Metric, Video, Shopping Lead Social Media Trends

Social media marketers have a busy, changing landscape to navigate in 2020. Among the top trends highlighted in a recent Entrepreneur magazine article by Deep Patel is a de-emphasis of social media “vanity metrics," such as follower counts and "likes," as both Instagram and Facebook trend toward dropping stress on public likes. Hopefully, marketers will take it as a signal to seek more actionable metrics, such as the rate and quality of user engagement, or user demographics and data for audience targeting. While social media management provider Sprout Social's "Sprout Social Index" monitoring still shows likes/comments as the leading measure of social success (72% of marketers), followed by shares/retweets (62%), nearly two-thirds of marketers surveyed felt that social listening will be more crucial in 2020, meaning a greater concern with what’s being said rather than how many people are looking at a single post. Brent Barnhart at Sprout Social joins Patel at Entrepreneur in listing video as a continuing growth trend for 2020, however. Video will make up 82% of all internet traffic in 2020, according to Social Media Today, and, as Barnhart notes, YouTube is second only to Facebook in terms of active users now, with Chinese-owned social video app TikTok bounding up as the latest video market disrupter. Patel urges brand marketers to prepare for video formats with more stress on creative storytelling that engages viewers in seconds and increased use of audience segmentation for "personalized video" content that is customizable and hyper-relevant to specific market segments. Social shopping is now an integral part of the social media experience, per both Barnhart and Patel. Patel advises meeting user expectations by combining creative and engaging storytelling with a frictionless shopping experience where customers don’t need to leave the social media site to buy products. Barnhart likewise sees increased direct business from customers and points to examples such as Facebook’s roll-out of personalized ad experiences and changing formats and call-to-action by audience targeting. Finally, Patel and Barnhart both predict that influencer marketing will increase use of "nano-influencers" with only a couple thousand followers. Their smaller, better-defined audiences allow for greater personalization and stronger audience engagement, delivering more measurable results. For more see, https://www.acculist.com/metrics-video-and-shopping-lead-2020-social-media-trends/

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/

2018 Digital Marketing: New Tech, Targeting, Tactics

Marketers can expect digital marketing to continue to experience rapid changes this year. Thanks to Forbes magazine's Forbes Agency Council, which recently outlined digital trend predictions for 2018, they may be able to get a head start. The first of the article's 15 trend predictions is continued growth for Augmented Reality (AR), per Chris Carter of Rep Interactive, as mobile devices become more powerful, social apps improve AR integration, and, we would add, traditional print, from direct mail to labels, also embraces AR. Meanwhile, conversational interactions will offer new opportunities and challenges, per a couple of council members—such as Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, chatbots and more. Now that Google says 20% of its mobile queries are voice searches and usage is set to climb further, marketers will need to create content targeting these types of searches and ads for non-traditional venues, predicts Brett Farmiloe of Markitors. Video was a big story in 2017 and is now seen as a basic of success for 2018 marketers, per several Forbes council members. It also means that marketers will face a higher bar in terms of quality. As social media platforms jump into live video and add features, "the shaky, holding-a-phone-in-your-hand live video won't be acceptable anymore," warns Thomas Brodbeck of Site Strategics. Most agree that the days of impersonal e-mail blasts are done, and marketers will be focused on hyper-targeting and personalizing every interaction, forecast several experts. Watch for personalized landing pages connected to each advertising campaign, for example. The need for unbiased targeting, predictive analytics and budgeting for every step of the customer journey will increase use of application programming interfaces for machine-learning algorithms, natural language processing and artificial intelligence, opines Douglas Karr of DK New Media. And as data protection regulation increases, ad tech vendors will need to go beyond tracking behavior with cookies to contextual targeting strategies based on page content, adds Julien Verdier of Adyoulike. "Influencer marketing" had marketing buzz in 2017, but Craig Greiwe of Rogers & Cowan predicts that 2018 will see a collapse of interest because brands that spent big on influencers haven't seen measurable results. He expects brands instead to "zero in on a few select individuals who drive results or move to organic grassroots promotion, and away from high-cost, middle-tier influencers who drive awareness but little ROI." Content marketing and native advertising, meanwhile, remain in the marketing tool box—but with changes. For more, see http://www.acculistusa.com/2018-digital-marketing-trends-technology-targeting-tactics/

How to Harness Social Media for Nonprofit Success

At the upcoming Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) 2017 Conference, we expect to hear a lot about nonprofit social media strategy, so we wondered what social media trends are impacting fundraising this year. A 2017 Redstart Creative blog post identified several noteworthy trends. As in the rest of the digital universe, video is the new response-getting must; now nonprofits can use live video to boost reach and engagement via tools such as new Facebook features allowing live video to be pushed to followers in notifications or timelines. As social media algorithms reduce organic reach and ad competition intensifies, Redstart advises uncluttered "less is more," quality-over-quantity content that focuses on resonating with the target audience. "Reply and engage" should be a new mantra, too, especially since major platform Facebook began keeping score publicly on all brand pages last year by adding a notification that tells viewers how quickly the page replies to messages. Meanwhile, a NonProfitPRO post by Dale Nirvani Pfeifer, founder of Goodworld, cites three basic steps for donor engagement on social media. Step No. 1: Respond quickly. As Pfeifer notes, 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect a brand to respond to their posts within 24 hours, and more than half of Twitter users expect a brand to respond within 2 hours! Step No. 2: Get personal. Responses can include a personal touch, but less time-consuming tactics include tagging supporters in thanks, or a simple “like” or “share” of comments. Step 3: Honor your donors. Even without personalization, make donors feel special via “thank you” messages and the transparency/inclusion of postings of organization news and fundraising goals. Finally, a recent post on npENGAGE by Jeanette Russell, marketing director of the social engagement platform Attentive.ly, underscores the power of "influencer marketing." Attentive.ly evaluated 90 of its nonprofit customers and found that the top 5% of influencers on a nonprofit's e-mail list of 140,000 can reach an average of 34 million people, or 85% the total reach of e-mail and Twitter combined. To identify influencers, use a social scoring methodology based on measurable factors: reach/number of followers, engagement of followers, relevancy, post frequency, and relationship with the organization. Then segment the influencers and their messaging into three main categories, Russell advises: the few high-scoring VIPs; Media (Blogger) Influencers who can be recruited to post to followers; and Everyday Influencers, who may have lower scores but are already on nonprofit e-mail lists so they can be quickly mobilized. For more, see http://www.acculistusa.com/harnessing-social-media-to-drive-nonprofit-success/