Top 5 SMM Trends 2018 that Shape Social Media Landscape
Top 10 SEO Trends 2018: Stay Ahead of the Game
December 27, 2017
Top 5 Content Trends 2018 to Devise Successful Content Strategy
December 29, 2017
To ensure you standout in this noisy social media marketing world, you must know the major trends of social media, which will change the game of social media marketing. Learn 5 major social media trends, which will shape the social landscape in 2018 and create an effective SMM strategy. An article which shares SMM trends to be used by small to large companies.
Social media landscape changes daily, but this change is so subtle, a majority of us fail to recognize this change. Not believing me? Well, live videos, disappearing content and stories, chatbots, etc. were introduced in recent past years. All these brought major changes in social networking platforms as well. Did we talk about any of it as a major change?
In the past few years, the social Media contributed in creating a connected world. As maximum consumers are on the social platforms, how can brands leave them alone there? The customers attracted brands on social media and now it has become a noisy place where each social media agency is honking about its brands. To stand out of this noise as an exceptional social media management company or an SMM expert, you must know top trends of social media in 2018, which will shape the landscape of social media and customer engagement.
1. Augmented Reality based Ads
You must have read this in many other articles written about social media trends and this is something you should look forward in 2018. Even if the Augmented Reality based project of Google Glass was a huge failure, we can expect to see revolutionary change in social media ads integrated with augmented reality in upcoming years. The huge success of Pokemon Go has given a clear hint that people would love this augmented reality and location based ads. In fact, according to sources Facebook is working on SPACE project, which is based on AR in its owned VR company, called, Oculus. So get ready to see this revolution in the upcoming year. Yes, this type of ads can be expensive and we can expect big brands take control here.
2. Influencer Marketing
An influencer, who has millions of followers shares a product and brand and all the followers start engaging with that Brand is the oldest marketing strategy, which we have been witnessing since childhood. Yes, social media wasn’t there at that time, but, traditional media was the platform at that time. Now, the platform changed, but the technique still works and continues to work in 2018 as well. The SMM campaigns blended with influencer marketing generated better engagement and ROI than a traditional Social Media Marketing campaign. This trend will continue in 2018 and yes, it is expensive and meant for big brands which can invest good amount of money.
3. Live Video
Introduced by YouTube and enhanced by Facebook, Live video feature given a cost effective tool to small and medium sized businesses to fuel up their SMM campaigns. Without much investment, any company can leverage benefits of social media marketing and increase its reach and engagement with the live videos. In 2018, we will see better filters and advanced features in live video functionality. So start making a social media marketing strategy with live video campaigns because any small, medium or big sized business can take benefit of it.
4. More Visuals
You might have seen many big brands have started using more GIFs in their Facebook marketing campaigns. Also, you may have seen a lot of visually good pictures over all social networking sites, including LinkedIn, which is developed for professional networking. The reason is, audience stop by visual content more than just textual content. That’s why the social algorithms are changed in a way that it stops showing pages in the feed, which has only text or links based updates. Also, the engagement rate is higher with visual content than simple text and links, so social networking platform will favor visual content more. Thus, any small or big Brand need to devise social media marketing strategy, which has more of graphics, GIFs, video and other forms of visual content.
5. More Boosted Ads
We, too, are a startup SMM Company in India and just like you or any startup or small business company, we love to get more organic reach, but, this wouldn’t be the case anymore. Sad, but true! In the early days, social networking platforms aimed to get more audience and now as they have more than enough users, which will be there forever, they are in the power position. The social feeds are controlled and influenced by the social platforms and the insights make it clear the boosted ads get much more reach than organic posts. Even if a post is awesome, it is less likely to get as much reach as a boosted ad. Also, a few social media marketing specialists have claimed that Facebook and other social networking platform favor paid ads more and intentionally decline the organic reach of pages, which don’t use paid ads. We can be wrong with this assumption, but this is the hardcore fact to be digested by each small business owner. We all need to allocate some budget to paid social media advertising to stay in the game.
These are the top 5 trends to be witnessed in the social media landscape during 2018. There can be more revolution like Instagram and Snapchat stories; increased limit of twitter; so on and so forth, but all these changes are subtle. I shared the major trends, which will change the game of many SMM Experts, so you must keep these trends in mind while making strategy of your brand’s social media marketing.
Don’t forget to read our article on Top 10 SEO trends 2018 to develop a successful SEO strategy and top 7 digital marketing trends 2018 to win an overall game of digital marketing.
If you liked our article, please like and share it with your network so others can learn from your expert feed. Please don’t forget to leave your thoughts and feedback in the comment box. We’d love to hear back from you. For more updates subscribe to our Blogs and social pages.
About Author: Ash Vyas
Ash Vyas has 10+ years of practical experience in digital marketing and international business development. She has written 100s of articles on various topics to live her passion of helping people with her knowledge and expertise. In addition to directing Digital Marketers India, Ash also delivers keynote sessions and holds key positions in some international companies as a consultant, director of operations and mentor.
