Thursday April 11, 2024
Keeping up with social media
The only constant is change
by Andrea Mora
CoverlyPro Social Media Specialist
Prefer to listen? Click below.
Posting to social media is the easy part. Getting content onto your platforms isn’t a strategy, it’s a given. The important part is creating content that your audience wants to see and you want them to engage with – easier said than done. With social media trends, tools, and tips constantly changing, it can feel impossible to keep up, but it isn’t.
Social Media – the good, the bad, and the dirty
The one constant in life is change, and that goes double for social media. Adapt or get left behind. Social media is an amazing tool to share your business or organization with the world, but competing with so many other pages and creators in a constantly changing environment can be challenging. As I work more with social media, I get more comfortable with how it’s built and how it changes. There’s a back-and-forth successful content creators do with developers. They continually change social platforms, and we learn and adapt our strategies.
The struggle is REEL
One of the most frustrating changes I recently faced was on Instagram. I created a reel for CoverlyPro – giving a helpful tip about how to find trending audios by tapping a button when posting a Reel. Since we plan our content about a month out, when it was finally posted, the ‘Trending’ button that I recommended wasn’t there anymore, so my tip wasn’t helpful anymore. I was defeated and frustrated by the change. It was a great feature, and I had no clue if the button would ever come back. But that’s just how it is between content creators and developers – the struggle is reel. I had to revisit my strategy for reels and adapt to the changing meta on the platform; but how could I know what changed and what was coming?
The Research
I started diving headfirst into Hootsuite blogs, webinars, Instagram tip and trick accounts, articles on Google, and even interacting with Instagram itself to find my solution. The developers were quick to make changes, but the community of social media professionals seemed to be just as fast.
One of the most helpful tools I found to keep tabs on what changes are happening and why, is simply looking at the update notes in the app store. I know, right? The updates are a clear and helpful list of changes and improvements that the developers are rolling out. As any company would be, developers are excited to push out new features and set their changes up for success in any way they can. (Plus, the algorithm prefers its users to use new features.)
Developers also gave professionals tools and resources to help creators keep up with changes. In Instagram’s case, there are two sites aimed to help content creators: About, and Creators. These were made to help creators adapt their strategies and discover how Instagram works from real developers as they implement changes.
So, what changed?
As a result of all my research, I found a new method of discovering and using trending audio in my reels. When developers took away the previous button, they gave us new helpful ways to create and boost our content that seemed to work even better. So, as frustrating as change is, it looks like the developers were offering a helping hand. The research also led me to focus on creating more reels for our client’s content calendars after recognizing that they were one of Instagram’s most supported features.
Initially, there wasn’t much of a change in engagement. But, as time went on, I saw the reels I was sharing go crazy. Within the first day of posting, they would perform normally, but within a week or so, I started to see likes, comments, and overall engagement grow. Eventually, I noticed our client’s reels performed even better than normal grid posts. By adapting to the changes with new strategies, I was able to boost our clients’ accounts to do better than ever before.
Moving Forward
I came to understand the relationship that we as social media creators have with developers. It’s an important back-and-forth that benefits us both in the end. They continue to develop services and features to better attract and serve users, and we, as professionals, learn about these changes and create content for those users to engage with. So, just remember that while creating social media content can be frustrating at times, there are many resources and communities for you to reach out to learn more and make your content bigger and better. A changing media landscape is a good thing, even when we get frustrated, because it keeps audiences engaged, and it’s our responsibility to do our part to keep up.