As a marketing director, I’ve been focused on planning our company's social media marketing strategy for 2017. In doing so, I’ve been paying attention to areas of social media marketing that are trending for the upcoming year. Here's what I've gathered that may help inform your own company's social media strategy:
Innovative Ideas On Snap
We are looking at more ways we can use Snap (previously known as Snapchat) because of the numerous innovations it has introduced over the course of 2016 that have the potential to gain momentum this year. This includes the use of vertical videos, live streaming video and ephemeral content. For our business, this means putting together and prioritizing videos in our marketing department: We try to create, at minimum, one two- to three- minute video each week. This allows us to chop them up and put out six or seven videos/snaps a week.
The recently introduced glasses may also offer an interesting perspective in terms of the first-person visual content they gather and share, especially since users are looking for experiences that give them a more personalized perspective of an event.
New Ways To Communicate
There is a service component to social media marketing now: Social media platforms are morphing into a communication channel where companies can provide customer service, while the customers can in turn offer their feedback and opinions. This means implementing a strategy to capitalize on this new degree of communications that brings marketing, sales, service and support together. Millennials like to communicate using video, so as a business we have to adapt it to our customers' preferred communication styles. Make sure you're grabbing your audience's attention at least every four seconds or so in order to keep the viewer entertained.
Increased Paid Advertising Volume
We've seen organic reach through Facebook sdeclining and continuing to do so through 2017, so we're dedicating a larger budget to paid advertising on certain social media platforms. We expect these paid ads to provide us with more creative ways to get attention and results. You should make sure to identify a significant return on your investment.
More Emotion And Creativity
Posts and content on social media that involve more emotions, imagination and artistic flair is growing. We've found this sentiment to be true, as more of our posts on social media have been shared virally and liked when we have incorporated a greater amount of emotion to go with the content's theme. This includes posting inspirational quotes from known thought leaders as well as video clips that show our executive team at work. This illustrates a level of passion that our audience, especially when social media could be considered impersonal and detached.
Greater Use Of Chatbots
Seeing the increased attention chatbots are getting, we are considering how this conversational agent, designed to appear like a human, can work in certain instances to engage with our audience on social media sites like Facebook. This might include fielding customer inquiries on social media as well as providing a way to gather more data that tells us about our audience. It appears that this technology will continue to evolve in 2017 and be used to maximize and facilitate effective conversations with our audience. It can keep them engaged rather than losing them to the competition who has more time to respond quickly.
Emergence Of The Social Influencer
Bringing together influencer marketing and social media marketing, the social influencer is becoming an important point of contact for us and many companies like ours. They can win us additional fans and followers that we may not have captured otherwise. Our focus in 2017 is to study more of these social influencers and contact them about how we might work together so they can advocate on behalf of our brand. The best way we've been able to do this thus far is by working with the influencers that we currently find talking about us online, and ask them to recommend our services to their friends.
With many of these trends illustrating the constant evolution in technology, it’s important to prepare as much as possible to pivot quickly to adopt and understand how this technology works as part of the social media marketing landscape. Along with these trends, our goal will be to continually research, study and observe emerging social media platforms along with consumer and business behavior on these platforms in order to gauge what else may change throughout 2017.
