To check in on social media marketing best practices, Verdin sent a team to the industry’s biggest conference this year, Social Media Marketing World. Here’s our breakdown of the most important lessons we learned.
Clients at our agency – typically destination marketing organizations, special districts and small local businesses – rely on our expertise for social media that produces results on modest budgets. Meanwhile, at Verdin, our content team members wear multiple hats and are always on the lookout for fast, easy tools. Let’s get into what we learned.
AI Can Help with Almost Everything Marketers Do
This year’s conference had an overt theme: AI dominance. AI is not the future; it’s the present. There are tools for everything, and marketers who aren’t using those tools are falling behind.
Social Media Marketing World, or SMMW, included an entire track of sessions on AI in 2025, from beginner’s guides to rapid-fire sessions showing off dozens of tools to deep dives on using AI analytics to inform strategy.
Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner founder and keynote speaker, said AI tools provide us with “low-hanging fruit” like speeding execution, increasing output and being more persuasive. Those are things all marketers should be using AI for as a baseline. But those who really want to go for the higher fruit, Stelzner said, also use AI for analysis and creativity.
These are three “high fruit” AI takeaways our team has already been putting into action:
- Use AI for decision making. AI is great at organizing information, recognizing patterns and staying dispassionate. Stelzner and other speakers said that for these reasons, we should really be asking it for advice in decision making, rather than just helping write emails and social captions. Feed it pros and cons. Ask it to research industry best practices, ask it to play devil’s advocate, and ask it to pitch alternative ideas. By the end of your decision-making process, you will feel better informed and more confident in your choice.
- Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm. All content creators know that having conversations with other creatives about their work ultimately leads to better results. With AI, you get a brainstorming partner for everything you do, and you’re not interrupting your coworkers or their billable time goals. Most of what generative AI spits out will be something you’ve already thought of or something that doesn’t work for one reason or another. That’s OK, because you’ll also find novel ways to say things and whole new approaches to topics that have grown stale.
- Use AI for content audits. You think that graphic or social media series you put together looks great? Ask AI to criticize your content and you won’t be so sure. It will absolutely roast you if you want it to. But more seriously, you can load every single piece of content you create into AI and ask it for specific, actionable criticisms in line with best practices. Our team has been putting this in place by taking screenshots of our content and asking ChatGPT to do its thing.
Get Behind Social Search
Remember when short, clever captions were everything? Some of us punny copywriters out here sure miss those days, but it’s time to move on. “Social search” continued to be a major buzz phrase this year at SMMW.
According to presenter Melissa Laurie of Oysterly, nearly 1 in 4 TikTok users look something up within the first 30 seconds of opening the app. Younger demographics, in particular, rarely Google anything these days. Instead, they hunt for answers on their social media platforms of choice.
How are we responding and adjusting our social media content for search? We’re writing long, informative captions, and we’re also making the post content itself more informative with on-screen captions, graphics and voiceovers.
Audacity Will Get You Noticed
Aside from all the talk of AI and specific tips for content optimization, another undercurrent ran through SMMW this year that made us look up. “Be audacious,” multiple presenters said. “Stand out. Do something different.”
“Your content should not look like everyone else’s content.”
Strategist Amber Figlow, in her presentation “Instagram Marketing for Misfits” encouraged the audience to try as many random content ideas as our clients will let us, just to see what works. Keynote speaker Mark Schaefer pointed to Liquid Death as a beacon of breaking taboos.
For the Verdin team, there was something wonderfully creatively inspiring about this message. In a conference all about AI, it felt almost like a backlash, a reminder that the wacky ideas only a human could create are what really work in marketing.
Of course, as always when we return from a conference, all that bold inspiration has to take a backseat to the realities of budgets, agencies and stakeholder approval. We’re now equipped with many handy tools and tips to help us work smarter and faster. But for our clients who want to get noticed, we’ve got some audacious ideas you need to hear, too.
To learn more about our approach to social media marketing, reach out to Mary Verdin, [email protected]. Also be sure to check out this recent post about using static images on your social feeds.