Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, etc., have revolutionized how businesses communicate with their customers. It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of social media to your business’s growth and continued success.
Due to the speed with which opinions or perceptions can be disseminated on social networks and their incredible reach, your business or product can go from being a star to being undesirable in a matter of a few days. A solid social media strategy, well integrated with your digital marketing campaign and your customer service processes, can be the difference between the “life or death” of your business project.
The difficulty is increasing.
Social media used to be so much easier. Today you must consider many variables:
The age of your audience may determine that they completely ignore a specific platform while preferring to use almost exclusively another.
Your type of product or company also defines which social networks you should be on and what type of content you should produce.
Political considerations: Carefully assess what causes or positions you choose to support or not support with your brand, as your audience is observing to decide if you are “on the right side”.
You must be very aware of what your audiences are doing on the networks. What are you talking about? What topics interest them? What are your priorities? What are you worried about? What kinds of things do they enjoy?
There is more and more competition.
More content is vying for your audience’s attention than ever before, and it continues to increase daily. In addition, certain demographic groups, such as young people and teenagers, are especially allergic to anything that sounds like marketing or advertising.
To compete, the creativity, quality, and relevance of your messages on social networks must be the best possible. It is essential to have a well-planned strategy, clearly identified audiences, and an agile production process to adapt quickly to changing trends while maintaining quality.
Relevance and personalization are required.
Social media users expect highly personalized and relevant content and reject anything that feels “generic” or “massed.” They are unwilling to give their attention to brands that do not consider them and their personal needs.
To compete in today’s environment and maximize the engagement of your content, you need to practice content personalization. It is content designed specifically for micro audiences: relatively small demographic groups with common interests.
To reach these groups, micro-influencers have become key —which allows them to serve micro-audiences with highly relevant content. When content is highly relevant, people are more likely to share it organically, multiplying the reach of your campaign and increasing trust and positive attitude towards your brand.
Users generate the content.
It is not enough to just create content or advertising campaigns on social networks. The maximum impact is achieved by motivating your audience to generate content related to your brand. User-generated content ( UGC ) is one of the most important recent trends in social networks.
When a user creates content about your brand or product–usually due to a “challenge” or some kind of contest that manages to go viral–this generates an explosion of awareness about your brand. It has the advantage that user-generated content inspires much more trust, credibility, and goodwill.
Campaigns last for weeks, not months.
It is not enough to produce good content (whether advertising or organic); you also have to be constantly innovating in terms of campaigns since it is no longer acceptable to run the same campaign for months, as it was done in the days of traditional media. Your audience on social networks will quickly tire of your messages, and you must constantly renew them to stay current and keep the interest of your audience.
Social Ads take on more relevance
We enter the golden age of social ads (advertising on social networks). The trend started by Apple to limit or even prevent the tracking of iPhone users is being emulated by other mobile platforms, limiting the segmentation options in traditional digital marketing ( display ads on websites, for example).
Options for effectively tracking your customers’ online activities are shrinking. This increases the relative value of advertising campaigns on social networks, which allow greater visibility towards the tastes, interests, and behavior of its users. Facebook will indeed soon launch advanced audience segmentation tools using artificial intelligence to support the development of this type of campaign.
Omnichannel communication is needed.
Omnichannel communication is about responding to your customer. Wherever they interact with your brand—on your website, mobile app, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. The challenge here is to give your customer service staff the technological tools. And knowledge so that they can respond and follow up without “losing the thread” of the conversation. Timely, cordial, and attentive treatment–without making the client. Having to explain her problem ten times to different people–helps increase trust and goodwill toward your brand.
Omnichannel communication allows you to accurately measure the results of your campaigns’ results and the effectiveness of your customer service staff. This will allow you not to waste good leads that come to you as a result of your social media campaigns.
Robots are here to stay.
The famous internet “bots” (artificial intelligence algorithms that can have chats with your customers. And solve some problems without human involvement) have a mixed reputation: sometimes they help. But they often dislike customers, who feel they do not want to spend on giving them a good service. It’s all in the quality of the bot’s execution: Amazon’s Alexa is an example of a well-executed and powerful bot. Yet it has cost many millions of dollars to develop.
It is easy to want to dismiss this trend because “it is in its infancy” or “it is costly to do it well. However, this field is evolving rapidly, and the savings in human resources. That it promises will be so significant that everyone will want to have them. It pays to anticipate this trend and acquire the necessary skills to take advantage of it.
Social commerce is already here.
There are already integrators connecting the presence in companies’ social networks with their integrated e-commerce processes. As this trend matures, more and more of the entire sales cycle will take place on social media. All phases of the typical sales funnel and after-sales service interactions will exist.
It is an inevitable trend, and the best thing is to learn what is necessary to take advantage of it and adapt your business to this new model.
The “reels” are the present and the future.
TikTok was the initiator of this trend, but now Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. We are focusing on promoting short content, also called bite-size. This content can be consumed in the vertical video for mobile devices in 10, 20, or 30 seconds. And in some cases, it can be extended to 2 or 3 minutes.
The new generations, although they spend more time-consuming content, spend less time on each piece or post. Lots of fresh, witty, relevant content is necessary to maintain engagement. Whether we like it or not, this is how the tastes of new audiences are shaping up.
Social listening becomes essential.
A technique that has been used for years for political campaigns is gaining. Relevance for the digital marketing of products and services: social listening. This consists of collecting and analyzing your audiences’ conversations on social media. Using data science tools to identify what they are saying about your brand or products. Also check Descargar Videos De Pinterest
Executed correctly, social listening will allow you to identify the emotional changes that your audiences have regarding your brand and relate this to the content you have published, product launches, campaigns, etc. This is the future of analyzing your campaigns and measuring the return on your investment.
We all go to the metaverse and the AR.
Although there are different opinions about the viability or relevance of the metaverse. Which consists of virtual reality spaces where users coexist and socialize. Play games and even trade – the reality is that people are using these virtual spaces more and more.
Considering that people born after the year 2000 are used to socializing just as much or more online than in person. It’s no surprise that the metaverse is a major trend. Although many things are still to be defined. There is no doubt that engagement in virtual reality spaces will accelerate and, with it, advertising opportunities.
On the other hand, AR– augmented reality or augmented reality– consists of splicing virtual reality images on a visual signal from the real world to increase its informative content. The Terminator series films were pioneers in demonstrating this type of visualization.
Today, Snapchat and other platforms are implementing ad campaigns using AR filters on mobile devices. The average engagement of these campaigns is 75 seconds. Which in the world of bite-sized content are an eternity and a success. Brands that can figure out how to apply AR to their campaigns will have a competitive advantage.