Wherever you turn, there are social media marketing best practice guides telling you what to do, when to do it, and where to do it.

These recommendations are often sound advice, but they’re also missing some of the most underrated activities you can do to boost your performance.

The following simple, daily tasks, can deliver big benefits for your brand.

1. Check global and local trends and participate accordingly

Participating in trending topics, where appropriate, can help you get your brand in front of a larger audience. This is an effective strategy for brands who are trying to build their following or want to achieve brand awareness goals.

Facebook and Twitter offer an easy way to monitor trends on their platforms. Twitter gives you suggested hashtags, and Facebook provides topics, which gives you an easy way to participate in the conversation. Google Trends is another tool for finding conversations you can contribute to on social media.

Only participate in trends when they’re relevant and appropriate for your brand. If a trend is news-related, you could share your input creatively, but avoid controversial content. If a trend is more casual, only participate if the trend’s audience would be interested in your brand.

2. Respond to mentions with custom message (and GIF)

No matter the extensiveness of your brand interactions, you should dedicate time every day to responding to mentions.

Ideally, you want to respond as soon as possible to these mentions, but with limited staff capabilities, dedicating time during the workday is likely your best option. Your focus should be on providing high-value responses to all legitimate mentions you can get to in your dedicated time slot.

People may have tagged your account when sharing your content – thank them for sharing.

Or better yet, offer them an additional resource or ask them a question about their opinion of the content.

You may see mentions that are product or service praise. Thank them with a custom message that may even include a GIF as an extra show of appreciation. You could also see mentions that are, unfortunately, complaints. These are especially important to respond to if they are of legitimate concern. You don’t want to feed the trolls, but you do want to address issues your customers are having.

For all mentions, try these simple techniques for optimizing the interactions:

• Continue the conversation by asking open-ended questions
• Share an additional resource to further assist the user
• Respond with personalized comments that demonstrate you were listening to their initial mention
• Retweet and/or like your praise mentions to give both you and the other user publicity

3. Participate in real-time interactions

One of the most important, effective ways to build brand awareness, engagement and influence is to interact with other users in real-time. You’ll build stronger relationships because of your live conversations.

One way to take advantage of this is to participate in Twitter chats. Find chats in your industry or ones where your services could benefit the participants. This is not the time to excessively self-promote your business, but you can still offer resources if it’s relevant to the conversation.

Another way to interact with other users is to track specific keywords and respond to relevant mentions.

For example, if you offer an app for tracking exercise, you can respond to people who mention a related keyword. You can offer your app as an answer to their inquiry. This technique is great because your business isn’t directly mentioned, so you can build awareness of your products that people may not have known about beforehand.

4. Add more to calendar based on blog content and top performing social content

Every day, you should measure what social content performed best the day before. If it was a blog post, add that article to your calendar or queue to be shared again.

Tools like Buffer provide information on which social content was most popular and engaging. You can also use Google Analytics to see how your social activity affected your website traffic. Also, most social platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, offer extensive analytics you can use to find top activity.

Use that information to replenish your calendar. You’ll always be adding fresh content, but you can expand your calendar by including top performing content to reshare. Use a different time and format to see whether it has the same effect. Using the same exact wording likely won’t be as effective because people already saw it once.

5. Curate the last 24 hours of helpful content (stay relevant)

Another way to add content to your social media activity is to curate. As long as you remain relevant in what you choose to share, this can be a high-value approach to social media engagement.

When you retweet or share other users’ activity, you demonstrate that you’re following and appreciating their contributions, helping to build relationships and influence.

Here are some other ways to curate content on social media:

• Create a Moment on Twitter and share it in a tweet. Tag the users you included in the Moment when you share it.
• Follow other blogs to find content you can share from your social accounts, but don’t use competitor content.
• Create curated Twitter lists to assist with finding content to retweet. This can include other accounts that share relevant blog content, such as marketing influencers. Additionally, you can use Twitter lists to engage with accounts via replies to their tweets.

As a social media marketing professional, you have a lot on your plate every day. These five social media tasks will help you organize and simplify your daily activity. It’s important that you maintain an effective daily schedule so that your social media accounts continue to grow and your brand awareness expands.

Article Written by Annaliese Henwood of Social Media Today