In the last year, over 70% of the US population was actively using social media platforms, and spent between seven minutes and two hours on average on their platforms of choice.

With new platforms and features being announced practically every week, brands have to stay on top of the most popular and useful ones for their audiences.

Currently, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with over a billion active monthly users. Practically everyone, including their pets, and even businesses, are using the platform.

While it used to be viewed as a platform for personal use, that’s no longer the case. These days, Instagram allows brands to appear more human to their audiences, showcase their products, recruit new talents, and inspire their audiences.

Wondering if it’s worth the time and effort to build a business account on Instagram? According to cision.com, Instagram gets 4.21 percent engagement per post compared to .07 percent for Facebook. It’s also the fastest growing among the larger social media platforms.

That is because a picture has always been worth a thousand words – who doesn’t love a good story told almost exclusively with pictures?

Influencer marketing is actually fairly easy to understand. You find influencers who are popular with your target audience, and they spread the word about your products or services, for a fee.

There’s usually either a social media element or a content marketing element when it comes to influencer marketing, or sometimes even both. One of the most common ways for influencers to market your business is through their own media influencer accounts. As far as content marketing is concerned, an influencer may create content to spread the word about your business, or you may create that content for them.

Now would be the ideal time for brands to check out and test TikTok, according to Al Zaccaria, co-founder of Linktree, an Instagram bio link personalization platform. Zaccaria’s rationale is that many brands are still thinking about checking out this increasingly popular platform.

As of November 2019, TikTok had already exceeded 1.5 billion downloads, as per Sensor-Tower. The app analytics provider added that TikTok was ranked third in downloads and even beat Facebook and Instagram, which finished fourth and fifth to end the year.

While social media algorithms and trends are always changing, one thing still holds true: content is king. This means that brands must constantly revisit and update their content strategies to remain relevant in the online conversation. Even the smallest adjustments can keep consumers interested, bring in new followers and take advantage of the platforms’ ever changing algorithms.

Below are five ways to make sure your brand’s content is king.

The uphill climb that is obtaining genuine engagement on social media can quickly become tiresome for even the most seasoned marketing professionals. As social media platforms continuously make reaching customers organically more and more difficult, marketers must think on their feet a bit in order to stay ahead of the curve.

Gone are the days when each and every post put up by a business page was shown to all of the page’s followers. Gone are the days when businesses had no trouble gaining traction on social media, thanks to all of the tools available to improve the interactions between businesses and consumers.

While no one can say with certainty what lies ahead for marketers in 2021, a glimpse at historical data may help answer some questions. An analysis of more than 22 million posts from over 56,000 business sites identified some revealing industry benchmarks on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The study was conducted over the course of more than a year and a half by SocialInsider between January 2019 and October 2020. Because the study began way before the pandemic and ran through nearly nine months of it, SocialInsider broke down some of its findings.