- Building social media communities: The way brands engage with their audience is a large part of meaningful and valuable social media experiences. Although sharing content you think your target audience would enjoy is part of maintaining your presence in social media, you also need to promote and develop connections that are more than just like or retweet. There are many companies out there that seem to have large social media follow-ups and yet, if you look at individual posts more closely, their level of engagement is almost non-existent. Those brands that see their fans engage more do so by creating communities around their content.
- Niche social platforms will perform well: Recently several niche social media platforms have not only emerged but have significantly risen to fame. TikTok, for example, is one such platform that started in 2016 and immediately gained popularity among youth. B2B companies prefer LinkedIn for their social media initiatives, while the gaming community flocks to Twitch.
- More brands will incorporate social listening into their strategies: Social conversations draw meaningful insights; social listening has made its way into every marketer’s strategy. Brands and marketers are using it for a variety of use cases.
- Social media influencers and word-of-mouth marketing: One advantage of building social media communities is that they are helping with word-of-mouth marketing another key trend for 2020. Communities allow you to engage with micro-influencers who are already your brand’s largest fans and advocates.
- The rise of new platforms like TikTok: According to Business Insider, app analytics site Sensor Tower reported Thursday that TikTok has been downloaded 1.5 billion times to date. The short-form video app continues to grow, with its downloads 6% stronger than this time last year. It is the third most-downloaded app outside of gaming this year.
- Ephemeral content and telling stories on social: Millions of users have become obsessed with quick-fire content. Referring to Fast Company, stories are growing 15 times faster than newsfeeds. More than 1 billion users are already hooked on the format. In fact, Facebook’s own chief product officer, Chris Cox, has pretty much hitched the company wagon to Stories, noting, “The Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.â€
- Influencer marketing will continue to soar: Marketers are not just collaborating with 1-2 influencers now, but are working with a whole network of small, relevant, niche influencers. These kinds of influencers get much higher engagement and cost much less.
- Social commerce will expand: Social networks are constantly evolving from shoppable messages to Facebook storefronts to becoming shopping sites. These will be leveraged by retailers and advertisers and will integrate social commerce into their advertising strategies.
- Video content will dominate: Video content is one of the most entertaining content forms and will soon become a clear winner in social media over all other content types. Either short-form videos are common on TikTok or Stories, or long-form content on YouTube, videos are the future of content on social media.
- Live streaming: The video streaming industry is on track to be worth $70 billion by 2021 with current success stories like Periscope, Twitch, and Facebook Live jumping on the gravy train of YouTube.
- Personalization will be supreme: The key aspect where the personalization phenomenon is leveraged by companies and advertisers is their distribution of social media advertising. Social media platforms have started to provide advertisers with sophisticated targeting and configuration options. These let you at the right time show the right ads to the right people.
- Chatbot conservations: As mavsocial mentions, chatbots help brands level up their customer service, automate basic functions, improve user experience and — of course– improve engagement and conversion rates despite ever-changing social media algorithms and increased competition. People like bots– they are easy to use and don’t need any setup.
- The rise of augmented reality: Augmented Reality experiences can be felt and witnessed by users of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and also Tinder among several other platforms. It is an immersive experience that is also integrated into concept stores.
- Experimentation: Instagram Shopping, Twitter’s character increase, Facebook’s algorithm updates, LinkedIn’s native video—that’s a tiny fraction of the social media changes launched in 2018.
- Social media as customer service: Customer service will always be a vital part of delivering good customer experience, but in the digital age, the customer service you offer is much more available to everyone online. Customer complaints and issues, as well as online customer reviews, are easier to find because many of them are shared on social media than ever before.
