Level Up Your Social Media Game

Your guide to social media that wins more than just likes.

Analyst perspective

Emily Wright

Senior Research Analyst, Marketing Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

Social media continues to evolve rapidly, changing how brands engage their audience, share content, and drive revenue.

As algorithms prioritize paid content and user engagement, it has become increasingly difficult for companies, particularly small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs), to drive organic growth. Even with generative AI, creating consistently fresh and engaging content in a highly competitive and saturated landscape continues to be very resource intensive.

To lay strong social media foundations that ensure ongoing success and see clear returns, organizations must rigorously review their platforms, content and post performance, audiences, tactics, and measurement practices. Taking the time to conduct comprehensive regular audits and update tactical plans provides marketers with a level of agility and precision that will not only improve social media performance and outcomes but also make it easier to tie back to revenue and demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media.

To succeed with social media, you don’t need to be everywhere; you need to be intentional. Through thoughtful adaptation to shifting algorithms, AI advancements, and changing user behavior, brands will see social media wins and business growth. Spend time understanding where and how you best compete on social, and channel resources and effort toward platforms, tactics, and metrics that drive real business outcomes.

Executive summary

Pain Points

Social media continues to be an incredibly powerful tool for businesses to drive awareness, brand equity, and overall growth, but it is often hard to master and obtain desired results from. This is due to many reasons, including:

• Algorithm changes and reduced organic reach.
• Content saturation and well-established competition.
• Changing social trends and customer expectations.
• Difficulty proving social media ROI.

Obstacles

Several challenges hold organizations back from excelling with social media and both optimizing and demonstrating business value:

• Lack of clarity around ROI and overall value of social media efforts.
• Focus on vanity metrics.
• Time demands and limited resources.
• Fractured understanding of target audience.
• Spreading presence too thin on too many platforms (or conversely, not having enough of a presence).

Info-Tech’s Approach

Through the Info-Tech approach, marketing leaders and social media teams will be able to:

• Prioritize best-fit platforms.
• Enhance audience understanding, targeting, and engagement.
• Understand competitive edge and differentiation from competition.
• Gain clarity around ROI measurement.
• Optimize platform strategy.
• Optimize resource and budget allocation.

“With Social Media so prevalent we are all extremely visible. Your prospective clients, your peers and your competition can drill as deep as they wish searching, reading and gathering information online about you and posted by you without you ever knowing who’s searching. Depending on what they find, your prospects may choose to do business with you or not.”

– Mari Smith

Social media: The ultimate brand power-up

“Social media is the highest ROI marketing channel.”

– HubSpot, 2025

Technology, algorithms, and customer behavior are constantly evolving, making it more important than ever for brands to be where their customers are – and social media continues to be that place.

Social media platforms provide an unmatched mix of direct engagement, cost-effective advertising, and audience-building opportunities that makes it a vital part of modern marketing strategies. It enables:

Audience Reach & Direct Customer Engagement

Unprecedented opportunities for brand visibility and direct customer engagement make social media a critical marketing channel.

Cost-Effective Targeted Marketing With High ROI

Precise audience targeting and engaging content can garner high ROI through cost-effective outreach, strongly supporting revenue growth.

Strong Brand Reputation & Customer Loyalty

Social platforms enable authentic connections with target audiences and deepen customer relationships for optimal loyalty and retention.

“82% of social media marketers report that social media marketing was effective for their brand in 2023.”

– HubSpot, 2024

Be intentional about the role social media plays to deliver on your brand’s unique business strategy

Social Media Roles

Discover Market & Consumer Insights

Deepen understanding of customer needs and preferences by mining data on customer interests, behaviors, and feedback and monitoring trends, gathering insights, and tracking competitors.

Power Recruitment & Employer Branding

Attract top talent, promote job openings, and showcase company culture.

Nourish Brand Equity

Expand reach, improve recognition, and establish credibility.

Support Customers

Provide accessible, real-time support, often with dedicated support accounts.

Control Crises & Public Relations

Address crises as they arise to better manage public perception.

Grow Customer Engagement & Community

Foster and strengthen relationships. Generate excitement and inform audiences of new products and company news, allowing for targeted, real-time engagement.

Generate Leads & Grow Sales

Move prospects through the buyer’s journey using ads, content marketing, etc., on social platforms to drive conversion and ultimately revenue.

With so many uses for social media, brands need to get clear on their strategic priorities to ensure that social media is playing the right role.

For example, smaller organizations may want to focus on growing sales and discovering market insights, while larger firms may prioritize recruitment and employer branding and PR management.

Success with social media is no easy feat

Brands face an increasingly complex and competitive digital landscape that requires more than just a presence on social media platforms.

Common challenges and barriers to social media success include:

• Difficulty proving social media ROI effectively
• Algorithm changes and reduced organic reach
• Changing social trends and customer expectations
• Cultivating and maintaining audience engagement
• Time demands and limited resources
• Content saturation and well-established competition
• Negative feedback and PR management
• Difficulty hiring and retaining top social media talent

Proving ROI to secure required resources and budget is often the biggest challenge for marketers: “83% of marketing agencies say that social media ROI is difficult to measure, with their main challenge being determining the appropriate metrics to use” (MDG Solutions, 2023).

Brands that don’t adapt and improve their social media efforts stay stuck on level one

Brands’ social media efforts fall flat for many reasons:

• Ad hoc posting; no clear strategy
• Rushing through the basics (target audience, platform goals, tone of voice)
• Underestimating resources, skill, and time required to succeed
• Underinvesting (no paid social, limited tools, lack of support)
• Inconsistent performance review
• Presence on the wrong platforms

These pitfalls put brands at risk of missed opportunities and poor brand awareness, weakening overall brand perception and hindering growth. Common outcomes include:

• Diminished brand credibility, customer trust, and loyalty
• Missed engagement and brand visibility opportunities
• Loss of control of brand narrative
• Loss of competitive edge
• Reduced search engine rankings

“Ignoring social media as a business tool can have severe consequences, including missed opportunities for customer engagement, falling behind the competition, lack of brand visibility and awareness, missed opportunities for lead generation and sales, and an inability to gather valuable customer insights.”

– Ken Ojab, Founder of Visual Insights Outsource

Organic is dying – be prepared to pay (and to be rewarded!)

Maintaining organic social is brand validation. Paid social is for meaningful, tangible business growth.

Gone are the days of brands relying on organic social media strategies as organic reach continues to decline across all social platforms (Sprout Social, 2024). To see returns on social media efforts and deliver on objectives, social media marketers must also embrace paid social. By balancing organic and paid social efforts, brands can advance audience targeting, see quicker results, scale faster, and save on already limited content resources.

To strike the right balance between paid and organic social media efforts, brands must first consider goals. Placing a greater emphasis on organic social typically works well for brands focused on thought leadership, community-building, and sustained credibility, while a greater emphasis on paid social is best for brands focused on lead generation, quick awareness generation, and niche targeting.

“‘Pay to play’ is now the standard for success on social media.”

– Neil Patel

Our approach

Insight summary

To succeed with social media, you don’t need to be everywhere; you need to be intentional

Spend the time understanding where and how you best compete on social and channel resources and effort toward platforms, tactics, and metrics that drive real business outcomes.

Proving ROI is critical to proper social media investment

Knowing what to measure and showing the ROI of social efforts is the most difficult, yet critical, part of proving social media effectiveness and acquiring needed resources and budget.

Great content doesn’t guarantee social media success

Going by content alone no longer cuts it. Growing organically is increasingly difficult in a crowded social media environment. Be prepared to get creative with outreach and use paid social strategies.

Social listening and regular performance audits are imperative

Being able to understand audience preferences, changes in behavior, and trends through social listening and consistent platform performance reviews will lead to engaging and highly personalized content that will drive loyalty and strengthen customer relationships.

Social media can’t solve for everything

Social media needs to be paired with other marketing strategies and tactics to be impactful.

Platform-specific strategies are required

Organizations should be leveraging each platform’s unique attributes, benefits, and ROI metrics.

Ignoring social media is not an option

Conversations about your company are taking place online whether you’re there or not. It’s best to maintain a strong social presence to influence the conversation and stay engaged with and informed by customer voices.

Blueprint deliverable

Social Media Tactical Plan Template

This template walks you through the steps of completing a thorough social media audit and provides the structure for developing a tactical social media plan based on performance on key metrics and ROI.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Executive & Technical Counseling

“Our team and processes are maturing; however, to expedite the journey we’ll need a seasoned practitioner to coach and validate approaches, deliverables, and opportunities.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop Overview

For more information:
workshops@infotech.com | 1-888-670-8889

Phases & Steps

Your guide to social media that wins more than just likes.