The journey since the arrival of social media to up until this point has been incredible. Since its emergence, there has been hardly a day when social media did not surprise us or brought us something new. For businesses, it is even extra special exciting since the minds behind these websites have been working tirelessly to develop features that help business grow and excel on social media.

The arrival of new features and softwares means that you have to stay updated and ready for whenever your social media marketing strategy needs to be modified or changed completely. Your target audience and customers expect you be current, impulsive and impulsive with your advertising and content sharing. If you do not give due attention to customers’ expectations and stick to your own design of marketing, there is a high risk that your clients and consumers lose interest in you.

Listening to your audience and following market trends can lead you to creating exceptional business revenues and sales. To help you with that we did a lot of research and gathered some points that will prove extremely helpful in designing your social media marketing strategy for 2016.

1.   Focus on building mobile friendly apps and websites:

As the mobile phones are getting highly advanced and cheap with accessibility to anywhere in the world, people prefer to do business through them. This not only saves their time but the issue of carrying around a big laptop or tablet is not involved as well, since mobile phones are handy and flexible to use in small spaces. This gives the businesses an opportunity to focus primarily on websites designs that work fast and better when accesses via mobile phone.

Most of the social media apps are now merely available for mobile phones and cannot be accessed through computers and laptops. One such example is Snapchat, which was introduced in 2011, and has since grew a large number of audience. It not only attracted the attention of small business but the multinational companies and businesses like General Electric, Taco Bell and McDonalds use it as well.

2.  Facebook is still the hottest and primary medium to build your business on:

 It has been more than 11 years since Facebook launched and approximately nine years since it became accessible to public. Even after such long time it is still the top used social media website among individual users and businesses. Although the risk of standing out from such a big crowd is greater and you need to put extra effort in, you should not ignore the wonders it can do. New apps like periscope, blab and Snapchat are making their way into the audience’s heart fast, but considering Facebook as orthodox and yesterday’s news will be a mistake that will become disaster for your business.

Facebook has never let itself become boring or there had not been a point where it appeared to be in a rut. The “buy” feature it recently introduced has made it even more worthy for advertisers and marketing.

3.  Live video streaming and audiovisuals:

 As I mentioned in the last point that Facebook has kept its users interested over the period, without becoming irrelevant or dull. Along with the “buy” button, it also introduced live video streams, where users can upload short videos of current happening, from around the world in real time.

Videos give the content an authenticity and people generally prefer them more compared to reading text. Snapchat attracted major attention because of its unusual features like geo-filters that allow people to show their current location in stories. This is a fun way to let people know and market your product by arranging a meet-up when you are in certain vicinity or on a business tour.

Periscope, which was introduced last year under the umbrella of Twitter Inc., is also a live stream video app. It is most common among celebrities and TV show hosts for behind the scenes shots. Blab lets anyone become a talk show host as soon as one signs up. You can talk about your favorite topics, publish podcasts and invite other people from the platform who share same interests as you, to chat in the talk show.

4.  Influencer marketing:

A huge population of internet world is connected to each other, interacts via number of tools and platforms, and is able to influence someone. People with large followings are able to influence better and have the advantage of delivering their message to huge audience.

Companies and businesses need to capitalize on the followings of these influencers and hire them to become the mouthpiece for their business. People are more persuaded when a product or brand is advertised unconventionally and the words are coming out of the mouth of their favorite personality.

Influencer marketing has the biggest advantage that it builds a trust between consumer and business. Since social media influencer focus on delivering quality content that is thoroughly researched and has a solid place in market, people listen to what they are saying. Developing long-term relationship with influencers can prove extremely helpful for your business.

Another method to practice influencer marketing is by using personal social media profiles of your employees. Research proves that more than 70 percent of buying decisions are made while people are using social media. The rationale behind that? When someone in users’ friend list buys a product and recommends it, the user is more likely to buy in comparison to traditional marketing and advertising.

5.  Use of instant articles to launch content:

Facebook launched instant article feature in May of last year. The idea was to allow the editors to publish content on Facebook like it is done on the website. An instant article saves your time by avoiding the loading interval a link takes while you are being redirected to the website to read it. It is faster and efficient way of sharing content with people. People prefer the content that is small in size and loads within seconds.

Another interactive feature of instant articles is that while reading, users can individually tap on the lines they like out of the whole content. It not only provides monetization opportunities but publishers have full control over the stories. The analytics tools also helps businesses to keep track of their performance so they can work on providing their users with enhanced experience.

The feature will definitely attract attention from advertisers and publishers in this year and grow more audience. It launched with initial nine partners, which are, The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. These high profile partners show that the feature is definitely worth trying and will catch fire once people get a hold of it.

6.  Focus on quality instead of quantity:

In the traditional days of advertising, producing a lot of content was the key to success. Due to the limited available channels, advertisers and businesses produced tons of content and slapped it across all accessible mediums in the hope of producing content that will resonate with customers.

Since the availability of channels is no longer a problem for advertisers, the focus has also shifted to quality from quantity. More channels and more competitors mean clients and potential consumers no longer have time to read everything they come across on social media. Users prefer to read only the content that is relevant and worthy of their time.

To produce such content researching the need of audience is most important. Finding out and delivering the content that has demand in market is the new technique to seduce your audience. For this reason do not worry if you are not writing content on daily basis. Keep your head at bringing together high quality content for your customers… something that keeps them interested.

7.  Advertise less while trying to build a connection with your customers more:

Users on social media ignore the posts that across as advertisements or promotion materials. The strategy is to post your copy in a way that tracts customers to engage with it. Do not tell them to buy your product because it is amazing and they need it. Ask them what they need and whether your product is the one to fulfill that… this type of advertising promotes a healthier connection between you and the customers. They become interested to interact more with you.

Providing a back link to your website while posting interactive content on social media is a crucial media marketing strategy. The advertising and the copy should be so good that when you post a part of it on social media, it leaves viewers wanting more. This helps in bringing traffic to your website, which in turn helps in generating leads and profits.

2016 is going to be the year of surprises. More technology will emerge giving way to new softwares, tools and interactive features. Your business needs to be on the lookout for what is happening out in the social media world to stay relevant. For that, you will need to come up with social media marketing strategies accordingly.

 

Post Views: 634