Tips for Navigating Social Media Platform Changes

For professionals, businesses, and content creators potentially affected by the upcoming TikTok legislation vote: 1. **Diversify Your Digital Presence**: Don’t rely solely on one platform. Explore and establish your presence on multiple social media platforms to mitigate risks. 2. **Stay Informed**: Keep abreast of the latest news and updates on the legislation. Understanding the potential outcomes will allow you to prepare and adapt your strategies accordingly. 3. **Engage with Your Audience**: Communicate with your followers about the situation. Being transparent can help maintain trust, regardless of the platform you use. 4. **Explore Alternative Platforms**: If TikTok plays a significant role in your digital strategy, start exploring alternatives that offer similar features and audience engagement potential. 5. **Adjust Your Content Strategy**: Consider how your content might need to be adapted for different platforms. Each platform has its unique audience and content preferences. 6. **Enhance Your Data Security**: Regardless of the outcome, use this as an opportunity to review and enhance your data security measures. This is crucial for protecting your business and your audience. 7. **Monitor Legal Developments**: The legislative environment around social media and technology is evolving. Staying informed on these changes can help you anticipate and react to future challenges. 8. **Prepare for Transition**: If you rely heavily on TikTok, begin preparing for a possible transition. This might include downloading your content, informing your audience of where to find you on other platforms, and adjusting your marketing strategies. 9. **Leverage Community Support**: Engage with other professionals and creators who are in the same situation. Sharing insights and strategies can provide valuable support and new ideas. 10. **Advocate for Your Interests**: Consider joining or supporting advocacy groups that represent your interests in digital policy discussions. Your voice can contribute to the broader conversation on technology regulation and its impact on users and businesses. Being proactive and prepared will help you navigate potential changes more effectively, ensuring that your digital engagement and business strategies remain resilient in the face of uncertainty.

Over the last quarter we’ve seen a huge uptick in impressions accross our social channels. So, what changed? The biggest change was our approach to social activation. Instead of using social platforms as a means of conversion, we shifted focus to brand awareness. This shift gave us the ability to produce better performing content that drove likes and shares rather than product/sales based content that consistently caused posts to flop. I now approach social media with the tactic of breadth and depth. Breadth are posts design to expand top of funnel brand awareness. These posts are engaging, funny, and or insightful but appeal to a wide audience and drive shares. These shares drive followers and impressions and lead to brand awareness. The secondary posts come with depth. Depth offers your followers a more meaningful experience with your brand or product and strengthens their time in the conversion phase of the customer journey. Posts with depth often have less engagement which we anticipate and recognize against our KPIs. This constant play of breadth and depth now drives new followers and then educated them on our mission and product. As you look across social platforms you will see that posts that boast sales, product heavy information or bottom of funnel specific activation, they almost always flop. This is because social platforms want you to pay for that conversion and the platforms no longer support those posts. This means that conversion comes through paid advertising and other middle to bottom funnel activation while social remains a more top of funnel play. What’s most important here is this tactic works today. Tomorrow something completely different might be the new tactic. In order to win, marketers must be fluid and adaptive to social, althgorithmic and economic changes.

Social Media Updates To Expect In 2024 These are the shifts I’m starting to see on social media and that I want to make sure you’re aware of as well as you start creating content after doing your IG refresh! 1 - Your Content Should Feel Organic People are growing numb to posts with flying graphics across the screen and over-produced content read from a teleprompter. If your organic content feels like an ad, people are going to scroll right past it. Instead, make sure your organic content (even if it’s sales content) feels like it just came from your camera roll. Photo dumps, candid photos, barely-edited Reels - that’s where the engagement is at. 2 - Long-Form Video > Short-Form More and more, users are consuming social media in their spare time like we used to consume live TV. If you’re creating video content, ask yourself – how would this land if it was being consumed like a podcast? Don’t be afraid to talk for longer periods of time, go inch-wide and mile-deep, etc. Just make sure you keep the viewer hooked the whole time with intrigue and masterful storytelling. 3 - Other Apps Are Growing In Popularity We saw this last summer when Threads erupted (and soon quickly lost all interest). But I think it’s worth noting that most people are hungry for new social media platforms – especially if you’re primarily focused on Instagram. If you’re considering adding a platform, Pinterest and LinkedIn (hi!) are exceptional for lead generation and brand building so I’d consider adding one of those. 4 - Don’t Grow On Twitter (Unless You’re Seeing Success Already) Twitter is notorious for being a highly political app, and it’s going to get even noisier in this election year – meaning, nobody is going to pay attention to your business. Not to mention, Twitter has had a LOT of changes lately and is considering changing to a paid platform. A lot of users have left the platform already, and I predict they will continue to do so. So, if you have an active community on Twitter, you shouldn’t. necessarily stop posting there, but I do recommend growing your community on other platforms instead so you're not building on a platform that's ultimately going to decrease in size and effectiveness. Personally, I'd rather connect with my audience here on LinkedIn than on Twitter and have seen other creators shift this way too. So I recommend investing more time here than on Twitter if you're between the two.