One of our mottos here at IMPACT is, “You do what you do best – we’ll handle the marketing.”

Beyond the day-to-day implementation of marketing tactics, we make it our goal to stay on top of the latest marketing trends so that our clients don’t have to spend their precious time worrying about how this or that change should affect their marketing strategy.

This especially applies to the ever-evolving world of social media. There seems to be changes to a particular social media platform every other day, some of which don’t make a difference in how you manage your social media presence. But some of these changes do.

In the past few months, there have been a number of announcements that could affect your brand’s social media presence. Here are five social media changes you need to know:

• Facebook introduced “reactions,” where people can select from six different emojis to communicate how a post makes them feel instead of simply “liking” it. In many ways, this is helpful, as people can better communicate that they “love” the new product you’re launching instead of responding with a generic “like.” However, the ability to respond as “sad” or “angry” about a post also means that your Facebook page will need to be monitored more than ever, and you should consider creating a plan for how to respond when you receive these reactions.

• Facebook changed its ranking algorithm for the millionth time. This time, they plan to “look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story.” What this really means for brands is that it will be more difficult than ever for your posts to rank well organically. Remember when we said that an average of only 5% of the people who like your page see your posts organically? Be prepared for that to drop even lower, as Facebook continues to make it so that companies must pay to advertise if they want their content to be seen.

• Twitter might also move to an algorithmic feed instead of a reverse chronological feed. If they do, users will likely have a choice to stick with the reverse chronological feed. But just as Twitter changed their “favorite” button to a “like” button last year, this is yet another step to become more like Facebook (they switched their “favorite” button to be a “like” recently as well). And as this article says, “Welp, there goes the last good thing about Twitter.”

• Instagram IS moving to an algorithmic feed. They just announced this “Your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most. That’s positioned well, but what it really means is that they’ll become a pay-to-play platform just like Facebook (which is no surprise, since Facebook owns them), making it more difficult for companies to succeed on Instagram organically.

• Snapchat was bought by Viacom, which is another sign that it’s going mainstream. Larger brands are pouring advertising dollars into this platform, and it’s time to consider using Snapchat to market your business.

– Emily Crider, Social Media & Project Manager