- Can social media help your business grow?
- Using social media tog row your business.
- What can social media do for you?
Social Media Marketing Trends For Business Growth
New social networking platforms appear daily. It is a guessing game to know exactly where to commit your time and resources. It is important to look ahead to where social networking is going, and how we can get on board. Here are a few tips:
1. Investment in Social Media Will Become a Necessity, Not a Luxury
Investing time and resources into a social media strategy is most definitely a moving from from ‘should have’ to ‘must have’.
Most people in businesses have already recognized the need to integrate their social media efforts with their content strategy, and are seeing the impact of social media in terms of lead generation, referral traffic, and revenue.
These very real and measurable benefits, and if possible, consider delegating social media tasks to existing employees, or hire social media strategists/full-time social media managers.
The benefits of social media are many, but they include:
- Improved social signals
- Company and Personal branding
- Improved brand awareness
- Word-of-mouth advertising
- Increased customer loyalty and trust
- Improved audience reach and influence
Social media is also one of the three pillars of SEO.
2. Image-Centric Networks
We all share through image and video, rather than text-based content. It is always better to see pictures. How many times has a picture caught your eye, then you go through and read the text? Think about sites like Pinterest and Instagram. It is the pictures that make us follow someone so look deeper into the post.
Other image-based social media sites like Slideshare, Tumblr, Path, and Mobli are available, and businesses will need to become more mindful about the ‘sharability’ factor of photos on their websites and blogs so as to get the biggest impact from social media content.
3. The Rise of Micro-Video
It seems that writing 140 characters and taking 3 minute long videos is becoming too tedious for many of us. Micro video to the rescue!
New micro video apps like Twitter’s Vine and now Instagram’s video sharing feature, let us video share in real-time. Instagram allowis 3-15 seconds per video, and Vine allows precisely 6 seconds, which means we can create and share videos instantly from our smartphones.
4. MySpace is still out there
MySpace appears to be making a comeback. There is now an iPhone app that allows users to network, receive private messages, and listen to their own personalized radio station, Recent news reports said that the younger generations are getting tired of facebook. Maybe, maybe not. But if that generation is looking for something ‘new’ maybe you should be on it, too.
5. LinkedIn
This is #1 social networking site for professionals. With its Influencers program, LinkedIn is positioning itself as not only another networking site, but as one of the largest sources of content creation for professionals.
As it grows and attracts even more users, the advantages of being “linked in” will become enormous for network marketers.
What does it mean?
Facebook and Twitter show no signs of completely going away, but it will be interesting to see how they move to keep up with the trends of other social networks.
Facebook will have been around for 10 years in 2014 (What???) and the social medial market has exploded since then. With any content we want at our fingertips, the competition is tough to get the next, biggest thing, faster.
If you want your business to grow at the fastest rate possible, you have to have a social medial strategy.