Social Media Marketing: UPDATES AND TRENDS, Week of March 18, 2024

Today, we talked about:

➡️ the "engagement recession"

➡️ the possible TikTok ban

➡️ working with influencers and their PR agents

Questions? Ask anytime!

Check back next Monday for more updates and insights ✨

There's a lot going on in the world of social media! If you have more questions after I go through these, feel free to drop them in the comments, or if you wanted to send me a message, I'll reply later this week and give you some insights on what's going on.

The first thing I wanted to talk about was what's being called an engagement recession: there's been a decline across the board in likes, comments, shares, etc. If you've been experiencing a decline in your engagements, on your social media accounts, you're not alone. A couple of ways yo can combat this - posting more frequently; utilizing all the different features; making sure you're showing up on multiple platforms. One way to help brands that you love, your friends that run small businesses, or other content creators is to go and comment on all their posts. Even just leaving a comment with a couple of emojis underneath a post from a brand that you care about or want to support really helps us get the content in front of more people. It's a positive interaction for the algorithm. It doesn't cost any money and only takes a few seconds, and it can really give a big boost to those people that you want to support. Another thing to help with engagement is to tailor your content to each platform you're using, so you know it is optimized for the site it is on.

As for TikTok, there was a bill that was passed by the US House of Representatives to move forward with the ban on TikTok because of the potential security risks, the potential for disinformation, and the Chinese government getting involved and putting out information, those sorts of things. It's now moving to the US Senate and we don't know what will happen when it gets to the Senate. If you're active on TikTok, until we know what's going to happen, you can still post there and engage with the people there. But you may want to encourage them to connect with you in other places and make sure that you're backing up your content that goes out on TikTok. If you're putting out videos, download them to your phone before you publish them, that way if you want to post it elsewhere, you can. I do recommend that you repurpose what's going out to Instagram reels, YouTube shorts.

The third thing I want to talk about is not as popular right now and people aren't talking about it as much, but I did want to put it on everyone's radar: There's a new trend or a new service that's coming out of all this fun social media influencing and content creation... in the past, a PR agency used to manage press and have a contact list for people to send articles, press releases, that thing, to. With the shift to social media being a primary source of news, their primary search engine, etc. what we're seeing is basically agents for influencers. Instead of a PR agency working with journalists, they're now working with people that have thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers, and connecting them with businesses to create content and promote specific brands. It is a little bit of a wild bust out there right now since social media influencer partnerships have only been around for a few years really. I think it's good to be curious but also cautious. So if you do consider working with large influencers, definitely make sure that you establish some goals and ground rules at the outset, whether you're working with the PR agency or even the influencers directly. Understand what deliverables are included, what your goals are, what your budget is, and make sure that the influencers that you're partnering with align with your brand and your audience. Do your research, make sure that your audience is aligned and then being clear about what's included, what are you looking to get out of the partnership, just like you would with any other advertising spend or initiative like that.

If there's a topic that you'd like me to cover, feel free to send me a message. I'm happy to include that in my little write up for the week before I jump on here. So if there's anything you want to know about or things that you've been noticing and you have questions about, I'm happy to include that in an upcoming live video!

Other than that, I hope you guys have a great week. Happy spring - it starts tomorrow! 'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for watching!