Social media content marketing is continually evolving, and businesses around the world need to make sure their marketing campaigns are keeping up.
As a quick reminder for all beginner marketers out there, good content is good content, no matter what kind of platform you implement. Our main goal should always be to create appealing, resonating content with our targeted audience, otherwise, we’ve failed.
Setting that aside, we also have to acknowledge that even great content needs to be delivered the right way. Choosing this can be a big headache for most companies. Just as conventional publishing evolved decades ago, the digital marketing world is following the same path. However, there are two main differences: the rate of this change and the fact that most digital businesses are forgetting to be human.
There is no denying that creating and delivering compelling content on social media platforms is crucial for most branding endeavors. The trick to grasp modern social media marketing relies upon using a more humane approach.
Here are four trends for social media content marketing that are expected to make a big impact on 2018:
Invest in Talent
By this point, most companies are clear that social media is vital from a consumer-engagement and brand-awareness standpoint, so they’ve progressively invested more and more in their social strategies. By the next year, we will continue to see strong investments in these strategies, but with a bigger emphasis on hiring qualified individuals that can constantly generate content for all social platforms out there.
The time for just cross-promoting the same old content on every platform is gone. We are now witnessing how the savviest companies are hiring folks that not only know how to grow your audience on a particular social platform but also have the knowledge to create specific content that engages that audience through every channel. These individuals must be highly organized and tech-savvy, and they must communicate beyond acronyms.
More Mobile-ready Content
According to recent surveys, mobile now represents 70% of all the time a user spends engaging with digital media, with smartphone apps alone accounting for the majority of this. The Facebook app maintains its leadership as the app with more penetration in the U.S. in 2017, while Instagram and Snapchat kept their seat in the top 10. Twitter is also continuing to be one of the most popular apps in the market, as reflected in the recent rise of its shares.
Its clear users are spending more and more time using social media from their smartphones, therefore, is likely that we’ll see how brands will invest more time and resources on mobile-ready content. This type of content is characteristically simpler and with fewer key presses to engage with it, yet it requires experienced and knowledgeable workers to create it.
Richer Forms of Content
It’s very simple: rich content tends to drive more engagement. But what does ‘rich content’ even mean? Depending on whom you ask, those two words can have different meanings. But most people can agree that rich content refers to any content that facilitates user interaction. A video would be the perfect example of this, as it requires the users to click play and encourages them to leave a comment. Twitter polls are another great way to ask users to weigh in on a certain topic. By creating these richer forms of content, you’ll be encouraging user interaction while at the same time collecting consumer insights.
Leveraging on User-generated Content
According to recent marketing studies, 66% of users trust online consumer opinions and an even higher percentage trust recommendations from people they know. Now that it’s clear people trust one another more than influencers or celebrities, it’s time to leverage on user-generated content more heavily when creating a social strategy. In 2018, we’ll likely see how brands spend more time encouraging and integrating this type of content into social campaigns professionally and organically.
Social media is now presenting many new and exciting opportunities to use cutting-edge content into building meaningful relationships with consumers. Brands must look forward into 2018 and start adjusting to the new trends if they wish to remain competitive in the market.