How to stay relevant as a digital marketer

As a social media strategist, being on social media is a lot more serious than simply checking Instagram casually every five minutes hoping I have gained a follower to boost my ego and make me feel superior to everyone else. When you are a social media strategist everything feels a lot more intense. This is because it is a constant battle to stay relevant. But of course I have adapted to my harsh environment by learning certain skills such as learning the art of hashtags or learning to focus on one audience.

When I’m browsing Twitter, it’s less of a “doing it for fun” sort of thing and more like “How can I try to keep up with trends so I can gain more traction and more of a following” sort of thing. You need to be looking up the most popular hashtags and keep up with current events around the world. This can be fairly hard at times because I know nothing at all about politics. But it’s my job to know what’s going on and how I can integrate my content with current trends. For example on Twitter I learned about #metoo which was a hashtag that was trending by bringing awareness to sexual harassment.

A hashtag, in case you don’t know, is a popular element on Twitter and Facebook. To sum it up, it is the symbol “#” with a word behind that symbol. Twitter and Facebook interprets these words as “tags” that identify a topic, and allows users to see other posts featuring that same tagged topic. So when somebody else in the world looks up the same hashtag in the search they will see your post.

There is a certain art to hashtags. One guideline I can share is not to use too many hashtags in the same post or you look too desperate and you really don’t want that. I think the maximum amount is three hashtags and that’s in rare situations. You can also try to make the hashtag trendy if possible. You can learn if a hashtag is trendy or not by following current events. Those events will mostly likely have a hashtag pertaining to it. Now that you have a trendy post you will get more people looking at your amazing work so you can hope one of the people who see your post gives you a like and maybe even a follow. Make your hashtags few, but targeted. Quality over quantity.

One challenging issue is whether to tweet from an objective point of view like a journalistic tweet you would see from Global News or tweet more subjectively such as opinionated tweets from Buzzfeed, Making this decision was tough for me because the Buzzfeed style tweets would probably be favoured by younger audiences but an objective tweet would be favoured by people over the age of 25. I try to make my tweets interesting, so in the end I chose to make my tweets more flashy. After all, we are teens writing about content of interest to teens so I should try to tweet with that audience in mind.

Being a social media strategist is a struggle to get followers and spread your content out to others. Looking into the future I want to be able to get the 8forty Twitter to 100 followers by using some of the social media strategies I am developing!