KWP! Head of Social Media and AdSchool Lecturer Tom Williamson takes a moment to share his knowledge of Social Media Strategy with AADC members.

I spend a lot of time talking to clients about a range of things; from how to include social media as part of their latest campaign brief, to how to deal with an issue or crisis their social media team is facing.

At the end of almost every conversation I’m asked, “So Tom… what’s the next big thing in social? What should we be preparing ourselves for next?”
I’ll answer that in a minute but before I do, here’s what you should be doing right now for your brand.

Mobile First
I’m sure you’ve heard it before but adopting a ‘mobile first’ strategy can only result in good things. There are over two billion social media accounts across the globe and over 1.6 billion of them are accessed via a mobile device. This doesn’t mean you need to immediately go out and have your brand website optimised for mobile (although, it’s highly recommended given Google now favours mobile optimised sites in its search results when searching on a mobile device). What it does mean is anything you publish on social platforms should be easily digestible on a mobile device.

How to create mobile magic:

Keep video short and sweet
Design images for smaller screens
Reduce the amount of text you publish and break it into digestible chunks.

Content
If you’ve heard your resident social media pal talk about content, you’ll be sick of hearing “but, but content is king!”. But, but it is and it will be for a while. The latest content for Facebook to favour in its algorithm is video; you might’ve noticed Instagram, Vine, Periscope, Twitter, SnapChat all rely heavily (if not entirely) on video content and not coincidentally, short video content. When you’re creating video content for Facebook, keep it short and sweet. Remember, most users’ video will automatically play without sound, so be creative about how you can convey your message both with and without an audio track, like Hotels.com did in its latest campaign (see above and below).

So what’s the next big thing in social? This will probably disappoint you but I don’t know. What I do know is what’s worked remarkably well for me and my clients for the past eight years:

Continue to engage qualified community members
Be true to your brands and strategies
Maintain transparency with your community members.

The AADC would like to thank Tom for taking the time to share his knowledge with us and the Adelaide Creative Community.

If you’d like to contribute your knowledge, news, views and opinions about the industry please email us at members@aadc.com.au – we’d love to share your story.

Tom will be presenting a Social Media Strategy Workshop for AdSchool in July. For more information visit AdSchool Adelaide.