Digital Content Marketing is rapidly growing and developing with major advancements in technology. And through the Information Age, social media and content marketing trends have been evolving.
People can access information online in just a few minutes. The Internet has anything and everything. Today, people have to visit a virtual marketplace to shop and they rely on the internet or Google to get information.
Similarly, Social Media has become our favorite pastime. Marketers understand the changing dynamics of the purchasing behavior of consumers and where people spend most of their time.
Therefore, social media content marketing has also gained popularity in the past decade.
Good content is the key to a successful marketing campaign. From a marketing perspective, content marketing through social media platforms has been extremely rewarding.
However, social media content marketing trends keep changing from time to time. Many such new trends will also be seen in 2018.
Image by Socialmediatoday.com
Let us take a look at eight of these upcoming social media content marketing trends to watch out for in the near future.
1) Advanced Form of Content
Content will shift from text form to visual form. Videos will be used to convey information instead of long articles or essays.
Informative videos with good content will be gaining popularity. The audio-visual form of content attracts more viewers on social media.
Content must facilitate user interaction. Many companies pay to advertise their products in attractive video formats.
Video content allows linking to shopping sites where people can purchase products. This kind of marketing is both informative and entertaining.
Currently, people have not realized the humongous benefits of this kind of content, which makes this field less-competitive. It is also a lucrative field of marketing.
2) Content Marketing Trends: The Rise of Ephemeral Content
Earlier, marketers focused on creating evergreen content that can be used for a long period of time. But recently, all major social media platforms have launched features based on ephemeral content.
This kind of content is time sensitive. It creates hype among users instantly.
Many companies will switch to ephemeral content to attract more customers and viewers. Snapchat pioneered this idea, and after analyzing their success, many others have joined too.
Brands can ramp up stories on the ‘Add story’ section of social media to connect with their customers directly. Social media influencers use these stories to add links to websites where they sell their products.
3) Mobile-friendly Content
With the increase in the number of internet users through smartphones, many brands are starting to make content that is favorable for small smartphone screens.
And many websites have launched mobile apps to engage more users. Apps can be easily downloaded on to smartphones. Websites can opt for mobile-friendly templates that can adapt a layout suitable for smartphones.
Smartphones are the perfect handy devices. More brands are realizing this fact and they are focusing on developing content suitable for small screens as well. It is formatted to suit the smartphone’s layout.
4) Augmented Reality
In the near future, the next big thing in social media content marketing is going to be ‘Augmented Reality’.
It’s a new way to engage with your audience. Many social media platforms are trying to integrate features based on Augmented Reality.
This means that a new way to showcase products is coming soon.
Through this feature, different brands can project their products in real surroundings with the help of special filters over the camera. This feature shows the buyers how a product will look in their natural surroundings.
It is a great way to market products. Many more such features will support content. The format of content will be upgraded to suit this added feature.
5) Investment in Professionals
Currently, social media is not considered a serious marketing platform and that’s why companies hire amateur writers for these platforms.
However, companies have started realizing that social media is a vital platform for brand awareness and customer acquisition. Hence, more experts and professionals will be hired for it.
Brands will invest more in professional and experienced copywriters. Companies will be hiring talented individuals to create content constantly for social media platforms.
Specific content targeting specific platforms will be encouraged. Slowly, more investments will be made in this area.
6) Advanced Analytics
Earlier, websites had just an analytics section that helped in determining your target audience. However, even social media platforms will start integrating analytics. By far, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have this feature.
More social media platforms are following in their footsteps and many new features are being offered to marketers to advertise their products or to build a brand.
Analytics is said to dig deep to a micro level in order to provide more accurate data. With this new advancement, content will become more personalized.
This will increase customer acquisition and retention rates. And more direct and niche content will be used in marketing.
7) Less Content, More Message
Most of the trending features that social media offers are time-sensitive. Stories are timed-out over a 10-second duration. Hence, timed videos and brief content will be used to match up with the latest features.
Direct messages, short slogans, and to-the-point content will be used in advertisements. Companies will require short content in a constant flow to engage their consumers. Less will mean more in this case.
8) User-generated Content
Companies and their marketers are integrating more features to utilize user-generated content, like testimonials, reviews, recommendations and referrals, etc.
Consumers trust other consumers. People want to know about the experience of other users. This has given rise to several forums.
Real consumers’ feedback, testimonials, and organic reviews are showcased to attract more customers.
This is relatively easy on social media, as it receives instant feedback. There are review and comment sections on all the social media platforms.
This will also be affecting content as people will strive for improved and audience-centric content. Marketers will be looking for more interactive content to get better reviews.
Conclusion
Astonishingly, the tally of total users of social media across the world is over 2 billion, which makes it the perfect platform on which marketers can advertise their products and/or services.
This is a growing industry. The numbers are increasing every day and companies know this fact. And it’s becoming more and more important to post and engage often with your followers.
In fact, a new, robust automated software for busy social media managers recently hit the market that may be of help with your social media content marketing needs.
It automatically posts, manages and even recycles content for you on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If this sounds like something you need, click here to take it for a test drive.
Be sure to keep yourself updated with these ever-rising trends. In this way, you’ll be able to optimize your various marketing campaigns appropriately.
And by integrating the above social media content marketing trends into your campaigns, you’ll be ahead of others in the game.
About the Author
Lovelesh heads up the Content Marketing and Writing Experts at Contentmart. Contentmart is the fastest, simplest and the most reliable platform to have content written for your business or website. He specializes in putting businesses in front of their target audience online using content marketing, social media and advanced link building. Feel free to hit him up on Twitter @Lovelash or LinkedIn for a chat on any of these areas.
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This is a good read to start the year with new strategies. I definitely agree with visual content. As it was from last year, and so it will this year and in the coming years. Found this ephemeral content interesting. Will look into this further as I’m still trying to improve my sites.Thanks for sharing these helpful and timely strategies.
You’re very welcome, Kim ad I’m glad you found it helpful! 🙂
Nice piece of content about social media. You are so right about having the ability now to analyze the impact of our campaigns and methods on these powerful social networking platforms.
Thanks for the positive feedback, Charlie!