Bloggers must continually adapt to change as social media marketing platforms evolve and users generate new trends. Marketing trends are effective tactics that spread and pick up speed until virtually everyone is leveraging them and they become a new norm in marketing.
Based on the trends that aren’t going away anytime soon, here are five social media marketing tactics to leverage this year.
Hashtag Strategy
You Need a Hashtag Strategy for Growing Your Audience on Social Platforms
Marketers aren’t the only ones using hashtags. Social media users are putting hashtags in their posts on personal social media accounts.
Whether they write them as a way of organizing their thoughts or as a shorthand witty expression of their feelings, they can help your marketing campaigns get found on social media. Here’s a glance at how hashtags should be used in some of the major social platforms:
• Instagram – Its search algorithm crawls your posts hashtags, helping you get found organically in Instagram search. In addition to adding a long list of hashtags at the end of each post, use them throughout your Instagram Stories because they rank in search, too.
• Twitter shows popular hashtags per location on the side, under “Trends for You.” Set your location to where your target audience is located. If you have a local business, it’s no problem.
Otherwise, choose a different location for your Twitter content each month or so, and add hashtags that are trending in that area. For example, if your target customer is a Millenial female mother, you might do research on a city where they’re densely populated.
In this video, Vanessa Lau shares HASHTAG MISTAKES That Are HURTING Your Instagram Growth!
• LinkedIn – Hashtags became a thing on LinkedIn starting in 2018. You can add hashtags to your LinkedIn updates and add up to five in each article you post on LinkedIn Publisher.
• It’s a good idea to combine the types of hashtags you use in each post, such as internet-popular hashtags and niche-targeted hashtags. You never want to use each on its own, because both combined will attract a larger audience to your posts.
Social Commerce
Social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook have long doubled as platforms that generate sales for marketers.
Social commerce has become a new opportunity for retailers to capitalize on, especially if they’re targeting Generation Z or Millennials.
Here are some of the ways you can benefit from the growing social commerce trend by leveraging the available tools on various platforms.
• Instagram – Shoppable posts and shoppable stories are still a growing trend as we enter the new decade.
• Snapchat – Shoppable ads on Snapchat, plus use your Snapchat stories to generate interest in your online offers, inviting them to find your link.
• YouTube – If your account allows you, put your store’s link into your YouTube video using the tools in YouTube’s creator dashboard.
• TikTok – TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform among Generation Z mobile users, and the platform now has a social commerce functionality in beta testing, which allows enabled accounts to embed links in videos within the app.
Virtually every social media platform relative to marketers today has taken some degree of a turning point to adapt to an increasing rate of mobile device shopping.
As Millenials continue to get older and need to buy more as they start families, Generation Z is at the same time increasing in their purchasing power.
That said, social media marketers need to know the social media mobile apps their target audience uses the most. They can devise their social commerce strategy around it to target more audience members.
Social commerce may become an increasingly prominent role played by social media marketers, as corporations decide to leverage the trend and make social commerce part of their sales strategy.
Video Marketing
Studies still show that video content is preferable among content consumers on both mobile devices and computers.
A study by Cisco revealed by 2022, as much as 82 percent of all online content consumed will be in video format.
Video marketing is an important part of social media marketing on virtually every social platform. Social media video content is still a healthy competition for YouTube, so don’t neglect it just because your brand has a YouTube strategy.
Instagram video continues to evolve on the platform, and it’s the most engaging form of content currently on it. Especially with shoppable posts driving social commerce, having a video content strategy on the platform can be valuable for your brand.
The same will be true for TikTok as they continue to test and roll out their feature of embedding your (potentially shoppable) link in a video.
Social Media Customer Service
Social media are more than platforms for connecting with old friends and staying up to date. Users also exchange daily messages with their closest friends and relatives on social media platforms and even interact with sales and customer support representatives from brands.
Some CRM tools let you integrate your brand’s social media accounts in a way that lets company reps see past interactions with other reps, whether the conversation was on Twitter, Facebook messenger or a traditional route like email or phone.
Each agent can pick up where their co-worker left off, so the customer never has to repeat themselves and can always go for help in the most convenient channel and pick up where they left off with customer support.
Millennials and Generation Z-ers in particular value convenient online and mobile customer experiences. Being present on a social media or messenger platform they’re always using to stay connected with friends makes things convenient for them.
Live Content
Live Content Drives The Most Engagement.
Just like video content is shown to drive more engagement than written content, live video yields measurably better results than pre-recorded video on social media.
On most social platforms these days, you can upload a beautifully edited digital video, and it can get views, comments, and likes.
However, the user engagement metrics these videos get don’t compare to those of live video streams, which platforms like Twitter, Facebook and, of course, YouTube, are doing.
Viewers like seeing you talk about a topic on the spot with no edits.
They feel like they’re hearing your truth directly, and seeing you talk in front of a live video about a topic in your industry shows you have a lot of authority.
Livestreams are also a great way to host Q&A sessions where you respond to comments.
Wrap Up: Social Media Marketing Tactics
Incorporating strategies to capitalize on these 5 trends for your social media marketing plan can help you make the most of what’s working in the year ahead and maintain a competitive edge. Of course, it’s important to continually measure your social media marketing performance and assess what strategies are working and which you should eliminate from your team’s action plan.
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