Social Media Marketing Trends YOU OUGHT NOT Ignore
The success of social media marketing lies in the right mixture of fruitful strategies. The incorrect combination will simply decrease the traffic from targeted customers instead of attract them. If you devise your social media strategies such as social media marketing optimization on the basis of current trends, you can increase profits and use social networking sites effectively for marketing. Here are the recent trends highlighted within an article published by Forbes based on the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Low Usage of Social Bookmarking Sites
In line with the research reports, the application of social bookmark creating sites has decreased to 10 percent from 26 percent in 2011. This considerable drop of usage clearly indicates the fall of bookmarking sites. Even though the sites including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Pinterest remain popular among marketers, majority of sites (e.g. DIGG, Friendfeed) are almost dying. Therefore, it isn’t a good practice to trust a bookmarking site blindly for marketing purposes in today’s scenario. Instead, check for the websites that are hottest and perform the bookmarking very cautiously.
Decline of Daily Deal Sites
Daily deal features or simply daily offerings of deals are seen as a powerful way to attract numerous targeted customers at a time. The study report says that around 80 percent of marketers are not interested in using the most popular daily deal sites including Groupon or Living Social for his or her campaigns in the near future.
Now people concentrate more on the significant amount of returns that they receive from their purchases over time. Hence, you should use social media sites for long term marketing goals rather than daily goals.
Top Sites for Social Media Campaigns
Marketers who use social media marketing for marketing will obviously perform social media campaigns (using social networking sites for promotion) for his or her products or services to attract targeted customers. The campaigns will undoubtedly be successful only if the relevant site is popular among the customers.
The study report indicates that marketers who save money than 40 hours weekly for social media marketing perform their campaigns more intensely through Google+, You Tube, Pinterest and Instagram compared to those who spend six hours or less a week on social media. Also, around 92 percent of marketers who’ve five or more years of experience prefer LinkedIn than 70 percent of marketers having significantly less than five years of experience. Forum marketing has also decreased to 16 percent this year from 24 percent in 2011.
Around 67 percent of marketers are planning to increase campaigns through Twitter even though it is really a slight decrease from 69 percent last year. Young marketers, more than older ones prefer photo sharing sites including Instagram for launching campaigns. 62% chose blogging as most suitable platform to master, that is the highest one accompanied by Google + (61%) and Facebook (59%).
Trends of B2C and B2B Marketers
Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers use Facebook at a higher rate of 67% than other platforms. Regarding Business to Business (B2B) marketers, both Facebook and LinkedIn have equal majority of 29% each. Given below is the pie chart showing usage statistics for every platform pertaining to B2C and B2B marketers.
B2B marketers use a more diverse selection of platforms in comparison to B2C marketers. Both of these do not completely utilize blogging and have minimal You Tube usage.
If you are a B2B or B2C marketer, try to encourage blogs as they are regarded as the most used social media platform. YouTube being the next largest search engine, you can enjoy the benefits it provides by posting low-cost videos. Orabrush (B2C Company) and Blentec (B2B Company) have become strong brands by using low cost YouTube videos.
As B2B marketers increasingly use LinkedIn, they have an opportunity to utilize SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn). This social media marketing entity may be used for generating leads for B2B organizations.
Fewer Check-ins Online
As per the study reports, there is a reduction in the usage of geo-location services including Foursquare from 17% in 2011 to 11% this season. These services allow check-in to your locations automatically online. The decline in these kinds of services indicates that people are now concerned more about privacy and safety. Marketers can tackle this example by introducing contests and rewards. This will encourage people to check-in more.
If Social Media Management agency are still following a old strategy for social media marketing, then it is the time to develop new strategies predicated on all these current trends. It is better to entrust this tedious task to a reputable social media marketing company that provides reliable social media services instead of try implementing the strategies by yourself.