Social Media Trends that Will Boost Engagement

These days, serious social conversations rarely happen offline.

Since the introduction of social networking platforms, social conversations have gone online.

In the United States, internet users spend 20 percent of their web time on social media platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.

As a business owner, this means you must ensure your outfit has an active presence on various social networking sites.

This way, you will be able to get existing customers hooked to your brand while attracting new ones.

In this article, we will discuss the various social media trends that have the highest potential of boosting customer engagement. Read on!

Record on Video

Even though the future is typically hard to predict, there is every indication video is the future of social media and digital marketing.

For starters, YouTube, a video-sharing platform, is the second largest search engine on the web. On any given day, people watch 1 billion hours of YouTube content!

Facebook, the biggest social-networking platform, does over 7 billion video views every day.

As you can see, online video is hot right now, and it will only get hotter. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index estimates that video will drive 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2019.

So if you want to record greater engagement with your customer, you better start recording more videos!

Consider hiring a video services provider to take over your video production.

This is the best way to ensure you’re churning out high-quality, informative and entertain videos that can generate substantial buzz around your brand.

Go Live

Even though recorded video is still incredibly popular, live video is quickly becoming one of the biggest social media trends.

In 2016, 80 percent of internet users watched more live videos than they did in 2015. A similar percentage would also rather watch a live video than read a blog post!

As such, live streaming your business events – such as product launches – is a good strategy for boosting engagement.

Although Facebook is the most effective platform for live videos (live videos rank higher in the news feed), you can also live-stream your events on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.

Beyond product launches, you can use live videos to showcase your workplace, or even explain to customers how to use your products.

Move Over Humans, Enter Chatbots

As your brand attracts more customers, it can be difficult to keep up with the growing number of customer service queries.

Unless you hire more customer care representatives (which isn’t a cheap thing to do), there is nothing much you can do to give customers the best experience.

But wait!

Thanks to chatbots, you can now let computers respond to some of your client’s queries.

Make no mistake, customers want to receive human responses when they reach out to your business.

However, an increasing number of people are embracing the use of chatbots because they enable businesses to be available round-the-clock.

You can deploy your chatbots on messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Kik and WeChat.

That said, you should use chatbots sparingly to avoid annoying your customers. A good option is to deploy them after your business closes down for the day.

That way, a customer will likely be happy to chat with your business bot in the dead of the night, instead of waiting until morning to get a human response.

Paid Content Is Still Supreme

A few years ago, organic content reigned on social media.

What changed?

The social networks probably figured they needed to make millions of money in profits every quarter, and paid content was a potentially lucrative channel.

Since then, paid content has risen to be one of the hottest social media trends.

Why struggle to organically push your content onto user’s social feeds while you can pay and earn top spot?

Regardless of how you look at it, the simple truth is investing in paid content will not only boost customer engagement but also increase your bottom line.

More customers will be able to see your content and know more about your brand or business. With increased brand awareness, expect sales to shoot up.

Like in the use of chatbots, you should be careful with how often you pay your preferred social sites to promote your content.

Consumers have a tendency to ignore digital ads. In fact, 80 percent of internet users (or 4 in 5 people) frequently ignore such ads.

Growth of Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics hasn’t always been what it’s today.

A couple of years, the tools for measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns were unreliable, to say the least.

You could run a campaign on Facebook, for instance, and you wouldn’t really know how many people an ad reached.

Today, you can keep tabs on your campaigns – in real time.

You can know the volume of mentions your campaign is generating, or how many followers or fans you gained in a specific period.

You can even tell you share of conversations vs your competitors!

In addition to the monitoring tools provided by the social networks, there are powerful commercial applications that you can also deploy.

Using third-party applications is particularly important because social networks can inflate numbers to please advertisers.

This, combined with the growing need of advertisers to measure every key performance indicator of their campaigns, will no doubt keep social media analytics a top social media trend this year.

Closing Thoughts on Social Media Trends

Social media is a powerful platform.

It brings friends and relatives together and also pushes businesses closer to their customers.

But, it’s not all about just creating social media accounts and posting to your fans whenever you like.

It takes time, skill and a good grasp of current social media trends to hack social media and earn big rewards from increased engagement.

And that’s exactly why you need the help of an expert.

Engaging a social media agency to take care of all your social media needs ensures you have all your hands on running other facets of your business, like managing the inventory.

Try our services today and watch your business become the talk of the day, every day!