Social Media Marketing UPDATES AND TRENDS: Week of March 11, 2024

A short rundown on 3 trending topics and updates in the world of social media and marketing — outages from last week, changes potentially coming to TikTok, and the importance of checking your sources // being careful about information you see online from “experts.”

Questions? Ask anytime!

Check back each Monday for more updates and insights ✨

One of the many things that I wanted to hop on and talk about today was the outages that we experienced last week. On Tuesday, for several hours globally, Instagram and Facebook became unavailable to most, if not all, users. And people for days after that were still experiencing trouble logging into their accounts, accessing their social media, and all sorts of fun things like that. Also LinkedIn and the artist formerly known as Twitter, now called X, also went down later in the week. So first, as we did in October 2021 (the last outage), we want to take the opportunity to remind people about all of the other options out there. Email campaigns, other social media platforms, direct mail, also options still relevant in this day and age. It also provided a good reminder to capture your leads from social media and take them elsewhere.

A lot of the content that you see is promoting something outside of social media - while the apps want you to keep people in their app, watching videos videos and engaging with content, it is important to take the leads that you get from social media and bring them into the real world, whether that's through your email list or booking links, etc. So in the event that either you as an individual do lose access to your account or if we have another outage, you're still able to connect with people and you don't lose those leads in the audience entirely. A lot of the content we do for clients prioritizes real-world sales and bringing them into the sphere beyond just Instagram and Facebook or LinkedIn and Twitter.

I also wanted to address TikTok and some of the things that are going on potentially with future bans. There's a lot of controversy think it was around the same time last year that there were legislations proposed talking about who's allowed to access TikTok. Currently, government employees and contractors are actually not allowed to use TikTok. They're not allowed to have it on their devices. We may potentially see that spread to larger groups of people. It's really hard to predict.

It could disappear tomorrow, just like anything, or it could be around for good and continue to be viable way to connect with people. So again this goes back to that importance of diversifying where you're showing up and then also taking the people that you connect with from social media out of social media into the real world and engaging with your business elsewhere. If you are active on TikTok, stick with it for the time being, and then we'll just keep an ear to the ground and see what happens over the next few weeks and months...

My third topic for today is the importance of social media literacy and checking your sources, especially when it comes to people talking about what works online. There's a lot of click bait! There are a lot of people that are saying they know exactly how everything works and they have the best strategy.

I just want people to be careful about where they're getting their information from. There's a trend going on right now in Threads where people are saying, "Oh, I just got off a call with Meta, and here's what they said you have to do. And if you want more information, buy my course." There has been an uptick recently in people that are selling courses or selling digital downloads and ebooks based on strategies that don't really exist or are saying, "I know better than anybody how this works." Well, the algorithm is a little bit of a mystery to anyone that's actually an expert.

People are just putting that out to get views, clicks, and ultimately to get people to their course. If you have any questions about how things work, I'm happy to answer them to my best of my ability.

As with anything in marketing, social media is not one size fits all. You have an individual business. You're offering something unique. So what worked for somebody else, may not work for you.

Anybody that's offering any guarantee or says that they just got off a call with Mark Zuckerberg, that did not happen. A lot of those videos videos that you see now, too, will even say, "This is how I went viral." Guess what? They weren't viral before they shared that clickbait! It's a trick!

If you're at the point where social media is becoming overwhelming for you and you want some support, please reach out. I'm happy to offer a variety of options for me and my team, whether it's just a little bit of guidance and tutorials, all the way up to full social media management.

I'll go live again next Monday with some other updates and trends. Other than that, I hope you have a great week.

Thanks for watching!