Tiktok, Instagram Reels, the rise of short-form videos, Stories with embedded music, merging IGTV and Feed videos into Instagram Video, the always-changing covid-19 safety management measures, Squid Game, social commerce, social gamification, the red flags meme on Twitter — there are so many changes that happen in the world of social media on a daily basis both from an industry and a cultural standpoint.

Social media managers have the difficult tasks of staying on the pulse of almost everything as well as hopping on the trending topic to stay relevant and relatable to their community.

But what happens if there is just way too much change?

Decoding the Recent Events

In the past 3 to 4 weeks, we have seen a number of updates to the Instagram app here in Singapore and even though we were asleep when the entire world was either panicking about the Facebook/ Instagram/ Whatsapp outage or are taking the moment for self-reflection and self-care, the recent social media platform updates seemed to have ruffled the performance of a number of brands, including those of ours, the brands we handle and the brands that people we know handles.

Let us not forget that in these past 4 weeks, the safety management measures have been constantly changing— switching from the new normal set up to some form of heightened alert status in only a few days. Home-based learning was adapted again, affecting the WFH workflow of the working parents. There were community-based changes that had affected the day to day life of the people. There’s no denying that these have affected their habits and behaviour. To be more specific, the way they have used their gadgets and social media may have also most likely changed.
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As social media managers or business owners who manage your own social media, the main question is, “what can I do to keep up with all of these changes and stay relevant without losing sight of what our brand is all about?” Or if you are an entrepreneur or marketing director working with a social media agency, “how do I ensure that they are doing everything that they can to make things work and achieve our KPI’s?”

First of all, we must face the fact that what goes up, must come down. It is perfectly normal to see dips in performance from time to time, or during uncertain times, to see erratic changes in your reach, engagement and conversations. There are two types of variables affecting these changes: your content and overall social media strategy (controllable) and the industry and cultural/societal/community factors (uncontrollable).

Controllable Factor #1: Community 

Whenever a social media crisis happens, the first question you need to ask yourself is, “how is my community responding to this?”. Knowing your community from the inside out gives you the head start you need to keep up with the changes. Your social media, your content — all of these should serve them and just like in business, you must know who your customers are, their interests and their behaviour. Observe how people in your community are reacting, identify patterns and causalities, get to the bottom of things — why are these things happening? What has changed is how your community does or responds to things?

If a new social media platform pops up,

• Is your community there yet?
• Is there a possibility for them to adapt and be highly active in the future?
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If it’s an environmental factor driving the changes,

• How did this event changed the way the community thinks?
• Why did this event changed the way the community thinks?

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Controllable Factor #2: Brand Values

Anything that happens is considered a challenge to test your integrity. Stay true to your values and people will continue to support you; people will continue to trust you for who you are.

If a new social media platform or feature pops up,

• How do you convey your values and message in an authentic way using this new app’s features?
• Have you created a solid foundation and strategy in the existing platforms you have? Or will adapting at this early stage affect your creativity and ability to connect with your community?
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If it’s an environmental factor driving the changes,

• Is this controversial issue relevant to us as the brand’s stakeholders and our community? Is it relevant to our values?
• What is our stand? What action/s are we going to take in response to this? Here are some things you can do: be vocal about your stand; share reliable and verified resources; encourage your community to start conversations; or drive change through actions such as fundraisers, making your supply chain more sustainable, placing mental health and workplace wellness in the front and centre of your company, or championing diversity and inclusivity through your hiring process.

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Controllable Factor #3: Social Media Strategy

After the high level controllable factors have been dealt with, now is that chance to take a look at your current strategy. Study your analytics for the past week, month, quarter and even the year to identify gaps and opportunities based on recurring trends and statistics.

Having a solid social media strategy doesn’t mean it will never change. In fact, a key pillar of a strong social media strategy is the willingness to adapt when the current facets of the current one no longer serve your brand or your community. Don’t give room for doubt, only make room for facts and what these facts say about the current condition.

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Here are 4 different ways to keep up with the changes and still achieve social media success:

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1 - Listen.

Allocate separate times in your day to go through your feed, engage with your community, browse the trending topics on Twitter, watch the news or Google what’s happening right now. You can also use tools such as Google Alerts to partly automate this for you. Identify keywords that you would like to be alerted about and Google will send you an instant, daily or weekly e-mail with the relevant news, articles and publications. Staying on the pulse doesn’t mean staying online 24/7. It means intentionally carving out moments to listen to the world around you.

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2 - Embrace Experimentation.

This may be an odd thing to come from a social media agency but news flash: failure is normal. Decrease in reach? Normal. High unfollower count? Normal. Decrease in engagement? Also normal. If you take the time to familiarise yourself with your own social media trends and notice that a post hasn’t been going well or that reach and engagement have been erratic for the past few weeks, consider this as a good thing.

Not all dips in performance are failures. In fact, we would say none of them are. As the world evolves and as the people in it evolves, social media does too.

How do you fix it? By experimenting. Once again, your data analytics will give you some information to help you create assumptions of what may have gone wrong. Was it because of your content, your campaign, a new social media update or was it because of an external factor?

Test out your hypothesis with different types of content to see how it performs. After a number of experiments, draw up your conclusion and create your content based on your findings.

Which leads us to the next point…

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3 - Have systems in place.

Social media strategy is dynamic. It can change depending on the changes in controllable and uncontrollable factors. This means that you need to establish habits to ensure you have a strong foundation especially when a social media crisis occurs.

Here are our recommendations:

• Create comprehensive social media guidelines for your visuals, copy, hashtags, UGC, etc.
• Create an intentional social media strategy aligned with your brand and business values and goals.
• Set aside some time on a weekly and monthly basis to study your analytics and performance.
• Make optimising your social media strategy a habit (ideally every 3 months or earlier than that if something in your strategy really doesn’t work)
• Give your community some time to digest and respond to your content before changing strategies: you need data to study and if you keep changing your data, your data will be inconsistent. Let your content simmer.
• Plan your content 2 weeks in advance: long enough to have stability and ease but short enough to allow you to adapt the calendar for last minutes changes.
  
  

4 - Be proactive, reactive and flexible.

With systems and strategies in place, the final thing you need to do is to be agile.

If you know your industry well enough, predict the trends and create content even before the topic populates your community’s feeds. With full knowledge and understanding of your community and your brand values, get creative in jumping into relevant memes and trends — post it on the day itself or in the next few days to stay current. And as for anything last minute, adapt, adapt, adapt.

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Do you need a social media agency to optimise your social media strategy and help your brand to stay ahead of the social media game to build a strong and engagement community and make your brand top of mind?

Get in touch with the beige. fam to find out how we can work together! There is one spot left for you in our client roster.

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