5 Tips For Keeping Up With Social Media News and Trends
Chasing the never-ending list of new social media updates, trends and emerging platforms can be a challenge, especially for small business owners and social media managers who are already balancing multiple priorities. Thankfully, keeping up with social media news and trends doesn’t have to be a time-consuming chore. Here’s five top tips on how to do it:
1. Manage your time
We’ve all experienced getting sucked into a social media hole...you start scrolling through the updates and before you know it, hours have passed. Rather than feeling the need to catch up with social media news and trends each day, it’s important to batch your time and allocate a slot within your working week that you dedicate to catching up on social media updates. Marketing Consultant Luan Wise suggests using this time to turn the social media news and trends from the week into a single piece of content. This not only allows you to filter through which news is actually relevant for you and your community, but also creates a resource which makes keeping up with updates easier for your employees and consumers. Alternatively, SocialDay does this for you with its quick-read weekly social media news round-up.
2. Focus on your business’ priorities
Social media is constantly evolving, so there will be changes almost everyday across the major platforms. Thankfully, not all of these updates will be relevant to you and your business, so you don’t need to think about implementing them all. By recognising and accepting this, you’ll be able to create a clear business plan and stay focused on your priorities. Of course, you can still be aware of social media updates in the background, but they shouldn’t be consuming your valuable time which would be better spent on tending to your community and advancing your business.
3. Use credible sources
We all know the internet has a habit of making social media news go viral, however the news is not always reliable or even true. It’s therefore critical that you go to credible sources to gather your information to ensure you’re sharing updates that you know are relevant and truthful. Other than SocialDay, some reputable places you can go to for your news include:
The platforms themselves: the major social media platforms have their own blogs where they report key updates and developments.
Regular update sites/newsletters: Luan recommends Social Media Today, TechCrunch, The Verge, and Social Media Examiner to keep up to date on daily news.
Industry reports: reports such as Hootsuite and We Are Social provide country-by-country updates which are great for businesses working with international clients, as well as statistics which are updated and compared on an annual, sometimes quarterly basis.
4. Set up alerts
It can be stressful trying to make sure that you don’t miss important updates. To overcome this, you can set up notifications like Google alerts around keywords you’re interested in monitoring, whether that’s specific platforms, features, or events. To avoid this clogging up your inbox, Luan also suggests using readers such as Feedly, which will ensure relevant updates are accessible as and when you need them, saving you valuable time and meaning you don’t have to subscribe to multiple newsletters.
5. Utilise communities
As well as monitoring social media updates, it can be beneficial for your business to see how people are reacting to and using these new features, products and platforms. Luan suggests becoming part of relevant Facebook groups, for example Digital Women, which allow you to see the questions that like-minded communities and your target audience are asking. This will then let you tailor your content to their needs and pain points, providing them with genuinely helpful resources. Other useful places to monitor the reactions and needs of your audience include LinkedIn groups and social media events like SocialDay.
Watch Luan Wise’s full SocialDay session, How to Keep Up With Social Media News and Trends, here:
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