It’s hard to believe that we’re already into 2018. This year, Twitter will celebrate its twelfth birthday, YouTube its thirteenth and Facebook its fourteenth. Your social media strategy will probably celebrate an anniversary of its own, as well.

Whether you’ve only been tweeting for a couple of years or you’ve been using social media since the beginning, it’s hard to deny that the platforms have undergone a tremendous shift in recent years. To keep up, we’ve rounded up some of the best ways to improve your social media strategy in 2018…

1. Less could be more 

When was the last time you looked at your social media strategy from a customer’s perspective? If you’re using scheduling tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer, you may not have logged on for a long time. Instead, you spend your hours staring at a dashboard and looking through analytics to see trends.

It can be hard to have your voice heard on social media. But, tweeting or posting too much content could be bad for your business. Doing so can make your accounts appear automated and reduce your organic reach. You could also have important marketing messages lost in a sea of others.

To avoid over-saturating your customers’ feeds with boring content, learn to automate on social media without looking like a robot. Tips include sharing original material, logging into your actual accounts to monitor progress, and interacting with other users.

2. Move away from stock images 

Stock images serve a purpose. They help to visualise your content, and they’re much more attractive than text alone. On social media especially, visual content can be highly effective. Tweets containing images receive up to 150% more engagement than text-based content. But times are changing, and consumers are switching on to the stock image market. Do you really want to be using the same generic imagery as ten other brands in your niche? If you want to stand out and improve your marketing on social media, take your own images that demonstrate your brand and customer base.

After all, people have followed your account to get updates on your business – not to see images from a photographer on the other side of the world. Plus, sharing your own images can increase brand awareness, customer loyalty and help you make connections online.

3. Stop avoiding video 

Video content has been on the up for a number of years, but most small and medium-sized businesses have chosen to avoid it like the plague. And we get it: recording and editing video content is significantly more time consuming and costly than tweeting out blog posts or images.

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However, the benefits of video content are vast. By 2021, video content will make up an eye-watering 82% of online data traffic, so getting your foot in the door and creating impactful content today makes sense. The sooner you learn to pick up a camera and film footage of your office – record a “how to” video or a “day in the life” – the sooner you’ll see success on social.

4. Personalise customer service

Nowadays, consumers expect to take their comments and complaints straight to social media, bypassing traditional customer service channels like email and telephone. To really make your brand stand out in 2018, you should consider upping your customer service. Business pages on Facebook display a time next to how responsive you are, so you should aim to get back to customer messages as soon as possible. Similarly, on Twitter and other social networking sites such as Instagram, you should aim to get back to customers within an hour during usual working hours, so consider setting up notifications to avoid missing messages.

There you have it – a few ways you can improve your social media strategy for the year ahead. Remember that your audience wants to see quality content, so always be mindful of your messages and whether or not they’re truly relevant to the customers you’re trying to reach.

Max Greene is the Managing Director of Muffin Marketing, a marketing agency specialising in content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimisation.