Michael Epps Utley 
Has your social media become a little same old, same old lately? Is engagement on your social platforms down?
This guide reveals nine hacks to refresh and jumpstart your social media.
1. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
It may seem counterintuitive, but taking a less-is-more approach to posting on social can improve your engagement.
Social platforms have historically rewarded profiles that post frequently, but constant low-quality posting has diminishing returns for audiences. Posting frequently can help you stay top of mind and in the algorithm’s good graces, but people may start to feel overwhelmed with incessant brand messaging.
If you want your company to stand out on social media today, focus on delivering value to your followers rather than just blasting posts at them. This will make people look forward to seeing your content rather than ignoring it. Be consistent, but be strategic.
2. Push Out More Video Content on Social Media
The demand for video is insatiable today. TikToks, Reels, Shorts, and other short-form videos are the most popular types of content on most platforms. On top of this, more and more consumers today base purchase decisions on watching videos.
That’s why social media platforms currently prioritize video over other kinds of content. If your business is not sharing videos on social media, it’s
time to play catch-up.
Here are some of the most popular kinds of small business social media videos:
Behind the scenes at your business
Product and service demos
User-generated videos
Trend-hopping and memes
Select video formats that align with your business type and marketing goals, but remain open to new possibilities and trends.
3. Automate Your Social Media
Managing multiple social media channels can feel overwhelming for most small businesses. Developing posts, creating captions for videos and images, interacting with followers, and performing other social media-related activities can be time-consuming.
Social media automation allows you to schedule your social media posts and monitor results in a single place. A tool like Hubspot will automatically post on all your social media platforms at the time you choose. This can save small businesses significant time over one-off efforts and encourage regular posting, which can improve social media engagement.
4. Leverage Chatbots on Social Media
Unless your business has a dedicated social media person or team, responding promptly to all social media inquiries can be impossible.
This is an issue because prospective buyers will not wait until you have time to answer their inquiries. They will likely move on to more responsive competitors if they don't get instant replies.
Take advantage of chatbots to avoid losing these potential sales opportunities. Chatbots can leverage artificial intelligence to answer commonly asked questions about your company. If programmed correctly, they can even collect contact information and add it to your customer relationship management tool, transforming inquiries into leads. Chatbots can also be programmed to hand people over to a human customer service representative who can handle more complex requests.
5. Add Stories to Your Social Content Mix
Stories began as a feature on Snapchat. Since then, other social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter (X), have added their version of Stories.
Stories allow users to post content—either images or videos—that appears at the top of the social feed and disappears after 24 hours.
If you have not used the Stories feature on your small business social platforms, you should do so. It can add a sense of timeliness and urgency to your social content mix. Similarly, you might pin content to your profile for extended periods of time to keep a new feature, product, or event top of mind.
6. Share More Snackable Content
People’s attention spans have been decreasing for decades. Some reports say that individual attention spans online are only about eight seconds.
To respond to this, most social media platforms now prioritize shorter, snackable content bites , typically consumed in about 30 seconds or less.
TikTok is a perfect example of a social media platform focused on short, snackable pieces of video content. The platform is only eight years old but has amassed more than 500 million active monthly users.
If your content tends to run long, find ways to repurpose it into more digestible bits, including short videos, factoids, memes, and infographics.
7. Check Out Your Competitors
If you want your business to excel on social media, you must keep an eye on your competition.
Even as you focus on promoting your brand, consistently watch your competitors to find out what they’re doing on social media. Perform a social media competitive analysis, map out their strengths and weaknesses, and then use this information to identify strategies and tactics to help your business gain an edge.
8. Recycle and Reshare Content
An extraordinary amount of content is posted to social media every day, week, month, and year. In this vast pool, ensuring your posts reach the people you want can be very challenging.
One proven way to achieve this is by recycling and resharing posts. Simply identify content that performed effectively, update the copy and images used in the original post, and reshare the posts. This provides additional opportunities for people to see content that could be meaningful to them.
Continue recycling and resharing content until results begin to decline.
9. Conduct Social Polls
Polls are known to earn higher engagement than standard social media content.
Typically, people don’t need much encouragement to participate in online polls. They love sharing their opinions online!
Beyond boosting engagement, online polls help you better understand your followers and their opinions. They could improve your business decision-making and maybe help you come up with ideas for new products and services.
Small Business Social Media Hacks: The Final Word
If your social media has become stale and less engaging, it’s easy to freshen things up and jumpstart follower interest. Leverage the hacks in this guide to bring new life to your social media feeds.
