We are working hard on the budget these days, but for what kind of content will we allocate a big budget? The pandemic will hopefully pass in 2021, but the consumers will not be able to forget it and its consequences will be felt for a few years from now by customers. So, you need to adapt communication to their needs and shape the content by the four Cs of Covid-19: community, contactless, cleanliness, compassion.

78% of consumers say that brands should help them out in their daily lives, according to 2021 Social Media Trends, a detailed report to drive your social media strategy.

The big priority fr 2021 is to monitor pandemic and analyze the conversations with your customers, in order to understand their concerns, and helping them to cope with these issues or to solve them. The pandemic is still here and it drives people’s motivations. Create relevant content that covers their needs and concerns. Lego is a good example. The brand engaged with its family audience with this tweet (“Remember washing your hands like our Lego Minifigure friend here. Thanks to our colleague Stuart Harris for the pic.”) published throughout lockdown and beyond, encouraging cleanliness, especially among younger audiences.

The good news is that you don’t have to create your content from zero, it’s better to remix it. Remixing is the art of taking existing formats, templates, or ideas, and recreating them to express users’ personality or ideas. And it’s the new user-generated content. The best examples are Tik Tok and Instagram Reels. These platforms are on the rise, and they have experienced a clear increase during the COVID-19 lockdown. When people weren’t able to head outside to create new content, but they had the tools to at least reinvent it. Remixing means fewer technical restrictions, take a trend, and recreate it into something new. You have to explore co-production opportunities and providing templates for
users to base their content off and encourage creativity. Identify the content your audience has created, engage with it, and promote it.

Now let’s see how to reinvent a business page in 2021 and stay up to date:

Instagram becomes SEO-friendly
The marketing plans for Instagram are very clear for 2021: more organic visibility and live streaming through Reels.
Now if you search for a keyword in the search bar, without using a hashtag, you’ll see relevant videos, profiles, and posts. But this game will be changed, and the focus will be on greater visibility of relevant posts. The platform will soon display posts that contain keywords searched by users. You need to prepare for this situation from now on, making sure you have relevant keywords in the posts, that reflect the topic of your posts. According to socielmediaexaminer.com, Instagram will categorize your account and you have to consistently post content that’s relevant to your niche. Also, you have to include relevant keywords to your business in your bio (i.e., Pizza Yummy | Food Delivery).

Live streaming on Reels
Instagram wants to attract video enthusiasts who are now on Tik Tok, and he has launched Reels, a new form of video content delivered in 15–30 seconds to create quick, attention-grabbing moments in a creative and entertaining way. If you don’t know what type of content to post on Reels or the people’s behavior, the best advice of Social Media Examiner experts is to create a Tik Tok account and see what’s already going viral on TikTok. That’s how you can figure out the difference on Reels.
Best practices on Reels:
Keep in mind that the preview is limited to 15 seconds before people need to click See More. You will get better results if you create content that is 15 seconds long so that the full video plays on Preview mode.
Add text to your video content to increase watch time, and also add call to actions such as Save or Share. If your fans take action on content, this will perform better in algorithm and will gain more visibility.

Short video content and effects will be the trend
Reels model should inspire you to create short-form video. You don’t need a professional team to do that. It’s much easier to do the same as in stories (now dropping in engagement), talking to your camera. You can add music and text to keep things interesting or using The Green Screen effect that gives you the ability to share photos (before-and-after images) and screenshots that showcase questions your business gets in messages.

More human touch in posts
People want to see transparency and authenticity in 2021. They like more and more brands that connect with them. They want to see that the brand reads their thoughts and emotions, that it has the same purpose as them. Leaders who will be more and more present and will talk to the public and the video content will matter.

LinkedIn becames the space of conversations that mimics office life
The professional platform needs to keep up with the change of working style. Most people work now remotely now and they feel the need to stay connected with a community.

• So, for building your personal brand on LinkedIn you need to focus on mastering conversational marketing. You can use several types of posts such as polls, open-ended questions in updates, funny office life photos in stories, or career milestones.
• If you manage a LinkedIn page, keep an eye on the new features that help little businesses build a community of raving fans around products or services. 
  

LinkedIn helps small businesses to grow

The professional platform has launched in june 2020 new features for small businesses:

• LinkedIn Events into the Pages experience to help you strengthen relationships with your customers, colleagues, and communities by being able to easily create and join professional events. You can use this feature in order to keep your customers up to date on how your business is doing and connect with your communities.
• Access relevant LinkedIn Learning courses for free. You can hone your skills in management, sales, marketing, finance.
• Updates about how your business is responding to COVID-19 are now on the top of your business page. You can share hiring decisions, operating priorities, or how you are protecting your workforce.
•  A new way to manage remotely job applicants. You are now able to set a job post’s location to ‘remote’ with LinkedIn Jobs. Also, you are able to rate and review job applicants to quickly filter down to the most relevant candidates. You can access a video intro feature to know job candidates better and faster and evaluate them before the live meeting. All these tools and features have been optimized for mobile and built into the LinkedIn app, so you’ll never miss a qualified applicant and you can continue hiring conversations on the go. 

LinkedIn emphasizes the importance of customized messages for connections

On LinkedIn we are facing spam, connection requests come from people who made us more hesitant and the commercial interests are often the most important. But we have to focus on building true relationships, writing a customized message to the people we want to connect with, and argue the value of your connection. The real gain is not only the connections but also an audience interested in your posts, which will interact with them and will give value to your career.

2021 is the year we have to listen to the customers, do more social listening and research, be aware of what is happening around us, and be there to help.