Social networking and social media is now a staple for modern life. With a simple handheld mobile device and a stable internet connection, you can create and maintain different accounts, connect and interact with different people, and even market your products and services online.
Knowing the latest social media trends is the key to keeping up with its fast-paced nature. This is especially important if you are involved in social media marketing, because if you’re not able to keep up with the latest trends, you could easily get overwhelmed by your competition.
The following are some of the most important social media marketing trends and stats today. Learn more about them and see how you could relate it to your business.
1. A younger audience can be more likely to convert to sales
The Internet is a very big ocean to fish from, so casting a line without knowing what to look for is very inefficient. Even if you’re focusing on just one social media channel, it’s still important to know your audience, and see if any of them fits your target consumer.
According to research by MarketingSherpa, adults aged 18-34 who are active online will likely follow a brand through social networking sites.
See if the product or service you are offering fits your audience, or else your marketing efforts will just go to waste.
This is why Instagram is the preferred social media platform of lifestyle brands that cater to millennials. According to ScienceDaily, 90% of Instagram users are below 35 years old. They are assured that most of their post views are by potential customers, increasing the possibility of converting their social media interaction to actual sales.
2. Visual content is vastly more likely to go viral
Having many friends or followers on your social network accounts doesn’t really matter if none of them interact with your brand. If there’s really an engagement between your brand and your audience, they should be liking, commenting on, or sharing your posts. This is why you should make every post count, to attract their attention and to encourage them to take action.
Visual content is the key to make something viral – it is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other kinds of content, according to HubSpot. Your marketing strategy should include ways of creating visual content for your audience, be it image posts, videos, or even livestreamed events.
3. Hashtags can help, but aren’t a one-step key to success
Social media is a good testing ground for new strategies and campaigns. One reason is that it’s relatively cheap, and you have access to a very wide audience. There have been successful campaigns before, but as they get copied by every other online marketing team, the effectiveness of such campaigns decreases.
A good example would be the use of hashtags to promote content. A Locowise study found that hashtags had no effect on engagement rates for Twitter posts. Remember when almost every brand on Twitter were spamming their posts with too many hashtags? Turns out, it’s not really helping them get a better engagement rate.
What matters more is the content that you post and share. It’s better to just focus on the quality of content, instead of spamming your post with crazy #hashtags.
4. What’s most important for you – engagement, total users or influencers?
Speaking of engagement rate, Hootsuite found that Instagram has the highest per-follower engagement rate, at 4.21%. This is 58 times better than that of Facebook, and 120 times better than that of Twitter.
If you don’t have enough resources to manage all the possible social networking sites available, choose and prioritize the one that has the biggest upside for you.
For example, Facebook may not have Instagram’s engagement rate, but they have the most monthly active users at 2.01 billion. Twitter may not have the numbers of the first two, but the ability to follow and getting followed back by various brands and influencers is unique only to this platform.
If your budget allows it, you can also have a communication and collaboration platform that lets you manage all three at once, as well as other platforms like LinkedIn or Snapchat.
Staying ahead of the curve is a never-ending effort
The Internet has paved new ways for us to do things, including marketing and advertisement. Social media became a strong channel to market products and services, and it empowered not only known brands, but also startups and small businesses. We need to constantly evolve our practices so that we can keep up not only with the competition, but also with the innovations and the technology that’s constantly advancing.
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