Social media can be extremely beneficial to a business for a number of reasons:
- Learn more about your customers and connect with your audience on a personal level (including specific audience wants and needs)
- Reach new audiences, meaning there’s more opportunity for conversion
- Offer fast, quality customer service
- Increase market share
- Create relationships
- Increase brand awareness
- Establish yourself as an industry expert
- Increase brand recognition
- Improve brand recognition
To name but a few. However social media is constantly changing and evolving, this presents both a problem and an opportunity. If your business doesn’t change with the trends it runs the risk of getting lost and left behind, however if you’re on the ball you may be able to win new traffic from your competitors.
Here are our top five social media trends to watch in 2016:
1. Customer Service – Social media has caused a shift in the way companies contact, interact and engage with clients. If you want to provide excellent customer service your team needs to be taking social media seriously. 78% of customers have not gone through with a transaction based on a company’s poor customer service, not because they were unhappy about the product or service on offer. Make sure to set up clear processes ahead of time, you do not want to be scrabbling around for content if a crisis occurs. Target your customers, use the social networks that they use and interact with them on a personal level. Find opportunities to offer your customers rewards, don’t speak at them speak with them.
2. Employee Advocacy – Overall your employees have 20x more followers and 8x more engagement than your company twitter. A lot of users are going to see their posts. To keep ahead of the game make sure to be clear on your social media guidelines, give examples of potential violations/what should not be said and best practices.
3. Influencer Marketing – If you want to market through a small group of trusted influencers you need to get smart. First find those who you want approach, this could be an individual or a company. Get active with them on social media, making sure to favourite and retweet content that they post. Then put together your outreach campaign, this should include: creating Facebook group, adding a welcome video to your social, adding all potential ambassadors to an email list and preparing your follow up emails.
4. Use Imagery – Striking pictures and images capture attention! Posts with graphics in then gain far more traction and engagement than posts without. Tweets with embedded images in them get on average 150% more retweets. Business Twitter accounts cannot afford to miss out on this valuable source of engagement.
5.Mobile is no longer an option – Mobile is now a necessity to survive, over 3.65 billion people now access social media via smart phones you cannot afford not to utilise this market. Make sure your social media posts are mobile friendly by: sizing posts accordingly to each network, add context to content and make it click-worthy and use call-to-actions throughout.
For more information about the importance of social media or how we can help your business develop its online presence contact us today.