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Top Social Media Trends In 2019
Social Media Tools, Tricks & Trends
Social Media Marketing is changing at a rapid pace and in 2019 it is important to keep up with the latest trends. As social media marketing continues to evolve reevaluating your existing marketing strategy to find what works and where you can improve.
Trish Carey, Marketing Director, SellerEngine Software put it so perfectly:
“While we’ll see a lot of changes in 2019, to me it really still comes back to understanding your audience, crafting different, targeted and appropriate messages for those audiences, and creating engaging content.”
Let’s explore the top social media marketing trends to follow in 2019 that you cannot afford to miss.
Cater To Your Audience
The top focus you should have is being responsive to the people that are following on your various social media platforms. After all, social media is all about building relationships and engaging with them.
“Being authentic and timely is a good start”, according to Jasmine Sandler, CEO, Owner & Operator of JS Media.
“This means responding quickly to customer complaints, issues, and questions. Doing this in a real way that nurtures and supports the customer or audience first is also important for overall social brand loyalty.”
Social media has transformed into one on one interactions. It is imperative to be responsive to your customers and engage with your audiences. Go big or go home, reply to every request, comment on all your post and really don’t do things to scale.
By letting your audience know that they matter will help grow your brand through them.
Share Authentic Stories & Moments That Matter
Anna Crowe, Assistant Editor of Search Engine Journal, believes 2019 will be the year of authenticity.
“That means less of static updates and more behind-the-scenes, raw, and intimate Stories. Stories create a more transparent and meaningful relationship between the user and the brand.”
Being authentic means being a better storyteller, which creates more work marketers and brands. You will need to tell stories that matter to your audience and not your brand.
Work with Influencers & Micro-Influencers
On social media everyone is someone. Engaging with influencers is very strategic. You have to know who to speak with and when, how and knowing when to listen. This ultimately gives you the highest return on your investment. Leading to many opportunities for joint projects, client referrals, shared content ventures and much more.
Facebook marketing authority Mari Smith can be quoted saying influencer marketing will be a dominant trend in 2019.
“We’ll see a big growth spurt in seasoned influencers creating successful campaigns, along with a rise in nano influencers (ordinary digital citizens with 1,000 to 5,000 followers),” Smith said. “Brands and businesses will seek proven influencer marketing strategies and especially look for proven influencer agencies.”
Video, Video, Video!
We have said it before and we will probably continue to say it till we are blue in the face. VIDEO marketing!
It is nothing new for marketers to use videos both live and uploaded it more important than ever to have a video strategy in place.
Victoria Edwards, Senior Manager of Social Media for GuideWell Connect, expects to “see more brands potentially partnering with influencers or developing content that has more of a real human touch, than highly produced content.”
2019 will see IGTV with Instagram pushing the app front and center. In addition, we will see continued growth in vertical video consumption on Facebook.
Akvile DeFazio, President of AKvertise, offers these video tips:
● Set a goal for each video.
● Storyboard with your team.
● Create a 30-60 second video that you can use on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn News Feeds.
● For Stories, create 15-second micro-segment videos of your longer ones to utilize, here.
● Repurpose your content where and when you can.
● Put your best foot forward in the first 10 seconds because no matter how interesting, useful, entertaining, or informative your video is, viewers will begin to drop off after the 10-15 mark
Facebook Messenger & Chatbots
Chatbots are a hot trend right now. Facebook Messenger and chatbots have incredible open rates and are one of the most effective ways to reach out and build consumer engagement.
businesses that market via Messenger earn 60-80 percent open rates within the first 60 minutes.
In 2019, it’s time to start chat blasting and some best advice is to:
● Build a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
● Grow your Facebook Messenger contacts.
● Start strategically delivering content via Messenger.
● expect the chatbot hype to die down a bit and for marketers to shift from “we need a chatbot” to “how do we use this strategically as a communications tool,”
Ending Fake Followers
2019 and in previous years Instagram is the most popular apps in the social media landscape. Influencers have benefited from its success and ultimately rising to fame through their growing audience.
It is no secret that several Instagram accounts have artificially increased their number of followers to boost their popularity. In fact, there are several services that provide fake followers for a fee and Instagramers knew that sooner or later this would have to stop.
A big step for Instagram was their announcement that they have started removing inauthentic likes, follows, and comments from accounts that used third-party apps to increase their popularity. Furthermore, they have built machine learning tools to identify such activities so that they prevent it from happening in the future.
As a brand, there is no need anymore to pay for followers, in fact, you should be spending more time on growing your community organically to avoid seeing a sudden drop of (fake) followers and likes.
Socialization in Social Media
When social media first came out, the point of social sharing and being involved in each other’s lives. However, along the way, we have forgotten the point and is now used as a broadcast medium.
Companies are finally realizing that people want more authentic communication that helps the connectivity between people to build meaningful relationships.
Trying to solely focus on selling to a person eliminates the socialization. Always asking for your audience to respond is not true socialization, but forced interaction that is seen as fake or untrustworthy.
Spend time socializing with your followers, engage in meaningful conversations with your commenters to build that true relationship.
Followers Having Trust
2018 had scandals, security breaches, manipulations and tons of fake news, 2019 will be a year to rebuild that trust from your followers.
This means abandoning tactics that earned you engagement but were through misuse and abuse. There are several ways to regain trust but experts point the three main ones out:
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- Increase your paid promotion budget: You will need this to counteract some of the losses you may experience from not putting out spammy content like that mentioned above.
- Stop asking your followers for something all the time: Create content that naturally creates engagement rather than begging for it.
- Stop selling, start communicating: Don’t be that friend that invites someone to coffee and then spends the entire time selling, because no one wants that. Invite your followers to a conversation, not a sales pitch.
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Use of LinkedIn
Marketers are not fully leveraging LinkedIn, however, if you look at what it has done over the last year it’s time to start. Last year LinkedIn has become a serious contender for video, influencers and connecting their products.
Some business professionals have already seen a drastic variance in video views on LinkedIn vs. Facebook- LinkedIn providing more views even with Facebook having a larger audience.
Akvile DeFazio also recommends testing out LinkedIn 2019 if it’s applicable to your audience, whether it’s younger demographic or executives.
“LinkedIn is evolving and making a huge push toward becoming an informative business content sharing and connection nurturing network. They are creating alluring features for younger demographics to begin using the network as they begin entering the workforce or heading into higher education,” she said. “If executives are your target audience, 59 percent of them would rather watch a video than reading text.”
More Strategic Employee Engagement
Are you utilizing your best resource? Employee engagement is content creation is an untapped resource in most companies.
2019 should be the year you start empowering your employees to fuel your brand. Employee-created content will receive significantly more engagement that content that is shared solely from the company.
Employees are the best way to humanize and personalize your brand and truly the best way to have relevant and contextual content creation.
Create Content for Your Mobile Fans
This is one of the subjects that should not have to be addressed repeatedly, but we do. 2019 makes it critical to craft a social experience that is fluid, beautiful and interactive for mobile users. This is not just the page but in every aspect of digital marketing, including social media.
That’s according to Ashley Ward, CEO & Director of Marketing at Madhouse Matters.
“Everything that you share on your social media profiles needs to accommodate a mobile user,” Ward said. “This means that if you want them to click on a link in order to engage with your post, that link needs to go to a page that is designed specifically for the mobile user.”
Social media is only going to continue to gain momentum and followers throughout 2019 and the years to come. Social media marketing is going towards a stage that focuses more on ROI, new technologies and a trusting relationship between the brand and the customers. If you find yourself without the expertise in social media marketing do not worry, Blue Water Marketing can assist. Blue Water Marketing has a team of experts that can design your marketing campaign to fit your needs. Consider giving us a call today!
