With TikTok’s future in the balance, new platforms on the rise, and an ever-changing social media audience, many publishers are taking a hard look at their strategies and processes coming into 2025. Evaluating top social media priorities should be a regular part of your process, but knowing what is serving you and what is not is essential to success.

Building a diverse strategy focusing on your strengths is a great place to start, but cutting resource-draining tasks is critical. Your team should determine where your time and money are best spent and run with it.

Evaluating success: how to decide what’s working

The first step is assessing your content and determining what consistently resonates with your audience. This isn’t a matter of simply looking at your highest performing posts, though that can certainly be an okay place to start.

First, prioritize your KPIs. Do you need conversions? Reach? Engagement? If you’re simply trying to get eyes on content, reach is a great place to start. Engagement will rank high on the list if you’re trying to build a community. If you aren’t sure where to start, here is a list of common KPIs for publishers.

Once you know what you want to get out of your social presence, you can start identifying which platforms are serving you.

Which platforms and strategies are delivering?

Social media priorities for publishers should all come down to one thing: What are you getting out of each task and each platform?

How do you figure out what’s delivering? Good question. Much of this is subjective and will depend on your KPI decisions. Some things to consider when you’re assessing the viability of your platforms and strategies:

• How much time do they require?
  • Is the content easy to create?
  • Can you repurpose the content across platforms?
  • Do you have staff that understand how to get the most out of the platform?
• What are you getting from each platform?
  • Look at each KPI and see what you’re actually getting from each platform. If you’re not driving traffic, but your video impressions are huge, it’s probably worth sticking with it.
  • Every platform will not deliver on every KPI. Do not expect every platform to work for every metric.
  • It is likely worth continuing if it is helping with one or two in a meaningful way.

Identifying opportunities

If you find that you are lacking in a certain area, it might be time to try something new to fill that gap. Launching a new platform can be daunting, but it can also open up new opportunities. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

Let’s use video views as a KPI in which we’re underperforming. For the purposes of this example, we’re getting great traffic from Facebook, but we’re struggling with video views. The first thing we should do is assess our video content. Here are some questions to ask (yes, these answers could sting a little):

• Is the content good? The video space is saturated and mediocre content won’t work.
• Who is our audience, and how does this video serve them?

If the answer to some of this is tricky, it could be time to revisit some of your personas (or build them if you haven’t!). Identify exactly who you want to reach, including where they live, how old they are, and their daily lives. Where do they work? How do they get there? What’s their economic status? All of these things will color how they receive your story.

The next step is looking at the holes. If your content is strong and you believe it is tailored to your audience, then it’s time to diagnose the problem. Some other considerations:

• Is this the correct platform for who we’re trying to reach?
• How consistent are we with our posting cadence?
• Are you maximizing your presence on successful platforms?
• Do you need to free up time and eliminate what isn’t working?

Maybe it’s time to add YouTube or TikTok to the list! Or maybe it’s simply time to revamp your approach to Reels. Either way, if you’re missing the mark it’s time to try something new!

Looking at top social media priorities for publishers in 2025

As we come into this new year, there are three things you should do to help you set your top priorities as a social media publisher.

1. Expand successful enterprises.

Priority #1 should be to keep doing what works. If it ain’t broke…

Seriously, though, do more of what works. If you have content that consistently overperforms, keep covering those stories! If Instagram stories drive a ton of engagement for you and are a great source of community and connection, keep posting stories! Maybe give access to another reporter to spice things up.

2. Eliminate what doesn’t serve you

If you have content or platforms that are a time suck and not delivering in any real way, it’s time to let them go. “That’s how we’ve always done it!” is not a good answer! If it isn’t hitting one of your priority KPIs, it shouldn’t be draining your resources.

3. Try new opportunities

If there are spaces yet to be explored, explore them! If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of a new task, try setting up a demo with True Anthem to figure out how we can give you the gift of time. We can help automate the stuff you’ve already figured out and help you take on the world.