10 Tips to Strengthen Your Social Media Strategy for 2025

happy thursday, y’all! writing to you in a full sweatsuit because where tf did this winter-esque weather come from in new york? give me the 75 degree days again!!!

i hope you’re having an amazing week and eating a ton of good snacks and watching love is blind or blasting the new remixed Charli XCX album.

this week, we’re chatting about how you can use your data that you have in the palm of your hand (aka your phone) to inform your social media strategy easily. just tell me what you think about the tips after your read them, okay? k thnx.

anywho, before we hop into today’s newsletter, i am excited to announce my own journey of trying to become tiktok famous. just kidding, i swear. i just started my own tiktok (@kendallhasnofilter) to ideally focus on creating content around social media, influencer marketing, what i have learned being a consultant for 8+ years and probably doing snack reviews because what else would i do. feel free to follow along.

also, a reminder for all of my NYC and Brooklyn folks, I will be speaking at TALEA’s BetterFest on Sunday, October 27th. You can use the code “NOFILTER25” right here. I’ll be talking all about how to build a personal brand on social media.

Ok, it’s go time.

BUT BEFORE WE GET INTO IT…

I have a quick, free gift for you.

If you’re a brand who is just working on their influencer strategy or wants to learn more about influencer marketing or perhaps you’re someone who has been working in the space for years, but have been looking for a perfect resource, it now exists as of October 16th.

It’s true that many of the best strategies are kept under lock and key, with influencer marketers left in the dark on how to advance their programs—or how to break into the space at all.

I’m so honored to give you the first look at the Influencer Marketing Field Guide by my friends over at Superbloom and Superfiliate!

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Inside, you’ll receive:

• Information around five core themes from sourcing + vetting, what to book + negotiating, contracting + creator support, and measuring + scaling success of your program

• 24 video-first chapters with industry experts

• 200+ mini video highlights with quick tips that you can easily start implementing the minute you download it

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From the basics of sourcing influencers across social platforms to more complex topics like whitelisting best practices and contracting creators to help you, The Field Guide is written BY influencer marketers and is FOR present and future influencer marketers.

You get to learn from our mistakes, our wins, and all of our years of experimenting to discover what works.

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Also, don’t make fun of my headshot. I know I really need one.

10 WAYS TO USE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA DATA EFFECTIVELY

Soooo the work actually starts before you start using the tips below.

Audit yourself and the work that has been done on the account or accounts that you brand is active across. What content was working? What wasn’t? Look at publishing metrics, audience demographics, what content was driving more distribution (shares) or establishing more community (comments)?

Don’t leave your data on the table. Dig deep and get granular.

When it comes to the broader goals of how social media operates with a business, it will always be relative to that brand and truthfully, the executive team on that brand.

Primarily, social media has a few main goals:

• Increase brand awareness (please note how increasing sales is not #1)

• Increasing potential web traffic (once again, look not sales!)

• Growing the online community (via content, CS support) and increasing community engagement (catching on?)

• Drive sales (as a bonus of doing the above!!!!!)

Ok, now let’s get into 10 ways you could make your life easier if you just spent a few minutes a week looking at your data:

1. Understand that social media data sin’t just in the numbers of likes you get on a post or the number of followers you have. Yes, those KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) may show that your efforts are moving the brand in the right direction, but they aren’t the end all be all. Your social media data is your shortcut to helping you ramp up, slow down (hey, sometimes it’s needed!) or just keep going at your pace to understand your audience from what they love, to what they dont so that you know where to focus for real impact to help move those KPI along.
   

2. Study Your Top Performers — When you’re in the weeds being a one-person show or your a solo founder trying to figure out what you’re doing, take a setep back and look at the work you’ve put in so far. What visuals, tones, and themes or content pillars resonated the most with your audience? For example, if you’re a food brand, do specific recipe formats work best? Do people prefer when you add the recipe in the caption or don’t by seeing if it increases engagement via people saving it? Do videos between the lengths of 15-30 perform better than 60 seconds? You have access to this all so use it vs. wasting your time doing things that may not serve you.
   

3. Optimize Your Posting Schedule — One of the biggest questions I get is “what time should I post?” To that, my answer nicely is “I can’t see your data so I don’t know the answer.” There is no magic time. You need to post enough and test across time zones, times of the day, to be able to collect 60-90 days of data IMO when starting out. Is most of your audience PST, but you’re EST? That matters. Is your audience/customer online during the day or are they working a 9-5? That matters. Understanding your consumer matters. Post when they would be seeing it, not when you want to just because you need to get a post up.
   

4. Look at Your Content Mix. If you know that static photo is the least performing medium for you on Instagram then why keep creating for that medium? Leverage your engagement analytics and medium specific analytics to understand where to put your effort or where you need to resource the business. For example, if you see that Reels are outperforming consistently, I would be hiring someone to help part-time so that we can double down for output. Don’t say “content isn’t working” if you haven’t let your data show you where to put your time and to refine yet! There’s always room to improve. Good content will perform (most of the time!), but good content comes from understanding the things that did not work and taking the step back to see what did.
   

5. Your Likes Don’t Determine Your Success — Action is everything. Engagement is great and helps. Look at the post formats, pillars, or types that are helping you gain the most distribution, reach/views, community interaction, and/or traffic.

   • How do you know your video is gaining traction? Look at the views. Know you’re on a good path, but something just didn’t work? Try the same content again, but with a different hook or format.

   • How do you know people are interested in your content? Shares. Why? They want to let their friends know about it or took a second to share it to their own story because it struck a cord.

   • How do you know people find it valuable? Well, it could be a mix, but let’s say Saves. They want to come back to it.
     

6. Listen To Your Customers — We know that creating for your consumer is important, but so is listening. What excites your followers? What irks them? Is there a constant question or comment being uploaded by followers? Tend to it. They are telling you something. Listen, create, post.
   

7. A/B Testing isn’t just for Email or Ads — It is for your social, too. This is just one of the reasons why understanding that knowing how to recycle and distribute content is an underrated skill. Testing is part of the journey. Small tweaks can make the greatest impact. For example, if you have a recipe video (as you see it’s easy for me to talk about food), then does a video perform better when you have the title of the dish as the cover image or the hook of “how to make ______”.
   

8. Use Your Competitors For Your Own Strategy — Make their weak spots your strength. In most cases that I see, education is the biggest weak spot, especially for the larger brands in a niche because they already spent their time educating enough to gain the traction they did, buuuuut then they stop. Remember, just because you may have millions of followers or a multi-million dollar biz doesn’t mean that your customers (old or new) are going to scroll back 3 years to see something you posted to understand a topic better around your product. Keep it fresh.
   

9. Get Focused on Your Paid Ad Strategy — I have said it before and I will literally say it again…and again…and again. Use your organic social media creative to inform your ad strategy before you toss money at the wall. If you’re ballin’ on a budget, organic social is naturally a cheap and almost free way to gain insights into product-market fit, interest, and more. Money may solve a lot of issues, but it won’t buy you a community, just an audience.
   

10. Actually Track and Report Insights — Turn your insights into regular reports to monitor your growth, best performing content, what’s not working, and more. I have this free social media reporting template that you can make a copy of if you want.

AHEAD OF THE TRENDS

A quick, snappy ode to the fun things I am seeing online across creators, social and brands. Sometimes, it’s a trend. Sometimes, it’s just a tip I want to share when it comes to marketing. TLDR; it’s just things that are cool.

• Trend of the Week: One of my favorite has been the Position Meme circulating around the internet for the last week or so. Rachel and Andrew at Cava crushed it for their Twitter. I refuse to call it X. Like Rachel even said, “anything can be brand safe if you try hard enough” showing that post and one from Spotify. BTW she has a great newsletter, Link In Bio. If you aren’t subbed and work in marketing in any way, you need to sign up.

• Product of the Week: This week’s product is one that is only in pre-order and one that I am excited about because they are my new client. Meet GOB. Follow along here as we make earplugs look hella cool and educate all about sound and more. If you have a product or you own a venue or work in music or the sleep space, hit me up at [email protected] and let’s see what we can do.

• Account I Am Crushing On: It’s an oldie, but goodie. The BRTHWRK tiktok account is still one of my favorites to date, but like the olddddd content. You can see some of what the content was like by their pinned posts. I was going through my bookmarks and their way of making a trend like breathwork fun, easy, and entertaining was just so amazing to watch and the way they leveraged their community recs to make new videos via replying or dueting was perfect.

LOGGING OFF FOR NOW

That’s it for this week! As always, thank you for letting me steal a spot in your inbox.

If you have questions about it, please hit "REPLY”. These newsletters are made to help you so I want to get your questions in real time as you need answers or things you’re just wondering about. You can always send them her or DM me on Twitter.

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Peace, love, and KPIs.

-KD

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