Are you tracking social media trends to improve your marketing strategy? Come here and read our article to get a bigger picture of the latest trends. These trends will give you a new direction and stay on top of the development.
A reasonable number of people spend most of their time on social media. In today's world, this is not an exaggeration. Social media is now an integral part of our daily routines. Most of us have become addicted that even before doing anything in the morning, we tend to check our social media news feed first.
Social media is important in the life of a marketer and consumer as most businesses are now flocking on social media platforms to get their target clients. Due to content overload, competition is so high on social media platforms. So, to stand out from the rest, a marketer must have a straightforward social media strategy. You can as well fuel your strategy when you stay updated with the latest social media trends.
Top 9 Social Media Trends
In this article, we will review the top 9 social media trends to get you updated. These trends are important that you ought to be aware of not only in 2021 but also beyond.
1. Live Video is Becoming Popular
Currently, we are experiencing totally different years as most businesses are turning on their heads and joining the retailing model. The whole model has changed and keeps shopping glow. It has become tricky to examine a product because people are forced to carry out transactions online.
Retailers and consumers who have no experience using the live camera are now left without an option other than participating in zoom video calls and meetings. A good example is seasoned videographers. And Something unique about it is that these older people who don't even know smartphones are forced to adapt to online chat and live videos.
COVID-19 has forced people to migrate from our real-world to live to stream. Even if the pandemic ends, streaming is now here with us to stay. People have adapted to interact in real-time through online platforms, and they can now examine products and order from their homes.
While old social platforms still perform, video streaming platforms have stratospherically increased their popularity, which will continue beyond 2021. When Microsoft closed the mixer, Twitch, their competitor, reached an unprecedented level with up to 84% of year-to-year streamers.
Streaming is not only for gaming but also important for major shopping. This is updating traditional shopping to the current generation.
2. Sharing User-generated Content
User-generated content is not new, but it is a trend still growing strong. The adoption rate among people has changed, and more marketers are utilizing it in many ways, even boosting engagement. Most brands are relying on user-generated content for producing their social media content.
Please find a way to have UGC in your content mix no matter how you are leveraging it. This is a free and authentic service rather than branded content. It helps your brand look legitimate and can go beyond doing wonders for your reputation.
That aside, there are many reasons why you should use UGC as a marketing strategy. First, they help you promote the authenticity of your products rather than content created by brands. Secondly, they also build customer trust in your service, product, or experience as they get to know before ordering. UGC is also perfect for driving purchasing decisions. It has a high impact on most people's decisions. And lastly, they are powerful in boosting your engagement.
Utilizing user-generated content on social media is simple. First, you need to create the brand's desire by sharing user-generated content to spark it. Also, you can use UGC to showcase and inspire brand loyalty as it gets customers to experience your brand for the first time.
This promotes long-term relationships resulting in multiple sales over time. And lastly, it builds the content library and gets relevant material to share with your customers. While using UGC, there are a few precautions you should note too. However, If you have never tried user-generated content in your lifetime, it is time to utilize it.
3. Driving Engagement by Ephemeral Content
Ephemeral content is another social media trend but can only be available for a short period and disappear. A good example is Facebook and Instagram stories. Our attention span is short, and we have changed the way we consume content. This is the reason why formats like Ephemeral content have become popular to drive engagement. The stories are short, attractive, addictive, and engaging that targeted people can spend hours scrolling then one after another.
This can be evidenced in the rise of daily users of Instagram stories ‘Ephemeral content .' Because it has become a trend, marketers have noticed it. They have taken advantage and are now leveraging it.
You can utilize the Ephemeral content on social media and improve virtual communication with your target audience. When you do this way, you can get more insight and improve on it in the future. Marketers have also realized a few ways to make this Ephemeral content perfect.
First, the stories should be interactive so that users can connect up to a personal level. Promote it to your users and connect your content and channel, but it must be consistent. Also, the Ephemeral content must create genuine insider views because it is raw and honest and can make minor errors. Lastly, you should plan instead of scripting to develop high-quality and real content for the followers. This way, you excite many people, which increases interactivity.
4. Personalization is Crucial
Personalization is also a worldwide consumer trend, but it has been with us for years. But when we consider the adoption of social media platforms, it is still among the recent trends. Many brands currently can personalize social media platform contents for the sake of a specific customer segment. Indeed, most people might not agree, but this is the reality. This is possible specifically for social media adverts.
Social media have now started to offer advanced targeting ads, a customization option for most marketers on these platforms. Thus, markets can show the right adverts to the right people concurrently. The trend has gone to another level, and now the platform understands the type of products a certain group of people likes.
That is why you can access ads showing the same product but from different brands on our social media platforms. If you don't believe this, try checking out, maybe. Once you check for one ad, you will eventually encounter several such ads on your news feed.
You should also note that the more ads you click on social media platforms, the more marketers understand your behavior and preferences online. The next step will amaze you. You will have many ads personalized to curate your taste. This is amazing, right? It is the best trend for online marketers that help improve the success rate.
5. Influencer Marketing will be Unstoppable
While influencer marketing is not the latest trend, it is becoming unstoppable. The trend has been here and is still here to stay for a while and has dominated our social media platforms. Many of the influencers are now paid good money for only promoting a brand.
You can see the adoption of influencer marketing from both angles. You can spot the sheer rise of these influencers on the platforms. Again, when you consider the business's expenditure, you will realize they are spending a lot on influencer marketers.
It is cheaper to promote brands through influencers than by creating paid ads. However, they both deliver a good engagement. But influencer is on another level in that they can help businesses gain marketing goals for different varieties, not only a general lead as seen on ads. This is why influencer marketing has become popular and will remain beyond 2021.
This is because it is getting stronger and bold enough among businesses. Marketers are now working in conjunction with all types of influencers. This means influence brings in more engagement at an affordable cost. Most marketers will likely end up using many upcoming influencers as opposed to a single celebrity.
6. Video Content is Still Dominant
Video content is also an engaging type of content that is dominating social media by storm. They are still dominant among other types of content. It can be short like those on Tiktok or stories on Facebook and Instagram, as well as long videos on youtube.
It is anticipated that videos are becoming the future of social media content marketing. Also, the Cisco study concludes that 82% of online content by 2022 will consist of video content. This is true, and the trend is dominating at a faster rate.
This implies, marketers should start using video content on social media platforms for advertisement. This your time to start with this got you unaware. Include videos in your content strategy, and they are dominating our social media. If not, you might have a hard time in the future. We emphasize you start using stories on your social media content, add video ads, and incorporate textual content.
7. The Rise of AR and VR Technology
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have also become the latest trends of 2021 on social media. This has come up due to the needs of brands trying to offer new and exciting experiences to their customers. Again, Facebook has introduced plans for Metaverse. This is a virtual world; social media platforms connect different people. Many businesses have opted for AR technology in their shopping.
This technology allows users to try out the services or products before committing to them. This is one of the best trends for markets to convince their customers. Because it helps consumers make a purchase decision before investing. The potential of AR and VR in the future is significant. They have many uses, especially in the industries.
Technology is changing the landscape of possibilities in many areas. These three technologies, Metaverse, VR, and AR technologies, can engage and transform our social media to bring about innovation. For instance, AR is replacing product description with video engagement.
8. Building Niche Community
While the social media community is still new, it is a trend that is becoming more popular now than before. These are social media groups created by a specific brand provider mainly for their customers. They consist of like-minded people who share the same interest. A brilliant example is Facebook groups.
Many marketers are utilizing them to reach out to their prospective customers and professionally engage them. Community discusses, shares their experience, and seeks the solutions. They also utilize such groups in launching new products, evaluating insight, and getting real feedback. Instead of businesses struggling to build success, you can rely on social media communities.
As a marketer, you consider a few things here. You should always keep your focus on the customer and have passion for what the fans care about because money follows passion.
While dominating the community manager, never overlook your existing base but instead deepen the relationship as you get members involved. The community consistently keeps all members informed. After that, you can emphasize offline engagement. That way, you can easily build a niche social media community to promote your brands.
9. Excellent Social Media Customer Service
Social media platforms have become more than just sharing videos and connecting with networks. The platforms have grown to become retail sites. You can now discover products and get customer services from social media platforms.
Many businesses have realized this as the best platform for delivering excellent customer services. This came about immediately after many brands realized most of their customers contact them via social media platforms. The possible reason might be a lack of communication through other means.
Therefore, due to such needs, brands and many businesses are now responding to many messages on social media to direct potential customers to follow the right channel. It has now become among the customer service channels for marketers.
Because brands could not handle customers well in front of other people, they are now handling them well on social media platforms. Businesses are now shifting their attention and engaging more tips to handle the customers politely. They even keep such conversations private and become more proactive in managing their customer's expectations.
Be Careful When Starting Social Media Marketing!
When carrying out our in-depth research, we realized that there are few things markets should do and a good number of tasks they should not do on social media platforms.
- What Should do
As a marketer, you should always inject personality and clear brand voice on social media, engage your audience, post consistently and share the contents, posts across the channels, engage images and video in your posts, use keywords and hashtags and lastly, use CTAs while engaging your audience. This is important in marketing on social media.
- What shouldn't do
However, there are a few things you should avoid. Never beg customers for attention, avoid using excessive hashtags, forgetting a text is a big mistake, never repost just anyone, don't spam your followers, avoid responding to messages that you cannot leverage but always act professional.
Even though some brands need your online attention on social media platforms, it is not good on all platforms.
It is time to evaluate your services on promoting your brands and what you should not do. You can access analytic information on any network you are using. It might give you an insight into the real result of driving traffic to increase sales. It is not professional to measure the performance of social media platforms through likes, comments, and follows. Rather, look deeper into your analytics and see your actual followers' engagement.
Conclusion
The above trends are dominating social media, and we anticipate seeing them trend beyond 2021. Marketers can easily leverage them and stay one step ahead of their competitors. This is because social media has become dynamic and very competitive in advertisement.
These trends will help you up to your platform game. Be on the lookout for the latest trends around such themes and use them for social media engagement. Engagement is important in social media businesses that generate revenue.
