Social media looks a lot different than it did ten years ago, and one of the most significant changes has been its role in marketing and branding. New platforms, features, and algorithms have made creating engaging, brand-consistent content more challenging than ever. To accommodate this, many brands are changing their strategies in two significant ways — internal team structures and technology, says Maarten Boon, senior product marketing manager, Bynder.
Picture the role social media played in your life ten years ago. You probably still checked Facebook on your desktop computer, Instagram stories did not exist, and brands had not yet figured out how to harness its power to support their marketing efforts. Could you have anticipated how integral social media would become to companies and the many different ways they would end up using it to engage their audiences? I certainly did not.
Social media and its role in marketing and branding have changed significantly in the past ten years. Brands now need a strategy that is both unified and all-encompassing and also personalized to the individual format and audience of each individual channel. Gone are the days of posting on only one channel, and simple text posts with stock images are a thing of the past.
Today, social media platforms offer various rich media formats to engage an audience. It is up to marketers to figure out how to develop the right content to keep pace with ever-evolving algorithms. Further, rich media content that often performs the best is more time-intensive to create and has ushered in an exponentially increasing volume of content needs. To keep up with demand, the way brands handle content creation for social media must change once again. So, how will the next ten years look different than the last?
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Changes in People and Processes
Before making any drastic changes to their social media strategy, brands should start by changing their internal structures to accommodate different content creation needs. Senior creative directors, once responsible for overseeing everything posted on social, are beginning to become a thing of the past. Instead, they are passing the torch onto younger professionals, who are often more in tune with the types of content that perform well on these channels, especially as there has been a shift toward more raw, authentic content.
For example, a scripted speech from a company CEO about the challenges of working from home might perform well on LinkedIn but would be out of place on TikTok. Someone less familiar with the nuances of newer platforms might not know this. Younger professionals are still familiar with more traditional social platforms but also understand new features and platforms more quickly because they are more likely to use them in their personal lives. A younger creative may still share that CEO video on LinkedIn but then may task the same CEO with creating a more casual TikTok asking followers to tell them they are working from home without telling them they are working from home (a popular trend on the app that highlights common experiences). It is these small changes that set certain brands’ social media presences apart.
On top of that, much of this work is more often being done in-house. Social media content is difficult to outsource, as the ability to respond quickly on social is key to success. This can be challenging for an external agency, considering that content creation with external partners leads to longer timelines. This puts even more pressure on internal teams and further limits their resources, which will not be sustainable five years down the road — or even five months if the same level of exponential growth keeps occurring. That is why many companies are also looking at how technology can alleviate some of this burden.
Changes in Tools and Technology
Not only are changes in social media influencing how teams are structured, but they are also changing the skills and tools that social media marketers need to do their jobs effectively. New features like Twitter’s Fleets or Snapchat’s Spotlights have put an increasing emphasis on quick, informal, yet visually appealing content. But kicking off a full design project for each Fleet is not sustainable. Instead, brands are turning to creative automation to reallocate portions of design work to marketers.
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This is done through master video and image templates created by the design team, which the social team can update at their disposal. That way, they can keep brand elements like colors, fonts, and logos consistent across multiple different channels while still being able to customize each asset to fit each platform’s specific needs. This significantly reduces the burden on both social media marketers and designers to constantly create something new while also making it easier than ever to maintain brand consistency.
Technological innovation is unpredictable, and social media is no exception. While we may be running out of platforms that have yet to add stories-like features, the next great thing is certainly right around the corner. It is hard to prepare for the unknown. But as more companies adapt their tools and processes to this rapidly changing industry, the easier it will become to create new, engaging, brand-consistent content at a moment’s notice. As a marketer, I cannot wait to see what is next.