Like most digital marketing channels, social media is always evolving. People’s behaviors are changing, and the technologies and capabilities of social media platforms are changing alongside them.
Care About Your Audience
This year, the top focus for marketers should be on being responsive to the people who follow you.
After all, social media is all about relationships and engagement. So this means responding quickly to customer complaints, comments, and questions.
One of the absolute best things that brands can do on social media is to be responsive to their customers and engage with their audience.
But how, you may ask, can you manage all these social interactions and provide real-time customer service? By making sure you have the right monitoring and tracking, thanks to a dedicated Social Media team.
Share Moments That Matter
Yes, this means more work for marketers and brands, because it requires better storytelling.
Take your very best web content and create one-minute videos on those same topics, and post them to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels.
This can be a great strategy, because content that worked for your audience on one channel or platform is also likely to work on other platforms – and those audiences aren’t the same.
Video, Video, Video!
Video is a thing again? Oh, yes. More than ever, actually.
Marketers, brands, and businesses must have a video strategy in 2019.
- Set goals for your video.
- Storyboard with your team.
- Create a 30-60 second video that you can use on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn news feeds.
- For Stories, create 15-second micro-segment videos of your longer ones to utilize, here.
- Repurpose your content where and when you can.
- Put your best foot forward in the first 10 seconds because no matter how interesting, useful, entertaining, or informative your video is, viewers will begin to drop off after the 10-15 second mark.
Facebook Messenger
Chatbots are a super-hot trend right now.
You can literally see real-time sales and conversion data for any website, and which campaigns drove that traffic. Start your free trial today.
As Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group, pointed out, Facebook Messenger and chatbots have awesome open rates and are one of the most effective ways to reach and build audience engagement.
Our best advice for 2019 is to:
- Build a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
- Grow your Facebook Messenger contacts.
- Start strategically delivering content via Messenger.
Keep the Trust of Your Followers
This means abandoning old tactics that used to get engagement but were misused and abused.
- Up your paid promotion budget: You will need this to counteract some of the losses you may experience from not putting out clickbaity, spammy content like that mentioned above.
- Stop asking your followers for something all the time: Create content that naturally creates engagement rather than begging for it.
- Stop selling, start communicating: Don’t be that friend that invites you to coffee and then spends the entire time selling to you. Invite your followers to a conversation, not a sales pitch.
Create Content for Your Mobile Fans
In 2019, it’s critical to craft a social experience that is fluid, beautiful, and easily interactive for mobile fans in every aspect of your users’ digital marketing experience.
“Everything that you share on your social media profiles needs to accommodate a mobile user,” Ward said. “This means that if you want them to click a link in order to engage with your post, that link needs to go to a page that is designed specifically for the mobile user.”
That’s according to Ashley Ward, CEO & Director of Madhouse Matters.