With 2018 being a pretty explosive year for social media, we can’t wait to see what awaits us in 2019.
Real Video Content
Videos have allowed us to ‘story live’ rather than ‘story tell,’ allowing brands to share more of their personality through real video content.
Story content is traditionally more ‘human’ than professionally edited advertising material, we’ve noted a significant increase in behind the scenes material and authentic shots from the day-to-day lives of businesses.
Most businesses have experienced a decline in organic reach via social media compared to previous years, this has lead them to utilise paid advertising opportunities to get messages across. Paid social media ads are increasing dramatically, throughout the past year we have seen many brands begin to introduce paid ads into their mix, this is primarily due to the user-friendly nature of the Facebook advertising platform and the ability for individuals to create detailed audiences with ease. With such a big increase in paid advertising, we now see an increase in competition, that’s why it’s so important to ensure ads remain interesting, authentic and translate directly into sales.
We’ve also seen the introduction of e-commerce directly into social channels, allowing buyers to complete their sales journey purely through social media. We expect this trend to skyrocket during 2019 and predict the introduction of sales through stories rather than through posts.
Consumers vs Brand transparency
In 2018, we noticed a demand for brand transparency from consumers, they now want to know exactly who they are interacting with on social media and who is receiving their data. For brands, this means they need to appear more authentic, transparent and genuine in order to establish perceived trust from consumers.
Stories, stories, stories, yep, you guessed it, Hootsuite has released data showing that stories are now growing 15x faster than feed-based sharing. For us content creators, this means stories are a ‘must’ for the social media marketing mix.
Customers are wanting to converse with brands via messaging services. They tend to turn to messaging apps to communicate with companies and we’ve noticed a dramatic increase in brand confidence from individuals who are able to initiate an online dialogue with businesses.
So it’s looking like 2019 will be yet another big one for social media, with new technology making businesses even more intelligent when it comes to social media marketing, we are excited to have these new opportunities as an agency and ride the digital wave in 2019!
You can now read about the social media trends of 2020 in our latest blog.