Social Media Trends 2018
Facebook is the biggest and arguably most powerful social network in the world with 1.55 billion active monthly users. Regardless if you are a startup or fortune 500 company, you need to be on Facebook and start *engaging with your consumers. (*Positively. We don’t want to replicate Amy’s Baking Company’s mistake).
Twitter is known as the ‘‘in the moment’’ platform and boasts a respectable 255 million active monthly users. Twitter is a perfect online marketing tool for businesses that want to reach out to people (and are ready for a reply). The key is to be quick and smart, ever heard of the dunk in the dark?
LinkedIn is regarded as the professional social networking site. LinkedIn largely focuses on b2b marketing rather than b2c.
Google +, Youtube are other social network sites that harshly miss out on the list.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Set Goals – Start big and work down. Do you need to increase customer loyalty?
- Know your target audience – Don’t just use demographics but expand with psychographics.
- Social Media – Decide on which digital media will help you connect with your audience. Will this take the form of a blog, video, podcast etc?
- Social Network Strategy – Focus on a social network that adds value. Just because a network has over a hundred million active users doesn’t mean it will directly contribute to your brand’s objectives
- Measurement and Testing – What does success mean to you? You need to constantly analyze your social media strategy to understand how effective it is. Engage with your audience, find out what works and what doesn’t.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing service may have been identified as the missing link connecting you with your consumers. However for the others, who are still contemplating diving into the social marketing end, look no further than the following facts.Social media marketing increases your brand’s awareness. 78 % of small businesses use social media to attract new customers. Furthermore, 33% of customers have identified social media as how they identify new brands products and services.
Social media marketing helps to validate your brand. A company’s social media presence, when done correctly, tells consumers that their brand is active and focused on thriving communication with consumers. 63% of consumers who search for businesses online are more likely to use ones with an informative social media presence. Need more help on how to validate your brand? Check out our branding blog.
Social media marketing has the power to increase customer loyalty. 71% of consumers who received a quick response on social media would recommend the brand to others.
Goodbye, free reach on social media (for real). For years, companies’ organic reach on Facebook (the percentage of their followers who see company updates that aren’t “boosted” with ad money) has been dwindling, dipping as low as 2%. Now it seems Facebook may finally kill organic reach on the News Feed entirely. This fall, the network rolled out a new “Explore Feed,” a kind of second-class stream just for company updates. Testing has already begun in some countries to banish all company social posts from the all-important (and increasingly crowded) News Feed over to Explore.
Tips to Kickstart Your 2018 Social Media Plans
- Create Social Friendly Sites: Mobile-first design is crucial if you're going to be using social media as a strategy for marketing in 2018. Pair this with social login options and you'll see your conversion rates increase in the coming year.
- Make CTAs: Facebook's call-to-action buttons increase click-through rates 2.85x, meaning if you haven't already in 2018 you should make use of the CTA buttons on your page. 78% of these buttons are "Shop Now' – this is a solid button for an e-commerce site with product pages but the top performing CTA is "learn more".
- Use Carosels: Facebook's Carousel ads are up to 10x better in terms of CTR than static advertisements and yield a 30-50% lower cost-per-conversion and 20-30% lower CTR than image link ads.
- Be Genuine: With Facebook’s changes to their News Feed, 2018 is the year to be genuine. This year Facebook also realized that social media isn’t fun for us all of the time, so their focus on promoting genuine messages that make people feel good about themselves isn’t going to go away soon. Try to focus on being helpful with your content and being as genuine as you can be with your brand. Bring back the human touch to your marketing plans wherever possible. Even if it involves automation there are ways to make a process feel human without it being human.
- Take Advantage Of Video: 70 % of in-stream ads in Facebook are viewed to completion, with 100 million hours of video watched on Facebook every day. The video is not to be ignored in 2018. Facebook not your social platform of choice? LinkedIn is looking into refining their video advertising too.
- Gather Your Own Data: Twitter is pretty unsure of how their character limit changes will affect engagement on lengthy tweets since for now longer tweets are interesting but over time engagement may decrease. Now more than ever it’s important that you gather your own data on how people engage with your content. Even the smallest of tests can lead to a large number of insights. Recently, we carried out a quick test on our Instagram profile with the timing of hashtags and found the optimal time to comment on hashtags.
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