The one thing that stays the same about social media is that it’s always changing.
You’ll see lots of articles on the Social Image website about changes to social media platforms, such as Instagram’s latest algorithm change or Facebook’s new Reactions buttons.
Social media sites develop new tools and make changes to stay fullfill user demands and to stay interesting.
These changes can help brands to stay engaging and fresh as well, but they also pose a challenge.
It can be tiring to feel like you need to regularly adapt to platform changes in order to keep your marketing relevant.
The following principles can help you to keep up with social media changes without obsessing over it.
Stay Informed
The first step in keeping up with social media trends is to be aware of them. There are blogs for almost every industry and marketing niche, which can be a great resource. You can also keep things easy by making the information come to you. In addition newsletters like our own, you can sign up for newsletters from most social media websites. Facebook, for example, has a weekly newsletter for marketing partners. These newsletters will include important updates and marketing advice right from the source. In addition to keeping an eye on social media platform news, make sure that you stay informed about trends within your industry. You may want to make a point to regularly check your key competitors’ social media profiles and get information from industry blogs or magazines.
Make Reviewing and Updating Part of Your Routine
You won’t always have time to respond immediately to changes in social media platforms. You can make sure you never fall too far behind, however, by scheduling regular reviews of your social media strategy. Depending on how important online marketing is to your business, you may want to do this weekly, monthly, or quarterly. This is a good time to review your analytics in addition to news of any big changes. Assess whether you want to make any changes, and then make sure your whole team is on the same page.
Diversify
As news feeds and marketing tools change, your performance on any one social media platform may go up or down. You can mitigate this effect by diversifying your marketing strategy. If you don’t already have them, consider making profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Pinterest in addition to Facebook. You can use a tool like Hootsuite to streamline your posting routine, so creating additional profiles won’t mean too much extra work.
Prioritize
While diversification is beneficial, recognize that you don’t need to put the same amount of effort into every social media platform. You probably have a good idea of which platform (or platforms) is most important to your marketing strategy.
When you’re short on time, focus on adjusting your strategy to that website’s latest changes, even if it means holding back on updates for your other profiles. Unless you’re a large business with a dedicated social media team, you’re probably not going to be able to keep up with every minute change on all of your platforms. Focusing on the one or two platforms that are most important to your brand can help you to get the best results from your effort, rather than diluting your attention across the board.
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Written by content manager Meghan Woolley
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