Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Social Media ROI Needs New 2019 Strategies

As social media marketing competition rises, organic reach dwindles and social ROI gets tougher, social media marketers need to hone their data, targeting and creative strategies. Here are just a few big social media trends for next year, based on analysis by Hootsuite and Social Media Today (SMT). Trust in social networks has declined. Edelman’s "2018 Trust Barometer" found that 60% of respondents no longer trust social media companies, and Facebook is among the hardest-hit, reports Hootsuite. As a result, Hootsuite sees brands focusing less on maximizing reach and more on "transparent, quality engagement." Instead of posting the same content across multiple platforms, successful marketers are likely to favor context-specific and audience-specific messaging that reaches smaller but more valuable groups in 2019. The need to balance privacy demands with personalization is leading marketers to be more open about when and why data is collected, but up to 96% of marketers surveyed still see personalization as driving customer relationships despite privacy issues, per SMT. As use of social media influencers has grown, their prices have climbed, and, at the same time, trust in celebrity influencers has declined, both Hootsuite and SMT report. One solution is to increase use of experts and employee advocates over celebrity influencers, notes Hootsuite. Meanwhile, SMT suggests more micro-influencer marketing. While they have followings of fewer than 10,000 people, most of the micro-influencers' followers are genuinely interested, and since micro-influencers are not massively targeted by advertisers, they are seen as trustworthy and down-to-earth, notes SMT. Meanwhile, when it comes to ad placement, Hootsuite predicts that "the news feed may be slowly becoming a thing of the past," as social media users increasingly prefer content in a stories format. Certainly, the stories format has exploded on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp--and is even being tested by LinkedIn. In fact, Hootsuite cites a recent finding by consulting firm Block Party that sharing via that method is growing 15 times faster than feed-based sharing. Meanwhile, the pay-to-play era is driving larger social ad budgets, Hootsuite notes, with "The CMO Survey" reporting a 32% increase in social budgets in 2018 alone. At the same time, ROI is getting tougher. The most recent "Internet Trends Report" from Mary Meeker  found that while click-through rates on Facebook are up 61%, CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) have soared 112%. The good news is that the gaps between social media and commerce are narrowing. For example, Meeker’s 2018 report also showed that 55% of survey respondents have purchased products online after social media discovery. Shopping is being made easier by technologies such as in-stream payment tools, video plugins and social media special features such as shoppable posts, Instagram's Explore shopping tab, Facebook Marketplace and Pinterest’s Buyable Pins. For more on social media trends, see our onsite blog post at http://www.acculistusa.com/harness-these-2019-trends-to-boost-social-media-roi/