The social media world changes all the time, so there isn’t a definitive guidebook to social media best practices. But here are some great tips to get you going.

• Aspire for authenticity.
• Thrive for engagement.
• Use your community’s favorite networks.
• Post at the right time.
• Post regularly.
• Test new platforms.

Today’s consumers seek authenticity, and a super polished or overly stylized piece of content isn’t it.

To grab the attention of your followers on social media, remember to use visuality in your social media posts.

It can be one image or many images. It can be images of the same product, place or service, but from different angles. Use videos as often as you can. The videos are best to keep short, as people tend to like short videos more than long ones.

• Content with relevant images gives your post over 90% more views than content without images.
• Compared to other types of content, visual content is more than 40x more likely to get shared on social media.

For example, if you sell wall art, show the wall art in a room, instead of just sharing the image.

If you do marketing for vacation spots, add an image or a video that reflects joy and happiness. You can also use images of the destination itself.

Sprout social shared a great visual graphic of the social media platforms consumers use compared to the platforms marketing people use.

Marketers need to be a little bit more on Facebook and YouTube. If their target group is young people, then marketers need to be more on Snapchat too.