Nobody can ignore social media marketing anymore, but very few actually understand how to approach it. Most small businesses create an account in Facebook, update it from time to time and leave it at that. However, if you want more than to just tick a corresponding box, you need some actual techniques.
1. Pay Special Attention to Instagram
Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networks (in 2013 it grew a whopping 23%; for comparison, Facebook only grew 3%). It is mobile – which corresponds to current trends, as the sales of mobile devices and the number of users who surf the Internet almost exclusively from mobile devices are increasing at breakneck speeds. It is visual – and visual images are incredibly powerful instruments for creating the needed impression in visitors. It is especially important in case you sell physical goods – after you’ve created a decent Instagram following, you can use it to showcase your items and persuade people to do your marketing for you.
2. Diversification
In the last 12-24 months we saw the rise of many new social networks. Some of them appeared as an answer to perceived flaws in the main players (for example, Ello that started last March stating that they will never sell personal information of their users like Facebook). Others in order to cater to needs of specific groups (Foodie – for food enthusiasts). Still others use some unusual mechanic as a sales pitch (tsu – they promise to share revenues with users based on the popularity of their posts). New social networks seem to spout up like mushrooms and it remains to be seen if any of them will be successful or survive at all – but marketers cannot ignore them, especially if they are aimed at their target audiences.
3. Scommerce
Social networks are getting increasingly eager to serve not just as an advertising ground, but as selling spaces in their own right. Twitter has already made first steps in this direction with the introduction of their Product Cards, but this trend is going to gain momentum, and judging by how quickly things happen in this sphere, it won’t take long for a full-fledged system to develop.
4. Video Is Growing in Importance
Statistics show that video is quickly gaining prevalence as content of choice throughout most social networks – for example, today Facebook exceeds YouTube in the number of video views via desktop, and we are talking about a network that is primarily text and picture based. Clever use of video in marketing is going to become more and more important – probably because of ever-growing sensory overload people experience, as they are getting less and less likely to read even a single sentence from the beginning to an end.
It is doubtless that social media marketing is going to continue to develop in 2015 and we don’t know how exactly it is going to happen. But we know that it is possible to try to be prepared.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1DqUEmY via small business marketing company
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Botpc3
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