Navigating the ever-changing social media landscape has always been an adventure. However, recent platform news has thrown a wrench into many a digital strategy, with B2B marketers across industries wondering where we go from here. Don’t fret! We’ve outlined the latest updates, what hasn’t changed about social media, ways to evaluate your content and strategy, and practical tips for moderation, paid social ads, and more.
What’s the Latest?
Meta came under fire when Mark Zuckerberg announced upcoming changes to their owned platforms, including loosened restrictions on allowed comments and content, elimination of their third-party fact-checking program, and adding Community Notes similar to those on X. The announcement raised concerns that misinformation, disinformation, and inflammatory speech will be more widespread on Meta’s platforms.
TikTok was banned – and then it wasn’t. After a lengthy back-and-forth between Bytedance and the U.S. government, TikTok, CapCut, and other Bytedance apps went dark for American users hours before the ban was to be enacted. However, the app was widely restored two days later, with users receiving a message thanking then President-elect Trump for his support.
In anticipation of the TikTok ban, Instagram announced a number of new features, including longer Reels, an editing app similar to CapCut, and a new TikTok-esque look for the profile grid.
Finally, X user engagement continues to fluctuate after the platform’s purchase in 2022, with users reevaluating their presence on the platform while exploring similar options like Threads (also a Meta platform) and Bluesky.
What Hasn’t Changed
Thankfully, a few things haven’t changed for brands on social media:
- Social media has always carried a certain level of risk, like negative replies or being unwillingly pulled into negative conversation because of its inherent characteristics — two-way conversations and the speed and ease of sharing.
- Social media has always been about community building and engagement, giving brands and customers the opportunity to converse directly with each other.
- Social media is a place to experiment to uncover where your audience engages online and the messaging that resonates with them most.
- LinkedIn has emerged as the strongest social media platform for B2B brands in the past few years, and at this point, that remains the case.
So, What Do We Do Now?
If it’s been a while since you reviewed your organic social channel strategy, now’s the perfect time to do so. Take a step back and examine two major things:
- Of the platforms you’re currently posting on, where are you seeing the highest positive organic engagement from your target audiences? Focus your efforts on the social platforms where you’re seeing the highest ROI.
- Where else do your target audiences, including key media, have a presence and engage online? Are they active on Bluesky or Reddit? Diving into these platforms, from exploring industry subreddits to listening to topic conversations through Reddit Pro Trends to following relevant Bluesky starter packs, can help you narrow down the platforms with the most opportunities for testing and learning.
When it comes to your content, focus in on the story you want to tell and the audience you want to engage. If diversity, equity, and inclusion, supporting your employees, and a strong company culture are core values of your business, continue to post authentic, positive content related to these themes, and have a plan in place to moderate and evaluate responses.
Review your platform metrics regularly at both the post- and theme-level — and compared to your other social platforms — to evaluate how this content currently resonates with your audience compared to historical performance. You may receive some negative comments, but don’t let that derail your efforts; if the sentiment and engagement are overall positive, continue with your strategy. However, if you experience a significant decrease in engagement and/or an increase in negative sentiment over time, then you’ll want to re-evaluate your strategy. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily stop posting about DEI content altogether but rather re-evaluate your channel priorities and where your target audience is engaging positively, focusing your efforts there.
Stand up or streamline a consistent social listening process. In addition to monitoring the comments, replies, and tagged mentions of your account, search brand keywords regularly across platforms. A third-party platform like Falcon by Brandwatch allows you to automate social listening for public conversations on X and Reddit and alerts you to drastic increases in brand mentions and/or other desired keywords and phrases.
Active Moderation Is More Important Than Ever
While you’re evaluating your strategy and audiences, now is the time to tighten up your moderation settings and processes. This doesn’t require spending hours each day babysitting your social accounts, but it does mean checking in on your mentions daily as well as reviewing your current settings and processes.
- Turn on comment filtering within your page settings to hide comments that the platform designates as potentially offensive, misleading, or spam.
- As an additional precaution, add sensitive, inflammatory, and/or hateful words, including profanity, to the hidden words setting found in each platform’s settings. This automatically hides comments that include these words. Auto-hidden comments can be reviewed in case innocuous comments are accidentally caught in the filter.
- Depending on the platform, you can also turn off direct messaging, control whether visitors can post on your page, or restrict these to followers only.
- Review page comments, posts, and messages each day for inflammatory or otherwise negative content. Depending on the platform, you can hide or delete these comments and block or ban these users.
If you want to pause posting on a platform on a temporary or permanent basis, you have a few options:
- Publish and pin a post telling your followers that you’re no longer posting on this platform and include links to your other active platforms. Adjust your page settings even further to turn off direct messaging. With this approach, you will still need to regularly review your replies and mentions to monitor for negative activity on these dormant platforms.
- To go one step further, set your Instagram and X accounts to private so only your followers can see your content.
- For a nuclear approach, you can also unpublish — not delete — your Facebook page. Although it can be reactivated at any time, we recommend the “publish, pin, and redirect” approach over this.
What About Paid Social?
When it comes to paid social, what hasn’t changed is the need to be clear and specific about who you want to reach and what action you want them to take, in order to spend your budget efficiently and effectively to reach your marketing and business goals. Just like with your organic strategy, examine your previous paid campaigns, including the results, creative, copy and targeting, and compare them to where your company is at now. Are you engaging who you want to engage? Are they taking the action you want them to take, based on your ad objective? Which platforms drive the KPIs that are most aligned with your goals? What is your return on ad spend (ROAS) in comparison to the ROI of your other marketing and sales efforts?
As you’re evaluating your organic metrics and target audience activity across platforms, explore the paid targeting options on each platform to identify which platforms can help you best narrow in on your target audiences. For example:
- LinkedIn allows you to target at a more professional level, including current company name and/or industry, job title, job function, and seniority level. You cannot target hashtags, keywords, or followers of another company.
- Reddit allows you to target by keyword or target specific subreddits, like anyone talking about cybersecurity and/or members of r/Cybersecurity.
- Google Ads allows you to target users searching for specific keywords, layer on broad audience targeting like “users searching for advertising and marketing services,” and even scan your website to match related user queries to relevant pages (designated by you).
Finally, when standing up your campaigns, make sure to use the brand safety features found on each platform, like excluding certain keywords, turning off comments on your ads, and designating content categories that you don’t want your ad to run beside.
The TL;DR
While social media can feel complicated or overwhelming right now, leaning into the known — your metrics, business goals, key messages, brand values, and audiences — will help you navigate the unknown. It’s also an exciting time to explore the many new platforms in the space, including Bluesky and anticipated/in-beta platforms like Flashes, Reelo, WhiteWind (whtwnd), and Skylight.
Still unsure about your best path forward? Reach out to learn how INK can help!
