If there was one common theme to embrace during min’s 3rd Annual Social Media Boot Camp, held last week in New York City, it was that you should always be experimenting with your strategy to get a better understanding of your followers. “Never stop testing,” said Nate Goldman, associate editor of social media at New York Magazine. And, always make use of the data available to you. “Know your audience!”

The conference, which featured some of publishing’s most notable brands, offered many valuable tips on how even the smallest companies can use social media more effectively to help grow their businesses. In addition to using analytics to help define who your audience is, the day-long conference offered these five key takeaways:

1. Invest in videos. Most social media platforms are encouraging and rewarding video posts so it behooves companies to begin investing in the medium. With smartphones these days, it’s very easy to create good video and you should produce videos that host “big personalities,” according to Victoria Fine of Slate.  

2. You can never tweet too much. According to Erika Owen, engagement editor at Travel & Leisure, the shelf life of a tweet is very small so there’s really no limit to the amount of tweets you can send in a day.

3. Capitalize on trends. “You don’t have to be the first, but you can’t be the last,” to jump on a trend, said Popular Science’s Social Media Editor Jason Lederman. Twitter and Facebook both list trending topics all the time. Find one that you can loosely tie to your brand and run with it. (Example: “The Dress.”)

4. Engagement is everything. Alida Brandenburg of Refinery29 was very clear when she stressed the value of likes, comments, shares and other social media platform engagements. They help determine your company’s respectability and act as a sort of “brand cachet.” Figure out what your audience likes to engage with and give them more of it.  

5. Humor is hot on Instagram. “Funny is the new pretty,” said Elisa Benson, social media director of Cosmo, Redbook and Seventeen. Use humor in your posts and it will increase comments, which she described as the ultimate engagement metric for the platform.