We all know that the dawn of a new year is the best time to reinvent yourself. What better time to shed an old social media skin and put on another one? We commonly use this time for personal reinvention. Why not use it for professional reinvention too? Sometimes, this process is a little bit painful, but it can be a very helpful exercise in evaluating how to engage with the world. But how can we reinvent a brand that already exists?

Reinvention of where you are online

This may seem like a given, but serious evaluations of where your profiles are is vital to being an effective online presence. If you have profiles on social media platforms that don’t make sense, you might be confusing your audience. More importantly, you could be alienating the audience that you do have. Tailoring your content is also extremely important for each platform that you choose to use for your business.

No matter what, you need to invest a little bit of time seriously evaluating the usefulness of each of your social media accounts. Do you use your Snapchat? Is your Instagram abuzz with activity? Would YouTube be a better fit for your content? All of these questions have answers with implications that will help your business gain the traffic that it needs.

As part of this evaluation, bring in your marketing plan that you’ve had for a while. Dust off the old folder, so to speak, and crack it open. Figure out how your social media accounts have been performing according to your plans. Figure out if you’ve met your goals, or if you’ve learned something new about your strategy. If you haven’t made a marketing plan, take this time to do so! A marketing plan can be your best friend and it doesn’t take a huge amount of time to develop. Making that plan is your first step to reinvention.

Re-evaluate your sharing strategy

Like it or not, social media is not an exact science. That’s why there are so many opinions about how to engage your viewers. The truth is that no single strategy works for everyone. Evaluating how your current performance is working is key to evaluating future social media endeavors. The best way to do this is to check over your Analytics. Analytics can tell you how your current content is performing, and can help to analyze trends in your data. You can use this to determine if your current sharing strategy is working, or if there needs to be some tweaks to the overall strategy. Reinvention of social media is not only about what, but when.

Experiments with different timeslots could help you understand the timing of your customer base and the ideal sharing times. Give a few options a try. Try first posting in the morning, then after work, then in the early evening. Use your analytics to find out which posts are most successful. You can try to repeat this over some time by using Evergreen content. Pick your top-performing posts, make sure that they’re always relevant, and then try to share them at different times over the course of a few weeks. Give it a shot at each of those timeslots and mix it up! Change the order of the posts around and see what mix works best.

Most importantly, during these experiments, there is no wrong answer. This information can be invaluable in your overall strategy, and can help you understand your viewer base as you’ve never understood them before. Don’t be afraid to take a few missteps. The content is already there. Just use it in a different way, and make sure that you’re strategic with your placement. dlvr.it can help you with these experiments by randomizing your eveergreen content and helping you understand this information.

Decide if dramatic reinvention is right for you

Sometimes, we decide to reinvent and we take it too far. We may think that we’re not reaching nearly enough viewers, and we may be right. However, sometimes taking that to an extreme is ill advised. You can make a few small changes, but dramatically altering your identity as a company can be detrimental to your overall image. Make sure that your changes are small enough that your brand identity is still recognizable, but large enough that they are still noticeable. After all, why change something if nobody can tell?

For example, you may want to change your overall social media presentation, but if your logo is distinctive and successful, you may not want to change that. Updating your entire brand image may not be the best course of action unless you’re doing a full relaunch. If you are doing a full relaunch, make sure that you update all aspects of your brand when you do so. You don’t want confusing old information to be floating out there for your consumers to find. Make sure that your relaunch is widely released and work to get that old info removed from every one of your platforms ASAP. You may not want to get rid of all your old content, but updating fonts, graphics, and screencaps are vital to presenting a unified front to your viewers.

Putting it all together

In the end, reinvention is all about assessing where you currently are, and finding out where you want to be. If you are in a place that you like and you’re performing well, no need to change anything. However, most of us can find ways to improve, and when we find those improvements, we can implement them easily. We are constantly evolving and changing as people, and our viewers are also making those changes in their lives. It’s important to understand where your viewers are in their lives and what they value. The more  you understand that, the more successful you will be.

Make sure that your changes don’t confuse your viewers, but instead enhance their lives. Stick to what your message is, and make it more appealing for your viewers to visit you often.