Just like the audiences you’re hoping to target on Facebook and Twitter, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media marketing. The strategies and techniques at your disposal are almost as varied and diverse as the types of people to whom you can market your goods and services, and while getting started with social media marketing is relatively straightforward, knowing how to launch, run, and optimize your campaigns from the outset is critical.

Whether you’re launching a brand-new social media marketing campaign this year or optimizing an ongoing initiative, we’re here to help. In today’s post, we’ll be revisiting our best social media marketing tips, including Facebook marketing ideas, Twitter engagement tips, tips for increasing the ROI of social advertising and more, from the past several years. From identifying and targeting the right audiences to expanding your reach across several different social media sites, there’s something for everyone.

Social Media Marketing Tip #1: Bypass ‘Leaky’ Landing Pages Altogether

Call them what you will – flows, pipelines, journeys – but most marketers are obsessed with “the funnel.” However, leads often take a hike just at the point when you’re trying to get them to convert. Luckily, certain PPC and social media advertising formats allow marketers to bypass the leakiest part of the funnel – landing pages – entirely.

Our first social media marketing tip is to eliminate the possibility of losing potential leads at the landing page stage. One of the most effective ways to do this is by using Facebook “Call” buttons in your Facebook ads. This powerful feature allows mobile users (which Facebook users overwhelmingly are, in many cases exclusively so) to call your business directly simply by clicking your Facebook ad – no landing pages, no load times, no vast, gaping chasm into which potential leads disappear forever.

Social Media Marketing Tip #2: Leverage the Power of ‘Life Events’

Targeting the right people with your social media marketing is important. Going after the right people at the right time is incredibly effective – and remarkably simple. Our next tip is to leverage the events in people’s lives to create timely, relevant advertising that targets people during periods of major change with Facebook’s “Life Events” parameter.

We’ve all seen what these “life events” look like on Facebook. Your arch nemesis from high school lands your dream job, your ex-crush gets married to that guy, the high school prom king and queen who’ve been together forever finally have the impossibly cute kid they’ve been threatening to have for years – you know, all the stuff that makes us feel really good about ourselves. Well, you can use these life events as the basis for a marketing campaign.

Aside from being able to target audiences based on such events, such as getting married or having a child, you can even specify how soon after these events take place that your ads begin to appear to these audiences. Wedding venues, for example, could set their ads to appear to newly-engaged couples after a period of, say, two or three months, while baby clothing retailers could set their ads to appear to couples shortly after announcing their pregnancy.

Social Media Marketing Tip #3: Provide a Seamless, Cohesive Visual Experience

Social media has done far more than change the way consumers shop; it has changed the way consumers view the Web in general. This most definitely applies to how your ads – and their accompanying landing pages – look.

Offering users a smooth, cohesive visual experience is almost (if not equally) as important as the messaging of your ads themselves. Think about it. If a user sees a well-designed, aesthetically appealing ad then clicks through to a godawful-looking landing page, it’s going to be a major turn-off that could potentially result in a lost lead or sale. For this reason, it’s crucial that your ad creative is both well-designed and seamless from beginning to end. This means that landing pages should match their ads perfectly, in both appearance and messaging.

Social Media Marketing Tip #4: Build Communities Around Actionable Hashtags

Despite what some experts would have us believe, hashtags are alive and well on social media. However, hashtags are far more useful than serving as a means of helping users find relevant content – they can also be used to foster and build communities of loyal fans and brand advocates.

This technique’s greatest strength isn’t just the ease with which this can be implemented, but the fact that the same hashtag can be used across several social media platforms. This allows you to cross-pollinate your messaging throughout various social campaigns, offering users a cohesive experience regardless of where they interact with your brand.

The world’s leading brands know how to use this technique exceptionally well, as Margot highlighted in an example focusing on Nike’s #chooseyourwinter and #runfree hashtags in 2014. Nike managed to effortlessly build an online social community of Nike consumers by using these hashtags, both of which proved extraordinarily popular and resulted in widespread social sharing – all with minimal expenditure on Nike’s part.

Social Media Marketing Tip #5: Structure Social Campaigns Around Your Business Objectives

Similarly to paid search, account structure is often treated as an afterthought by many social advertisers. In their eagerness to launch a campaign, they give little thought to how to best structure their account, which can not only result in a messy, disorganized account that’s much more difficult to optimize, but also greatly diminished performance. For this reason, our fifth social media marketing tip is to structure your campaigns based on their objective.

For Facebook advertising campaigns, many of the objectives are clear, such as “Promote your Page” or “Reach people near your business.” However you choose to structure your campaign and its objectives, be sure to pay close attention to these details before launching a campaign.

Social Media Marketing Tip #6: Use Twitter To Test Out Content Ideas

Most marketers use Twitter heavily as a promotional tool for their content marketing initiatives, but far fewer bother to harness Twitter’s power to tap into potentially hot topics before they sit down to produce their content.

Twitter can serve as a powerfully effective “content lab” in which you can test how well-received a piece of content is likely to be, or gauge interest in subject areas that deviate considerably from your usual editorial focus.

Social Media Marketing Tip #7: Start Remarketing on Social

Regular readers probably saw this one coming, but our top social media marketing tip is to use remarketing in your paid social campaigns.

Think of the last time you were browsing your News Feed on Facebook. You saw an ad, clicked through immediately, and bought or signed up for whatever the site was offering. Remember? No, neither do I, because unlike the perfect world in which marketers wished we live, people very rarely behave this way online. By failing to remarket to potential customers on social media, you’re literally putting all your time, money, and effort into a single opportunity to convert your prospects, which is every bit as crazy as it sounds when you put it like that.

Remarketing is one of the most powerfully effective techniques at your disposal – and it becomes even more so on Facebook. By remarketing to prospective customers on social, you’re vastly increasing the chances that a customer will go the distance and convert. Even if they don’t, the additional brand exposure is still worth the investment alone, so it’s crucial that you start remarketing on Facebook.