Social Media Marketing
The Not-So-New Trends in Social Media Marketing
Sep 13 2022
The first big trend in social media marketing is that now most social networks are algorithm-driven. This means people don’t see the latest posts in their feed. They see the posts that the network believes they are most likely to be interested in.
Sometimes, business content gets reduced exposure, but most algorithms are designed to show you the best content based on your affinity for the person or page posting.
Note: This is why you tend to see posts from the same handful of people on Facebook, even though you have hundreds of friends.
Facebook started this trend but it’s now true on most social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The bottom line is that if you want to break through on social media you need exceptional content.
With more and more noise on social networks, you need great content to break through and be heard. Even if you run an ad, if people don’t its content, it will become more expensive or stop running.
Marketers have a huge challenge on social media to create great content that has thumb-stopping power and drives impact.
In the early days of social media, we used to talk a lot about calendars and frequency. These days quality is more important than quantity. In social media marketing, you post less often but focus on higher quality content when they do post.
Video is HUGE on almost all social networks and growing quickly. Several years ago Facebook and other networks started to emphasize video as the key content they wanted to encourage.
Video usually gets more views vs. text, images, or links and since people pause your videos, you get higher engagement or impression.
The types of videos that you can create and the interactivity within them are also growing constantly. There are Live videos on most social networks, Watch or TV networks to encourage longer-format syndication, and interactive video elements like polls, stickers, and clickable elements appear.
If video isn’t a part of your social media strategy it should be.
Advertising is now becoming a staple of most social media strategies. It used to be that social media was considered “organic” – meaning people would naturally see your content if it was great.
As a result of the lack of organic traction, more and more brands are relying on advertising, which isn’t a bad thing. Many marketers are outraged that social networks want businesses to pay but really, if your message is worth creating and sharing it should be worth advertising.
Social media advertising is incredibly easy and low-cost for businesses to get started. It doesn’t require big bucks and many small, smart, and nimble companies are outperforming billion-dollar brands.
Stories as a format for social media are growing big time. While now Stories are limited to only a few platforms it is expected that this news feed format will continue to grow.
If you aren’t familiar with Stories you can see them on both Facebook and Instagram. Stories are a sort of full-screen news feed where the entire picture or video takes over your screen and you can tap to move to the next one.
Stories are highly visual – mostly images, short text, or short videos – and tend to be more fun and playful. They have stickers, lenses, and fun camera effects to play with.
Stories are the fastest growing product in the history of Meta. If you haven’t started playing with Stories yet, start now. Businesses can create organic stories or story ads.
What we’ve seen now is that there are a handful of established players and breaking in is incredibly difficult. The failure of Google+, a social network launched by Google, showed that people are happy to stay where their friends are.
The other trend we’ve seen is that when new players emerge rather than moving to the new platform the big social networks just figure out how to integrate that functionality.
The “next big thing” will probably come from the big networks and be more about in-platform innovation.
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