Today I'm chatting with the team from Oh My Digital about Instagram trends for 2021 and how to know when you’re ready to outsource your socials.

Who are Oh My Digital?

Oh My Digital Agency is like your work wife; easy to work with, ready to listen to your problems and give knowledgeable advice when you need it. We stay on the pulse of digital marketing trends so you don’t have to. We love a cheeky pun, chocolate, dogs & empowering businesses to nail their digital marketing with no BS advice and strategy.

Instagram Trends for 2021

• Accessibility: Captioned video content (checkout the Threads app to make this easy), image descriptions.
• Aesthetic isn’t everything: This has been happening for a while, but it’s getting less important for grids to look picture-perfect. Obviously, if your industry is highly visual/design-focused then this is more important, but if your brand is more down-to-earth or relatable then you don’t need 100% perfectly polished content. People like to follow others they look up to – but they also want to hear from people they can relate to.
• Bite-sized video: Reels aren’t going anywhere. Don’t be intimidated. They can take a little while to edit but it gets so much quicker with practice. One huge benefit is you don’t need to speak on camera, so they can actually be a lot easier to create. Don’t overthink it!
• Organic reach continues to shrink: Any social media platform should always form part of a bigger strategy. Remember you don’t own your social media profiles, so take them at face value and use them as a tools to drive people to your email list or website where you can convert them into customers!
• Facebook Brand Collabs Manager: Okay, so this is a Facebook tool but it’s going to have an impact on Instagram as well. This is a new platform for brands to discover and engage influencers, and then easily manage any sponsored content or use it for Facebook ads all in one place. So if you use Influencer marketing – or want but don’t know where to start – then this should be really helpful for you. We’re doing a live training with our members on the 28th of January to walk them through it.
• Authenticity is key & consistent brand values shine: People are starting to see through the businesses who only get behind a movement when it’s trending on social media, and those who practice what they preach long after the movement has lost the trending hashtag #blacklivesmatter. Authenticity is absolutely essential in 2021 and businesses who can show up with their brand values consistently shining through in their day to day actions will reap the rewards.
• UX has never been more important: With more people indoors using technology than ever before, brands have been forced to adapt or fail. People aren’t standing for outdated websites, broken links or buttons and slow loading times anymore. If your websites or technology isn’t up to date, you stand to get left behind.
• Connection: Instagram has become an amazing platform to network and build relationships with people across the world. But the trend for 2021 is actually using Instagram to grow those relationships. One of the hottest apps right now is Clubhouse, and people are using Instagram to take their new found connections from Clubhouse and build them further on Instagram, as well as offline to develop them further.

How to know when you’re ready to outsource your socials:

You know your ideal customers are hanging out on social media, and you’ve seen the positive impact it can have on your business to date, but now you’re ready to scale it up.
Not every business needs social media! So don’t feel like you need to be prioritising this just because everyone else is. However, if you do know it’s important for your business, then it might be worthwhile to get some expert help and save yourself the guessing game and time.

Posting or engaging on social media has fallen to the bottom of your to-do list – or you just don’t enjoy doing it yourself.
Consistency is really important to getting the maximum results from social media, so outsourcing can be a good way to make sure this responsibility is off your plate and still being completed to a high standard every single month.

You have an established, consistent and distinctive brand voice.
If someone is taking over, you want to make sure they know how to write and communicate in your brand’s tone of voice. This way your customers are getting a consistent experience and you can continue building great relationships and brand awareness. If you haven’t really found your brand’s voice yet, it might be worth working with a brand or copywriting specialist to get this nutted out.

You’re open-minded to new ideas.
If you hire a professional social media expert to manage your content for you, you won’t get any value out of hiring them if you want to dictate every post. You need to be able to trust that person and open your mind to their suggestions and creative ideas – it’s their job to do the thinking for you! Of course, if you have some preferences or direction then that’s completely fine, but if you can’t trust your social media manager to own the overall strategy then you are either not the right fit for each other, or you may need to do some work on your mindset to feel more comfortable with outsourcing.

Your business is profitable and you consistently have the spare cash each month to be paying an ongoing social media management fee.
Never feel pressured to commit to an ongoing package with a social media manager unless you feel comfortable and confident that that package works for your budget and makes sense from an ROI perspective. If you’re not at this stage yet, then there are so many other options available. There are lots of great social media content planners out there that you can download and use to guide your posting – we even offer customised content calendar guides as part of our Digital Marketing Plans. If you need some further guidance beyond that, you could join a marketing membership that gives you content prompts to plan your posts around each month. We do this with our members every month!

 

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