Grow your social media audience, create more conversions to your site, and increase your ROI with the top 2019 social media trends from Hootsuite.
It will be harder than ever for marketers to get noticed on social media in 2019. According to Smart Insights, only 48 percent of businesses using social campaigns claim to receive any results from their investments. We recommend taking some time to learn more about the latest trends to keep campaigns engaging for your consumers. Stay ahead of the competition and increase your conversions with Parallel Interactive’s curated list of 2019 social media trends from Hootsuite.
Top 2019 Social Media Trend
1. Rebuilding Trust
People distrust traditional media and celebrity influencers now more than ever because of pressure to increase security and transparency from major social media platforms. A recent study suggests only 28 percent of people trust celebrities while 60 percent trust academics and relatable influencers. Selecting the right influencers for your audience is critical to building your brand on social media.
Recommendation: We recommend using micro-influencers with proven engagement rates to promote your brand. Search top posts within your company’s popular hashtags to find influencers who are loyal to your business and are willing to promote with little persuasion. Vet your influencers carefully to distance your brand from potentially harmful publicity. Generate additional trust by creating Twitter chats, Facebook Groups, and branded hashtags around demos within your audience.
Gen Z is taking over the consumer landscape turning traditional social media on its axis. Social stories (vertical videos that disappear within 24 hours) are one of our top 2019 social media trends because of their visual appeal and quick nature. In fact, stories are growing 15 times faster than feed-based sharing, according to Block Party, and many businesses are beginning to explore this popular trend.
Recommendation: Start experimenting with stories to learn what content works best for your brand. Stories appear at the top of social feeds, making them more likely to be seen, so popular accounts like McDonalds post news and special offers to increase visibility. Publish at varying times throughout the week then review every seven days to see when your audience is most active. We recommend making your content look raw, unedited, and live action – these tested significantly better with Hootsuite audiences.
3. Personalized Ad Content
Top performing brands are changing the way you pay for ad space. Rising costs and fleeting attention spans are limiting ROI for advertisers. Paid social teams are now focusing on creative, organic social ads, boosting only their best performing content to save money. Personalized content creates consumer discussion and engagement instead of bombarding your audience with consistent ads.
Recommendation: Focus on targeting a specific audience within your brand and create ads based on your chosen demographics. Define your target goals and metrics so you can better determine if your ads performed well enough to boost. After analyzing the data, repurpose old, top performing concepts for new campaigns to continue building on your successes.
Read our article on programmatic advertising for an in-depth look at how artificial intelligence can maximize your business’s personalized ad potential.
4. Social Commerce
It is easier than ever to make social sales from young buyers with new in-app selling technologies. More than 800 million people around the world use Facebook’s Marketplace to buy from brands, and Instagram’s shoppable posts allow users to go from post discovery to checkout without ever leaving the app. We recommend implementing social shopping into your standard campaign processes as soon as possible in order to put your business ahead of competitors.
Here’s how Best Buy uses shoppable Instagram posts during the holidays to generate additional sales for their products:
Recommendation: Start simple in 2019. Set up a few shoppable Instagram posts with your Business Profile. Optimize your posts by tagging multiple products per image to show how your products interact together. Then, promote them with contests across your platforms to gain awareness. Review your sales metrics monthly to note which categories of products sell best for future promotions.
5. Messaging
Direct messaging on social media is a very clever way to streamline your customer support by managing multiple questions at once. According to a global Twilio survey, nine out of 10 consumers prefer online messaging to communicate with businesses. Most people prefer to directly message a company before completing a sale in order to build consumer trust before pulling the trigger.
Recommendation: We recommend enabling Facebook Messenger for your Business Page and setting up a simple instant reply. Provide a short greeting, general information, and additional contact information to encourage trust between you and your customers while they wait for your reply. Repost screenshots of positive interactions to answer common questions in one post and create additional trust in your brand.
you got it! Here are two:
Remembering Black History row: https://t.co/R0DldtdrFN@strongblacklead row: https://t.co/X6QP8mst1C
— Netflix US (@netflix) February 5, 2019
6. Cross-Posting
Cross-posting is publishing the same copy/imagery across multiple social platforms under the same brand. Why do we do it? It saves time, keeps accounts active, and makes it easy to share content with a wider audience. The issue? Repeated content doesn’t receive the same level of interactions. Optimization requirements and demographics vary by platform, and don’t transition well between each other. Simple differentiations between posts can mean the difference between success and failure.
Recommendation: Instead of repeating content word-for-word customize your content to each platform. Parallel Interactive follows an 80 percent rule. We leave 80 percent of the content the same, but change it enough that the post still appears unique to the platform. This shows our audience we care about our brand and how it is represented on all feeds. A little extra effort can go a long way with 2019 social media trends.
7. Engagement Rates
Marketers’ know gaining followers on social media is no easy chore. Time, patience and plenty of ad spend are necessary to achieve quarterly follower goals, but influencers have shown us a more significant – and more importantly, inexpensive – metric: engagements. Studies show that micro- and nano-influencers have higher engagement rates than other brands with increased ROI’s. Businesses are seeing up to a 65 percent ROI using influencer marketing alone, making it a valuable asset to any marketing campaign.
Recommendation: Research influencers that already exist in your target demographics using free influencer marketing tools like HypeAuditor. Focus on influencers who have large engagement rates and reach out to them with exclusive offers to encourage partnership. We recommend beginning with simple promotions such as “Reduced price when you use promo code: XXX” to track how well your influencer campaigns perform with 2019 social media trends.
