40 One-Sentence Social Media Tips

I’ve shared thousands of social media tips over the past few years with clients, in articles, and — ironically — on social media.

But, you’re busy.

Since you probably don’t have hours to consume them all, I followed my own advice (see tip #20) and boiled the most valuable ones down for you to quickly consume.

Here are 40 one-sentence tips to help you get more out of your social media activity…


1. When you post an image, don’t use the caption to tell your audience what it is— use it to explain why it should matter to THEM.

2. Make the most of all three opportunities you have to attract engagement in every post: The image/video, the caption, and the comments.

3. Don’t “Like” posts you don’t actually like just to be nice because doing so will train the social platform algorithms to show you more posts you won’t like.

4. Growing your email list is way more valuable than growing your social following because an email list is algorithm-proof.

5. Social media itself isn’t a goal — it’s a tool you use to accomplish your actual goals.

6. Create elastic content: Break successful big pieces of content like blog posts and podcasts into multiple smaller pieces of content and expand small pieces of content like tweets that do well into bigger pieces of content.

7. Any time someone asks you a question, turn your answer into a social media post — they’re not the only one who had that question and your answer will provide value to your audience.

8. Create social posts that express things your audience wants to say, but can’t or won’t say themselves.

9. Most social media strategies fail because they chase attention instead of earning it by speaking to people’s needs, thoughts, fears, hopes, and experiences.

10. You have two audiences: People who know you and those who don’t.

11. Never follow someone on social media solely because they followed you, are related to you, work with you, or out of guilt.

12. You don’t have to be on every platform — do you really feel like any one platform doesn’t have enough people using it for you to build an audience and accomplish your goals?

13. True social media success is built not by being fake but by being more honest, authentic, vulnerable, and real than most people are willing to be.

14. Study the social media profiles of your audience to learn who they are, how they communicate, what they value, what they share, what they have in common, and how best to share things that will resonate with them.

15. When you follow someone new on social media, publish a post telling the rest of your followers that you did so and it will get the attention of the person you followed who may then promote you and provide value to your audience.

16. Do the opposite of what celebrities do on social media: Use it to connect instead of promote, post about your audience more than yourself, reply as much as you post.

17. The best social media marketers and content creators are the ones who experiment the most.

18. Create content that will change the lives of the people who consume it.

19. Share posts that help people achieve a transformation they seek — to get from Point A to Point B.

20. Promise (and deliver) your audience a lot of value in a limited amount of time: You’re reading this in part because I’ve boiled the advice down to a collection of single sentences you know won’t take you long to get through.

21. A headline is the most important part of a blog post because without a great one no one will read the post itself.

22. Your audience isn’t the number of people who consume a particular creation — it’s the number of people you can count on to consume your NEXT creation.

23. If 1,000 people watch your video and love it but don’t subscribe to your channel or email list, that’s nothing more than 1,000 missed opportunities.

24. You can’t grow your audience until you decide exactly who you want to be in your audience.

25. Quality and quantity both matter.

26. The more actions you ask people to take after consuming your content, the less likely they are to do any of them.

27. Create evergreen content: If you post about topics that are only relevant today, then today’s the only opportunity you have to recoup value from it.

28. Repurpose posts on multiple platforms — if it works well on one platform, a version of it will also work on another.

29. If you’re going to pay someone to help you with social media, that person’s social media strategy expertise is more important than their social media management ability.

30. Because of algorithms, most of your followers haven’t seen your posts even if they did well so share them again…and again.

31. Always reward the behavior you want: Reply to every comment and acknowledge every share of your posts (unless they’re a troll).

32. The more you share your backstory, the more people will see similarities to their own and the more likely they are to care about your future.

33. Craft your social media bio in a way that tells potential followers what’s in it for them if they follow you — it’s not about who you are, it’s about the value you’ll provide to them.

34. Follow fewer people, curators instead of publishers, and individuals instead of brands.

35. When sharing a link to something, don’t just post the headline and a link — include the most interesting bit of information from the article in the actual post so people can get value without clicking through.

36. Fill in the blanks of this statement and let it guide your social media strategy: “I help [TARGET AUDIENCE] solve [PROBLEM/CHALLENGE] by sharing [INFO/SOLUTIONS] with them on social media.”

37. The more varied the topics you post about, the more difficult it becomes to attract an audience — focus on a niche.

38. Use white space in social posts — skip a line after every sentence to make for an easier read and take up more space in people’s feeds as they scroll.

39. If you’re struggling to grow an audience, it’s probably because you’re either not doing enough or doing too much.

40. If you treat a person with 100 followers like you would a person with 100,000 followers, incredible things will happen and your audience will grow.

For a deeper dive into these tips, check out the Related Resources section below.


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