Because it’s a day that ends in “y”, one of our social media institutions has decided to make sweeping changes. This time, it’s Facebook who’s changing up the way digital marketers use its platform. Now: don’t be alarmed, a lot of these changes are positive and will make running your company’s page a little easier. However, if you don’t take action and account for the coming changes, you could end up losing precious followers!

The major change? Facebook will be removing the ability to “Like” a page, which will clear up the confusion between liking a page and following it, but if you don’t take action to get your audience to follow your page, you’re going to lose a lot of engagement as soon as this change rolls around. Make sure your audience is aware of this! Have a pinned post at the top of your page, make stories, have a few updates about it before the change-day comes. It’s not going to be easy to regain all those followers if you just let them drop off; Facebook feeds are clogged as is, they may not even realize they’re no longer seeing your content unless they’re a dedicated fan of your company.

That’s the only change that you need to worry about, but there are going to be a series of new features that will enhance the user experience for brands using social media. A Q&A feature will be added to mobile so that you can have a database of asked and answered questions for customers to refer to, and a new Pages exclusive news feed will be added so that you’ll see content from relevant sources and have a broader networking opportunity.

Because this change is just one in a tidal wave of updates that social media platforms have been making, I want to take the rest of this post and talk about how we can anticipate and deal with the shifting nature of social media rather than getting stressed and scrambling for answers. It’s unlikely that anyone chance will spell death for your social media presence.

The easiest thing to do is make sure you’re keeping up with publications that talk exclusively about social media. There are several out there, Social Media Examiner is one that I like to use for just this reason. Trades are usually pretty on point with forecasting changes and noticing how trends are developing, so you’re less likely to be caught off-guard.

Another thing, make sure you’re going on these social media sites yourself. Don’t like your scheduling and content people handle it; get in there and try to be aware of even minor changes from log-in to log-in. Platforms very rarely announce their changes, a lot of the time sites like Facebook and Twitter will just change their layout or features seemingly overnight. So you’re going to need your finger on the proverbial pulse to be able to adapt.

Finally, don’t feel the need to respond to every change or hop on every new feature just because it’s new. Bandwagoning is going to cost you time and resources at some point if you just hop on trends willy nilly. Remember fleets, Twitter’s answer to Instagram stories? Well, the rollout was widely mocked, no one uses them, and it turns out that’s not what users log on to Twitter for! So why would you invest time in them? If a change doesn’t directly impact how you do business, sit back and wait to see how the change unfolds before investing time into it.

Navigating social media isn’t always easy; that’s why there are professionals to do it for you. Don’t you wish you could go back to just thinking about your business again, and leave the world of likes, shares, content, and metrics behind? You can! The Go! Agency is fully prepared to take your social media off your hands and give you what you’re actually looking for: results.