Why Flexibility and Adaptability are Key to Social Media Success

Whilst it could be argued that social media as a discipline is no longer a “new” opportunity, but is now something more established on the radar of brand and organisation marketing directors, it would be a mistake to consider the medium as mature. At best, the medium has evolved from its swaddling clothes, learned to walk and gone to school, but is still firmly a teenager at heart, perhaps somewhere between secondary school and university. Importantly as a medium, it looks likely to always retain this teenage characteristic, or at least for the foreseeable future, because it is unwilling to be categorised or stop evolving.

Whilst this is clearly a light-hearted comparison, there is a very real point in here for brands and businesses. Social Media’s pace of continual evolution demands flexibility and adaptability amongst those executing campaigns within the media, because social media abides by few rules and is continually changing shape and direction. Indeed, anyone that calls themselves a social media expert and claims to have a handle on the evolution of social media is in fact declaring the exact opposite, because the graph of social media evolution is increasing at a quicker rate than the graph of human understanding.

It is this very uncertainty and journeying into the unknown that has caused so much heartache for a number of brands and businesses, eager to develop their social media profiles but not without the harness of tried and tested measurement and analytics. However, whilst it is never possible to fully control the social media animal, it is possible to set some rigid measurement tools and adapt your campaigns accordingly.

From an audience acquisition perspective, brands should look to set clear KPIs for growth, be they annual, monthly or weekly. Whilst these figures will of course fluctuate as a result of the unknown (i.e. Facebook quite often sees sudden unexplained increases in fan followers), it is possible to provide clear targets for audience growth.

Similarly, engagement levels can be measured accurately. On the Facebook platform, Facebook Insights will not only show the number of impressions per post, but an interaction rate based on the size of your audience. Given the importance of engagement, particularly for brands in a competitive sector, here is a clear and measurable KPI, that can be used to tweak and ensure content narratives never fall below an agreed engagement percentage.

So, there are ways and means. However, the important thing for brands is to recognise that there are no absolute experts, but with flexibility, analysis and the ability to adapt to what the results are telling you, there are opportunities not only to set and measure KPI’s, but to reach them time and again.