One of the keys to successful business marketing today is being up-to-date with social media trends. Social media trends show you what people are thinking, the mood they are in and the type of content that will get their attention immediately. You take advantage of this information to create successful social media marketing strategies. Here are the top social media trends for summer 2018 to help as a base for your social media marketing.
Top Social Media Trends in the Summer Of 2018
Webinars
Webinars have made it into digital marketing as an integral component not only for large commercial entities but personal brands as well. If you notice, there are tens and dozens of different webinar tools available on the market today due to their rising popularity. The reasons for increasing webinar popularity are many. Some prominent ones are as under:
- They let you communicate with your audience on a personal level.
- You can “explain” your products and ideas on webinars so everyone understands what you are selling.
- They are serving as an excellent tool for generating leads i.e. you can collect contact details through RSVPs and post-webinar by offering a recorded version in the email.
Before you get into webinars and start using them for marketing purposes, be sure to pick a good webinar platform and how to make the most of it.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing continues to be a powerful way of marketing your products and services even in 2018. In influencer marketing, you choose well-known figures such as celebrities, sportsmen, etc. to market your products. Influencer marketing can be extremely beneficial for businesses because they get an opportunity to take advantage of the followers of the influencers.
Instagram is one of the best platforms for influencer marketing due to its image-based take at social networking. A word of advice as you do influencer marketing would be to take advantage of nano-influencers in addition to macro-influencers too.
Tie-in Events
Seasonal events are a great way for businesses to market themselves, their products and services. Look for events that will be coming in summer and find a way to take advantage of the day. If you have a large business located in multiple countries, you will have to be even more careful. Once you find out about a famous summer event, you shall facilitate it with some promotion or launch your own special offers. You want to get attention towards your event by post content in the hashtags that are related to the summer event you have picked.
Video Marketing
Video marketing leads the way and businesses are happy about it. Videos are much more expressive than text-only articles and thus they can draw a strong response from your target audience. You don’t have to worry about slow internet connections because a video is a hit in almost every country of the world today. Take a look at how Facebook has incorporated video into its streams by enabling autoplay.
At the same time, you have YouTube coming up with new strategies for marketers to make their advertisements stronger. One of the new ways to advertise on YouTube is through bumper ads – ads that are only six seconds long and cannot be skipped by viewers once they appear during a video.
Chat Bots and IM Apps
There was a time when instant messaging applications were treated differently from social networking websites. Today, there is not a lot of difference between them probably because social networks have come up with their own instant messaging applications such as Messenger from Facebook.
Businesses are taking advantage of instant messaging applications to listen to their customers and answer their queries. This strategy helps them establish brand authority and develop loyalty in customers. Since it is not practical for humans to be chatting with thousands of chatters at the same time, large enterprises have started using chat bots and artificial intelligence to converse with their customers.
Disappearing Content
When it comes to content that stays available only for a set amount of time, there is no social networking platform doing it better than Instagram. At first, it was Snapchat that came up with the idea of content disappearing after a set time.
Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networking platforms today and it was able to use that feature to its advantage like no other. Why you should be interested in this type of marketing is because it has shown great results recently. Within one year of introducing Instagram stories, the giant social networking platform had more than 250 million daily active users just for this particular feature.
Final Thoughts
Frequent, in-time and data-driven social media marketing strategies are surely integral to a successful brand promotion on the internet. However, nothing will work as planned until you make your brand relevant with what’s ongoing. Leverage these social media trends of 2018 to turn leads into paying customers and paying customers into loyal customers.
