What SMR Social Learned in 2017

Another Year Over

Wow, where did it go? As a brand new year starts it’s important for us to reflect on last year to make sure we can take everything we learned into 2018. If there’s anything 2017 taught us here at SMR Social its:

  1. Things are changing faster and faster in digital marketing, especially social, but the more consistent you are with your content and branding the easier it is to keep up with the changes and not be affected by them too much.
  2. If you’re not running paid ads on social then you need to be spending every waking hour in Twitter and Instagram conversations.
  3. You need to start making professional videos for your business.
  4. Monthly reports help our clients see the value of our service more than we thought they would – if you’re not generating social media reports then you should start.
  5. If it wasn’t for tea and coffee we’re not sure we would have made it through 2017!

What’s going to change for 2018?

2017 was a great year for us. We were lucky enough to work on some very exciting campaigns. We have clients that trust us and let us test enough ads for us to find what works for them, not just what works in general. We were able to compare a lot of mundane campaigns with a lot of very effective campaigns, helping us to spot the key factors that make a campaign successful. But most importantly for us and our clients, we’ve been able to keep one eye on 2018 so that we know what to prepare for! Here’s a few key points that we believe businesses need to be aware of in 2018:

  1. Stories – The rise of Snapchat in the past couple of years has changed social media more than you may think. It’s forced Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to compete. It’s pretty obvious that Facebook are trying to blow Snapchat out of the water (rather than just buy it for themselves), and we think they’re doing a pretty good job. But it does mean that as a business, you need to keep up. Adding to your Facebook and Instagram stories will be an important part of your social media strategy in 2018. Are you prepared to get in-front of the camera? If not, you need to think of an alternative way to use stories.
  2. Influencer Marketing – There’s 2 ways to look at this. You can either use your business to become an influencer, and start getting paid to help other brands get noticed. Or you can seek out influential figures in your industry and use their social media following to promote your business. Who are the top dogs in your industry?
  3. Messenger – Facebook are doing everything they can to help brands use Facebook Messenger to reach their audience. Ad placements can even be seen in Whatsapp. Can you think of a way for your business to ‘slide into your audience’s DM’s’ without it being creepy?
  4. Stricter Ad Policies – 2017 was pretty controversial on many levels. But what you may not have noticed is that Facebook and Twitter got a lot of stick for this. So much so that they had a massive overhaul of their AI and human ad checkers, and as a result hundreds of thousands of ads and accounts were shut down. It’s not just a case of putting ads up and hoping Facebook will approve them anymore, you need to be familiar with their Ad Policies and you need to abide by them.

Well that’s all from us today on the first day of 2018. We hope you have a fantastic year. Keep checking back for more content, we’re going to try and get back to posting regularly!

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