Table of content:
- Micro-Niche Communities
- Dynamic Social Ads
- Social Media Influencers
- Stories On Social Media
- IGTV
- Live Streaming
- Facebook’s AR Studio
- Social Commerce
- Messenger Bots
- User-Generated Content
Social media platforms provide a way for direct marketing and help in generating leads, driving website traffic, building brand awareness, and creating brand advocates. If you’re not on social media, you’re actually missing out on the great opportunity to increase your business conversions.
A clear social media marketing strategy will help your brand achieve its goals with a sense of purpose. Don’t know how to start? The following steps will guide you through how to engage your audience on social media and optimize your results:
- Determine your social marketing goals
- Set up your KPIs for social media performance
- Research your target audience
- Perform competitive analysis
- Create and curate engaging content
- Publish your content regularly
- Track and monitor your social media performance
- Improve your strategy if necessary
Here is another interesting read for you:
Social Media Marketing Trends To Watch For in 2022
Let’s take a look at the latest social media trends that you should consider while crafting your social media marketing strategy.
1. Micro-Niche Communities
You can’t promote your products and services to everyone. Reason? Everyone’s needs are different and if you deliberately try to speak about what you offer, they will get annoyed with you. This is why the micro-niche communities are now an emerging social media trend.
Brands are either creating their own private community websites or leveraging social media platforms to create their own groups. Creating a micro-niche community helps brands to get connected with the people who share common interests and can be converted into loyal customers.
How to do it?
- You can create your own social community website and allow your target audience to join you.
- You can create groups on social media platforms to promote your products and services and provide your target audience with satisfactory answers to their queries.
- You can join groups that relate to your niche and assist your target audience with your solutions.
2. Dynamic Social Ads
The ideal marketing strategy is to promote your products in front of those who have expressed interest in a product like yours. Dynamic social ads help a lot in this. This allows advertisers to run ad campaigns only for people who have expressed their interest in your website, in your app, or elsewhere on the web.
How to do it?
Select the platform to create dynamic ads. You can run a dynamic ad campaign on search engines as well as on social media platforms according to your campaign goals. Instead of creating an ad for every product, you can create an ad template including all your ad assets. Dynamic ads automatically use your ad assets from your catalog for the products you’d like to advertise.
3. Social Media Influencers
To establish authority in your industry, it’s required to build relationships with people who belong to your niche. Social media influencers can help you build such authority in your target market.
Social content creators have dedicated and engaged groups of followers in their respective niches. If you want to reach out to them, it’s advisable to build relationships with these social media influencers.
How to do it?
- Find out the top influencers who have an audience that aligns with your target market. For example, if you are a tourism company, building relationships with travel bloggers is beneficial for you.
- Look for influencers who have gained followers organically instead of paid likes and followers.
- Plan your budget and send your proposal.
4. Stories On Social Media
Creating social media stories is one of the trending ways to delight customers with visual content. Using the right element along with specific tags can assist you in increasing brand engagement. If your audience is also active on social media stories, investing your time to create story content can bring worth to your business.
How to do it?
- Story Marketing is momentary. Hence, create time-sensitive but exciting content.
- Personalize your content to let customers feel your brand.
- Use typography, images, or video styles consistent with your brand image
- Track metrics to figure out where your stories are having the biggest impact.
5. Videos on IGTV
Instagram is no more just an image-sharing platform. IGTV has converted it into a video-sharing platform too. Brands having an active Instagram audience can leverage this addition to promote their products and entertain them using the right creatives at the same time.
How to do it?
- Prefer creating videos in a vertical format.
- Keep your videos short but engaging.
- Don’t forget to add subtitles.
- The cover image of your video is a deciding factor that determines if a user will click or scroll past. Make sure to add an interesting one.
- Track and monitor the progress continuously.
6. Live Streaming
Live streaming is a great way to get closer to customers and build relationships with them. Brands are taking advantage of this as it allows them to reach out to the people that haven’t yet come across their names. And, your target audience is more likely to tune in if it is done with an influencer as the host.
How to do it?
- Live streaming is different from video marketing. So, plan your strategy accordingly.
- Make sure the stream is more conversational than just a formal lecture.
- Let your audience feel that you care. Allow them to join your customer support and Q&A streams.
7. Facebook’s AR Studio
Augmented reality enriches the customer experience in an exciting manner with new layers of context, meaning, and emotion. Facebook’s AR Studio allows publishing, managing, and tracking AR performance across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
How to do it?
Want to provide your audience with a rich AR experience? Choose a partner from the Spark AR partner network and login to Spark AR Hub. Prepare your publishing assets and then submit it for review. Don’t forget to track your insights on a regular basis.
8. Social Commerce
Social Commerce involves online purchases through social interaction on social media platforms and it is now the hottest trend today. Instead of driving referral traffic on websites, you allow customers to directly complete purchases on social media.
How to do it?
You can easily create shoppable posts and apply social commerce strategy on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
- Instagram: Take advantage of Instagram Shopping and Instagram Checkout.
- Facebook: Take advantage of Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Page Shops.
- Pinterest: Create buyable pins, Shopping Ad Format, Product Pins Catalog.
9. Messenger Bots
The use of automated messaging software by businesses is rising day by day. Facebook Messenger Bots are one of the widely used messaging software for marketing purposes. You don’t know when your customers would like to contact you. These messaging software can help you make them satisfied with relevant answers to all their general questions while you’re busy in an important meeting or just sleeping.
How to do it?
- Always remember, the bot is just a software program that can assist you in your product promotion. It can act like a human, but can’t be a human. Hence, align your strategy accordingly.
- Set one goal at a time. It could be to provide customer service, identify leads, product promotion, or anything else.
- Clearly define the chatbot’s role in initial interactions.
- It is advisable to segment your customers.
- Provide customers with an option to connect with your team at any point in the conversation.
10. User Generated Content
Let’s say you’re in need of buying a Laptop. You went to the shop and found lots of options there: HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, and more. The salesperson demonstrated each of them with their specifications in quite an interesting way. Would you be interested in buying instantly or would like to ask your friends who have experienced working with these technologies?
Obviously, you would like to know about their experience with the same product you’re going to buy. Isn’t it?
Product recommendations, reviews, polling, testimonials have more potential in selling products rather than just running an advertising campaign. Because they are real. And, the real always has worth.
That’s why user-generated content is one of the top social media trends these days as it allows customers to know what is real.
How to do it?
- Your UGC campaign should be aligned with your marketing goals.
- Make sure you have a proper system to collect and organize user-generated content.
- In the end, you might be getting some negative feedback. Monitor your submissions closely and try to satisfy them with your positive responses.
Final Words
These are some of the major trends in social media that you have to consider before creating your social media marketing plan. With a bit of research and planning, you can easily grow within your industry.
Which of the above-mentioned trends catches your attention the most? Do you think you need to modify your social media marketing plan? Share your opinions in the comments section below. Stay tuned with us and we’ll get back to you with more exciting information.
