The world of social media marketing is noisy these days. Getting your content to the people who are most likely to buy your products or use your services is akin to trying to flag down a car going 90 miles an hour on a six-lane highway — when you’re in a building on the side of the road. It’s tough going.

The only way to succeed is to make sure that your social media posts stand out in a crowded playing field. You need to create content that’s compelling and irresistible if you want to grab attention from your competitors — or, let’s face it, from your followers’ friends and family.

Here are some things that can help your Facebook posts and Tweets stand out in 2021.

Up Your Emoji Game 

You might not think of emoji as professional but the bottom line is that internet users love them. Incorporating them into your social media content can help your posts stand out.

Go to GetEmoji.com and you’ll find a huge bank of emoji you can copy and paste into your posts.

It’s important not to overdo it. Using one to three emoji per post is the right range. A word to the wise: make sure you know what an emoji means before you use it. I’ve seen more than one example of the “tears of laughter” emoji being used to express sorrow. If you don’t know what it means, don’t use it.

Add Images to Tweets

While it’s common to see photographs and graphics attached to Facebook posts, visual imagery is less common on Twitter. One way to make your Tweets stand out in 2021 is to start adding images to them.

You should make sure to center your photos horizontally for the best appearance. If you’re sharing more than one image, you may want to refer to this handy Adobe Express Twitter image size guide that explains how to properly size images for sharing on Twitter.

Animate Your Photos

You already know that visual content is hugely popular on social media. The problem is that everybody knows it, which means that most of the content you’ll see on your feed will have a photo or image attached.

One way to make your photos stand out is to turn them into animated GIFs. While there are plenty of GIFs available online, your best bet is to take a few minutes to create your own.

Pixaloop is a free tool that you can use to add animation to your photographs. You can choose to animate part or all of your picture. It’s easy to freeze the parts that you don’t want to animate. In addition to adding animation, you can choose from a library of video effects and overlay objects to make a memorable GIF.

Post Long Form Content

When you think of social media content, you probably think of short, snappy posts that take less than a minute to read. While there is certainly a time and a place for short content on social media, one way to make your posts stand out is to share long form content.

Facebook is ideal for long form content because there is no limit on the number of characters you can post. You can also combine content types by pairing written content with photos, infographics, or videos.

If you do decide to post long-form content, I suggest posting a TL; DR (too long, didn’t read) synopsis at the top or bottom of your content. This type of summary will help people decide whether your content is useful to them.

Become a Hashtag Expert

Hashtags are everywhere and you might be forgiven for believing that using as many as possible is the answer to good social media marketing. In fact, that’s not the case. Using too many hashtags can cause your posts to fade into the background.

Twitter guidelines suggest using no more than two hashtags per Tweet. You can use more but they count toward your 280-character limit. Your best bet is to choose one or two hashtags that will help the people in your target audience find your Tweets.

On Instagram, I’ve seen some people recommend using up to 11 hashtags per post, but I think 11 is too many. The truth is that the most effective Instagram posts have one to three hashtags.

It might be tempting to get cute with hashtags but that’s not ideal for business-related Tweets. What I do recommend is creating a unique hashtag for your business and encouraging the people who Tweet about you to use it.

Use Social Media Plugins

You want people to be able to share your social media posts — so why not make it easy? Adding social media plugins on your website or blog can streamline the sharing process and help your company be more visible on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For example, you can use a plugin such as Click to Tweet, which allows readers to click key quotes in your content and Tweet them to their followers.

Another option is to sync your blog with your Facebook or Twitter accounts to automatically share your new blog posts as they go live. It’s a quick and painless way to get as many eyeballs on your content as possible, as quickly as possible.

Finally, you should absolutely include social media follow buttons on your homepage and blog. It used to be enough to simply put your Twitter handle and a link to your Facebook page on your site. However, today’s internet users expect convenience. They’ll be more likely to follow you if they can do it with a single click.

The social media landscape might be exceptionally crowded as we head into 2021 but that doesn’t mean that you need to resign yourself to fading into the background. The tips here will help you to create the kinds of posts that people will notice — and make it easy for the people who already follow you to find, read, and share your content.