Speaker spotlight: Navigating new platforms in government social media
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As the government social media landscape continues to evolve, socialgovs are faced with a crucial decision: stick with established platforms or explore new ones? With each platform offering unique features, audiences, and engagement opportunities, making the right choice requires careful strategy and adaptability.
In this edition of our Speaker Spotlight series, we’re chatting with Anabell Chavez, Digital Communications Manager, and Jennifer Arenas, Digital Community Engagement Manager, both with the City of Long Beach, CA. These experienced government communicators share their insights on evaluating new platforms, balancing innovation with stability, and staying ahead in an ever-changing digital world.
Want to gain a clearer strategy for your agency? Join us at GSMCON2025, where Anabell and Jennifer will lead the intermediate session “X vs. Threads & Bluesky: Building a Winning Strategy for the New Social Media Era.” Whether you’re looking to integrate new platforms or refine your current presence, this session will help you make informed, strategic decisions.
Get your ticket during Regular Registration to save the most—secure your spot today!
Q: How do you determine whether a platform might be worth your agency’s time and resources?
Anabell: This is timely because the City of Long Beach is going through this decision making now as the social media landscape is changing a lot and quickly. However, this might also vary based on the agency.
The City of Long Beach has a Social Media Policy and in it we have a dedicated section on the creation of new pages. We advise departments that when deciding whether to launch a social media account, departments should consider the purpose of the messaging, the department’s goals and objectives, audience, content development, page maintenance, legal risks, technical capabilities, and potential benefits.
Jennifer: By now social media managers have experienced various new social media network launches and learned that some do better than others. Sometimes it’s best to wait and give yourself time instead of automatically jumping quickly to create a new social media page. Allow time for the new social media networks to gain momentum allowing agencies to observe and stay up to date on how it’s performing, check whether many government or similar agencies are also joining, learn the audience, and research the platform’s success and downfalls.
After considering every factor, then make the cautious decision on whether it is worth it and if it makes sense for your agency. Sometimes focusing on the social media pages and social media communities you already have established might make more sense. A lot of time, less is more.
However, as a best practice we recommend securing your agency’s social media handle on platforms you may consider utilizing in the future whether you end up using it or not.
Q: What key factors should agencies consider before committing to a new platform?
Anabell: In government, public sector jobs, and in the nonprofit world, capacity and bandwidth is always an issue. Personnel and resources are also usually scarce, especially in communications. It is important to understand that social media pages live forever, and someone will always have to maintain and manage it. Therefore, really keeping in mind whether your team has the capacity to manage a new page that may have unique features, different photo dimensions, and best practices to follow can be a lot of work. That is why it’s very important to have a set content and managing plan as well as goals or KPIs established to measure the success of this new page if created.
Q: How do you balance experimenting with new platforms and maintaining a strong presence on established ones?
Jennifer: By leveraging social media management tools that allow us to duplicate posts and make minor adjustments to the copy or swap out graphics/images to the appropriate graphics in one place saves us so much time. Using these tools as well as sharing the responsibility by dividing the workload allows us to maintain our established platforms and be present on new ones.
Anabell: However, there are times where we have a lot on our plate and being present on all platforms is challenging, which is why it’s really important to take a step back sometimes and have a clear understanding of your audience. Sometimes it makes sense to upload the same Instagram Reels video onto YouTube shorts, Facebook and maybe LinkedIn (since now they allow short form videos to be uploaded) and X, but it doesn’t make sense on Nextdoor or Reddit.
In other cases, for example, when we have emergencies like a local storm that is approaching and we need to send our community information on storm preparedness or alerts to avoid the ocean after heavy rain, that messaging needs to go on all platforms and be formatted for each appropriate platform.
Many times, it depends on the content and your objective/goal.
Q: Why is it important for agencies to stay adaptable in a constantly evolving social media landscape?
Anabell & Jennifer: Aside from it being part of our job to stay up to date with trends and news, as local, state, federal agencies we are the official source of information. The social media landscape is not only evolving, but it is also becoming oversaturated with influencers and so many pages. There is an excessive amount of content or accounts, making it difficult for any individual post or brand to stand out and reach an audience because of the sheer volume of competition. This leads to struggling to gain attention and difficulty to get high engagement, which is why it is even more important than ever to be really intentional and strategic when posting.
Staying up to date on new product features, trends and the latest news on social media will help your agency develop successful organic content. Having a budget to boost and launch a paid social media campaign can increase your chances of success, but usually budgets are tight or non-existent. That is why having a strong understanding of the current landscape and trends is crucial to increasing the success of organic content.
Below are a few pages we recommend following.
Government Social Media® empowers government professionals to achieve mastery in social media through conferences, online training, and association membership.
Best communicate with the public you serve and get connected with fellow socialgovs by registering for the 2025 Government Social Media Conference happening in the Orlando-area and virtually from wherever you are! Join the free GSM Network for text-only chats on socialgov topics or access the Government Social Media Association for regional virtual meetups and educational webinars. Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest updates on training, events and more.
Government Social MediaĀ® empowers government professionals to achieve mastery in social media through conferences, online training, and association membership. Best communicate with the public you serve and get connected with fellow socialgovs by registering for the 2025 Government Social Media Conference happening in the Orlando-area and virtually from wherever you are! Join the free GSM Network for text-only chats on socialgov topics or access the Government Social Media Association (GSMA) for regional virtual meetups and educational webinars.
