Top 5 Social Media Trends to Prepare For in 2018

Social media is one of the best ways to reach and expand your customer base. You couldn’t have missed that, unless you’ve been hitchhiking the Galaxy for the past few years, waiting for Elon Musk’s Tesla car to come around.

If you’ve been at the office all that time, you’ve probably done all the work. You’ve identified the best social channels, you’ve been producing neat content, you’ve nurtured a decent size community that is loving your brand. Here is what you need to know next – the latest trends and updates to help you succeed on social media in 2018.

1. Social is Now Mobile

According to Statista, there are now over 2.46 billion social media users, and counting. Most of them are using the apps via their smartphones:

• Facebook – 95.1 percent of active user accounts accessed the social network via smartphone this January.
• Twitter: 82% of monthly active users are on mobile.
• LinkedIn: 60% of its unique visitors access LinkedIn via a mobile device.
• Pinterest: 80% of its traffic comes from mobile devices.
• Instagram: It’s a mobile-first app, so most of its users are on mobile.
• Snapchat: It only has a mobile app and no desktop version yet.

In order to stay ahead of the game, brands should explore the personalized targeting options, available through social channels, and revisit their mobile marketing strategy.

With Facebook & Instagram still being in the lead, creating great visual content is the most efficient way of nurturing rewarding relationships with your prospects and leads. Keep in mind that these days social media users can quickly identify marketing visuals vs real shared ones, so jump-start your creative mind and produce some truly engaging content.

2. Social Messaging is On

Social messaging overtook social media, creating new opportunities for marketers. Enter chatbots.

• Facebook Messenger hit 100,000 bots in April 2017 just in five months.
• 1 in 3 Americans is willing to make a purchase through a chatbot.
• Compared to phone calls, chatbots are time-saving. For businesses in the banking and healthcare sections, the average time saved is 4+ minutes, with $8 billion cost savings projected by 2022.
• 85% of all customer interactions will be powered by chatbots by 2020.
• 80% of businesses will be using chatbots by 2020.

“Chat apps will come to be thought of as the new browsers; bots will be the new websites. This is the beginning of a new Internet.”

– Ted Livingston, founder of Kik

3. Videos

Videos are the most popular content type on any of the social channels. We all know that by 2019 video content will be the driving factor behind most of the search traffic in the US. Producing high quality and engaging videos with educational, entertainment, storytelling or direct sale purposes, is what marketers may want to spend some time and money on.

4. Tell Them a Story

Storytelling is about connecting with your audience by creating content that resonates with it. Carefully mix characters, conflict, climax, and resolution, stay true to your brand’s voice and keep it real. Emotion, authenticity, and personal connections and driving to action.

Experiment to see which social media tools work best for your brand. Write a long post, create a video, or simply use a Facebook & Instagram Story features. You can even put to use the different type of ad formats, such as Carousel or Canvas on Facebook, to tell a gripping story.

If you’re interested in Instagram marketing in depth you can check  Moosend‘s full guide “From Zero to Kylie“.

5. Social Media Advertising

Organic reach keeps falling, so it is no surprise that businesses are spending more money on social advertising. Social media ad spendings are growing more than 20% annually, and the expectations are that this growth rate will be steady.

Social platforms’ updates and new features present marketers and users with new possibilities. Not unlike playing online chess with a bot, while white water rafting – just when you’ve mastered the rules of the game and the direction of the currents, everything changes. So stay alert, keep an eye out for new trends, and regularly update your social strategy, so that you improve your social media ROI.

Subscribe to our blog for all important updates and more tips.