How Innovations in Social Media Help Build a Brand

Digital-savvy consumers at every level use some form of social media today. Accessibility to connect with customers is no longer the challenge. The real challenge for a brand is standing out with unique content that grabs eyeballs.

Two Aspects of Social Media Innovation

There are two distinct aspects of innovation on social media worth separating:

• What social media platforms themselves offer — new features for connecting with audiences.

• What organisations or individuals do with those features — the innovative content built to engage an audience.

Innovation From the Platforms Themselves

Staying on top of new updates and product innovations from social platforms matters. The moment a platform releases a new feature, it's actively looking for brands or agencies who can pick it up quickly and deliver innovative solutions, and platforms tend to push those new features up the news feed to make sure audiences consume fresh content consistently.

Facebook Live is a good example: when it launched, Facebook went as far as notifying every follower whenever a brand went live, giving early adopters a genuine visibility advantage simply for moving fast.

Innovation Independent of New Tech

Platform-driven innovation is only one half of the picture. Brands also need to innovate independent of emergent new tech. New trends surface from all corners of the internet, and brands need to recognise the kind of content that's making waves and adapt their strategy accordingly.

Reddit and Tumblr are good examples of this: unique platforms with high engagement and genuinely dedicated communities, where internet humour, creativity, global tech conversation, entertainment, and rich visual content tend to originate. These platforms are often two to four months ahead of Facebook and Twitter in producing organic, viral content, meaning brands who watch these spaces closely get a real head start.

Building a Culture of Content Innovation

Both aspects of innovation ultimately come back to the same requirement: quality content that genuinely engages an audience. That means innovation has to be built into the culture of the social media team itself, not treated as a one-off campaign effort. In practice, that team needs to:

• Subscribe to trusted resources for updates on new product developments across social platforms

• Pay close, ongoing attention to what's being talked about on the internet

• Stay authentic to the brand throughout. You cannot be innovative without being honest

The Takeaway

Catch the wave at the right time, often enough, and a brand starts leading the pack in producing genuinely innovative content.