Proactive vs. Reactive Social Media

Making the most of social media and the opportunities it presents for businesses can sometimes feel like a bit of a game. How often should you post, when should you post, should you share other posts, what should you be posting? We’ve discussed some of these topics and today it’s the turn of reactive vs. proactive social media tactics. Reactive means reacting to current news, events and trends, and proactive means planning content and schedules ahead of time. There are benefits and drawbacks to both, read on to find out more.

Social media is all about being social, i.e. interacting with people. This is reactive behaviour, so reacting to people’s responses to your content, to other people’s content, to the current news and trends. Capitalising on current news can often create the most engaging marketing campaigns by engaging with the current conversations taking place.

However, for managing your own time and ensuring that you’re not wasting time on social media, proactive planning is really useful. This way you can ensure that you have well-structured and well-designed campaigns in place for different holiday periods, sporting events and other eventualities. By pre-designing and scheduling content in, you can manage your time more effectively than attempting to ‘come up with something’ every time you want to post on social media. And this will also tie into other marketing campaigns that you run.

And you can do both. For example, with sporting events, you know they’re coming up. So you can plan for different eventualities; winning, losing, world records etc. And then implement the correct response at the correct time, but having pre-planned it all along!

Essentially, a bit of both won’t go amiss. Planning content for your social media channels means that you can managed themed campaigns and often manage your time more effectively using scheduling tools. But if you never log on and interact in the channels ‘live’ then you’ll miss the conversation that your customers may be having, and also miss the ability to react to immediate events. So, be proactive and reactive!