Total Guide to Social Media Marketing – Issue 1

In a new feature for 2018, we’re giving you the round up of what’s new in the world of social media marketing. From algorithm updates to new features and everything in between, keep checking back for a monthly update on this ever-changing industry.

As a digital marketing company, social media marketing is a vital piece of our marketing efforts. As well as publishing great content to our websites and building on our email list, utilizing the ‘big four’ of the social media world, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, we’re reaching new people all the time.

Facebook

In a move that Facebook are calling “Bringing People Closer Together”, the latest change to their algorithm will move posts from friends and family above posts from companies, brands and media in the News Feed. On the one hand, this will be a big hit for the end user who’s fed up of being bombarded with messages from people trying to sell them things. But on the other, it’s not great news for companies, brands and media outlets whose organic reach has been steadily declining for as long as we can remember.

Facebook have again made paid promotion even more important to marketers. Without putting some spend behind your posts there’s no clear way to predict how your post will perform. As changes will take a few months to roll out, you may see this as Facebook trying to boost its ad revenue, and why not?

BUT. This will push marketers down the direction of creating genuinely interesting, useful content that resonates with your audience. The only sure-fire way to make social media a useful resource for your marketing efforts is to publish engaging, timely content and interact with your audience. No more free rides for marketers! Time to take another look at that content calendar. No more posting for posts sake!

NOTE: Facebook will give a boost to friends, family and Facebook Groups. If you can come up with a reason to foster a community of people in a Facebook Group, now’s the time.

Twitter

Twitter have made a move that is set to shake up campaign management for social media marketers. If you've ever juggled multiple campaigns at once you'll know it can be tricky deciding which content to promote, who to target it to, how much budget to put behind it, etc. To help with this Twitter has launched Twitter Promote Mode, which they've described as an "always on promotion engine" that will automatically promote your tweets to an additional 30,000 users a month and get you 30 new followers.

Essentially, instead of choosing which tweets to promote, Twitter will automate the process and pick and choose which of your first 10 tweets of the day to promote to your pre-determined audience. All for a flat monthly fee.

This has the potential to be an incredibly useful tool for marketers. Twitter Ads is something we've not fully made the most of over the years so we'll definitely be experimenting with it.

LinkedIn

The proudly professional social network has been a little quiet in the beginning of 2018 announcing new features ever since their latest addition in December. On their mission to make sure their users are as tooled up to find their next opportunity in their career, LinkedIn has introduced ‘Trending Skills’.

This is aimed at keeping users informed about skills that people with your job title also have. If you have that skill and it’s not on your LinkedIn Profile, get it added! People with five or more skills get discovered in 27 times more searches, so if you’re trying to establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry, make sure you take note of the skills trending in your industry.

Instagram

There are so many ‘right ways’ and ‘must-try’ strategies getting shared it’s a full time job to keep up with them (actually, it’s MY full-time job) so when Instagram themselves shared an article from Forbes about the “Five Critical Gen Z Instagram Tricks That Marketers Are Missing” we thought it might be useful to take notice!

To give you the headlines, it’s all about crafting your persona thoroughly, choosing an aesthetic strategy that has space to grow, including F.L.U.F.F. content, using ‘pods’ and breaking the fourth wall. It’s a seriously great article from Kelly Samuel, and we’d highly recommend giving it a read here.

Thanks for reading!

What do you think of the most recent updates in the social media world? Do you have any other tips? Did we miss anything? Let us know by reaching out on social or emailing me at [email protected]