26 Nov
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Are you ready for 2024? It’s time to step up your game and hop on the latest social media marketing trends.
If you’re a social media marketer, you should learn more than writing a caption or creating a good post and using tools such as online photo blur tools, photo editors, and other editing applications. More than creating good visuals, good storytelling is also crucial in reaching your targeted audience.
Here are the ten social media marketing trends in 2024:
- Creating content relevant to your target audience
- Visualization is a game-changer
- Engaging users with personalized social media content
- Investing in micro-influencers on social media
- Experimenting with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
- Using short-form video content
- Decentralizing platforms is the future
- Building communities and close-knit marketing tribes
- Promoting social media as a shopping platform
- The rapid increase in the use of ephemeral content
Social media has significantly transformed marketing and will continue changing it as different trends will continue to grow. Latest global social media statistics show that 57.6% of the world’s population uses social media and a consumer’s average daily usage is 2 hours and 27 minutes (Global WebIndex, 2021). Hence, social media marketers need to understand the trends that will help them grow their businesses.
Table of Contents
10 Essential Social Media Marketing Trends in 2024
Here are the social media marketing trends that you need to be aware of:
1. Creating content relevant to your target audience
Earlier this year, Instagram enabled a feature that allows users to choose whether they can hide likes or views. Gone are the days when content is judged based on the number of views or likes, and people were no longer interested in scrolling mindlessly through different platforms.
Good content is user-driven. Stories relevant to the target audience’s daily lives and content that have meaning for them and their circle are considered high-quality content. This assumption prompts brands to create social media content that connects with their potential clients more personally instead of being just an advertising tool. More than trendy topics, the company’s storytelling can give its users a more meaningful experience. It is also important to remember that good storytelling goes hand in hand with quality visualization.
2. Visualization content is a game-changer
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the human brain can process an image in 13 milliseconds. Cornell University also presents that if we visualize data, 68% of the people will believe the information is accurate. Visualized data is compelling and shows, and for your brand to stand out, you need to understand how to create visual content for your target audience.
You can use different tools, such as an online photo blur tool that can help you blur the subject background to emphasize an element of the image. Other photo editors can also help you visualize the contents you want to create. Creating a new post and customizing it is easier using these different tools online.
3. Engaging users with personalized social media content
One of the best ways to engage your consumers is to tailor marketing to their needs.
Engaging users with personalized marketing messages creates an interaction between the brand and the target audience, resulting in a special bond. One way to engage with your potential client is by being responsive to their comments and queries on your business’s social media accounts. However, you should learn to leverage user-generated content (UGC) aside from influencer marketing to gain their trust. PR Daily (2021) noted that brands should pay attention to consumers who are organically promoting their products or services and leverage such opportunities.
Online shoppers are more likely to trust fellow consumers than celebrities when buying a particular product. Therefore, showing feedback from other customers can capture the attention of your potential consumers and may improve converting new leads. Encouraging your customers to share their experiences with your brand is an excellent way to create more content for your company. You can ask customers to use official hashtags, so finding them on social media is more accessible. Using hashtags can increase engagement in social media. You can also encourage them to post and share their posts on different social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.
Twitter, which has hashtags as its most useful feature, is also a good platform to engage your customers. By adjusting the search volume to tweets that have at least 25 retweets, you can quickly filter out queries.
4. Investing in micro-influencers on social media
Influencer marketing has been popular for a while now, but recently, the trend has changed. The current trend shifted from mega to micro to nano influencers.
In 2018, Facebook was heavily scrutinized because of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Twitter also suspended over 70 million accounts due to bots and trolls that influenced the previous US presidential election. According to Malwarebytes (2019), 95%vof internet users don’t trust social media, and many shoppers nowadays don’t respond well to direct promotional advertising campaigns such as celebrity endorsements, TV ads, and aggressive sales pitches.
Hence, keeping it “smaller” allows influencers to interact more while incurring lesser costs for the brand. Moreover, advertisers now prefer to engage with a whole network of small, relevant niche influencers rather than just one or two big celebrities.
5. Experimenting with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented reality has become the current trend on social media, taking over photos. With mobile phones, you can experiment without using photo editors. Instead, you can use AR designs such as filters, lenses, stickers, interactive maps, interactive product displays, and emojis based on your appearance.
On the other hand, virtual reality (VR) has been a buzzword in social media marketing in recent years as it can potentially revolutionize consumers’ experiences. Using VR technology, consumers can experience a new product’s features, attributes, and functionalities. Next year, VR will be more popular as it gives people an opportunity to have meaningful virtual interactions amid stay-at-home orders and the need for social distancing. For instance, right now, Facebook is leveraging a virtual reality platform to beta-test a virtual world that can make online exploration visually possible.
6. Using short-form video content
One of the top marketing trends this 2021 is the use of short-form video content to reach consumers. A shorter human attention span and distracting social media can end the era of the 30-second ad spot. It is revealed in research that the human attention span lasts only 12 seconds. Currently, the average consumer attention span is roughly just eight seconds.
Videos are an excellent way to tell a story about your brand or services. Videos allow the users to relieve the experience. Users receive better videos such as meme videos that are engaging and deliver a particular message which may also go viral. For an effective video marketing campaign, you must decide on the message you want to communicate to your target audience and share it with platforms where your target audience is. After sharing it on different media, monitor your reach so you can improve it further.
7. Decentralizing platforms is the future
The future of social media is a decentralized model where blockchain and open-source technology make it more accessible and democratic for users. Although many people might be skeptical at first, decentralization is a good way to grant full ownership to its users.
The future of social media allows users to understand and move with algorithms. Decentralization means that users aren’t bound by central authority dictating rules of engagement and monetization. It will create a more open space for everyone.
For instance, the classified site Craigslist was “unbundled” 10 years ago into dozens of separate niche verticals, resulting in a dozen more companies such as Airbnb, Zillow, and Indeed. Recently, this unbundling also happened to Reddit with Discord is considered Reddit’s “Slack for Gaming.” In the last five years, the US search volume for Discord has reached 760% and is now valued at $15B.
8. Building communities and close-knit marketing tribes
The pandemic has created significant changes in our lives and has driven people closer, especially virtually. Social media is now more than promoting products and services but more about building a community between a business and its consumers.
Creating a space where consumers can share, discuss, and experience the brand is one of the most potent tactics to attract loyal customers. For instance, setting up a Facebook Group is a good start in building a community. It will allow business owners to understand consumer behavior which can serve as a basis for other promotional campaigns.
Moreover, expanding your reach is more effective when talking to individuals over big groups is more effective in reaching out to people. In building communities, marketing tribes are essential in offering organizations different ways of communicating with people rather than talking to wide-ranging demographics.
Examples of these close-knit marketing tribes are Facebook Groups, which spawned with various private communities, and Instagram threads that allow users to share experiences with select groups of friends and followers. These marketing tribes create a space where people can exchange more intimate and personal chats instead of messages targeted to mass audiences.
9. Promoting social media as a shopping platform
Next year, social selling will continue as a trend, and marketers need to utilize social media as a shopping platform.
Almost everyone uses social media anytime and anywhere. Hence, making social media a prime spot for businesses to look for leads. Instead of cold calling random contacts, social media has allowed companies to reach their consumers easier. It enables you to utilize social insights and online intelligence to have strong leads before interacting with your customers.
According to Top Dog Social Media (2021), businesses use social selling for lead development and market research. However, it is crucial to use the right tools to execute this properly. Consumers are now more knowledgeable, so traditional sales pitches, cold calls, and cold messages may not work anymore.
Moreover, in utilizing social media as a shopping platform, it is also essential to build a relationship with your customers. OptinMonster, 2021 reveals that 76% of customers are willing to connect with service providers or sellers, and 53% of customer loyalty is driven by a business’s ability to offer quality insights and customer service.
10. Rapid increase in the use of ephemeral content
Ephemeral content refers to any online content that online lasts 24 hours. One example of ephemeral content is Instagram stories. This concept started with Snapchat and is now widely used on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Messenger.
The popularity of ephemeral content is such a hit that many advertisers are using “stories” to advertise their products and services. When viewing a story, a swipe-up option successfully sends people from social media to their websites.
Moreover, some businesses use ephemeral content such as stories to share user-generated content (UGC) or to get the user closer by displaying “behind the scenes” or backend information.
Final thoughts
Good storytelling and visualization, along with using the right tools, the power of social media can capture today’s consumers and can widen your reach as marketer. Social media affects our daily lives immensely, and if social media marketers can leverage emerging trends, companies can remain ahead of their competition.
Author’s Bio:
Shelly is a former government employee and university teacher. She is the co-founder of SaaSLaunchr: SaaS Marketing Agency, a marketing service provider offering SEO, guest posting services, and content marketing to SaaS startups and businesses.
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