Throughout the year, social media landscape has witnessed many changes. From new social networks making to the fore to major revamps to the regular one, the social arena appeared to be very busy all this year.
As we are leaving to the next year with a fresh note, we will have new social media challenges to meet. I personally feel that the changing dynamics of social media needs your full attention in 2019. Unless you aren’t prepared to adopt, the changes will keep puzzling you.
Top Social Media Trends 2019
The article sails you through 5 social media trends of 2019. Having a better understanding of these trends will help you make required changes to your social media marketing strategy in the coming year.
1. Eminent Spread of Messaging Apps:
Trends show that users have largely turned to messaging apps this year. They overpowered the reach of social media apps. And if trends continue, messaging apps will dominate the social landscape in 2019. Messaging apps are now the best bet for marketers for their ability to create real time and relatively quicker engagement.
Social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat etc. have almost captured the big chunk of messaging market. And they continue to add advanced features like Stories, news updates and automated bots to the platform for broadening their reach.
Leading messaging apps WhatsApp is already tapping the potential instilled in messaging by allowing business accounts to engage customer right from the platform. It’s evident now that big brands and publishers have plans in place to tapping into the latest messaging trend.
2. Trust and Loyalty will become the Buzzword:
Growing trust deficit and privacy concerns turned to be the top reason why people switched to messaging app from social networks. Recent data breaches reported in Facebook and then in Google are two instances that led companies to rethink on mechanism to building trust with the audience. Having learnt lessons from recent data braches, brands and publishers will have to be transparent and truthful with their audience.
3. Focus on Specific Channels:
As the paradigm of social media is heading to a fiercer competition, it’s a wise idea to stick to the best-performing channels for your business. Long before when Facebook was the only platform with massive user base, brands looked at Facebook for their marketing and branding initiatives. Now, the social ecosystem is entirely changed with multitude of social networks where your niche audience could be found.
In this scenario, you need to focus on those channels where you think your potential customers are. It’s a better practice to follow your niche audiences that are relevant to your business. It’s futile to broadcast the same to message to all platforms. You may feel it like limiting your reach but focusing on platforms with the best ROI really works. For instance, if Vimeo brings the best audience engagement and ROI, stick with it. Increasing ad budget for YouTube won’t be of any help.
So the idea is to audit your brand performance on all social media platforms and set goals. This way you can march in the right direction.
4. Live Streaming Videos and Podcasts, and will add Value:
In 2019, content will remain the king. Besides quality and audience centered blogging, long form content will play an important role in engaging audience if written with a plan and properly formatted. Beyond the text, podcasts, livestreaming and videos will be game changers in coming year.
With the advent of Google’s YouTube and Facebook’s Live, social media brought video content to the mainstream. Now, millions of videos and livestreams are being uploaded on a daily basis on different video streaming platforms. The growing popularity of the video content is pushing brands to tap the opportunity vested into it.
To allow video content consumption on their platforms, Social networks have even made necessary algorithm tweets. This is to make sure that video posts and livestreams appear more frequently on user’s feeds.
Soon, podcasts will be a dominating tool for marketers who seek to build their own personal brands and spread the business message. Most podcasters still focus on the content they convey, instead of delivering a blatant sales pitch. This is why they are still relevant and resonate well with users.
5. 2019 will be the Year of Augmented Reality (AR):
It’s only a matter of time when Augmented Reality aka AR and Social media mix will bring great results for marketers. In 2019, we are expecting even more applied use of this combination to unleashing opportunities. Brands have already started using AR to facilitate seamless customer experience. Indeed, AR has capabilities to make the brand message engaging, and more actionable.
Social network giant Facebook is investing big time AR ventures. It’s itself an assertion how serious they are about AR. Facebook’s messenger app is already powered with AR Camera effects for engaging messaging and customer experience. Brands aren’t leaving any stones unturned to capitalize the AR trend to improve customer satisfaction.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.