With the new tech trends catching on at a fast pace, the social media marketing in 2018 is also all set to come up with new and disruptive trends. As the technology is advancing, so are the ways in which brands are expressing themselves and marketing online. With the passage of time, new demographics are gaining importance and so are the platforms they prefer to interact. In the year 2018, we will need to rethink our social media marketing strategies keeping these changes in trends in mind. So, in this case, it would be interesting to catch hold of some of these trends in order to brace ourselves to welcome the social media in 2018 for our businesses. Here are the trends, we can safely expect to see all over the social media channels, something that we should get our businesses ready for!
1) Augmented reality will see a surge
With the rise in technology to support it, the new era of social media will be that of augmented reality experiences. Starting with its penetration in the mobile gaming space, the new trend is likely to soon prevail in the social media spaces of the businesses as well.
2) Influencer marketing will continue to grow
A majority of the businesses that have tested influencer marketing, have agreed it to be a successful an effective means to grow the customer-base by getting connected to a new audience while also increasing engagement with their current audience. In the coming years, influencer marketing is therefore, expected to continue to gain popularity specially for the new generation audience that seems to overlook the conventional ways and means of marketing.
3) Brands will shift focus to the gen Z
The gen ‘Z’ers have now grown up to the extent that the oldest of them have started to contribute to the economy by being a part of the workforce. As per the recent studies, the gen Zers hold more value than the millennials for a majority of businesses and therefore, need to be focused on. The platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat are thus, bound to be focused on as their preferred ways to interact.
4) Instagram Stories lead the pack!
The speed with which, in the past one year, the Instagram stories have grown in popularity, it has already left Snapchat behind in terms of their user-base using the stories to share their lives with friends. This trend is expected to continue and the brands are therefore getting more interested in using Instagram stories to engage with their audience, especially that of the gen ‘Z’ers.
5) More videos in the content mix of the brands
The popularity of the video feature in Instagram stories and snapchat has proved it for a fact yet again that video content is any-day more effective than any text or visual content. This is the reason why the brands these days are increasing the proportion of videos in their content mix. With the regularly changing social media algorithm, the video content is only gaining in popularity for generating a buzz over the social media and building a stronger followership. Sharing videos on social media such as Facebook, has gone big and his trend is here to stay. The videos on Facebook get high engagement in terms of likes, shares and comments and on top of it all, the reporting feature in Facebook also informs us about the performance of the video content vis-à-vis the performance of the rest of the content.
Apart from these trends predominating in the market, brands will go big on live streaming of the videos and augmented reality based engagements on their social media. With the focus of the marketers shifting to the gen Zers, social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat will be majorly targeted. While these newer platforms will take over in the market, the existing ones such as Facebook and Twitter will focus on improving their online experiences and would try to get more secured and usable. Having learnt about the trend predictions for 2018, the marketers who aspire to get successful with their brands in the coming days should brace themselves with their social media strategy for 2018 focused on these.
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