Top 6 Social Media Trends for 2018 For Business of Any Size

2018 is going to be an interesting year in social media. We could see the demise of SnapChat. Twitter? That remains to be seen if 280 characters can bring in new users to the platform. We will see the rise of social ad spend. And we will most likely see a decline in organic impressions. But there will also be an opportunity for those businesses that put in the time and energy into their social media efforts. These are some of the trends that we feel businesses should be focusing on starting now and moving through 2018.

1.UGC- Utilizing User Generated Content

First off, what is user generated content? It is defined as any type of content that has been created and put out there by unpaid contributors or, using a better term, fans. It can refer to pictures, videos, testimonials, tweets, blog posts and everything in between and is the act of users promoting a brand rather than the brand itself.

This is not necessarily a new concept or even a new trend, but adoption of companies utilizing user generated content has been slow to take off from what we are seeing. UGC can be more powerful than the content that a brand puts out because word-of-mouth referrals are the best kind of referrals. When people are excited about your brand or product, they feel compelled to talk about it, and post about it. A great example of the power of UGC was Coke’s “Share a Coke” campaign with personalized Coke bottles with a variety of names attached to the label.

Coke’s customers took over social media posting photos of their Coke bottles, essentially taking on the role as company spokesperson and advertiser. It resulted in millions of additional impressions of the Coke bottles, but what makes UGC content different is the authenticity of real people posting non-stagy and non-corporate looking photos across the globe. Essentially, free advertising for Coke. And how do you develop brand ambassadors like everyday people? You ask for it. But also, ask to make the photos trackable by using a custom branded hashtag in the post, tagging Coke in the post, or even run a contest with people’s photos they post. Just remember, people generally trust their friends and family long before they will trust a brand. Unless, your Coke of course.

2. Tailored Content to your Audience, using Audience Insights

Audience Insights can be used in different ways, on different platforms, to either reach a specific audience, or understand your own audience better and those people interacting with your brand. Call it a buyer persona if you want, but the idea here is that knowing what interests your follows and fans so that you can better tailor the content you develop to match those interests.

A very simple, hypothetical example would be if you were a Running Magazine. What type of content would your audience be interested in seeing or interacting with? Either by looking at your Facebook Audience Insights and your followers, Google Analytics within your Audience Reports, or if you utilized a social listening tool, you would be able to tell that your fan base likes running, but they also like running shoes. Therefore, you would start creating content around running shoes such as videos, demos, reviews and maybe a Top 10 list.

Below is an example of a cross promotion between Red Robin and the Wolverine movie, and it’s doubtful this relationship was on accident. It was most likely based on audience insights.

A more complicated example would be a sports team, pro or college. You might discover that your fan base and followers overwhelmingly like the music of George Straight. Why might that matter? He would be an outstanding candidate for an influencer program to cross promote your team and brand with, or you might consider using the music of George Straight in a video, commercial, or maybe over the sound system at a game during a halftime break. But the idea here is to use the interests of your fans to your advantage to create a stronger bond and more engaging content. And you might just sell more product win the process too.

3. More Video Content, including Live Video

This is also not a new concept, but still has been slow to be adopted by many brands for a variety of reasons. There are many reasons why video is a powerful social media and marketing tool. Here are just a few of the mind-boggling stats and the role video plays in people’s lives:

Nearly 75% of all internet traffic in 2017 was video
Your website is 53% more likely to experience high search rankings if you have a video on the homepage.
64% of all consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.
Social video generates 1200% more Shares than text and images combined.
People will retain nearly 95% of the information in a video as opposed to about 10% of written text

The list goes on and on as to why video should be a major part of your content strategy in 2018. And video can and should be utilized on all social platforms from Facebook to Instagram Stories, and everything in between. Another reason why video is such good content on social networks like Facebook lies within the social media algorithms themselves. Facebook and the others want to reward those business pages that keep people on their site or platform longer, a term known as dwell time. A video is the easiest way to improve dwell time, or even Time on Site for a website. And the longer you keep people around, the more likely they are to take action you want them to do. Make video creation a priority in 2018.

4. Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring

First off, what exactly is social listening? You’ve probably heard the term, but what is it and what can it do. The answer is A LOT. In simple terms, Social listening is the process of tracking conversations around specific phrases, words or brands, and then leveraging them to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences.

You can:

Track overall brand health
Create content your audience craves
Generate ideas for marketing campaigns
Improve your customer experience
Drive strategic product decisions

Social Media Monitoring collects every social mention and action. To put it simply, “monitoring sees the trees; listening sees the forest.”

You generally need specific software or an agency to handle this part for your business because no one wants to sift through 25 million tweets or 12 million Instagram hashtags each day to find the data they are after. But with listening you don’t necessarily have to look at each tweet your brand or product is mentioned in, but you can. Listening is about looking at the aggregate of your mentions, and make a business decision based on that large sample. With that, you can uncover good and bad things about your company, but the idea behind listening is that you can act on those things based on a common theme. Like if you were a large IT company and people were complaining about downtime. People take to social media and the web to stage these complaints in many cases. If your company didn’t have social listening in play, you might not be able to uncover the threat to your business, or least not quick enough.

But you can use listening to track what your competitors are up to, what’s working for them, and maybe even what’s not working for them. You can use this data to guide your own content strategy. And you can also see how you stack up against your competitors in terms of branding, or what is referred to as Share of Voice. There’s a lot of your business can learn, but also put into play if you utilize a social media listening company to harvest this data. It can take you out of the dark, and develop valuable insights about your business.

5. Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content is simply any content that is posted and shared that is NOT permanent. But this form of content is no longer just a SnapChat mainstay, it has infiltrated Instagram with huge success behind Instagram Stories. You might think, “What is so incredible about content I make that disappears in 24 hours, what’s the purpose?” Well, a lot in fact. Because of the way that Stories are created, by using content that is no more than 24 hours old, and stays live for no more than 24 hours people and your followers know your content is real and authentic. Which, at the end of the day, is really what social content is supposed to be…real and authentic. How? By creating “stories” of where you are at any given time, behind the scenes footage, and every day activities become somewhat interesting.

But by doing this as a brand, and doing it regularly or even daily, you start to become part of the daily routine of your fans and even prospective fans. Even slightly voyeuristic.

For marketing purposes, ephemeral content has a way of tapping into that holiest of all grails…customer attention. And because many people have developed a certain mistrust of ads, being real or “native” in your content can build stronger bonds with your audience, but can also be a way to create a new voice within your brand. But don’t forget to speak to your audience.

6. Influencer Marketing

This again is not a new trend or concept, but it is evolving rapidly. Influencer marketing is way for brands to reach their target audience by way of using someone else to promote their product or brand. Many celebrities can charge upwards of $100K to make an Instagram post holding a product in their image. But many businesses have failed doing this because they didn’t research the influencers fan base or audience insights, or if even their follower was even real, and not purchased.

The wild west days of companies picking any Instagram “star” because they have 100,000,000 followers are, or should be mostly over. But what will be trending in 2018 is identifying the correct influencer, and measuring the ROI of those campaigns. In other words, it doesn’t make sense for a brand that sells purses to use an influencer whose audience is mostly big game hunters. That will fall flat.

But, as in our previous example above, it would make sense for a Running Magazine to utilize an influencer who talks about running shoes. It’s not always that cut and dry. But now we are seeing a new addition to influencer marketing, and that is the use of what is referred to as micro influencers, or those with around 10,000-50,000 followers. The ROI is generally higher, and engagement rates are usually significantly higher with a smaller follower base. It is also significantly cheaper to hire a micro influencer, maybe even $50-250 per post in many cases. Or even a cut of the sales of a campaign. As we look back at the benefits of social listening, it can help identify those people who are influencers in your industry and remove some of the guesswork if they will be successful for your brand.

So, while influencer marketing is not new, it will become even bigger in 2018 as a valid marketing channel for many businesses, but what will be new is targeting influencers and being more strategic in who you use. But, also the rise of the micro influencer.

These are just a few of the major trends we see coming in 2018 that nearly any business of any size can capitalize on in their marketing and social media efforts. The key is to start planning today, and pick 2-3 you feel you can execute, and move from there. And if you need help executing any of these trends, you can always hire someone to do it for you who has more experience in these areas, or has the time that you and your staff might not have. Whatever the case, start doing your research and planning now, and make 2018 your best social media year ever.

Top 6 Social Media Trends for 2018 For Business of Any Size

1.UGC- Utilizing User Generated Content

2. Tailored Content to your Audience, using Audience Insights

3. More Video Content, including Live Video

4. Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring

5. Ephemeral Content

6. Influencer Marketing

Categories

Search

Blog Categories

Related Resources

Archives