Digital marketing: How to keep up with algorithm updates and stay ahead of the curve

As relentless as it sounds, it's key you don't adopt a 'set and forget' approach to your social marketing – Katrina Bell reveals how to avoid it.

You may already be feeling that you've done a considerable amount of work on your social marketing this year, but just as fast as the Facebooks, Instas, etc, keep on tweaking and optimising, so must you. Unfortunately, there really is no autopilot feature for online communication.

The only way to beat the social apps at their own game is to regularly adapt and refine your approaches. Let’s not forget, the apps are tinkering with the algorithms because user behaviour is permanently shifting. And they aren’t trying to work in your favour – they just want your money.

Which is why you cannot just set down a template and leave it be, or that there is such a thing as a perfect result for every post or campaign. With time, your skill levels and confidence will increase even if your views and engagement are not always consistent.

Track, Test, Refine

Track: You will need several tools in your digital marketing arsenal to achieve genuine growth, and the most important of these is always going to be data. There are subscription services such as Brandwatch and Hootsuite to streamline the process of posting and analysing across multiple platforms. In the free/cheaper bracket, Buffer markets itself as ‘free, forever’, and HubSpot offers a comprehensive free-to-try offer.

Test: Have you considered producing content that only your Followers can see? Or just posting in a group if your product or brand has one? Facebook, for instance, allows you to post only to Friends/Followers. You can use this approach as a focus group to gauge reactions, number of engagements, etc.

Another simple way to analyse how your content can be cross-purposed is to experiment with using an Instagram reel, reposted to Facebook as a post.

Have you ever thought about doing a demo Live on Insta that can then be uploaded to Facebook as a video? There’s only so much you can achieve with a text/image post asking how people like to clean their ovens or keep their bathrooms looking pristine.

This achieves 2 goals. Your most loyal and engagement fans on Instagram can have a cosy chat in real time, the more passive engageers will find your content later on either because they follow your brand, or they follow similar ones.

Instagram even encourages the use of Trial Reels, which will be pushed to get a ‘gut check’ on your content. If it lands in the way you hoped, you can share to your followers, or if not, quietly archive and learn from the knowledge after 24/72 hours. Just toggle Trial in the final window before posting.

Refine: Continual optimisation is where real growth happens. The value of your brand on the social apps is no longer determined solely by your follower count. With that in mind, there is a new breed of social listening tools such as Talkwalker from Hootsuite that uses AI to get real-time insights from platforms in real-time. If you need to get a grip of current trends and what people are saying online, this is likely to be a growth area. 

It’s fair to say, the old-school method of analysing data after a campaign has been turned on its head, letting you shift tone and be much more agile.