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  • Writer's pictureSundeep Mallipudi

Social Media Trends That Will Impact Your Business in 2020

Updated: Mar 17, 2021



How is social media trends relevant to you that will impact your business?


Well, Brands are dominated by the wave of social media marketing. Around 73% of digital marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their brands/business. Today, social media have actually advanced as a great tool for marketing. Much like other forms of traditional and digital marketing, the social media landscape is altering at a fast speed. This makes it crucial for you to stay up to date with the most up to date patterns. You likewise need to future-proof your social media marketing approach. It needs to be examined to see what benefits you as well as what does not. This can assist you to enhance it to get the best outcomes feasible.


So, In this article, I will be talking about which social media trends might impact your business?





AI Chatbots


Chatbots are just one of the most up to date patterns on social media sites. It has actually become progressively basic for individuals to reach out to brands through social networks.

This makes it really crucial for brands to respond to their queries as rapidly as possible. While it can be an uphill struggle to obtain a human to react instantaneously but chatbots can pertain to the rescue in such scenarios.


AI is the future of social media advertising as well as with it you can have better communication with your consumers. Chatbots powered by AI are being utilized on Facebook Messager by many businesses/brands to promote their products/services and even resolve clients' concerns.


There are many excellent chatbots in the market that you can make use of, some of them are IBM Watson Assistant, Chatfuel, Collect.chat, and many more... These chatbots can help you arrange meetings as well as collect leads with ease.

Also, You do not require any type of technological knowledge to build this chatbot. AI Chatbots can be built using any platforms' easy-to-use drag and drop chatbot builder.


Example:

Slush, a Finnish organization that holds entrepreneurial events all over the world, had adopted an AI-based chatbot and had a great experience. The Jenny chatbot by Get Jenny on Slush’s website successfully handled 64% of all customer support requests for the Slush event customer support team—a significant load. Also because of the 24/7 availability of the Jenny chatbot on Slush’s website and mobile app, there were about 55% more conversations with Slush than the previous year.


Because of improvements in AI, many more businesses/brands are switching over to this mode of client service to boost customers'/clients' satisfaction. It can come in handy to answer common questions that might not require any type of human intervention. At the same time, the fast responses additionally result in prompt dispute resolution for the customers/clients.



Influencer Marketing


Influencer marketing has actually ended up being prominent on social media really quickly. It has also defeated traditional advertising and digital marketing in regards to taking the brands/business near to the audience with hundreds of fans.


Influencers make money by promoting brands/business products or services to their audiences. Brands, on the other hand, are trying to find dependable influencers to team up with to reach their target clients.


Nevertheless, it's not only the influencers with large fan-followings who can profit in influencer marketing. As it's popularity soars, big influencers are becoming pricey for SMEs. This has actually led to the rise of micro-influencers.


The micro-influencers have fewer fans than huge influencers yet they have the advantage of higher engagement among their audience. Furthermore, they bill dramatically much less than popular influencers. This makes it affordable for SMEs to team up with them and also advertise their brand to their audience. Just like micro-influencers, there are also nano-influencers. These influencers have much less than 10 k fans. While brands might not have the ability to get to a substantial audience, they can benefit from the tightly-knit audiences of nano-influencers. And also it does not need a huge budget to work together with these smaller influencers.

As they might simply be setting out on their influencer advertising and marketing journey, they may seek a steady collaboration. Maybe a great point to start a lasting partnership with the influencer.


Nevertheless, finding reputable influencers can be rather a difficulty provided the variety of fake accounts on social networks. You require to completely assess each profile and also figure out if it's real or not.

To avoid this issue, you can make use of influencer search platforms like social bakers, upfluence, etc. They can make the entire process of finding an influencer exceptionally simple. It has a data source of over 3 million comprehensive influencer profiles, easily create & export influencers lists, and optimize your influencer selection with AI recommendations.



Staff member Campaigning


With the increase of influencer advertising, there has actually been a rise in the variety of fake influencers as well. These people fake collaborations with brand names to promote themselves and materialize influencers.


Brands require to put a great deal of sources as well as time into assessing influencers to figure out their credibility. In a time when it becomes hard to trust influencers, staff member promotions will come handy for all your social media outreach campaigns.


Your staff members can become to be influencers for your business/brand amongst their circles. You can motivate your employees to talk about your brand on social networks to promote it amongst their very own groups.


One way of doing this can be by giving some share-worthy material to them and in return, you can provide some reward for them. You can use devices like Content Studio. This platform allows you to release firm updates to workers as well as make it easy for them to share them on social networks. Workers can schedule the messages with a single click as well as aid get the word out regarding your brand on social space.

This system also helps you include market news stream to make sure that you can maintain your staff members upgraded with the most up to date news in the sector.


Employees can be considered as trusted resources for the brand. Obtaining them to promote your brand can help you acquire a grip on social media. This trend might dictate the future of social media marketing and also influencer marketing.



Driving Sales With Social Media


While social networks have long been used to generate engagement as well as sales. Brands are given with the essential tools to advertise their products on social media to get sales, like with advanced tracking tools such as the Facebook Pixel, it is feasible to chart out the buyer persona also.


Nevertheless, for this, you need to keep publishing excellent content that is unique and useful for the viewers daily. To simplify publishing on social media sites, you can utilize systems such as Buffer or HubSpot. You can schedule your posts well in advance so that you can release them precisely when you want them to be published.

Making use of the tool, you can likewise monitor your social mentions as well as connect with your target audience. This can aid you to boost your sales. According to Kleiner Perkins, concerning 55% of individuals that discovered an item on social media purchased it later on. Amongst social media platforms, Facebook is the leading platform for product searches. Instagram and Pinterest are very closely catching up in this fad also. This indicates that you can create advertising campaigns for your products on these social media platforms to produce regular sales. It is not essential to depend on sales pitches any longer and with the use of social media, you can capture the attention of your target consumers as well as obtain them to buy from you with ease. Also, paid promos on social media for your products/services should absolutely be a part of your social media strategy.



The Importance of Engagement


Engagement has constantly evolved as a vital part of social media. It is more than just the accumulation of followers across social platforms and it gives an impression to the views about the expertise and knowledge we have on a subject matter through meaningful and useful insights and discussions on social media. This implies that content that has genuine conversations has ended up being a lot more preferred. Businesses/brands that focus on building their social media engagement can benefit from more trustworthy audience reach, a better ROI, and greater brand awareness that makes it easier to attract new customers/clients.

In order to improve your organic reach on social media, your content needs to be very interesting and useful. That suggests it ought to be interesting and appealing to your target audience also. It's not sufficient to simply ask people to like, share, as well as comment on your posts when that doesn't make any impact on the reader. Of course, it would take a lot of time to build that trust among the reader to make them open up to you and start a meaningful discussion, but you need to be consistent on your content to achieve this trust among the audience.



Social Groups


Well, the increase in the ways the marketers are looking for opportunities are diversifying and social groups are one of them. Either on Facebook or LinkedIn there are a lot of groups available out there with people share with comment interests in each group, as a marketer you can go in to hear the audience's views and perspectives and participate in the conversation that will be taken place in the group. Well, I am not talking about some groups where it does not matter about the opinions but those groups are just to promote your business out there to a mass audience (may or may not share the common interests). But otherwise, if you can get into reliable groups on social channels and make your contributions it will be a great strategy for lead nurturing. You can just give your expert suggestions and solve or give away to solve your audience problems while having a healthy discussion on the group it would make a difference.

Well, also groups on Facebook have brand-new functions such as live video discussions, story updates, and also participating as a business. With the adjustments in the algorithm of Facebook, groups have come to be the go-to place to connect with your audience.



Stories


Stories began on Snapchat. Nevertheless, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and also WhatsApp had adopted this attribute too. These are mostly vertical Stories normally last for 1 day and offer individuals tremendous chances to produce different types of material.


More than 500 million individuals view Instagram Stories each and every single day. In a similar way, about 300 million individuals view Facebook stories on Messenger as well as Facebook on the desktop/mobile versions. They are extremely appealing and also as a result of their interactive nature, they have caught the interest of millennials.

Few facts to talk about

  • 60% of them consume Stories on Instagram, 53% on Snapchat, and also 48% on Facebook

  • 59% of Millennials and 70% of Gen Z users watch Instagram Stories

  • 1 in 4 Millennials and Gen Z-ers look for Stories of the products or services they want to buy

  • 15–25% of people swipe up on the links in branded Stories.

  • Instagram Stories has an average reach rate of 5.82%

  • 36% of businesses/brands use Instagram Stories for product promotion

  • 59% of business/brands link Instagram Stories to a shoppable page

Because of this degree of interaction, they have ended up being a preferred marketing strategy for businesses/brands. Also, they are easy to produce and do not require a great deal of technical knowledge. The major factor for their success though is that they aren't too long to view. This makes it very hassle-free for individuals to view them on the go.



Going Live


Well, you might have heard about going live on social media in recent times whether it may be an expert/influencer or a trainer or a celebrity or an interview with business owners, whatever it is going live on social platforms is given a real boot to the interaction.

People spend approximately 5.5 hours every day watching videos online. Also, social media makes a huge impact on our lives with around 4 billion people watching videos on Facebook and YouTube daily. So, Live videos are definitely a must inclusion in social media strategy. They were released initially on YouTube in 2008 and then on Facebook in 2016. Also, Instagram added this function later on and now even LinkedIn has adopted this strategy.

A study conducted by Brand live kept in mind that about 95% of marketing professionals were preparing to add live sessions to their social media marketing techniques. There's a lot of things you can do by going live on social channels such as launching new items, interacting with your targeted audience to have a Q&A session, Interviewing, and expert in your industry, etc. You can even demonstrate your products and also produce how-to sessions by going online. This can help your target audience to obtain a better knowledge of the product. Also, a live video session will give your audience the possibility to engage with you in real-time and also clear their ambiguities.


This can also help generate better interaction with your target audience and also make the communication interesting for them. You can even provide your business/brand with a more human touch by developing Q&A live video sessions. These add a human component and also permit the customers to get their doubts addressed throughout the live session itself by speaking to you.

Example:

Benefit is a cosmetics manufacturer and it uses the live sessions strategy to increase the audience interactions. It does Facebook Live weekly series, Tipsy Tricks every Thursday at 4 p.m. PST, the Benefit team shares their best beauty tips and tricks to their audience. They showcase their products in order to increase the exposure of the product and by seeing these live series of videos audience will be engaged and will be prepared to use the products of benefit with confidence and that increases the sales.


The increasing significance of video marketing can not be neglected and is definitely a trend that will certainly define the future of social media marketing.



Significance of Messaging Apps


Messaging applications are really giving good competition to typical social media platforms. Individuals are more diverting towards private interaction with close peer circles rather than just posting a vague comment on a blog post, which may or may not be addressed by the right person. This makes messaging apps very favorable for them. WhatsApp, Telegram, and also WeChat have actually garnered above 1 billion active monthly individuals.

Well firstly, Brands need to understand how they can make use of messaging apps to obtain their wanted reach and engagement. Several brands have actually begun sending messages to consumers on WhatsApp to develop connections on an individual degree.

Example: Absolute Vodka, which introduced an advocate for an exclusive party. To get in the party, individuals needed to message an imaginary baby bouncer and convince him to let them in. This caused over 1,000 one-of-a-kind photos, videos, as well as audios focused on persuading the bouncer.

Owing to the convenience with which it is feasible to communicate with near as well as darlings, messaging apps will certainly remain prominent. There are lots of advertising and marketing avenues which are yet to be discovered on it and this is only the start and this trend might also become the future of social media marketing.



Augmented Reality - The Future


We may not understand it yet we're currently making use of AR when we make use of the filters on Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat, and also a lot of time we click photos of our buddies with different filters on the mobile camera's. It's possible to give our face various looks through it and click pictures and also videos. Well, it is also possible to utilize AR during video calls on platforms like Facebook Messenger, etc.


While it hasn't been utilized to market products much right now other than a couple of use cases, there might quickly come a time when we might have branded AR content.


For example, you have the ability to try on branded glasses and purchase them right away on SmartBuyGlasses application.

Instagram has already rolled out such attributes and we might soon see more brands embracing it on the platform. AR is not only fun to attempt but also gives a beautify personalized experience to the online buyers. This makes it very beneficial for marketers to advertise there products and show them the real feel of their product at their fingertips. Facebook has currently revealed the intro of such AR advertisements to make shopping on Facebook even more attractive. This could also end up being a trend in the future of social media advertising.


So Augmented reality is definitely the feature of the social advertising which you need to start adopting from now, slowing and them when it shows it boom you can be with it to make the most out of it.



To conclude, Social media is an integral part of digital marketing. Trends such as live video sessions, AR, as well as AI-powered chatbots are right here to change the future of social media advertising. With the rise of messaging applications, advertising on them might be an opportunity in the future. Influencer marketing and staff member campaigning also help boost your marketing strategy.

Which social media marketing trend do you believe, will impact your business more? Allow us to know in the comments.

If you would like to add any other trend please feel free to comment below.


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