One thing that's made Flash so popular as an animation program is the ability to "cheat" on animations. You can use tweens to set a start and end point, and leave the rest up to the program; you might think this wouldn't work for character animation, but it does. All you need to do is create your character in multiple parts, instead of drawing it all as one piece - with each limb separated out like a marionette's. Then you can play puppet-master all you want with the parts, by controlling each individual piece with its own tweens.

Sometimes you'll find that your Flash animation calls for multiple symbols that look exactly alike save for one thing: their color. You may be animating Skittles, or creating a bed of flowers, or millions of other possibilities that would call for the exact same shape filled by different shades. You'd think this would be a pain, forcing you to duplicate and individually edit the symbol until you had as many as you needed in all the right colors - but by tweaking the color options of symbols, you can skip that step and just apply tints to instances of one original symbol.