If you don’t know how to use social media to scale your business and elevate your marketing, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table. 

Even if you’ve been using social media for years to drive sales and speak directly to your audience, the continued emergence of new platforms like Threads and TikTok mean it’s crucial to stay up-to-date with the latest trends.

If you’ve been holding off on creating a LinkedIn demand generation strategy, don’t know how to get started on Threads, or you’re wondering what sort of videos to post on TikTok, you’ve come to the right place. 

We’ve got all the info you need about how you can use a range of social media to find your audience, speak directly to consumers, and ultimately scale your business.

The newest kid on the block has taken the social media world by storm, with more than 100 million users signing up to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest creation within days of its launch. 

How do you get started? Well, firstly, Threads is linked to Instagram… so you can’t start a Threads account without first having Insta.

Once you’ve downloaded Threads from the App Store or Google Play, open the app and hit the ‘Login with Instagram button’ at the bottom. You’ll then be presented with the option to follow the same accounts you follow on Instagram.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a row of icons at the bottom of your screen. They are:

The great thing with Threads is that you already have an in-built audience, given that most users automatically follow everyone on their Instagram account.

Threads offers the opportunity to have a direct conversation with consumers, ask them questions, get feedback on your products, and establish your brand’s tone of voice. 

Use it to give your brand some personality without the heavy lift – or cost – of needing to create bespoke imagery or video. And don’t forget to have some fun with it! 

After launching in 2016, TikTok today is undoubtedly the king of video content. 

It’s been downloaded more than three billion times, has a billion-plus active monthly users, and is especially popular with the 16-24 demographic. But those demographics are getting broader every day.

Interestingly, Tiktok users tend to search for products and services in the app first, before they even consider searching on Google. What they find is authentic, user-generated content stacked with products and services they personally feel more driven to buy. 

TikTok is also popular with many small businesses looking to reach a wider audience beyond the city or region they’re based in, by creating their own highly targeted, industry-specific videos and essentially ‘going viral’ in that niche category.

Love it or hate it, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing ways to use social media to scale your business.

Just get busy showcasing your business – you don’t need a professionally-created video to make your mark. Simply grab your phone and start filming. The most popular videos on TikTok are rarely the most polished. 

Just remember to use captions, hashtags, and text in your video so TikTok’s algorithm can find your content.

If you were creating a strategy on how to use social media to scale your business from scratch today, you’d be wary about including Twitter – or X as the name has recently changed to. These days, it’s feeling as unpredictable as Donald Trump’s hair in the wind.

While the company reports that more than 330 million users are still active on the platform, it’s fair to say it’s been a rocky road since tech mogul Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022. 

Musk has made a number of changes since then, including revamping Twitter Blue – with users now charged $US8 a month for access – removing the verified status of high-profile users, briefly banning links to what LinkedIn calls ‘prohibited platforms’ like Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon, and even limiting the amount of tweets users can view in one day.

In late July 2023, Musk made another significant change – ditching the Twitter logo and rebranding the platform ‘X’, to better reflect his vision of creating an all-encompassing service that does much more than just send and receive text-based communications. 

That said, it’s still an influential platform, especially for breaking news. 

While rivals like Mastodon, BlueSky, and now Threads attempt to take market share away, there’s still value in engaging on Twitter – or X – particularly if you’ve built up a decent following over the years.

Just be mindful that some users have started to look elsewhere for their real-time social fix.

Use Twitter to build your personal brand and following, as well as to demonstrate thought leadership in real time. But remember: Twitter’s ‘always on’ nature means it’s much tougher to build a following if you don’t tweet every day.

If you’ve got something insightful to share that requires more than one tweet, start a thread. The first tweet of the thread should be the hook. It needs to be intriguing and thought-provoking enough to draw in the audience. 

Then use the subsequent tweets in the thread to tell your story and report your findings.

While Facebook is these days only marginally bigger than YouTube – a platform that benefits from broadcast-quality videos sitting side by side with user-generated content – Meta-owned Facebook benefits from being one of the oldest social media platforms around.

Today, it boasts almost three million active users – many of whom continue to post business updates and marketing collateral to their company profiles – and sees particularly high engagement among the over-35 age bracket. 

And while groups on Facebook continue to attract large member bases and genuine engagement, it’s paid ads on Meta that generally command the biggest return on investment.

Think of Facebook as a referral platform. People flock there looking for professional service recommendations. 

By ensuring your Facebook business page is up to date, you ensure that your biggest fans and past clients can pay it forward by referring you. 

And if you want to learn more about where your audience lives online, you can run a Meta ad across both Facebook and Instagram and see which platform performs better with your audience.

Just remember: while Facebook may have lost some of its lustre compared to its competitors in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace, it’s still a great way to use social media to scale your business given its sheer reach.

While Threads is attracting plenty of attention, LinkedIn leads the way as arguably the most effective platform for tailored content that speaks directly to your professional audience. 

Thanks to the ability to publish articles and newsletters – not to mention short and snappy posts that drive audience engagement – LinkedIn has become the go-to social media platform for industry innovators and thought-leaders alike.

It’s the perfect place to post business-related and expertise-driven content, with LinkedIn’s algorithm pushing content higher up in its feed that provides first-hand insight and lived experience from genuine experts.

As much as LinkedIn is a fantastic platform on which to create business-related content, a great way to cut through all the noise is simply by using direct messages to open up a one-on-one conversation with your audience. 

You can also try tested paid campaigns – although the reality is you may encounter higher conversion costs than on other platforms.

In short, it’s a must when using social media to scale your business.

Once the obvious market leader for creative content, the rise of video platforms like TikTok, and to a lesser extent Snapchat, means Instagram has had to pivot more than your average netballer to keep up with consumer expectations.

While it’s had to play catch-up to competitors whose sole focus has been video, the addition of Reels in August 2020 has seen the Meta-owned visual platform claw back plenty of market share.

Instagram remains a great visual showcase for your business, and the platform is jam-packed with creative types and consumers who use it to search for products and make online purchases based on what shows up in their feed.

It’s also one of the most youthful platforms around – which means you can’t afford to ignore Instagram if you’re aiming to use social media to scale your business and target key demographics.

Treat your Insta profile like your website. Most consumers now view social pages first to help shape their decisions around purchasing, long before coming anywhere near your website. 

So don’t neglect the opportunity to set up your feed and pinned posts with everything that will resonate with your audience – including what problem your brand is solving, any testimonials you may have received, and what sort of culture you represent. 

One downside is that what you post in-feed is unlikely to get pushed out to anyone other than who’s following you, which is why you should use Reels judiciously to gain a much broader reach.

As Stories are only discoverable by your followers or those who search for and then click on your public profile, they’re only useful for pushing engagement to your current audience. So try to update your Stories daily – and remember they’re a great conversion tool, given those who view them are already fans of your brand.

We use social media every day at Hunt & Hawk to start conversations and drive traffic wherever it needs to go. 

We’re home to a team of creatives who know exactly what content to create for an Insta Reel, use LinkedIn to produce thought-leading articles, and can find an audience on a range of ever-changing social platforms.

If you still need a helping hand with using social media to scale your business, just drop us a line. We’re always here to help.