The preferences of consumers how to use social media are constantly changing. When it comes to marketing strategies on social networks, marketers need to constantly ask themselves important questions: “Which of our actions are working for the brand?”, “What can be done to improve our approach?”, “What can be integrated into our strategy to improve involvement?”, “What new and unexpected trends of SMM in 2018 can be implemented?”.
Marketers and company owners should adapt to the changes and follow digital media trends if they want to always derive the maximum benefit from this channel. There are main three marketing trends that would be relevant in 2018.
Video Content Delivery in the Real Time Mode
Interest in online broadcasts among PR and marketing professionals is increasing. More and more brands are starting to integrate broadcasts into their promotion strategies. Live broadcasts on Instagram and Facebook were popular last year, but in 2018 this trend is gaining even greater popularity. Recently Snapchat has joined this trend, thanks to which video broadcasts and live broadcast for many of us have become commonplace.
This trend is very important for brands because it allows you to maximally bring your customers and company closer at the expense of almost personal communication and direct interaction. But this method has difficulties. To get a return on this digital marketing trend, you need to come up with truly original and creative ideas to share with your subscribers something really worthwhile and useful. In order to get really decent content, you can apply to this custom writing help and get professional help.
Virtual Reality in Social Networks
Social networks, like any other technological phenomenon, will evolve, mix with other technologies and be transformed into a new format of communications. Virtual reality is perfect for this. VR opens new opportunities for advertising and promotion of brands and products.
Companies will compete with one another in creating the most effective approaches and campaigns to attract users’ attention. With the spread of VR-technologies, this niche will be captured by marketers and PR specialists. Advertising will be built into the virtual environment of social networks, attract new customers, for which companies will pay money to platforms.
Thus, if VR-advertising is effective (and it is likely to be so because this is a new direction of advancement, whose potential is huge), social networks will continue to develop in the direction of immersing the user in their virtual reality.
Speaking of virtual reality, it is necessary actually to mean VR and also augmented reality (AR). In the future, they probably will merge into the mixed reality technology, but at the moment VR is the most developed and conceptually designed innovation, suitable for convenient use.
Messengers as a Prospective Direction of Development
Today’s boom of instant messengers can be compared to a similar phenomenon of ten years ago – an explosion of social media. Already, applications for messaging are used by 2 billion people, and according to forecasts, by 2021 the number of users will increase to 2.48 billion.
This is one of 2018 trends, and brands should take advantage of it until it has not declined.
Messengers are one of the fastest ways to deliver messages, and this is relevant in the era of life at an accelerated pace. Messengers are ideal for informing customers about events with a “shelf life”: flash-fliers, short-term shares, situational content.
Also, an important plus of instant messengers is their versatility. In addition to communication, brands can use them for promotional mailings, ordering, and as a content marketing tool.
How Brands Can Use Messengers
- Chats
Viber opened up business opportunities more than a year ago. In public accounts, brands can conduct a dialogue – chat one-on-one with customers, send public messages to all clients simultaneously, and conduct public-chat.
- Chat on the Site through the Messenger
Messengers can be integrated with a brand site using different widgets. If the client first came to the site and he had questions, he can immediately ask them in the usual messenger and does not need to subscribe to the business account of the brand.
- Newsletters
To inform about news, promotions, sales, and other news through messengers is much more effective than via email. At the same time, brands, of course, cannot send messages to contacts who did not agree to the newsletter.
- Channels
Channel is a feature of Telegram. Through them, brands broadcast all sorts of content: announcements, useful materials, product collections. All this can be done with a link to a site.
On a Concluding Note
2018 will be the year when SMM and instant messengers with video hosting services will merge almost into a single whole. Taking into account the increased competition among social networks, standard approaches will work worse.
For professionals, this means that you need to look for new creative approaches to the audience. For business, the promotion will only be more expensive and every lead, potential client, will now cost more, which means that they should be more valued and the company should conquest their loyalty.
