In the last decade, we have seen the consistent, rapid growth of social media – from platforms and data to use cases and engagement. However, since the pandemic in 2020, social media users are now spending at least 2 hours per day on an average of 8 different social media apps. As marketers, we need to rethink digital strategy and social media management.
This has triggered a need for businesses to shift or escalate their social media engagement as they head into a post-pandemic world. This “rethink” impacts not only community management and content – but also strategy, customer experience and support, governance and capability. In fact, it touches almost every aspect of our business world.
Here are some of our tips and tricks for ensuring your digital strategy and approach to social media is up to date
1. Shift away from selling towards engagement
- Providing value and demonstrating compassion – create context-sensitive content
- Moving away from the traditional selling tactics – establish lead nurturing programs
- Listening to the concerns of social media followers – create listening programs and feedback loops in your products
- Posting content that relates to business functions and practices, but is not promoting the product itself – develop a solid content strategy.
2. Focus on mental wellbeing
- Creating a community through social media content – bring your industry expertise into the mix to help support your ecosystem
- Producing content that includes links to mental health services – find and share relevant, authoritative content in your channels
- Being mental health-conscious in developing products and promoting them, however, content does not have to CENTRE around mental health
- Addressing the mental health of consumers and employees – highlight examples of positive mental health storytelling.
3. Consider new social media channels and formats for content
- Publishing more ‘thought-based’ content rather than promotional content – generate links to blog posts, webinars or YouTube content
- Creating short videos that are engaging to watch, rather than longer posts – we might even try this ourselves
- Experimenting with new platforms (for example, browse through Tik Tok find particular hashtags that land you the ‘feeds’ of new audiences)
- Engaging more with the influencers of different industries in order to generate advocacy from previously untapped customer segments.
4. Vary your content publishing timings
- More posts = more engagement on some platforms. While this can be seen as ‘spamming’ on some platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn prefers a velocity of posting and prioritises comments and sharing
- As people are still working from home and spending more time on their devices, there is a new opportunity to experiment with the days and times that you post content.
Assess your social media readiness
How prepared are you and your organisation for social media? Do you have the right strategy, people and processes in place?
Take our quick, free social media readiness assessment to find out:
