1. The Importance of Engagement
Engagement has always
mattered on social media. However, with the change in Facebook’s algorithm that
emphasizes meaningful interactions, it has become even more important. This
means that content which starts genuine conversations has become more favored.
In order to improve
your organic reach, your content needs to be highly engaging. That means it
should be interesting and appealing to your target audience too. It’s not
enough to just ask people to like, share, and comment on your posts.
You need to change
your approach and move away from engagement baiting techniques. Genuine content
is the key to success in the future of social media marketing.
2. The Rise of Groups
Groups on Facebook
have new features such as live videos, story updates, and participation as a
business page. With the changes in the algorithm of Facebook, Groups have
become the go-to place to connect with your audience.
Through Groups, you
can not only get feedback about your products but even generate additional
engagement.
A similar effect has
been noticed on Instagram where influencers have started making their profiles
private. This is done to avoid the effects of the Instagram algorithm.
Instagram Stories also
have a “Close Friends” feature. Through this, brands can showcase their Stories
to a select few people to give an insider look. This can even give people a
more exclusive feel and they’d feel privileged to be able to see these Stories
too.
Such segmentation
trends can be expected to grow and shape the future of social media marketing.
3.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer
marketing has become popular on social media very quickly. It
has even beaten print
marketing in terms of popularity on Google Trends. People with
thousands of followers can leverage their audiences and collaborate with
brands.
Influencers get paid by the brands to promote their products to
their audiences. Brands, on the other hand, are looking for reliable
influencers to collaborate with to reach their target customers.
However,
it’s not only the influencers with massive fan-followings who can reap the
benefits of influencer marketing. As it’s popularity soars, big influencers are
becoming expensive for brands. This has led to the rise of micro-influencers.
Micro-influencers
have fewer followers than big influencers but they have the advantage of higher
engagement with their audience. Additionally, they charge significantly less
than popular influencers for sponsored content. This makes it affordable for
brands to collaborate with them and promote their products or services to the audiences
of the influencers.
In addition to micro-influencers, there are also
nano-influencers. These influencers have less than 10k followers. While brands
may not be able to reach a huge audience, they can benefit from the
tightly-knit audiences of nan0-influencers. And it doesn’t require a large
budget to collaborate with these smaller influencers.
As they
may just be setting out on their influencer marketing journey, they may seek a
stable partnership. It could be a great point to start a long-term partnership
with the influencer.
4.
Transparency
2018 was a
year filled with privacy issues on major social media platforms such as
Facebook. GDPR also came into effect to protect the data that websites took
from customers.
According
to Sprout Social,
only 55% of customers felt
that brands were transparent to some extent on social media. On the other hand,
only 15% of them felt that they were very transparent.
This powerful statistic shows that there’s a lot that brands
need to do to grow their transparency on social media. And millennials expect
brands to be the most transparent on social media. This means that you need to
up the ante by admitting your mistakes or at least give honest responses to
them.
The same
survey also found the top desire of consumers is for transparency from brands.
That includes business practices, the company’s values, and product changes.
Which means that you should share changes to your products and give a
behind-the-scenes look of your company too.
The greater your transparency on social media, the more
consumers trust you. And trust can translate into greater sales. That said,
transparency is definitely the way ahead in the future of social media
marketing.
5.
Driving Sales through Social Media
While
social media has long been used to generate engagement and sales, the latter is
becoming a solid trend. Brands are provided with the necessary tools to promote
their products on social media to get sales.
With
advanced tracking tools such as the Facebook Pixel,
it is possible to chart out the buyer journey as well.
According
to Kleiner Perkins,
about 55% of people who
found a product on social media purchased it later. Among social media
channels, Facebook is the leading platform for product discovery. Instagram and
Pinterest are closely catching up in this trend as well.
This means that you can promote your products on these social
media platforms to generate consistent sales. It is not necessary to rely on
sales pitches anymore.
With social media, you can catch the attention of your target
consumers and get them to purchase from you. Paid promotions on social media
for your products should definitely be a part of your social media marketing
strategy.
6.
Chat bots and AI
Chat bots are one of the latest trends on social media. It has become increasingly simple
for people to reach out to brands through social media.
This makes
it very important for brands to respond to their queries as quickly as possible.
While it can be a difficult task to get a human to respond instantly, chat bots
can come to the rescue in such situations.
AI is the
future of social media marketing and with it, you can have conversations with
your customers. Chat bots powered by AI are being used on Facebook Messenger by
many brands to promote their products and even resolve customers’ issues.
Mastercard, for
instance, has their own chat bot that talks to you about your expenditures and
finances.
Due to improvements in AI, more brands are
switching to this mode of customer service to improve customer satisfaction
levels. It can come in handy to answer common questions which may not require
any human intervention.
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