Social media is quickly changing, and so are the habits of online users. Marketers must be well informed on the latest trends to ensure that they have a successful social media marketing campaign year. As you plan for your social media marketing strategy put in place the social media marketing trends for 2019. Here are 7 social media marketing trends to consider when creating your online campaign.
√ The Rise of Micro-influencers
Most companies owe their successful brand drive to social media influencers. Social media influencers have thousands or millions of followers and each time they tweet, comment, or post, many people see their actions. This is the reason why brands are spending thousands of their marketing budget to pay social media influencers for their social media campaign.
With time, the demand for big influencers grew, and their asking price is outrageous. Small-sized and medium-sized companies could not afford them and therefore sought other options. That is when micro-influencers came in to place. Micro-influencers are found in every social media platform and have less than 10,000 people. They have authority over their followers and are highly listened to by their followers. Micro-influencers service prices are pocket-friendly to both medium and small-sized companies.
Although Micro-influencers do not have social media authority as celebrities, they have a bigger social presence through engagement. Their passion for a certain product or brand is influential. Therefore, businesses have to look for the right micro-influencer to deliver value.
√ Messaging Apps and Artificial Intelligence
Messaging Apps and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible to engage customers in their businesses such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Chatbots. AI, on the other hand, is revolving in the business world. AI is designed and developed to provide automated answers to common questions. They answer questions just the way a human does. You cannot easily identify it as a robot. Brands or companies find AI to be time, cost and energy saving as it does most of the work.
The adoption of AI as part of customer service has shown positive results. The response rate to customers’ inquiries is high. It a win-win situation where customers can easily reach their brand and the brand can easily reach their customers through social media.
A good example is a Chatbot (through Facebook’s Messenger). Chatbots are becoming popular since they offer personalized interactions, instant customer service, answer common questions and convenient to use. Making use of an Instagram bot, for instance, can mean that it handles the tedious tasks of following back, liking new posts, commenting, and more so you’re free to focus on other profitable aspects of your business. With all of those benefits, it’s no wonder it has been trending.
√ The use of AR
Businesses are quickly embracing the idea of Augmented Reality (AR) to make their campaign more fun and engaging. Augmented reality is a cutting-edge technology that adds virtual content to your environment making it look like the real world. Online businesses are employing AR to provide real customer service experience. When buying a hat from an online store, for example, you will have the option to try them out virtually before buying.
AR is popular on the Facebook platform. Facebook is heavily investing in AR to keep its users on its platform. Facebook Messenger has AR camera effects to enhance the improvement of customer satisfaction. Nonetheless, the introduction of AR ads to make brand messages more fun and interesting. The introduction of AR on Facebook has facilitated the ultimate customer experience.
√ Personalization
Every day tones of information are being uploaded on the internet. Brands use the information uploaded to their own advantage. They have developed ways to target their potential customers. One of the ways is social media—whereby it filters their audience by age, gender, location etc. Targeting consumers have paved the way for personalized ads to reach their audience.
Finding consumers that are interested in what you have to offer is critical to your success as a business as well. Each social media platform is unique and requires its own strategy. Perhaps Twitter is the most difficult of all to master. Figuring out how to get followers on Twitter can be challenging but extremely rewarding for your business.
Have you ever come across an ad on your social media about something you searched earlier? Or got a suggestion of similar items you once bought on a particular site. This kind of marketing is referred to as hyper-targeted personalization. Brands use consumer’s social media posts, clicked links, online habits and consumer’s buying history for personalization to take place. Brands that use personalization are building a long-time relationship with the customers by making their experience personalized.
Social media activities run for 24/7- users will search for information online on a certain product, purchase items and talk about the brand at any time of the day. Social media users will share their views, recommendations, frustrations and ideas on certain brands or products. Most of the times, they do not tag the said brand or product in their post. In an attempt to listen to what customers are saying, brands started using social listening. Social listening is the act of brands to listen to what social media users are saying about their brand or product(s).
Social listening monitors brand mentions and industry keywords in blogs, news sites and social sites in order to manage their brand reputation, improve customer service and social selling. One of the advantages of social listening is it can generate leads and spark social selling. As people continue to mention brands on social media, social selling will be on the increase. Brands will continue to find people who need their services or products.
√ Use of stories
Social media serves as a mirror of our social life. There is no better way to share our life with friends and family than stories. Social media users share their stories through status updates, posts, tweets or pictures. Before the sharing videos become popular, social media users were limited to photos and posts to tell their stories.
Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram are quickly changing on how their users are going to tell their stories. They allow their users to display their visual content for 24 hours. Users get to share the stories for only 24 hours. Stories have that personal touch, appear real and are real-time. The audience can easily be persuaded to try the brand. Snapchat began this trend of stories, and since then other social channels have embraced the idea due to its demand and effectiveness.
√ Use of videos
Consumption of videos continues to grow each year and marketers are leveraging its popularity. Video content especially live videos and live streams are quickly dominating the market. This is because:
- Marketers are creating creative content that is more engaging and interactive.
- Shooting live videos is easy.
- Social media users can easily relate to the brand.
- Videos have a wide base of audience and therefore attract a large number of followers.
Conclusion
2019 social media marketing trends all focus on improving customer experience. Marketing is on the verge to adopt new technologies to provide real-time value to customers. 2019 is definitely the year them marketing gap between brand and customers will be closed.
