Social Trends

Tis the season for Social Media Marketing! As we get ready to shop for the holidays, we should always remember to be conscious of how we are marketing our businesses. This article will help those of you caught up in the holiday rush to remember to focus on the important aspects of marketing your own business. Whether it is from your Etsy shop, or on your Instagram, here are the steps you can take to ensure you are taking advantage of the holiday season.

The first step is to imagine the holiday shopping season as a funnel and slowly build your campaign gradually.  Late summer and early fall should be reserved for building email lists, creating your holiday-focused SEO content, and expanding your social audience. October and November are considered to be ideal months for building interest and consideration by engaging with potential customers and answering feedback from your audience. Once Thanksgiving Day is over, focus your strategy on conversions and on campaigns tailored to drive a sale.

Next is to get involved with personal shopping recommendations. Artificial Intelligence can help enhance and fine-tune product advertisements. Using these recommendations can help you secure sales in the final weeks of the holiday season. 

Storytelling is another important aspect of social media marketing during the holiday season to connect with your audience in an emotional and non forgetting way. Brands like Apple have created an entire short story using animation, music, and characters their target market can connect with. Memorable ads connect with your audience on a personal level and using this knowledge to your own benefit with storytelling will help build your customer base. 

Instagram has been a great social media vehicle for business advertising this 2018 holiday shopping season. Implementing this media outlet for your campaign will surely increase your sales.

Lastly, get a jump start with your holiday planning through Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. This is when the majority of holiday shoppers due their purchasing due to sales. Building suspense and teasing your audience will create interest and followups. Plant an early seed in shoppers’ minds for when they start their holiday shopping.

For more information on these great tips, check out the article by Johnathan Crowl I posted above!

Being a graphic designer and marketer, I have learned that they really do go hand in hand. Especially in the social media environment. This article by Ruby Rusine on business2community.com is great at describing what it takes to get your followers to love and share your photos. 

Visual content remains supreme in the world of social media, especially when you have to grab the attention of a viewer who is continuously scrolling through posts. Neuroscience says that our brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, which is astonishing.

As for how this relates to social media marketing, tweets with visuals receive 150% more retweets than tweets without visuals and Facebook posts with visuals see 2.3 times more engagement than those without visuals.

While designing your social media post, your message should be clear and readable. Viewers might only see your post for a second, so making sure that your message is interpreted the right way is important. Catching the viewer’s eye with design should come from color harmonies and an overall balanced aesthetic. Colors can have a subconscious influence on their viewers. For instance, shades of blue invoke feeling of calm and trustworthiness, greens symbolize freshness and safety. 

Pairing beautiful colors with proper fonts will help pull together your social media graphic. Just like colors, fonts can also create an emotion within the viewer. Certain typefaces can be serious and proper, such as a serif font, while sans serifs are more modern and clean. 

2019 is approaching faster than ever. What changes and opportunities will the new year bring to social media? Hootsuite is a social media management platform which specializes in making findings, scheduling, managing, and reporting on social media content easier. Hootsuite CMO Penny Wilson analyzed the social media industry’s experiences in 2018 and she and her company are predicting what is in the cards for 2019. Wilson mentions how 2018 brought, “Concerns around fake news and data privacy led individuals to question their trust in politicians, media outlets, social networks and businesses alike. Those same concerns extended to how brands forge relationships with customers and the data they use to do so.”

Her tip for the new year based on analytics from 2018 is to rebuild trust with your customer base and followers. Customer confidence can be rebuild through a business’s respect to their privacy. Society values their privacy and will not trust a company who is constantly trying to dig for information. This can be done through being upfront about when and why data is collected and then using the data that customers are okay with sharing to create personalized one-to-one experiences that deliver a special value.

Implementing the new story feature on social media platforms is another way to connect with your audience on a personal level. Stories feel real, are immediate and intensely personal to the viewer. Stories also have the benefit of disappearing after one day which leaves plenty of room for experimentation. Instagram stories are a perfect way to compliment a recent image post of a product or service in action. Plus, add filters and AR overlays to your photos and videos to give them a boost.

Marketing your event on social media is not always an easy task if you have no direction on where to start and develop your strategy. Luckily, this new article from business2community.com can help you take all the right steps in marketing your event to the community. 

If you are having a speaker at your event, it would be wise to include a photo of them in print and digital advertising; especially if they have a large following on social media. Your speakers can also be a good vessel to influence your target audience for the event. Celebrities and small social media influencers can be a great option to promote your event if they and their followers share similar beliefs to what you are trying to advertise. Each speaker that you have at your event could double, triple, or even quadruple your social media reach. 

Hashtags are another good way to extend your reach on social media. Your event could be about adopting puppies in Massachusetts, so including a hashtag like #MassPups or #MassPuppies most likely will work to your advantage. Hashtags are a great way to market to your customers as well as creating trends. But make sure that the hashtag is appropriate with your target audience and the social platform that it is used on. 

The fear of missing out, or as most younger people would call it, FOMO, is excellent to use to your advantage for this situation. Using sneak peaks in your marketing material will ultimately build the anticipation of your event. Mentioning that your show has sold out and that a waiting list would be available is another way to reel in attendees. However, you do want to make sure that your show/event has almost sold out.

Engaging with your attendees who mention that they are going to your event is also important. Things like retweeting or reposting attendees’ social media posts will help build a larger audience and allow for more connections within the business-customer relationship.

2019 is right around the corner and it is going to be a big year for social media marketers. This year has been a great opportunity for businesses to use influencer marketers. However, most influencers have thousands if not millions of followers. Currently, more businesses are realizing that Nano Influencers are beneficial to reaching a segmented niche, or creating more trust in the influencer/consumer relationship. Brands are moving away from big influencers and celebrities and more towards everyday customers who have 1,000 to 5,000 followers. Nano influencers have more engagement compared to influencers because their followers are real people and not overwhelmed by bots. 

Instagram entrepreneurs monetize on the community that social media influencers create. Platforms like Shopify are making this step a lot easier by keeping overhead costs low and creating success with the influencers own branded line. 

Facebook is working on building augmented reality glasses! Bringing social media to the world of AR is something we all saw coming. Will this form a successful bridge between the virtual world of social media and the real world, or will it ultimately create a distraction from being in the current moment? 

The Facebook AR glasses will use waveguide display with a two dimensional scanner. This technology creates a superimposed virtual image on top of a live image of the physical world. Other companies are using this technology already, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset and the Magic Leap One. For Facebook to over come the clunkiness of their glasses and supply a strong enough battery in such a small space, will be a true obstacle for them to overcome.

Snapchat’s spectacles are already a thing consumers can purchase, but with only the ability to take photos and video, Facebook’s AR glasses will be sure to have a market of their own in terms of social media glasses. Just think about it, advertisers paying to use Facebook’s AR software to create superimposed advertisements anywhere they want, without the need for buying real estate for traditional print and digital media. How can Facebook not deliver such a useful tool to push along the future of advertisement. Plus social interactions with friends will be much more intuitive. Perhaps this technology will allow you to see who you have friended on Facebook just by looking at them. Or your friends most recent Facebook posts will be hovering above their head. Or maybe even see a Yelp review of a restaurant just at first glance! Don’t forget about how immersive Candy Crush Saga will be. It seems as if this technology is limitless.

Social media is always important for the growth of your business. People need to know your brand before they understand the value it has to offer. Social media tools allow companies to reach their viewers and possibly convert them to potential customers for a return on investment. Increasing the exposure of your brand’s image will drive traffic to your website, however, generating reach with social media comes with a couple rights and wrongs. Luckily, Vanessa Joy debunks a few myths to allow you to successfully reach your company goals with social media. 

First, everyone needs social media. In current times, it is often difficult, maybe even impossible, to get the proper engagement with print media, email and a website alone. Imagine posting a print ad for your company in the hallway of a college campus. Most people would pass by it and not even think twice. Now picture you personally handing out that same ad to the entire student body, with just the click of a button. Yep, that’s the power of social media. 

Getting numbers that matter along with engagement that matters is key. Buying followers is a myth that will not pay off in the long run because, chances are that they are not the correct demographic that you want to be targeting. Engagement from people with a similar demographic to the client you are looking for will only be available through earned followers, not bought. 

Posting on a daily basis allows your customers to know you exist. Therefore, make sure that you are posting creative content at least once a day. Make sure your business is seen through optimization for maximum engagement! Your Instagram is often seen more than your website, so make sure that it is always being updated with new products and promotions. 

When it comes to the content that you are posting, another myth is that you always have to post your own content, which isn’t true. Interaction will be more likely if you are posting popular content from someone else.