Why You Need To Be Agile In Social Media
Maybe more so with social media marketing than with any other form of marketing, you need to be agile in your strategy and your implementation. But what exactly do we mean by agile? In the world of social media marketing, the idea of agility refers to both an attitude as well as a variety of resources. To be agile, you need to be ready to change and do things differently very quickly. You need to be flexible. Not only does this require a specific mindset but it also means you have the tools you need to make these practical changes as soon as you can. Let’s take a look at five of the key reasons it’s so important to be agile in social media marketing.
5 Key Reasons To Be Agile In Social Media
1. You never know what’s going to work with social media.
Social media can be a very tricky beast to tame. You’re at the mercy of not only a hard-to-please audience but also an algorithm that is often completely unpredictable. You never know exactly what is going to work. Some approaches that you think will be very successful—and that you spend a lot of time and energy implementing— could end up falling short and having very little success.
On the other hand, there might be a campaign that you consider to be filler content, and it doesn’t take much time or energy to put together, but it ends up being wildly successful with your target audience. Many experienced social media marketers will likely tell you a story of a piece of content they put out there on a whim that ended up doing surprisingly well. And as great as that can feel, it’s sometimes a little bit disheartening when you compare it to the content you worked so hard on that didn’t resonate with your audience at all.
This is a key reason agility is important. You don’t know what’s going to do well and what isn’t. So you have to be flexible and keep an open mind.
2. You never know when social media is going to change on you.
There’s another reason social media can be so unpredictable: It’s constantly changing. The algorithm could start favoring different types of content. Audience demographics could shift. What consistently worked for you over the course of a solid year might suddenly stop working, and you suddenly find yourself brainstorming what you’re supposed to do instead.
Think of the way the social media landscape changed even in the past few years. The short-form video became very popular, and social media strategists who started creating video content over graphics or photographs began having more success. If you’re set on creating the same type of content you’ve always created, you’re not going to evolve with the current state of social media.
3. Surprise opportunities always pop up with social media.
Social media depends a lot on trends, and those trends come and go pretty quickly. People all want to talk about the same pop culture moments, recycle the same memes, or put their own spin on the same joke. For somebody who is running a business social media account, you need to stay in the know about the popular content people are consuming, or else you’re left out of the conversation—and you miss an opportunity to promote your brand.
Remember in January 2021 when pretty much every social media account was sharing a picture of Bernie Sanders with his arms crossed in a pair of oversized mittens? Savvy social media marketers used this trend as a way of getting their brand out there in front of as many eyes as possible. If you weren’t agile and quick to create the in-demand content while the trend was hot, you missed out on an opportunity.
4. Social media is a collaborative process.
For many businesses, there’s no single person who is running the social media account. It’s something that many team members collaborate on, from developing ideas, creating content, publishing content, and tracking and analyzing the results. As with any other collaborative endeavor, everyone involved has to be agile because it won’t be solely their own ideas or their own process. If you’re working on social media marketing, you might have an idea that then gets combined with somebody else’s idea. Or maybe you are in charge of creating content that somebody else envisioned and differs slightly from an initial idea that you had. In all these situations, it’s not about doing your own thing and doing it your own way—it’s about working together with others.
5. Your goals with social media might change as well.
Finally, don’t lose sight of the fact that your goals with social media might change. This has nothing to do with changing trends or changing algorithms. This is all you and your business. It might be that your focus one week will be on building your brand identity. After focusing on that for a while, your goal might be to make sales. Different goals will require different tactics, and you need to stay agile if you’re going to succeed.