Hundreds of millions of Americans—and our counterparts worldwide—watched the US election and its high-drama aftermath unfold on social media over the past week or so. Most of us were using Facebook or Twitter, but in the immediate wake of Election Day, a new social media platform suddenly rocketed to the top of the app download charts: Parler.

Conservative politicians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have been evangelizing Parler to their followers for more than a year and have been joined by right-wing media personalities. Conservatives have now redoubled their efforts to evade “censorship,” as Twitter works overtime to fact-check false claims about the election.

What is Parler?

Parler is a Twitter-style social media platform that first launched in 2018. As with Twitter, it’s built around a newsfeed of accounts you can choose to follow, and users can upload images in addition to creating posts of up to 1,000 characters (Twitter caps posts at 280). In addition to being available by Web, Parler has both iOS and Android apps available.

The service takes its name from the French verb parler, meaning “to speak” (or sometimes, “to talk”) as in the examples “Parlez-vous français?” or “Je veux parler avec ton gérant.” However, the app does not take the French pronunciation of the word—par-lay—and is instead pronounced “parlor,” as in a sitting room where you greet your 19th-century visitors. Posts and messages made on the platform are called “parleys.”

What makes it different from Twitter?

Parler planted its political stake on day one. The service explicitly describes itself as “a non-biased, free speech social media focused on protecting user’s rights,” a stance meant to fall in line with the oft-repeated (but largely untrue) claims of right-wing politicians and media personalities who believe that Twitter (and, to a lesser degree, Facebook) is unfairly censoring them.

These claims of censorship are usually clearly, demonstrably false, mostly made to garner political support. There are some rare exceptions of total bans, but these are generally linked to a proven history of dangerous behavior. Twitter, for example, banned professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platform in 2018 after Jones repeatedly broke Twitter’s anti-harassment rules. And this year, Twitter and Facebook both banned QAnon groups, figureheads, and content, citing a litany of real-world, physical harms to which the conspiracy movement is linked.

That, however, does not stop right-wing personalities with large audiences from claiming their voices are being suppressed. In December 2018, Candace Owens (2.7 million Twitter followers) became the first high-profile conservative to call for others to bail on Twitter and join Parler. But she was not the last. Throughout 2019, figures from the Trump administration and the right-wing mediasphere followed in waves, which accelerated after Twitter began trying to enforce its existing community standards on the president’s account by appending fact-checking labels to some of his false claims.

It feels like this has happened before…?

Several small social media platforms have launched in recent years, all claiming to be “free speech” alternatives to mainstream sites that dare to commit mild acts of moderation.

Parler’s most direct competition, for example, is Gab, which launched in 2016 and marketed itself as an alternative to “the entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly.” The platform rapidly became a haven for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, including the shooter who committed the 2018 mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Gab’s free-for-all position on speech has prevented it from gaining widespread traction, however. Both Google and Apple blocked the Gab app from their mobile app stores. The platform went briefly offline in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting, as a veritable host of Web hosts refused it service, before one came through. (That hosting business also provided service to 8chan after Cloudflare cut it off.) These days, Gab uses a Mastodon instance, allowing it to have a mobile presence.

So Parler is a right-wing free-for-all?

Yes, but also no. Although Parler professes to be a free speech paradise and deliberately courts conservative voices, it has not yet deliberately recruited known far-right harassers and provocateurs as Gab did. Parler also does have a user agreement (PDF) and community guidelines (PDF) to which all users are expected to adhere.

Those guidelines, however, are left deliberately unspecific, and a post from Parler founder John Matze, as captured in screenshots by BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac, seems to show that the new waves of users are having some trouble figuring out where the behavior boundaries fall.

“When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED,” Matze evidently had cause to write. Deliberately obscene usernames, pornography, and threats to kill other users are also not permitted, he added.

The company also tried at first to distance itself from any potentially unsavory (but legal) content users shared. It did so by adding a clause to its user agreement that would have required the user to pay any legal fees Parler incurred in a lawsuit over user-generated content. The company seems to have scrapped that clause in the most recent version of its user agreement, however, after it attracted negative media attention.

How’s it working out?

Poorly, it seems. Ars’ own Jim Salter took a spin through Parler this week and discovered that, in addition to much of Parler’s content being questionable, a host of quality-of-life issues make the platform difficult to use.

For example, Jim found that image embedding on Parler rarely works, and embedded links don’t fare much better. The interface also strips context away from conversations, divorcing replies and comments from the parent post to which they are responding.

That “no pornography” rule also isn’t faring so well. The combination of lax oversight and insufficient built-in spam protection tools leaves Parler as a sea of good old-fashioned spam—as Jim puts it, “It is like hopping in a time machine. SO MUCH of the absolute lowest-effort spam just choking every hashtag on the service.”

So what’s the point? Is Parler legit?

These answers are linked because it seems the point of Parler is… money.

That’s no surprise, of course; the point of running a business—any business, in any market segment—is to generate profit. As my colleague Jim realized, however, Parler makes it particularly easy for users to hold their metaphorical hats out, with a setting that adds a “tip jar” link to any tweet parley.

Which brings us back to President Donald Trump. In the wake of his electoral loss to President-elect Joe Biden, Trump has been directly challenging Fox News and is reportedly planning to launch a right-wing digital media brand of his own after he eventually leaves the White House.

Parler has been trying to court Trump since at least June, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump currently has almost 89 million Twitter followers. If Parler managed to peel Trump away from Twitter and bring a sizable fraction of his fan base along with, it could be a major coup for the nascent platform—particularly if the reports that he plans to try launching a new media brand pan out.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1721648

Managing both platforms that offer similar content might seem redundant, but the rewards are well worth investing your time.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/359053

Facebook and Twitter are struggling to contain rising anger from Donald Trump’s supporters online, as a wave of momentum builds around the US president’s claims that the election is being stolen from him.

In the past 24 hours, Facebook has invoked emergency measures to make it harder for users to share posts that contain misleading information, to remove such posts from people’s newsfeeds, and to restrict the circulation of poll-related livestreams.

The social media company has also expanded its warning labels from posts by political candidates to a wider web of rightwing influencers, many of whom were echoing Mr. Trump’s messages, saying that it was flagging individuals based on whether their posts were going viral.

On Thursday afternoon, Facebook moved to shut down a “Stop the Steal” group, which had amassed more than 360,000 followers in just a day, saying that it was concerned about calls for violence from some of the group’s members.

The move prompted outcry from the group’s founders, the pro-Trump Women for America First, who also complained that their account on MailChimp, the group emailing service, had been suspended. “Is this how social media treated Black Lives Matter protesters?” Chris Barron, a spokesperson for the group, wrote on Twitter.

Another 79,000-strong private group called Stand Up Michigan to Unlock Michigan was also shut down by Facebook, but only after it had successfully called for its members to storm a Detroit counting center.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief information security officer and a professor at Stanford University, said that while “nothing really stuck on election day,” online narratives had since “consolidated” around several themes, particularly “Stop the Steal,” a catch-all slogan for all accusations of voter fraud against Democrats and election officials.

In one sign of the growing discontent and tension on the platform, an internal metric at Facebook that tracks “violence and incitement trends” rose 45 percent over the past five days, according to a report by BuzzFeed that Facebook did not deny.

Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern, acknowledged that Facebook and other platforms had been “much more aggressive” in this election in labelling posts and removing potentially dangerous online groups.

But he said in the coming days, Facebook will need “to do a lot more and a lot sooner,” and called for automated systems to “catch these things.”

Twitter, meanwhile, permanently banned the account of Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, after he called for the execution of Dr Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

The moves angered Mr. Trump, who took to Twitter to accuse the platform of being “out of control, made possible through the government gift of Section 230,” the law that grants social media groups immunity for the user-generated content they host.

A Twitter spokesperson also said the group had been “proactively monitoring #StopTheSteal and related Tweets since Tuesday morning,” adding warning labels to a number of tweets from high-profile Republicans pushing the narrative.

The approach contrasted with that of Google-owned YouTube, which has come under fire during this election for failing to respond to misinformation.

In one example, the company refused to take down a video posted by rightwing media group One America News Network that included false claims that President Trump won the election and allegations of voter fraud conducted by Democrats.

YouTube said that the video, entitled “Trump won,” contained “demonstrably false content that undermines trust in the democratic process”—but added that this still did not breach its policies in any way.

Additional reporting by Kiran Stacey in Washington, DC.

© 2020 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1720076

The Federal Communications Commission’s top lawyer today explained the FCC’s theory of why it can grant President Donald Trump’s request for a new interpretation of a law that provides legal protection to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Critics of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan from both the left and right say the FCC has no authority to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives legal immunity to online platforms that block or modify content posted by users. FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson said those critics are wrong in a blog post published on the FCC website today.

Johnson noted that the Communications Decency Act was passed by Congress as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was an update to the Communications Act of 1934 that established the FCC and provided it with regulatory authority. Johnson also pointed to Section 201(b) of the Communications Act, which gave the FCC power to “prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary in the public interest to carry out the provisions of this Act.”

Johnson then explained why he believes this means the FCC can reinterpret Section 230:

The Supreme Court has twice considered whether the FCC’s general rulemaking authority under Section 201(b), adopted in 1938, extends to the 1996 amendments to the Act. Both times, the Court held that it does. Writing for the Court in Iowa Utilities Board, and employing his trademark textualist method, Justice Scalia wrote that this provision “means what it says: The FCC has rulemaking authority to carry out the ‘provisions of [the 1934] Act.'” The Court explained that “the clear fact that the 1996 Act was adopted, not as a freestanding enactment, but as an amendment to, and hence part of, [the 1934] Act” shows that Congress intended the Commission to have rulemaking authority over all its provisions. Likewise, in the later City of Arlington case, the Court confirmed that the Commission’s rulemaking authority “[o]f course… extends to the subsequently added portions of the Act.” From these authorities, a simple conclusion follows: Because Section 230 is among the “subsequently added portions of the Act,” it is subject to the FCC’s Section 201(b) rulemaking authority.

FCC still wrong, critics say

One problem with citing Section 201—which is part of the Communications Act’s well-known Title II—is that the section applies to common carriers. The Pai FCC in 2017 justified its repeal of net neutrality rules by claiming that the commission has no authority to regulate broadband providers as common carriers under Title II—even though courts had specifically ruled the FCC does have such authority. Now, the FCC is citing Title II to claim some authority over social media platforms, which have not been classified as common carriers.

But John Bergmayer, legal director at consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge, disagrees. Today he told Ars, “201 is concerned with common carriers, not information services. Of course the 1996 Amendments are part of the [Communications] Act. But 201(a) and (b) are both directly addressed to the duties of common carriers.”

Johnson argued in his blog post that “the general grant of rulemaking authority at the end of Section 201(b) contains no reference to common carriers; it simply empowers the Commission to make rules that are ‘necessary in the public interest to carry out the provisions of this Act,’ without qualification.”

However, common-carrier regulation is the topic of all of the text in the single-paragraph Section 201(b) leading up to the statement cited by Johnson. Here’s what the statute looks like on the FCC website:

Still, Johnson provided another citation to back the FCC’s case on the point. The US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in 2008 “held that Section 201(b) gave the Commission authority to interpret ambiguous provisions in the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992,” Johnson wrote. “Notably, that Act by its terms applies to cable operators, not common carriers. The Court reasoned… that it was sufficient that the 1992 law amended the Communications Act and incorporated the relevant provisions therein. The same reasoning applies to Section 230.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1716259

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https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/356089

October 13, 2020 7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

This article was written by Lindsay Patton, a member of the Entrepreneur NEXT powered by Assemble content team. Entrepreneur NEXT is our Expert solutions division leading the future of work and skills-based economy. If you’re struggling to find, vet, and hire the right Experts for your business, Entrepreneur NEXT is a platform to help you hire the experts you need, exactly when you need them. From business to marketing, sales, design, finance, and technology, we have the top 3 percent of Experts ready to work for you.

As Covid-19 spread across the U.S. and we started pivoting to our digital-centric lives, we’ve developed new needs from our daily apps. To keep up with demand, social media giants have been busy rolling out new features and tools for their users. 

Due to the pandemic, we’ve all had our digital habits thrown for a loop. Even how we engage in social media has changed, with best times to post shifted, and a noticeable drop-off in activity past 6 p.m. as people have started prioritizing their post-workday needs.

To keep up with society’s new digital traits, social media engineers have had to work tirelessly to launch more efficient and simpler features. Here’s a roundup of how the biggest social media platforms pivoted due to Covid-19.

TikTok versus everybody. 

If there’s a clear winner of 2020, it’s TikTok, the video-sharing app that saw increased downloads since the Covid-19 outbreak began. In January of this year, TikTok brought in 22.2 million unique visitors within the U.S. Those visitors nearly doubled by April, when most U.S. citizens were in the middle of their quarantine. Globally, TikTok brought in 315 million unique visitors, making it the most-downloaded quarter for any app. 

There’s a reason TikTok has become a worldwide phenomenon, too. With people feeling isolated and anxious over the nearly year-long pandemic, they’re turning to activities that offer instant gratification. Psychologist Dr. Prerna Kohli explains how this format can encourage reward-seeking behavior:

“The app is easy to use and the content doesn’t require much talent or know-how or even literacy, allowing users to access all kinds of crowds. It’s a quick bandaid for your boredom, where your actions are mostly rewarded and you receive positive conditioning for being yourself. Nobody’s interested in the make-up you’re wearing, only in the message you’re conveying.”

TikTok’s success brought out copycats.

Seeing this TikTok takeover put pressure on other dominant platforms to step up their offerings. Just within the past year, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube have put forward efforts to recreate that TikTok magic.The three apps worked hard over the past few months to develop new features inspired by TikTok. 

• Instagram Reels

  • Instagram saw success when it took Snapchat’s model and made it better with Stories. Now, the Facebook-owned platform hopes to do the same with Instagram Reels. The feature, which launched in early August, is similar to TikTok’s format: users create 15 or 30-second videos put to music. So, how’s it been performing? Well, the New York Times called it a “dud” and a little more than a month after its launch, Instagram Reels had to update its features due to user displeasure. 

• Snapchat 

  • Snapchat’s pre-Covid-19 partnership with Warner Music Group was inspired by TikTok’s marriage of music and video. The app will have its own music library for snaps, but will not roll out a video feed like TikTok or Instagram Reels. In August, Snapchat tested its music/video pairing feature in Australia and New Zealand. No updates on when it’s hitting the U.S., however.

• YouTube Shorts

  • YouTube Shorts hopes to remind everyone who is the video king. Shorts allows you to create short-form videos within the YouTube app and is currently beta testing in India. Unique to Shorts is a multi-segment camera that allows users to string multiple videos together. Like TikTok, Shorts will have a music library to choose from. Unlike TikTok, Shorts will only allow 15-second video uploads.

With most of these features still in testing mode and Instagram Reels only being a couple months out from its release date, it’s hard to tell if the TikTok-inspired features will stick.

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Facebook saw opportunities to streamline. 

When it comes to Covid-19 response, Facebook has been on top of it. The conglomerate saw a chance to fill some Covid-size holes and put efficiencies in place to make living digitally simpler. Taking a note from Zoom’s book, Facebook launched Rooms, a video-meeting feature that holds up to 50 people per room. Rooms have no time limit, can be promoted via link in Facebook feeds to help grow audiences and users don’t need a Facebook account to use the feature.

Likewise, online shopping skyrocketed during quarantine, and Facebook looked at ways it could improve its Instagram shopping experience for users. Brands have utilized Instagram’s visual-friendly format to promote and sell products, however, users had to leave the app to make purchases. Now Instagram offers in-app purchases through its Checkout feature, as well as buying options during Instagram Live Shopping events. 

Facebook is also using its Instagram and WhatsApp ownership to streamline between the apps. In August, it was announced that the apps would share a combined messaging platform. Currently, users have the choice to combine Facebook Messenger with Instagram’s chat option but the merge won’t be complete until WhatsApp gets involved. 

Live event and streaming options increased.

As we settled into our homes full time, Zoom quickly became the go-to platform for events, offering options many social media apps didn’t have in place. As we’ve had to come up with clever ways to meet and present remotely, we have also learned how limited we were in options we would have never thought of pre-Covid-19.

The quickest shift is when Facebook brought back its Live With feature in April. The platform got rid of the option to do a Facebook Live stream with friends in November, not predicting our world’s status just a few months later. Another quick and simple shift Facebook did was enable Instagram Live video viewing and commenting from desktop. With more people utilizing Live for events and meetings, a desktop option offers users more viewing convenience.

People are connecting more than ever on Facebook-owned platforms, too. Between February and March, total messaging went up 50 percent and Instagram and Facebook Live events doubled within a week’s time. Additionally, group calls increased 1,000 percent within a month. 

Boosted steaming numbers aren’t unique to just Facebook, though. Between March and April, streaming in general nearly doubled and the industry as a whole is up 99 percent. It was Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, that saw the biggest growth of all, averaging 1.645 billion hours viewed per month.

And who knows? With how 2020 is going, chances are things will shift again over the next few months and this article will be obsolete.

To hire the Experts you need, exactly when you need them, visit next.entrepreneur.com to schedule a meeting with our Expert solutions team.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/357612

October 12, 2020 6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In the last several years, social media “pods” have become a popular strategy to get more attention and engagement through a social media channel’s algorithms. Although many pods involve people who already know each other, it’s also possible to create a niche or topic pod, find followers and then ask them to participate actively. 

It sounds like a good idea to convince others in your circle to “upvote” one another’s posts and comments on sites like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. In some pods, people are genuinely interested in helping boost each other’s social media engagement rates. However, that’s not always the case. 

Related: How the Crisis is Changing Consumer Behavior, and How Entrepreneurs Can Act on It

Reasons to avoid social media pods

Although engagement pods aren’t the same as “buying” followers and likes, the process still essentially means you are creating fake likes and artificially enhanced engagement rates. The intent behind Instagram pods, for example, is to climb up the engagement ranks by manipulating Instagram’s algorithm and follower counts, as opposed to organically targeting audience members that can convert into customers. 

Directly asking pod members to go onto your profile and page and like new posts doesn’t generate a genuine picture of what others think about your brand. Others will catch on, too, once they notice the same accounts like and comment on every post. Instagram or whichever social media channel you’re using might well suspend or even ban you for this spammy behavior.

Moreover, simply focusing on the same “Instagram engagement pod” means you’re not consistently putting effort into cultivating new followers by extending your content beyond your social circle. In the process, you end up limiting reach and genuine engagement instead of doing everything possible to grow it. 

Related: 5 Essential Ways to Help You and Your Business Thrive During Lockdown

Natural growth strategies

To avoid the “pod group” approach, try the following strategies to grow your business authentically.

Create content that prompts a response

No matter what form your social media content takes, most often you want to provoke a response from your target audience. Simply seeking “likes” and “shares” doesn’t encourage them to respond. It’s like the intrusive marketing of old, where companies and marketers just told their audiences what to think and do. 

The best way to get that kind of increased engagement is to start asking questions with your content. Think of questions as conversation starters that encourage your followers to share their thoughts. And those questions don’t need to be complex or deep. You can simply ask your followers how they are doing and what they think about a certain topic. 

After all, social media is popular as a platform because so many people feel like they have a “voice” there. By asking your audience users questions, you tell them you want to hear that voice. 

Besides posting a direct question, you can use other tactics to prompt more responses. For example, you can create a survey or poll and ask your followers to respond. Polls only take a few minutes to create on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Related: Why You Should Speed Up Your Digital Transformation During the Crisis

Deliver more content followers actually want

Long content posts might not provoke the engagement rate you want. You might find a few brave followers with a lot of time on their hands who will willingly stay the course and scroll for minutes to read your extensive social media content. However, most social media users simply don’t have that kind of time.

If you want to increase your engagement rates on any social media channel, give your audience new content it actually wants, such as live and recorded video content as well as images, GIFs and short stories. 

Boost engagement and excitement with giveaways and prizes.

People like to compete and play games that offer the chance to win something tangible. That’s why gamification continues to drive engagement on social media. Your followers might even share these posts to get their social circle to play along as well and create some friendly competition. That, in turn, enables your brand to benefit from some viral engagement. Additionally, winners often post pictures of their prize, which may lead their social circle to become interested in your brand’s next giveaway. 

Offer a unique prize, such an autographed product, an experience like a trip or exclusive access to an influencer your audience admires. When you offer a few prizes, it might encourage more to play since the odds are more in their favor. Sweeten the giveaway with prizes from two favorite brands, if you can find another suitable company willing to partner with you. This also provides cross-post opportunities and expands your reach in a significant way. 

Related: The Counterintuitive Way Social Media Can Reduce Stress

Offer something extra

Not every company has the following to partner with a big brand or give away merchandise. If that’s true for you, explore other opportunities to build your social media audience with smaller offers. 

Your audience still sees the value in discounts, coupons and exclusive offers that they can receive in exchange for following your page or profile. Creating these regular offers also gives you a good reason to reach out to them regularly. 

Also, you can build on the human behavior known as “fear of missing out” (FOMO). Potential customers might be more likely to check out your profile when they sign in to find any new digital coupons or deals. They don’t want to miss those flash sales you announce periodically that can provide them with incredible savings. 

As long as you plan for regular incentives, you can almost ensure a higher engagement rate with this tactic. 

Under construction

To build an audience of true fans and drive social media engagement, think of it as a work in progress. Start with a social media strategy blueprint that details the engagement areas you want to focus on first. Look at your current engagement carefully so you know what you are working with. Then start building the long-term and short-term strategies like those listed here that are proven to increase social media engagement.

Related: 4 Ways to Determine If Now Is the Right Time to Launch Your Business

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/357164

It’s no secret that social media marketing trends change rapidly. You might see a hashtag trending on TikTok before you go to bed, but when you wake up, everyone’s talking about a new hashtag or meme on Twitter. Is it any wonder that small business marketers need a way to confidently navigate social media?

For certain, it can be hard for small companies and startups to put more than a few hundred dollars into a social media marketing strategy. Plus, many entrepreneurs lack the experience and expertise needed to spot hot trends and capitalize on those topics in real-time, unlike big competitors that have unlimited marketing budgets and personnel.

The good news is that developing a successful digital marketing strategy is possible, and it doesn’t have to take grunt work or cost you more than a cup of coffee a day. It simply requires innovation. (In other words, even if you have a small marketing budget, you can still compete with the biggest competitors — #yougotthis.)

Unlocking the secrets of digital marketing

If you spend any time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other social media platforms, you’ve likely seen how trends bubble up out of nowhere. The possibilities may seem overwhelming, but you can’t afford to wait and see what sticks. You have to jump in and offer relevant content that outshines other chatter before the topic shifts. Agility is the game.

To navigate social media, you must hone your social listening and online investigation skills. Identify where you should start by asking, “What’s going to be pertinent to my core audience?” A good way to find out is to see what your strongest competitor’s social media marketing strategy looks like. Is the company using specific hashtags or emojis? Which posts garnered the most engagement?

No matter what, joining the “First!” crowd (aka early adopters) is a win. This holds true for anything: memes, emoji, hashtags, social platforms, etc. If the trend takes off, you become an early adopter and net more brand awareness. If it fizzles, you learn from the experience and prepare for the next trend. All you need to keep going is creativity and a positive mindset. Plus, the platforms themselves may reward you.

How to navigate social media

Does digital marketing still seem daunting? Here are four strategies you can use as you learn to navigate social media:

1. Spend up to 10% of marketing resources on new social media platforms

Did TikTok sneak up out of nowhere? You might not have noticed its growth signs. Don’t worry; it won’t be the last social media platform to take off.

Start investigating new social media platforms and spend about 5% to 10% of your marketing budget there. Get to know how they work and figure out where your business could fit in. At the same time, devote the rest of your efforts to popular platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. When your “portfolio” is split up like this, you won’t lose too much if a new venture takes a nosedive.

2. Conduct A/B tests with your content

Split test different kinds of copy, hashtags, graphics, videos, and images to see what does well. Once you find what performs the highest, make it 90% of your strategy. You can continue to iterate and experiment with the remaining 10%.

Remember that it’s OK to regurgitate content to a certain degree. Twist existing content into a new angle and reuse other people’s videos and images — just don’t forget to credit the original creator when possible. Memes in particular require very little editing. All you need is a popular format and a pithy caption.

3. Enlist help — real or digital

You can’t spend all your time learning how to increase brand awareness on social media. Find opportunities to crowdsource and automate your digital marketing in order to efficiently keep up with trends.

In his book ‘Traffic Secrets‘, Russell Brunson talks about trying Instagram with his influencer friends. This group approach can lighten your workload. Find partners you can create content and share insights with or consider relying on digital marketing automation tools to help you identify trends and schedule posts.

4. Avoid the “quick win” mentality

Social media trends come and go, but winning the digital marketing game is a long-term goal. It may take months or years for your account to take off, even on a new platform.

So stay positive and keep going. If and when you see significant success, you’ll gain street cred for being an early adopter or a long-term user. Plus, you’ll be in a better position to stay ahead of the curve on trends because of your comfort level with the platform.

Social media has proven to be an excellent equalizer, enabling fledgling companies to compete with larger businesses for followers and engagement. By following these four strategies, you’ll be able to better leverage social media trends this year and find your social stride.

Arjun Rai is the founder and CEO of HelloWoofy, a social media and blog management platform driven by artificial intelligence that helps small businesses (or as he likes to say, “underdog marketeers”) with smart marketing for the digital age. You can find him on Twitter @arjunraime.

How to navigate social media marketing trends

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Social Media has become inescapable in this day and age — knowing how to correctly use it to control your online reputation is absolutely critical.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/356670