How to Use Social Media Effectively in 2025

Social media has steadily become a bigger and bigger part of daily life. Over five billion people, or more than 60% of the global population, use at least one social media platform. That kind of massive popularity presents a huge opportunity for business leaders. By getting on social media and implementing the right marketing strategies, you can drive great results for your business.

There’s a misconception that social media marketing only works for massive corporations like Coca-Cola or Nike, but that’s not the case. Even small businesses can leverage social media in a way that fits their budget and reaches their target customers.

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn how to use social media effectively to promote your small business. It will cover everything from finding and understanding your target audience to strategies for creating and distributing content that resonates with that audience. By the end, you’ll be ready to start developing your own social media strategy to grow your business.

The most popular social media platforms have changed over time, with some, like Friendster and Vine, closing entirely. Today, the biggest platforms in terms of their number of monthly users include:

Facebook: The biggest social media platform in the world. Its user base skews slightly male, and most users are over 35.
Instagram: Instagram started as a photo-sharing platform but has also expanded into videos. It’s most popular with users between 18 and 35 years old.
TikTok: TikTok is arguably behind the current craze for short-form videos, and it’s especially popular with young adults.
Pinterest: Pinterest’s user base is largely female, and the platform emphasizes photo sharing.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is known as a professional social media site where users can connect with colleagues, business leaders, and brands.
YouTube: On YouTube, users can post videos that are anywhere from a few seconds to many hours long. Its user base skews slightly male, but the platform is popular across age groups.

Part of learning how to use social media effectively is choosing the right platforms for your brand. It’s not realistic to try to succeed on every platform, so focus on selecting platforms where you can successfully connect with your target audience. For example, TikTok and Instagram may be the best options if your target audience is on the younger side.

With the explosive popularity of TikTok, many other platforms have shifted toward emphasizing short-form video content, too. Instagram, for example, launched Instagram Reels, while YouTube debuted YouTube Shorts.

Another significant trend recently is the decline in organic reach. Organic social media reach is when you build an audience by posting content for free and relying on users’ engagement. With organic reach declining, there’s a greater emphasis on using paid social media marketing to reach wider audiences.

The first thing you should do when deciding to use social media for your business is to set clear goals. These goals will be your guiding light every time you need to make a decision about what to post, which platforms to use, or how to engage your audience. Once you define your “why” behind using social media marketing, your goals will keep your whole team on the same page and focused on achieving something specific.

Common social media marketing goals include:

Increasing brand awareness
Boosting traffic to your website
Generating new leads
Improving customer service
Reaching new markets
Enhancing your brand reputation

Make sure the goals you set align with your broader business goals. For example, if one of your goals this year is to grow sales by 10%, you could set a social media goal of driving 20% more web traffic through your social posts.

The most useful goals adhere to the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. So, using the example above, you could fine-tune the goal even further to “Increase web traffic by 20% by the end of the year by consistently posting on social media and linking back to our brand website.”

Knowing your audience inside and out

Another key factor in how to use social media effectively is understanding the target audience. The better you understand and connect with your audience, the more impactful your social media efforts will be.

It can be very helpful to start by creating audience personas for the types of customers you’re trying to reach on social media. An audience persona is a fictional profile of someone within your target audience, with details about their demographics, behaviors, preferences, and pain points.

For example, one of your audience personas could be Sarah. Sarah is a 40-year-old who lives in the city, regularly hikes, and enjoys watching outdoorsy content on Instagram and Facebook. From there, you would use this profile to create social media content that appeals to this fictional person and, by extension, the rest of your target audience.

But how do you figure out more about your audience? Try strategies like:

Sending out surveys to existing customers to ask them about their thoughts and preferences
Analyzing your website data to better understand who visits your site
Looking at the data you collect about your existing customers, such as their locations and spending habits
Doing social media listening, reading what customers and other users are saying online

Once you’ve been on social media for a little while, you can use platform analytics tools to dig deeper into your audience. These tools can show you the age range, gender, location, interests, and more details about the people interacting with your social media content.

Take the information you gather about your audience and use it to match the content you produce to your audience’s preferences. If your audience prefers video content, focus on sharing more of that. If they’re interested in humor, incorporate some fun and jokes into your posts.

If you had to break down social marketing into five categories to focus on, they would be:

Content: Creating valuable, engaging material

Your content is the star of your social media, so don’t cut corners. Focus on making enjoyable, useful posts that appeal to your target audience.

Conversation: Building a genuine dialogue with followers

Social media is called “social” for a reason. You can and should use these platforms to interact with your audiences, building a deeper relationship. Reply to comments, encourage them to share their thoughts, and always be open to feedback.

Community: Fostering connection among your audience

It’s not just about the relationship between each user and your brand, either. Try to foster a connection between your audience members by encouraging them to interact with posts and share their own stories. If you make a habit of interacting and showing your followers that you value their input, you’ll strengthen your online community.

Consistency: Maintaining regular, reliable presence

The unfortunate truth of social media is that without new content, users will quickly direct their attention elsewhere. Stay relevant and engaging by posting consistently on the platforms you choose.

Once you grow and engage your audience, the key next step is converting that engagement into real results for your business. Use compelling calls to action (CTAs) to get users to take the next step toward making a purchase, whether that’s visiting your website, making a call, or filling out a sign-up form.

With your goals in place and an understanding of your target audience, you can create your plan for how to use social media effectively. Make sure you tick these boxes:

Selecting your social media platforms: Focusing on just one or two (at least to start) can make the process more manageable and still yield great results.
Allocating resources: Set a budget, assign team members to different social media tasks, and decide how much time you’re going to dedicate to this project.
Set a content calendar: Determine how often you’re going to post and what topics you’re going to cover. Creating this calendar ahead of time, monthly or quarterly, and using content planning tools will help you stay on top of posting.
Integrate with your other marketing channels: Don’t silo your social media marketing. Make sure it ties in with your other marketing channels, especially email. Consider promoting your social media accounts to your email subscribers and directing them to great posts.

Content creation fundamentals

There are lots of different types of content you can post on social media. Your job is determining what kind of content your target audience wants to see, from the topics you cover to the content formats you use.

Consider these popular content formats:

Short-form video (less than two minutes long)
Long-form video (longer than two minutes, up to several hours long)
Live video
Text posts
Photos
Images and graphics

The platform you’re using will guide which types of content you can post. For example, TikTok is all about short-form videos. Facebook is much more flexible, allowing you to publish images, videos, and text posts.

You can experiment with different types of posts until you find the formats that resonate most with your audience. And don’t overlook user-generated content strategies. User-generated content (UGC) is content that regular, everyday people share on social media about a brand and its products or services.

Sharing UGC on your social pages can be a way to show your audience the positive experiences real customers have with your brand. It’s like digital word-of-mouth promotion.

Content distribution rules and frameworks

Part of learning how to use social media effectively is posting regularly, but don’t overwhelm yourself and your audience by trying to post as much as possible. Instead, create a sustainable posting schedule you’ll be able to stick to for months, if not years, to come.

Aim to post between three to seven times each week. In terms of what to post, you may find the 50/30/20 rule helpful for balancing your content. This rule suggests breaking your posts up into these categories:

50% engaging content: Posts like tips, tutorials, and answering questions that are relevant to your target audience
30% curated content: Sharing content from other sources that you deem useful and interesting to your audience
20% promotional content: Posts that directly promote your brand’s products or services, like new product rollout posts

Essie uses social media effectively with these Instagram posts featuring use and complete design — On Instagram, nail polish brand Essie shares design ideas and nail inspiration to inspire their audience, balancing out some of the more direct promotional posts. Image source: Essie on Instagram

If you’re active on multiple platforms, remember that you can reuse your content. Your audience on one platform may be different than the audience on another, so share your content across your accounts (with adaptations as necessary) for the broadest reach.

It will take time to build up an audience, even if you’re posting regularly. One strategy for boosting engagement and connections on social media is the 5-5-5 method. In this method, you dedicate five minutes to liking five posts on social media and posting five comments. By engaging with related social media content, you’ll get your page in front of more social media users and speed up your growth.

Building genuine engagement

A common mistake business leaders make when starting out on social media is treating it like a one-way street. You post content, and that’s the end. But when you treat social media this way, you’re missing a huge opportunity to create a meaningful connection with your audience and generate engagement.

Higher engagement will help your page perform well in social media algorithms, create more brand loyalty, and ultimately lead to better results from your marketing efforts. Try these techniques for increasing comments and shares:

Posting a variety of content formats to keep your audience interested and find out what they like best
Using humor in appropriate ways
Encouraging the audience to share their opinions, thoughts, and experiences in the comments section
Creating content that’s interesting and valuable enough for users to want to share with people they know
Focusing on posting videos over static content
Sharing interactive content like polls and live Q&A sessions

You should encourage audience participation as much as possible. If you get feedback on your posts, respond to it. With positive feedback, you can thank the user for sharing their experience and maybe add extra details to personalize your response.

With negative feedback, it’s still valuable to post a response. Don’t sweep these comments under the rug. Stay professional, and try to address the user’s concern. If necessary, reach out to them privately to get into more details. Engaging with negative feedback gives you the opportunity to improve that unhappy user’s experience and highlight your commitment to customer service in front of the rest of your audience.

Measuring success and ROI

Whenever you launch a new promotional campaign, you need to clarify how you’ll know if your efforts are a success. Some metrics you can use to measure social media marketing success include:

Reach: The number of unique users who see your content
Engagement: The number of likes, shares, and comments you get on your posts
Follower count: The number of people who follow your brand pages
Click-through rate: The percentage of users who click on links in your posts
Conversion rate: The percentage of users who complete a conversion, such as signing up for a contact list, making a call, or buying something

When you set up a business account, most social media platforms have built-in tools to help you track basic metrics about how users engage with your posts. You can also use third-party tools for more thorough tracking and analysis.

Track your social media performance over time to see if you’re making improvements. If you used the SMART goal framework, you should be able to analyze your performance metrics against the goals you set.

Don’t worry if you don’t see the results you’re hoping for right away. Use your analysis to figure out what works and what doesn’t, then make changes for better results going forward.

Measuring social media return on investment can be challenging because it’s sometimes tricky to tie your conversions and sales to your social media efforts. However, using tools to track direct revenue from users clicking on your social posts and completing purchases is a good place to start.

You can’t underestimate the value of good social media marketing tools as you’re exploring how to use social media effectively. From tools that help you design your content to analytics software, these tools will make managing your social media pages much easier. Consider these options:

Content creation tools for non-designers

These tools often include pre-designed post templates that you can easily customize to fit your brand. They may also provide stock images and graphics for you to jazz up your posts. With tools like these, you don’t need to be a designer to create attractive, professional social media content.

Scheduling and management platforms

Social media scheduling tools allow you to create your posts ahead of time and designate when you want to post them. When the scheduled time arrives, the software will publish your post for you automatically.

Analytics and reporting solutions

As you dive deeper into social media marketing, the built-in platform analytics tools probably won’t be enough. Look for third-party analytics tools that monitor, analyze, and present your social media metrics in an easy-to-understand way. Analytics dashboards that use data visualization like graphs and charts can be especially helpful for engaging with your results.

Learning resources for ongoing education

Social media is always evolving, so it’s important to stay up-to-date with new techniques and best practices. Digital marketing webinars are a great resource for learning more.

You may also find it helpful to get advice from other small business leaders who are in the same boat. Try asking questions and hearing about others’ experiences with social media marketing in an online community like the Constant Contact Community.

No one is an expert at anything when they start. As you’re getting the hang of social media marketing, try to avoid these common mistakes.

Platform oversaturation and burnout

When you start out, you may have tons of great content ideas and enthusiasm for sharing them with your audience. It’s totally understandable. But resist the urge to post as much as possible.

If you set an unrealistic, overwhelming posting schedule at the beginning, you’ll quickly burn out. And your content won’t have as much of an impact on your audience, either. Instead, focus on setting a posting schedule that you can actually maintain long-term.

Continually brainstorm ideas so you’re not running out of content to post. If you want to create a large batch of content at once, that’s a great idea. Just hold off on posting it all and spread the posts out on a content schedule.

Inconsistent posting and engagement

Then, there’s the opposite problem: not posting frequently enough. If you go long periods without posting or just post sporadically, you won’t be able to build a strong relationship with your audience.

Some users will probably forget about your account and lose interest. Others will be discouraged from waiting for new content or a response to their comments. Some loyal followers will stick around no matter what, but it’s still a missed opportunity to get more out of your social media pages.

So, try to set a post schedule and stick to it. Be consistent about responding to comments, engaging with other accounts, and interacting with your followers. Becoming a reliable presence on social media is key to growing your page.

Overly promotional content

No one likes to feel like they’re being bombarded with advertising or sales-speak. If all of your content is just direct promotion for your products or services, you’re going to scare off a lot of potential followers.

Focus on creating a balance in your content instead. You can use the 50/30/20 method or any other method that works for you, just don’t make overly promotional content the focus of your page.

The majority of your content should be about providing value to your audience rather than the other way around. Share things that they would find interesting, engaging, or useful. Then, once in a while, you can slip in a post that’s more promotional. Bonus points if you can make those promotional posts extra engaging in their own way.

Ignoring audience feedback and data

Your social media audience is an invaluable resource for gaining insights into how customers feel about your brand, what they like and don’t like, and what content has the biggest impact. When your audience offers feedback, listen.

There’s direct feedback in the form of comments and messages, but there’s also indirect feedback in your account metrics. If your audience really likes a particular type of content, those posts will probably have higher engagement and conversion rates.

Pay attention to all this information so you can fine-tune your marketing efforts. Your audience may even give you new ideas for products to release or changes to make behind the scenes that will help you grow your business further.

Poor crisis management approaches

You can’t make everyone happy in real life or on social media. Eventually, everyone gets a nasty comment or even several. What matters is not avoiding eliminating that kind of engagement entirely—it’s how you handle them when they come up. Poor crisis management will hurt your brand on social media, while good crisis management can actually strengthen your relationship with your audience.

Have a procedure in place for dealing with customer relationship issues on your social media pages. For example, you might start by taking at least a few minutes to calm down so you don’t respond impulsively. Then, respond politely. Acknowledge what the commenter or commenters said and offer a solution.

If necessary, take contentious discussions off your public page and into a private forum like email or phone. The same principles apply if you’re dealing with a wider crisis on social media. Stay calm and professional, address the issue promptly, and work toward a solution. Strong crisis management will make your business seem much more trustworthy.

An often overlooked aspect of social media is using it as a customer support channel. On your social media pages, you can quickly answer customer questions, address issues, and work toward resolutions.

The comment sections of your posts and your direct messaging inbox (if enabled) are both avenues where customers may bring up inquiries or concerns on social media. Note that comments are public, while messages are generally private.

You may get some difficult public comments but don’t panic or ignore them. Acknowledge what the customer said and avoid making excuses. Instead, offer an apology if warranted and offer concrete steps you can take to solve the problem. If the issue is complex or involves personal details, move the conversation to a private channel.

Make sure your responses to these customer service requests are as prompt as possible, ideally within the first 24 hours. Responding quickly will make your customers feel heard and leave them with a better impression of your brand.

Integration with email marketing

The best social media marketing works together with your other marketing channels like email. Your email marketing can help your social media and vice versa—all to drive better results for your business. Just remember to keep consistent design and messaging across channels for the greatest impact.

One strategy is growing your email list on social media. You can put a link to your email sign-up directly in your bio (depending on the social media site) or add calls to action in your posts that link to your sign-up form.

Some brands show lead magnet previews in their social media and direct users to sign up for their email lists to access the rest of the content. Or, you could run social media contests and giveaways that require users to sign up for your email list to enter.

Promote your email content on your social media pages to grow your list. Tease your most recent email newsletter, for example, so your social media followers get an idea of what they’re missing out on unless they become email subscribers.

Conversely, you can use your email marketing to drive even higher engagement on social media. Your email subscribers have already proven that they’re interested in what you have to say, so there’s a good chance they’d enjoy your social media content, too.

Start by adding links to your social media pages in the email footer. Often, brands just include little graphics representing each social media platform with links to their pages. These links make it easy for interested email subscribers to find your content on the platforms they use.

But you can take it one step further. Do some direct social media promotion in the body of marketing emails. Incorporate previews of the videos or images you post and encourage readers to visit your profiles. Try clear CTAs like:

Follow our page on Instagram
Watch the rest of this video on YouTube
Check out our content on [Platform]
Share this post with a friend
What do you think? Leave us a comment

The easier you make it for your email subscribers to discover your social media posts, the faster your socials will grow.

Sock company Bombas adds links to its Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest accounts with graphics in the footer of each marketing email to help drive traffic to its social media pages. Image source: Bombas

Promoting your business on social media can work for any brand in any industry—no matter how big or small. While it may feel overwhelming at first, it’s actually very doable if you break the process of how to use social media effectively up into steps.

Start by setting your goals. What do you hope to accomplish by putting your brand on social media? Once you know that, you can choose platforms, start brainstorming ideas, and create your content. Then, hit publish and monitor your results. Learn by listening to your audience and analyzing your metrics.

You don’t have to do it all alone, either. Use social media tools like Constant Contact to make the process more manageable. With Constant Contact, you can schedule your content, publish it across multiple platforms from a single dashboard, and even boost your growth with paid social ads.

How to Use Social Media Effectively: A Complete Guide for Small Businesses