When considering your marketing strategy, coming up with social media ideas can be a struggle. Social media marketing is an effective way to keep in touch with your clients and gain exposure for your business or blog. Whether you’re a total newbie at social media marketing or need ideas to spice up your current marketing strategies, discover social media marketing ideas from this guide that can help you with your campaigns.

1. Utilize tags when possible.
If you use a social media network that uses tags, such as Twitter, be sure to add them to your posts. Tags or hashtags are useful because people can find your posts when they search for relevant tags in your posts. When using tags or hashtags, make sure that your tags are two or three words long and relevant to your posts; if you stuff keywords, it can look like spam and be unattractive, which can make you lose visitors to your social media page.

2. Check out your competitors’ posts.
Look for popular posts on your competitors’ social media pages, and see if you can create your own unique content from it. For instance, if you’re in a cooking business and a competitor has a popular post about the best quick dinner meal recipes on his or her social media page, you can create a post similar to the topic, such as a post about the best 30-minute dinner meals. When you derive your content from a competitor’s popular post, you need to figure out why it’s popular, which can be the title, and how the post is formatted. If there are comments about the article from readers, take note of what they say about the post; use the comments as tips to help you write your own article.

If you want to keep track of your competitors better, search for tags or posts on social media networks that relate to your business, and follow your competitors. If you don’t want to follow them, you can create a spreadsheet and copy and paste the links onto it instead. Check your competitors’ social media pages at least once per day, and note any popular posts or links that their followers share or comment on. By doing this over time, you can see what your target audience likes to read and keep track of where they visit online.

3. Create eye-catching thumbnail images for YouTube videos.
If you’re using YouTube as a social media marketing tool for your business, get more YouTube video views by creating appealing thumbnails for them. You can use a graphic editor such as Photoshop or GIMP to help you create the thumbnail images. When you create the thumbnail images, be sure to include the following:

1. An image of yourself showing a fun expression or appearance
2. A colorful background that’s not too bright
3. A large title in white, red or blue

You want to create thumbnail images for your YouTube videos that will catch people’s attention and make them choose to watch your video over others. Make your images crisp and clean so they look attractive and interesting. This also helps you add credibility for your business since your YouTube videos will look more organized and professional when you create thumbnail images for them.

4. Choose the best social media accounts for you instead of using them all.
With many social media networks on the rise such as Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Pinterest, there are many to choose from when you want to get into social media marketing for your business or blog. However, don’t overwhelm yourself by signing up for all the popular social media networks on the Internet. Not only will you lose time to focus on more important aspects of your business, but you’ll also have too much to learn about all the social media networks in order to use them effectively. Instead, take your time to explore the popular social media networks to see which ones are the best for your business. For instance, if you host a blog, you can use Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to share your posts whenever you update your blog. If you own a restaurant or bakery, you can use Instagram to share photos of new menu items you’ve created, restaurant decor or how you create your items.

5. Be a conversationalist on your social media pages.
Social media networks aren’t just for promoting yourself: It’s used mostly to socialize and connect with others who have the same interests as you do. Engaging with your followers not only helps your business grow, but it also helps you build better client relationships. You should also answer messages when you receive them from your followers. If you want to engage your audience, you can create interesting tidbits about your day that people can relate to or play trivia with your followers and offer discounts on your products or services to those who answered a question right.