profiles and pages with different comments for your message that will hit the language use of the respective community and focusses on their topics and interests.
• Share your posts on different days and at different times of the days. Networks and communities have specific rush hours for traffic and engagement.
• You can also share your post in relevant groups and communities on Facebook and LinkedIn but share them on different days and times and use different messages tailored to each group and audience. Make sure to follow the community rules of each group and only share content that will benefit the audience of the respective group.

2. Content is still king

Don’t post everything everywhere. Only share quality content that will benefit the audience of the respective social platform. Capitalize on content that converts best for each of your communities:

• Share content that hits the interests of your target audience.
• Create and share tips to make your customers’ lives easier.
• Share content that will make your readers remember you as a useful resource for valuable information on your topic.
• Provide tips, strategies, how-to articles or entertaining content for your specific audience and topic.

Tools to help you to find top-performing content for your social media posts:

• The WordPress plugin Easy Blog Ideas and the content marketing tool Buzzsumo help you to identify top-performing content on social media.

3. Create multiple visuals for your content

Visual content is more likely to get shares, likes, and comments than pure text messages. Content with relevant images gets 94 % more views than content without relevant images. Visuals will increase click-through-rates (CTR) about 47 %. Infographics grow 12 % more traffic, and 200% more shares than posts without images.

Create multiple visuals for your content, such as photos, images, infographics, gifs, and videos. Capitalize on all your visuals to share, reshare and repurpose your content. For instance, if you share content that contains more than one image, share all your images – one at a time – to repurpose your content. This will extend the lifetime of your content and allows you to reshare your content without repeating yourself.

Tools to help to create visuals for your social media posts:

• Canva helps you to create visuals and infographics super fast and easy. Canva offers a huge variety of templates, layouts, photos and icons you can use to create professional-looking images.
• Pixabay, Pexels or Unsplash offer a huge collection of stock photos you can even upload to your Canva designs.
• Movely and iSpring Free Cam enable you to create animated videos and professional-looking screencasts.
• With the Internet Marketing Ninjas Tool you can resize your images for each social network quite easily.

4. Use hashtags in your social media posts

Hashtags have become essential parameters for linking your posts with current discussions (trending hashtags) or turning your social media posts into searchable content. However, hashtags don’t work equally well on all social networks. They work well for Twitter and Instagram, but they perform less on LinkedIn and Facebook. Also, the character and number of hashtags work differently per network.For instance, Tweets using more than two hashtags see a significant drop in engagement. Whereas on Instagram, the more hashtags you use, the more engagement you see.

• Use hashtags only on posts relevant to the topic. Using mismatched hashtags just for getting attention, won’t do you any favors since people easily get annoyed if they don’t find what they are looking for.
• Only use relevant keywords and phrases for typical search words on your topics.
• Don’t #spam #with #hashtags. Over-tagging a single post or adding them to every word will make your post illegible.

Tools to help you find the right hashtags for your posts and communities

• Check out Hashtagify search for popular hashtags on Twitter and Top-Hashtags for Instagram. Tagdef helps you to look up the meaning of trending hashtags or add your own.

5. Harness the power of emojis for your social media posts

There are currently 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard. In fact, emoji-based marketing messages have increased by 775% year-over-year. Emojis not only work for private conversation but can also be used for corporate communication to connect with your audiences. Emojis provide a global storytelling language and the can support brand building if applied correctly. Emojis in a Facebook post can lead to 57% more likes, 33% more comments, and 33% more shares.

• Make sure your emojis make sense to complement your message. Don’t jump on the emojis bandwagon just to have them.
• There are so many emojis around and some of them can be easily misinterpreted. Only use emojis that will be understood by your followers. Always make sure the meaning is clear.
• Stick with your brand messaging. Don’t blow kisses to your audience for promoting a serious business service.

Tools to help you harness Emoji power for your social media posts:

• Check out Emojipedia to look up the meaning of specific emojis if you are not sure what they are meant for. GetEmojis to simply cut and paste the emoji you are looking for.

6. Choose the right post format for your social media posts

Some networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn offer two general post formats: link post format and image post format.

When you share a standard link post, the preview will display and share your featured image as defined in the meta tags of your post (Open Graph / Twitter Card parameters).When you share content that consists of multiple visuals, for instance, a blog post with statistics and infographics, or a tutorial with multiple screenshots, then also try image post format for your visuals – one at a time – to re-share your post. Use a different comment with each visual and refer to the content the image conveys. Schedule them at different times and days. This will bring even more variations to your posts and allows you to reshare your content multiple times without repeating your post. Sometimes, image posts work much better for engagement than link posts, so try out both formats and analyze your results.Selecting different post formats will bring your content in front of more eyeballs and extend the lifetime of your content.

Tools to help you with selecting the best post format for your social media posts:

• Check out Blog2Social for selecting different post formats for sharing, tailoring and scheduling your social media posts across multiple social media networks and accounts.

7. Share your social media posts at the best times for each social network and community

Whenever you post on social media, only a fraction of your followers will actually see your post. Your reach also depends on the level of activity in your community at the time you publish your post. Make sure to hit the rush hours of each network and the best time to post for maximum visibility on social media.While Twitter is busy throughout the day, other networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are especially crowded during the afternoon and in the evening. LinkedIn is most frequented during the morning hours when most people are on their way to work and in the afternoon right before they leave the office. So, before you set up your social media posting schedule, take a look at the best times for each network.

Tools to help you schedule your social media posts

• Blog2Social and Buffer help you tailoring and scheduling your posts with a pre-configured best time manager to automatically share them at the best times for each network.

Further Reading: When is the Best Time to Post on LinkedIn in 2024?

Summing up

Cross-promoting rather than cross-posting your content across multiple social networks and communities will help you to get more reach and engagement for your posts. If you care about your fans and followers, you should take the extra time to tailor your message to not only the platform you’re posting to but your specific audience too. By using the right social media tool that helps you to customize and schedule your social media posts in one single workflow this will only take a few more seconds to go.

Photo by Riccardo Scauri on Unsplash