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We are looking deep at the social media marketing trends that will help keep your marketing strategy up-to-date and effective in the year to come. Things are changing fast. Have you caught up?

Social media is now considered synonymous with digital marketing, going actively alongside digital campaigns. And therefore the strategies used are more or less similar for brands. But with such an explosion of content, and people’s habits changing, platforms evolving, and new platforms come into existence calls for new tricks to stay relevant.

A big part of social media interaction is meaningful and valuable experiences as a way for brands to engage with their audience. Some brands out there have seemingly large social media following yet, on a closer look at individual posts, reveal very low engagement levels. Brands that are seeing more engagement from their followers are doing so by building communities around their content.

Twitter chats fuel a strong sense of community through content, utilizing thought leaders from all areas together in a real-time conversation. It gives your brand the best opportunity to engage directly with current and potential customers.

It is estimated that there are now 3.484 billion social media users globally, with a 9% increase compared to last year. But with too much information around, people are now reducing their social media use with one in three adults in the UK going off socials. To adjust to this change In the future, brands need to push more towards making social media more private and secure for users since that factor is becoming a major concern.

Rather than investing completely on social media bucket, you need to ensure that enough budget and resource are also allocated to other channels, including email marketing and search engine marketing.

With everyone an influencer, many types of influencers are no longer trusted by consumers. Big influencers can cost heavily for brands but they no longer have the impact that they used to because they are seen as sponsored. Now, 61% of consumers will trust the recommendations of friends and family over celebrities because they are more likely to be honest. Smaller influencers also tend to have better relationships with their followers, meaning they benefit from a higher level of trust and therefore more engagement at a lower cost, as well as increased trust in the brand.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram tend to be the core platforms used by brands but LinkedIn is also being used extensively by companies today.

Although Twitter has seen growth this year, its active user numbers have fallen from an all-time high in 2017. Facebook too has seen a huge drop in users over the last two years.

One go-to social media platform that’s steadily on the rise is TikTok. It now has around 500 million monthly active users worldwide and registered more than 1.1 billion installs as of March 2019. Pinterest also fits well into the e-commerce space and serves ell for an audience that is engaged with the idea of buying products they see there. 75% of Pinterest users say they are “very interested” in new products compared to 55% of people on other social media platforms.

Customer service has risen as a great selling point in the digital era. It is vital for customer service to be good, fast and reliable. Online, the customer service you offer is a lot more visible to everyone online. Stats show that 28% of consumers have used social media to communicate with a company last year, a trend on the rise since more than 30% said it is a convenient contact method and 23% believe it is a good way to get 24-hour service.

Since Snapchat, other social media platforms have taken the Stories format seriously. The result has been huge growth in the usage of this format, especially on Instagram. Stories offer a different experience because they are visual and designed to be both created and consumed in-the-moment. It is a platform for experimentation, tongue-in-cheek posts and fun, making them highly engaging, which is one of the reasons why Stories had a growth rate 15x than that of Feeds in 2017. Current, live updates and real-time content makes stories super interesting. Instagram Stories are therefore the most up-to-date content a business can offer a consumer.

The coming years calls for a major overhaul in digital marketing keeping the social media trends in mind. At OnPageOne, we utilize the best strategies to make your brand shine from the crowd.