A recent webinar hosted by content marketing consulting firm Convince & Convert discussed how our current environment is affecting brand’s social media strategies and the changes that must be made to operations in the interim.
In the “11 Things You Must Adjust in Your Social Media” webinar, hosts discussed how brands need to “stay connected to customers, prospects, partners and team members” using social media. In times of crisis, brands can’t use their existing social media calendar and hope it sticks – each post must have a purpose. Changes covered in the webinar include a focus on purpose, influencer marketing strategies, repurposing content and more.
Key Changes Include:
- Change Your Bios: If operations have been affected in a way that impacts customers, change all social media bios accordingly to address service changes.
- Listen Harder: Online word-of-mouth is the only word-of-mouth currently available. Your customers and prospects may be talking about you more than usual – and in more places – and it’s important to pay attention anywhere your brand exists on social media.
- Post with Purpose: As mentioned above, brands can no longer maintain an editorial calendar simply because it exists. For every post, you must understand and consider the audience, specific communications objective and desired behavior or outcome.
- Spotlight Customers, Partners and Teams: Humanize as much of your brand’s social media as possible. Customers trust and care more about each other than they care about companies and organizations – especially within our current environment.
- Double-Down on Influencers: Influencers have even more clout when considering clicks on Instagram posts including #ad, which have increased 76% since early March.
- Make Sure Visuals are in Context: Spend the time to double and triple check photos on social, email and beyond to ensure they don’t illustrate behaviors in conflict with social distancing or shelter in pace orders. Per Pattern89, social media imagery that features human contact is down 30% since March 12.
- Try New Formats and Publishing Times: Previous best practices regarding videos versus photos may no longer be valid and content consumption patterns are massively disrupted by social distancing and work-from-home practices. With these changes, now is the best time to test new formats and publishing windows, including nights and weekends.
- For Paid, Recalculate Your Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS): Your brand or company’s initial reaction to our current environment may be to stop or curtail social media ads, however, social media ad costs have dropped making ads more affordable than they have been previously. Now is the best time to rework your ROAS formulas and experiment with new creative, messaging and formats.
- Elongate Sales Funnel: Customers of consumer brands and products may still want to buy, but many may feel that that can’t buy right now. Determine how you can give customers information and inspiration to maintain your relationship that may pay off later.
- Repurpose Winning Content: If content is not inappropriate or irrelevant at this time, optimize or repackage content into a new series that works for our brand. This practice is low risk and high efficiency – giving you winning content without having to recreate the wheel.
- Focus on Helping, Not Selling: What your brand and organization executes within the next few weeks will set the table for the next five years – figure out what you can do to help your customers and make that happen.
If you’re looking for a team of experts to help you maintain your business’ social media presence during this time, contact us.
