December Social Buzz | Social media business in 2017: Don’t let your brand disappear

There used to be a method, let’s call it the old-fashioned way, that you could reach a large number of users. You would simply build an audience overtime and share updates. Now, if you aren’t sharing different media on multiple platforms you may have missed the time your audience is most engaged.

Algorithms are one of the ways that are increasingly limiting the success of the old-fashioned way. So how do you succeed in an ever-changing social media world? It should come as no surprise that money talks.

Every social media platform is working to evolve promoted posts. These ads can be a smart investment as they are highly targeted and it’s easy to track the views and clicks as return on the purchase. Many would say 2017 is the time to set a budget and start using promoted posts and ads.

2016 showed numbers like 1.18 billion daily active users on Facebook and 467 million members on LinkedIn.

User numbers like that certainly explains the trend of enlisting employees as brand ambassadors.

Encouraging or even incentivizing team members to share your brand’s message across their own social media accounts is an alternative way to expand the reach and impact of your brand’s social media without spending money on ads or promoted posts with the social media giants.

This method is most effective if the post aligns with the team member’s own audience and they actually want to share the company posts. 2017 might be a great time to encourage team members to be your social media militia.

However, the employee social media militia is sort of a double-edged sword. If you think about the people you work with, or even interact with, on a daily basis it becomes easier to understand the skills gap that exists with social media.

Just last week, videos gained another win with the launch of live videos on Instagram. Facebook combined Live with 360-degree videos, and Twitter even joined the party with the option for live videos. That’s just one week of new platforms to become an expert in.

Social media coursework is slowly being incorporated into university programs, but as the number of channels and more sophisticated uses grow, the best option with team member engagement is to keep it simple.

Another use for social media that is going to continue to grow in 2017 is real, real-time engagement. Many customer-service centric companies have real people who interact with comments on social media. Users are starting to expect a brand to have a social media team on their feed for people who present questions or have issues that need a resolution.

Finally, as 2017 social media content strategies and plans go into use next month, don’t ignore analytics. The analytics that are available on social platforms are comprehensive and fairly easy to comprehend. Whether they are successes or failures, statistics will play an important part for understanding 2017 social media reach.