With each passing day, social media platforms are getting more popular. Facebook alone has billions of active user accounts. As social media networking sites are used by millions of people worldwide, they have become the best marketing platforms for businesses. Social media marketing is considered the most important part of the overall marketing strategy for every organization today, irrespective of the size. Let’s see how.
Why Social Media Marketing?
According to one research, 60% people claim that they come across a new brand on Instagram. Approximately, 75% people take action on Instagram or Twitter posts they see. Gone are the days when social networking platforms were considered a means to connect with your relatives and friends. Today, they are extensively used by marketers to promote brand and services.
If you haven’t yet included social media marketing into your marketing strategy, you are missing out on one of the most crucial marketing techniques. Plus, you are losing a large number of your prospects to your competitors. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, read the following social media trends for 2020 and stay up-to-date with the upcoming marketing techniques.
Videos: The Best Social Media Marketing Tool
Research suggests that videos will make up to 82% of overall internet traffic by the end of 2022. People love to watch videos as they find them way more personalized and engaging. Visual content attracts the audience and drives them to not only like your content but follow your social media account and engage with your brand.
Everyone knows how important customer engagement is when it comes to marketing. For social media enthusiasts, videos can prove extremely beneficial. Social media marketers should try to create story-telling and personalized video to draw their audience’s attention and keep up their engagement. You can even post short teaser videos and ask customers to check your YouTube channel or website to watch the full videos and purchase from your brand.
Gated Communities
Gone are the days when online communities involved separate, private, and super engaged people. Nowadays, the popularity of the chatting sites and messaging applications is on the rise. These channels allow people to form small communities that fit their personal and commercial requirements.
Private networks, messaging applications, and other such gated communities are poised to develop in popularity in 2020.
Social Shopping
Nowadays, brands are selling their products through social media sites. Social shopping is expected to get common in the coming year. As mentioned before, people come across new brands on social networking sites. The engagement rates on these platforms are extremely high. All that the customers need is a recommendation from their family member, friend, relative, or an unknown Instagram and Facebook user. That’s it! Without a second thought, they will check your brand and place an order almost instantly. That’s the power of social networking sites.
Do you know 78% of customers use Facebook to search for the latest products? Currently, 30% of customers purchase products via Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook. In fact, 72% of customers claim that they buy products on Instagram if they find them interesting. The figures clearly tell how famous social networking sites are getting every day.
Death of Likes
The currency of likes is expected to revolutionize in the coming year. Facebook and Instagram already tried to remove like counts from the post. According to the social networking platforms, these changes are mainly developed to address the mental and emotional harm caused to the social media users.
Micro and Nano Marketing
You might have heard of influencer marketing on social media platforms? Well, influencer marketing is undoubtedly one of the best ways of promoting your brand on these highly-popular platforms. Currently, 22% of internet users buy products after seeing the influencer endorsements. Influencer marketing, which was earlier limited to the celebrities and famous personalities, now involves micro-influencers as well.
First of all, not all marketers have the budget to hire super famous influencers for their brand promotion. Secondly, celebrity endorsements couldn’t bring the best possible results. That’s the reason why the interest of marketers is gradually shifting towards the micro-influencers. Micro-influencers can be not-so-famous celebrities, bloggers, and other people with a decent yet loyal following base. They charge reasonable rates and promote brand enthusiastically.
Ephemeral Content
In 2013, Snapchat introduced Ephemeral content that produced amazing results. Ephemeral content refers to the stories you see on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram that only last for 24 hours and disappear. In the fear of missing out on special announcements to offer, customers have now started to watch stories. In fact, ephemeral content has increased the time people spend on Instagram and Snapchat from 15 minutes to 32 minutes.
For marketers, it has proven a great way to boost your eCommerce sales by introducing the limited-time offers, exclusive deals, and swipe-up options. If you want your content to reach out to a wider audience without using sponsored ads, the story ads on Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram can turn out the best marketing strategies in 2020.
Virtual Reality
From the recent Facebook announcement regarding its “Horizon” plans, it looks as if Virtual Reality will play a pivotal part in developing social media platforms in 2020. The emergence of Horizon will change the way people use Facebook and other social media sites. It will allow users to watch, develop, share, and interact with the content.
Users are expecting more commercial applications of virtual reality in online shopping, marketing, and social media advertising.
Personalized Content
Customers buying decision is highly influenced by personalized content. This is no longer an era where brands can impress their audience with generic or traditional social media advertisements.
In 2020, marketers and influencers will focus more on content personalization. The question is “how to promote your brand by creating personalized content”. In simple terms, the marketers upload ads that their audience can relate to.
For example, people upload videos where they are seen using a particular skincare product. They post “before” and “after” pictures to help people understand the benefits of the specific brand easily. This improves the engagement rate of the brand and drives more and more people to their website.
Final Words
If you want to survive the competitive online marketing field, you need to stay up-to-date with the upcoming social media marketing trends. These are the top social trends we are expecting in 2020. From gated communities to video marketing to ephemeral content to virtual reality; social media platforms are getting better for the audience and businesses.