How Brands Can Deal With The “Death” Of A Platform

The tricky thing about social media is that there’s always a new trend or platform making waves, and every day a new one falls into obscurity for a number of reasons. From Myspace to Hi5, social media platforms have come and gone and along with it their usefulness in the world of online advertising, whether potential or realized. One such recent example is Vine, which was purchased by Twitter in 2013. With no real plan for monetizing and their top content creators fed up with the lack of changes to the platform, they experienced a lull that resulted in them closing their doors at the end of the year. While there was never an advertising platform on here, brands were making use of it for their own creative content purposes. But what happens when a platform isn’t useful anymore? There are a few things a brand can do in order to move on successfully without jumping the gun and shutting it down completely, as sometimes platform have a resurgence in popularity. Vine, for example, was almost overtaken by Cinegram and snapchat but proved useful in other ways mainly via Twitter. Here are just a few ways brands can deal with the end of a platform’s popularity cycle.

Look At The Trends

While a platform might be waning, you might still have a strong audience on it so it might not always be wise to jump ship right away. It will be important for your brand to have a look at the things that said platform brings in in terms of viewers, clients, customers and other such conversions. Every brand is different and the ways their client base acts on social media is never the same, so they might be slower to leave a platform than others.

How Much Effort

It’s important to consider how much effort you’re putting into creating content for said platform. If it’s your main outlet, you might want to consider trying others in conjunction with it instead of focusing all of your efforts in one place.

Weight It Out

Consider the pros and cons of what you stand to lose or gain by staying on a particular platform. Is it time? Money? Clout? You will have to stop and really consider when your efforts might no longer be worth the return on your investment and act accordingly.

Cut Back

If you determine that your efforts are better served in other spaces, it might be time to cut back a bit on how much original content you post on that particular platform. Consider using a newer one or sticking with a more established one and creating content mainly for that space to be shared on other ones later. Consider creating visual content that can be used across social channels so you’re not relegated to one space.

Shut It Down

Ultimately, you might reach a place where keeping the account open at all is pointless. If it’s something that is no longer yielding any use to you, it’s perfectly okay to shut it down and move on. You always have the choice of then focusing on other more established platforms, giving a newer one a try or further developing one you might have been ignoring in the past!