Social media marketing: Six trends to keep your eyes on

Social Media is Marketing the Future

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you are not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you’re missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks to achieve your marketing and branding goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and other content that drives audience’s engagement. Social media marketing can help with many goals, such as increasing website traffic, building conversions, raising brand awareness, creating a brand identity and positive brand association and improving communication and interaction with key audiences. As social media marketing plays a vital role, following are the six trends to keep your eyes on:

Instagram stories

Instagram has over 700 million monthly active users, less competition and a more engaged audience than other social media giants like Facebook or Twitter. This presents businesses with an opportunity to market their products to a more targeted and interested audience without spending an enormous amount of money on paid advertising. Instagram stories have a slideshow format and are only live for 24-hours. Instagram stories offer social marketers a great opportunity to reach a higher number of people by taking advantage of one of the fastest-growing social networks.

Twitter

With over 313 million monthly active users and a young demographic to boot, Twitter is a great platform for most marketers. Starting up a Twitter page for your company is easy. Anyone can come up with a Twitter handle, upload their profile photo, fill out their bio and send out their first Tweet. However, growing your Twitter account and turning it into an actual tool that generates leads and builds up your brand is not that simple. Some of the main ways, businesses use Twitter include sharing information and content, driving engagement for promotional activities, interacting with consumers, networking, branding and reputation management.

Chatbot

A Chatbot is a program that mimics human interaction. It automatically chats with internet users and gives a series of pre-prepared answers according to what they ask. It is an interactive FAQ tool that becomes more and more useful as you add more and more questions and answers to it. User engagement drives conversions. Chatbots can lead users on an Easter egg hunt or chat about the sports team they hate. The limit is up to our imagination.

Live Chat

Live chat is a must-have tool for your business. The biggest live chat benefits include the increase in sales, efficiency, and improvement in customer service and loyalty, customer convenience, proactive outreach; reduce expenses, faster solution to problems, competitive advantages, and reports and analytics.

VR and AR

They got to make themselves known by a wide public, bringing about a confrontation that led to a better definition of their roles. While VR has proven to be the evolution of gaming, AR has found its way in communication and marketing. With the new AR features on the iPhone X (and 8), you can expect a lot more AR related content being generated, and consumed, in 2018.