Five Hacks To Make The Most Of Your Social Media Strategy A strong social media strategy is a must for any business looking to brave the waters of marketing in the digital age.

So, you've spent all this money on an advanced social listening tool to help your business make the most of its social media strategy. Now what?

Here are five hacks that can take your social performance from good to great.

1. Set clear timeframes

Are you tracking a certain campaign? Or is your social listening an ongoing effort (as it probably should be)?

Identify the time-frames you will be monitoring and reporting on. Consider monitoring elements such as brand mentions, trending hashtags and industry news daily and other elements such as competitors' performance, upcoming events, and A/B test results every month instead. This social media checklist provides a handy breakdown of what should be monitored on a daily, weekly, quarterly and yearly basis.

2. Create alerts

You know what doesn't wait for your reporting timeframes? A crisis! Or a viral trend!

That's why you need to set up alerts that track spikes in activity (great for jumping on a trend before your competitors), or buzzwords that might indicate not-so-great news for your brand. This gives you the real-time advantage of being able to act quickly and activate PR crisis plans.

3. Create specific content for the platform(s) you are posting on

Each social media platform favors a certain type of content. For example, image-based platforms like Instagram are more well-suited to visually appealing products such as cars or fashion brands. This is linked to the platform's algorithms but also - quite simply - to what speaks to the audience on that platform.

Now, let's take a look at Emaar's recent social strategy. The Dubai-based property developer recognized the opportunity that the exponentially growing social platform TikTok presents. TikTok favors short-form videos that are entertaining and shareable.

However, Emaar initially seemed to be reposting videos that were created for Instagram. Too corporate. Too out of place on TikTok. Unsurprisingly, these videos did not perform very well.

A different story emerged when the brand took part in Dubai Tourism's #ThisIsDubai challenge, which featured content that was more clearly created for TikTok. These videos were not overproduced and featured young and entertaining rap songs that spoke to TikTok's audience- and the proof was in the engagement figures that jumped from single figures to thousands.

4. Share your results

It's only fair that you do justice to all the hard work you put in identifying, measuring, analyzing, filtering, and optimizing your results. Your report needs to cover all these elements without being too data-heavy and inaccessible to those who don't have a deep understanding of social.

Your report should be visual, comprehensive, and understandable across the board. After all, you need to put your best foot forward to convince budget owners that social media is worth it. Remember to draw key connections between social analysis and results, results and business goals (ROI), successes and next steps to amplify them, and areas of improvement (and an action plan to fix them).

5. Don't get complacent with influencer marketing

Sometimes brands are lucky enough to find great influencers who embody their brand values. So, they create long-term collaborations with them. Maybe they even turn them into brand ambassadors. That's fantastic.

It's also dangerous.

Often, when you find "the one" you stop looking. You miss out on other opportunities. Nowadays, there's a wealth of options when it comes to influencer marketing and great marketers recognize the opportunity to engage different ones for different campaigns and strategically leverage an influencer's beat, so to speak.

Using a social listening tool, you can find influencers who are relevant to your brand and are actively engaging your target audience. Approach each campaign or marketing wave with a fresh perspective, and let the results speak for themselves.

Related: Six Social Media Marketing Facts You Need to Know