Staying Ahead with an Adaptive Social Media Strategy

Information in this blog post was obtained from the Content Marketing Institute, Hootsuite, Neil Patel, and Social Media Today.

Image Courtesy of Unsplash

A social media marketing strategy summarizes everything you plan to do and hopes to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you are succeeding or failing. In this blog, we will look at the steps to building an adaptive social media strategy, social media agility, and social media experimentation.

What is an Adaptive Social Media Strategy?

“Adaptive content is designed to support meaningful, personalized interactions across all channels” (Urbina, 2025). It is content conceived, planned, and developed around the customers: their context, mood, and goals.

Image Courtesy of Unsplash

Steps to Build an Adaptive Social Media Strategy

Remember, social media best practices can change fast. So, reviewing the following action steps throughout the post is a wise idea, even if you think your social strategy is already running like a well-oiled machine. A few social media best practices for 2025 include the following (Newberry, 2025):

1. Do audience research. Your audience is the foundation of everything you do on social media. That means you need to know who they are, what they want, and how they spend their time on social platforms.

2. Build a presence on the right networks. The average social media user is on seven social platforms, but you do not need to connect with your target audience on every platform they use. They do not want to communicate with the same brands everywhere. You do not need to be active there if the platform does not fit your audience and brand. Creating thoughtful content for fewer platforms will always serve you better than attempting to maintain a presence on every platform.

3. Use testing to refine your strategy. Some social media posts bring great engagement rates, new followers, and website clicks, while others do not. The only way to know is to implement a consistent testing strategy that allows you to tinker with individual components of your social content to see what creates measurable change.

4. Schedule your content in advance. Planning your social media content allows time to create high-quality content and logically put together campaigns developed with collaboration and feedback from your team.

5. Check each platform’s specs and requirements before posting. One of the reasons you should not cross-post duplicate content on every platform is that each platform has its own image/video size or character count specification. Even if the overall message of the post stays the same, customizing the media specs and caption length will keep your profiles polished and professional.

6. Align your social media strategy with top-of-funnel business objectives. Social marketers tend to rely on engagement metrics to track social media ROI. For B2B marketers, social media is a top-of-funnel tool. The top 3 overall goals for B2B companies are (1) to create brand awareness, (2) to build trust and credibility, and (3) to educate audiences. “These all support social media B2B lead generation” (Martin, 2025). Content marketing via social media is also a meaningful way to use content marketing to nurture those leads.

7. Develop business-friendly content resources. B2B social media is all about relationship building and lead generation. A walled garden of content resources that require an email address to download can help build your list. That list can also help you create custom and lookalike audiences for social media advertising that extend your reach even further. Not everything should be behind a wall. Share interesting, informative data to keep your followers interested, even if they are not yet ready to buy. You will be front-of-mind when the time comes.

Image Courtesy of Unsplash

Social Media Agility: The Key to Quick Adaptation

Suggestions to turn your competitive insights into actionable business strategies include tracking mention volume by week, noticing engagement spikes, gathering demographics, and keeping up with pricing trends.

1. Track mention volume by week. Pay attention to how many brand mentions you are getting each week. While ebbs and flows are common, significant variations can point to something bigger. If mentions are up compared to the prior week and there are positive brand sentiment metrics, that could point to a high profile kudos to a social media post that has sparked conversation about your organization online. If the increase in volume is negative, it could point to a mounting PR crisis. Identifying that early gives you time to get on top of it.

2. Notice engagement spikes. Understanding when and why something captures your audience’s attention also gives you a blueprint for holding their attention. Marketing success is as simple as giving people what they want, and competitive intelligence tells you what they want. However, you need to know your average engagement rate to understand what counts as a spike in engagement. Alternatively, when comparing your organization to others, the average engagement rate for your industry and the platform you are measuring.

3. Gather demographics. Knowing more about your customers and market share is always a good thing. Competitive intelligence software can track your audience’s key demographics, such as gender, age, language, location, interests, occupations, etc.

4. Keep up with pricing trends. Some questions are: “Does Competitor A always have a quarterly sale?” “Has Competitor B just switched from a one-time purchase to a subscription model?” “Has Competitor C raised their prices?” and “How do all their customers feel about these changes and the pricing in your industry?”. Maybe there are forum comments from users saying your product is much more expensive than Competitor B. While that is true, it could point to needing to educate your audience about what sets you apart in the competitive landscape. That insight translates directly into social media content and marketing campaigns your marketing team can start ASAP.

Image Courtesy of Unsplash

Social Media Experimentation: A Vital Component of Adaptation

“Facebook and Instagram are down, while TikTok and WhatsApp are up” (Hutchinson, 2023). Moreover, Snapchat and Twitter usage remains relatively stable. TikTok’s growing influence has been well documented. At the same time, the rise of WhatsApp reflects the broader trend away from public sharing, with users far more inclined to post content in smaller, private groups than subjecting themselves to potential scrutiny and judgment by sharing to the leading social feed.

Video tends to drive more engagement, so it is no surprise that both YouTube and TikTok are gaining traction. However, that may also raise more concerns about the potential influence the Chinese government may or may not have over how TikTok operates. “Twitter users are more likely to pay attention to hard news subjects such as politics and business news than users of other networks, whereas TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook users are slightly more likely to consume fun posts (or satire) related to news.”

Conclusion

Building an adaptive social media strategy encapsulates everything your brand hopes to achieve on social platforms. By combining strategic planning, agile responses to trends, and continuous experimentation, brands can remain flexible and stay ahead in an ever-evolving digital landscape. This approach enhances your brand’s online presence and ensures you are prepared to meet your audience's needs while fostering long-term engagement and growth.

For more information about Tips and Tricks from Fundamentals to Social Media Advanced Strategies, read my colleague Cristina's post here.

Resources

Hutchinson, A. (2023, June 14). A new report examines social media posting and news consumption trends in 2023. Social Media Today. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-social-media-posting-news-consumption-trends-2023/653054/

Martin, M. (2025, February 10). Competitive intelligence: How to find insights on social and beyond. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/competitive-intelligence/

Newberry, C. (2025, March 12). 19 social media best practices for faster growth. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-best-practices/

Patel, N. (2023, February 8). The 2023 list of marketing statistics you need to know. Neil Patel. https://neilpatel.com/blog/marketing-statistics/

Urbina, N. (2025, March 25). The 5 WS of adaptive content: A new look at making content contextually appropriate. Content Marketing Institute. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/content-optimization/the-5-ws-of-adaptive-content-a-new-look-at-making-content-contextually-appropriate/