Social-media platforms can be a daunting frontier for brands who are unfamiliar with how to leverage various platforms for brand awareness, customer education, and activation. Although platforms rise and fall in popularity, and their back-end tools often evolve, social-media marketing still holds the potential to meet a variety of objectives to marketers who can master their nuances.

Here are 10 ways to leverage social media within a multi-platform strategy:

1. Geofencing

Geofencing — the use of GPS technology to create a virtual geographic boundary, which then triggers an action when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area — fills a variety of purposes for marketers. Mobile ads can be served to potential customers and clients who attend a fair, sporting event, open house — anywhere that would be relevant to their interests — showing where your brand is already activated.

It’s the friction-free, 21st-century version of a clipboard on which visitors write their home address or email by hand: not only can you serve ads to people during an event itself, but ads can be retargeted digitally to the same user after the event to keep your brand top of mind.

2. Creating personalized experiences

Social-media users are generally in the habit of checking and re-checking their social platforms. An ad on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, or X can reach social users more continuously than an ad on any dot-com site they don’t visit as often.

The upshot: it’s easier to use cookies to tailor a personalized ad experience on these platforms with relatively little lag time since the last time they opened their favorite app.

3. Social-media ads can meet buyers at all stages of the journey

From awareness to consideration, conversion (research and evaluation) to retention, social-media ads have the potential to meet buyers at all stages of their journey. The potential for more continuous ad reach can effectively serve the buyers who journey from awareness to retention while checking their social feed intermittently over the course of a month, week, day, or hour.

Social media also offers immense potential for customers to serve as ambassadors and advocates for your brand. Its ability to generate referrals organically, without paid partnerships, can foster the most powerful word-of-mouth marketing campaign in your brand’s history.

4. Deeper conversion tools than other online ads

For some brands, quickly moving the buyer from one stage of their journey to the next is paramount. Social media helps here, too. For example, offering a 10-percent-off coupon can move the buyer from the consideration stage to the conversion stage in one click.

Remember that social-media users are accustomed to rapid-fire information processing. Going deeper in the consideration and conversation stages — through visual or written social posts that offer deadline-oriented messages, incentives, and stronger calls-to-action — often elicit instant movement out of the awareness stage.

5. Social text offers more opportunities than image-based ads

When it comes to social-media posts, forget character limits. Text-based ads allow for more space when the text is placed in an image than a text field on Facebook, for example. Written coupon codes and QR codes blend cleanly in an Instagram post with text in the image field.

These are just a few reasons why, compared to the average web/mobile ad, a well-designed social-media placement offers users a more holistic blend of headline, description, and visual elements.

6. Tools for social-media advertisers are always growing

AI-based options are expanding on all platforms in 2025, offering useful shortcuts to every copywriter and designer who’s ever wondered “can’t there be a faster way to do this?” Meta can now read visual ad copy and suggest things like “we noticed this coupon code ― would you like to use it in your ad?” X’s AI image generator, Grok, offers a native tool within the app for generating crisp, clean images in seconds.

Social-media platforms already provided easy opportunities for entry based on a variety of factors, including cost. Multiple social platforms are now providing recommendations that brands can consider to help optimize their messaging, such as AI-suggested text, making animations based on static imagery, and serving content and creative dynamically based on user demographics and how they typically receive information.

7. New platforms with new audiences pop up quickly

The social platform Bluesky saw its user base double from October 2024 to January 2025, an extreme example that highlights the potential for rapid growth of any social platform. It’s rarely a bad idea to scoop up a desired user handle (or two) on a new platform, but posting, buying ads, and engaging with users on a new platform can probably wait — unless it meets and aligns with the company’s marketing strategies.

When TikTok first offered ad buys, for example, its ad targeting was very broad. The platform initially didn’t make sense for advertisers that only used targeted geofencing or more niche audiences, but has since expanded its capabilities. Threads was expected to open up for advertisers by the end of 2024, but hesitation on the part of parent company Meta, potential advertisers, or both seems to have postponed those plans — for now at least.

8. Social platforms offer direct-sales platforms now

Amazon might have started with books, and TikTok with viral “dance videos.” Now, both platforms offer direct-sales platforms that can force legacy businesses to re-think every aspect of their online presence.

Instagram and Pinterest have also emerged as players in the direct-sales space. This should be a point of consideration for brands weighing whether to budget for influencers to promote on these platforms.

9. Speaking of influencers

Partnering with a trusted influencer who shares your values can be a simple matter of finding the right person on the right platform. As their direct-sales platforms have grown in popularity, TikTok and Amazon have gone over and above in their efforts to make influencers feel at home on their platforms.

The skincare company GoPure, for example, effectively built its name off TikTok. TIAA, a Fortune 100 financial-services organization, leveraged 50 NIL (name, image, and likeness) college athletes on Instagram and TikTok to create buzz around retirement equity. Sometimes the marriage between brand, influencer, and platform requires creative thinking.

10. Your competition might already be there

A number of independent journalists were among the first to amass large audiences on Bluesky when X amended its algorithm to suppress outside links. The early adopters who made the leap were predictably rewarded with engagement and traffic.

Scoping out the landscape of a new platform — even if it’s only new to your brand and potential audience — is never a bad idea before diving in head-first.                

Andrea Ness is media strategy and oversight director at the marketing agency, ddm marketing + communications. She provides leadership and oversight to ddm’s media team.