The landscape of social media trends is ever changing. It’s getting harder for your message to be seen and heard by your customer (or potential customers). That’s why it’s important to have a rock solid, up-to-date social strategy across all channels. This helps ensure you are building upon a clear and consistent message that resonates.
Social media has become a mainstay in a solid marketing plan alongside more traditional digital forms of marketing like search, SEO, email and display. Social media is poised to grow to 24% of marketing budgets in the next five years, up from 10% today. And each social media channel only continues to grow on a daily basis. This allows your brand to put more content in front of customers on a daily basis.
So what’s next for social media in 2017? Follow these top 5 social media trends to ensure your brand is at the forefront of your customers feed.
Pay-to-Play
In the beginning all content on social media was organic.You could court followers and grow your audience organically by posting high-quality, shareable and engaging content. Those days are over. With the influx of brands and users producing more content than ever it’s getting increasingly difficult for brands to get their content seen.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter are all capitalizing on this trend. They are creating robust advertising features that allow brands to target fans, past customers or lookalike audiences across all platforms with promoted posts. In order to grow your following and ensure your message is seen you must have a dedicated social budget to support that.
Expiring Content
With it’s surge of popularity in 2016, Snapchat’s success is hard to deny. The defining feature that makes the platform stand out is the sense of urgency it creates by limiting the availability of each post.
By creating content that expires within 10 seconds to 24 hours, Snapchat is establishing a new behavior amongst users. More content is being consumed at a more immediate speed than previously seen. This model has since been incorporated to Instagram and shows promise of being rolled out to more platforms in the future.
Live Video
The impact of video is undeniable. Four times as many consumers preferring to watch a video about a product over having to read about it.
There is no question that Facebook Live dominated this election season. Everyone from news outlets to magazines was producing daily live interviews and Q&A’s. Whether pre-produced or live, video is here to stay. It’s important to define a strategy for how your brand can use video in 2017 to easily reach and convert customers.
Social Commerce
Directly correlating sales from social has been a struggle since the beginning of social media. Instagram’s recent announcement of making images shoppable shows promise of bridging the gap between ecommerce and social. In the past this has been an impossible metric to track.
Pinterest has also been making strides with ecommerce investments. Specifically, their buyable pins that allow users to purchase products within pins so there is no need to actually leave the app. Establishing a more seamless user experience between social and ecommerce helps to ensure that brands continue to invest on each channel with a direct ROI.
Personalization
Utilized across all marketing tools from email to websites — personalization is dominating social media through dynamic ads. Look at a shoe on Nordstrom and that shoe is sure to follow you to Facebook and possibly Pinterest. Retargeting customers who visited your website and serving them relevant ads of product they just viewed allows for higher conversions and engagements.
Staying ahead of the social curve in 2017 will ensure that your message is relevant and appealing to your customers. Need help creating a social media strategy that converts? Contact Filament today.
