Top 8 Social Media Marketing Tips That Still Work in 2025

What if most businesses are ignoring the cheapest audience on Earth?

That sounds like hyperbole until you remember how attention lives now: inside apps, not on billboards. The idea is simple and unsettling — showing up on social platforms often costs nothing. Yet so many companies still pour dollars into paid channels while neglecting the free mechanics of attention that move markets and customers.

Underpriced attention as a business asset

There’s a thesis here worth repeating: attention can be underpriced. That’s not a marketing slogan. It’s a framework for ruthless prioritization. When a nascent platform offers organic reach, that reach behaves like capital. Spend time there and you compound momentum. Ignore it and you miss scale. I found that point urgent and a little angry — mostly because it’s avoidable and obvious once explained.

Pick platforms with context, not habit

Context beats convenience. If you sell to other businesses, LinkedIn should sit at the top of your stack. If your audience is teenagers, TikTok should be your laboratory. But this isn’t binary. Each network demands a different voice, tempo, and format. Think of platforms as rooms at a party: your tone at a PTA fundraiser should differ from your approach at a college dorm. That small discipline — being contextual — separates a forgettable post from something that actually converts.

Small creative moves with outsized returns

The practical advice lands fast. Thumbnails and the first three seconds of a video matter more than most creators admit. I actually felt a twitch of envy hearing how much top creators spend on thumbnails; it’s the quiet edge that costs little but returns massively.

Another deceptively simple move: repurpose. A photo plus three thoughtful paragraphs can perform as well as a high-production video when the writing connects. That was refreshing. It suggests that if you’re a better writer than an on-camera performer, you still have a clear path to breakout growth.

Document vs. create — a truth about personality and stamina

Advertisement-style content has its place. But a lot of the most magnetic content is simply documentation of life and work. This distinction isn’t a moral judgment; it’s a sustainability strategy. Some people thrive with scripted, studio-quality pieces. Others excel improvising — the candid kitchen-table confession, the raw road-trip clip. The trick is to know which you are and then lean into it relentlessly.

LinkedIn: the overlooked land grab

It’s easy to dismiss LinkedIn as a dry resume repository. But right now it behaves like Facebook circa 2013 — open for organic reach, rich with B2B intent, and primed for creative entries that feel human. That felt like a revelation worth noting out loud: businesses can do business development by posting consistently and thoughtfully on the platform. It’s less mysterious than diets and workouts; it’s about applying basics consistently.

How pop culture becomes marketing

Pop culture moves markets. The Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce moment wasn’t just celebrity gossip. It was a case study in cross-pollination: two attention networks amplifying each other and spilling into the NFL’s business. You don’t need A-list talent to use pop culture. You need to be clever about appropriating the cultural moment in ways that feel authentic to your brand. That’s the social equivalent of showing up at a cocktail party and being interesting.

Strategy over theatrics

What I kept returning to was the mixture of discipline and experimentation the speaker demanded. This isn’t wishful thinking about virality. It’s strategic organic content: a regimen involving post cadence, timing, hooks, thumbnails, platform-specific formats, and the audacity to try formats that feel awkward at first.

There’s also humility baked in. Most people already know what to do roughly — but execution is hard. The barrier is not ignorance; it’s repeatable practice. That’s a bracing point. It turns excuses into a schedule and flings open the possibility of measurable results.

Concrete habits for creators and business owners

• Post with intention: consider platform, format, and time.
• Document the work, especially if you aren’t a polished performer.
• Use pop-culture hooks to create approachable, memorable content.
• Invest in small production wins: thumbnails, the first three seconds, and captions.

Honestly, what surprised me was how often simple tactical changes can drive dramatic outcomes. An asphalt contractor suddenly doubling revenues after a few viral TikToks is not an outlier anecdote in this talk. It’s the point: unexpected audiences can become paying customers when content meets context.

Final thought

The larger argument is both optimistic and inconvenient: the tools to build a powerful business identity are closer and cheaper than most teams admit. That invites a practical question worth sitting with — what small change in your content routine could move the needle this month? I don’t mean a tweak. I mean a sustained shift in where you allocate attention. That’s the work worth doing.