A closer look at eight of the top social trends that you should be aware of.
Starting a business is no simple task and typically requires a lot of the right pieces to fall into place in order to ultimately obtain success. While it's important that your business idea is sound, this idea will need to be matched with excellent marketing campaigns if you want to effectively grow your business. Among the most important elements of marketing is socializing your brand and networking with your customers.
While running high quality ads and maintaining a premier online presence will certainly help your business gain success, it's also essential that you engage with your customers and make sure to put a face to the business. It's also very easy to conduct marketing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which means that you shouldn't need to sacrifice another aspect of your marketing. If you're currently attempting to enhance your social network marketing efforts, it's important that you keep up-to-date about the latest social trends and how they can affect your business. The following will provide you with a closer look at eight of the top social trends that you should be aware of.
While social media marketing once focused on broad content that could be enjoyed by practically anyone, current social trends are moving closer to personalized content. The modern customer wants their experience with a brand to be more personal, which is why your social media marketing should accommodate these changes. You should consider delivering content to consumers that's directly relevant to their interests. Consumers no longer want to be provided with generic information. This type of information doesn't provide any value to consumers, which is why you won't be able to improve your social media marketing efforts with generic content.
When you post more personalized content on social media platforms, you'll be able to better interact with your customers. The content that you post can act as a jumping off point for you to start interacting with consumers who place comments under the post. When you develop more personalized digital content for your customers, you'll be able to consistently grab their attention, which will keep them focused on your brand and startup business. If you want to see success as a startup, you should focus on standing apart from your competitors. Making personalized content is a great way to do so.
Live-stream videos have been increasing significantly in the past few years and are practically essential if you want to benefit from your social media marketing techniques. When looking specifically at Facebook, videos that were live-streamed in 2018 had an overall engagement rate of right around 4.3 percent, which was much higher than the engagement rate with non-live videos of 2.2 percent. The best live-streaming functionality is available on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
With Facebook, you can easily send a notification to your customers that you're about to go live. If you're using Instagram, a top live-streaming feature that they offer is the ability to interact with another Instagram account for a joint live stream. As for Twitter, they are partnered with the popular Periscope app that allows for easy streaming. Live streaming is a great way for startups to interact directly with their customers without any delay. The comments that you receive during your live stream can help you alter the content to be even better for future streams.
A great way to improve customer service is by messaging your customers online through the various social media channels that you use. Taking these steps will allow you to build a customer relationship that should last. By using analytics, you can effectively identify the users who are looking to interact with your brand on a continual basis. Once you've identified these customers, you can begin to message them. When doing so, make sure that you listen to any suggestions and recommendations that they make for ways that you can improve your product.
If you find that customers have questions in the comment sections underneath your social media content, it's important that you answer them. This social trend is accomplished by engaging in social listening. With the right tools, you can monitor your social media accounts to look for customer feedback and any mentions of your brand. Along with responding to these individuals, you can use the data that you collect to alter your marketing strategy. This can benefit your startup by bolstering your social presence. Better customer service will allow for higher mentions of your brand, which will help you create a strong brand identity and loyalty with the customers you interact with.
While written content is always going to be a viable way to market to your audience, people who heavily use social media platforms are more likely to pay attention to images and videos. If you want to get your messages to a wide audience, images and videos have proven to be powerful tools to share messages. For instance, infographics are increasingly popular on social media platforms and will allow you to display your messaging in a creative and succinct manner.
To understand just how important image and video sharing can be to your startup, you should know that upwards of 300 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook on a daily basis. The modern customer wants the brands and businesses that they follow to provide imagery and video content. Without this content, customer engagement will drop substantially. Video content is particularly popular on Facebook, which means that you can easily interact with your customers and grab their attention by posting regular video updates. Videos and imagery usually receive good responses, which should help your startup with customer retention.
Among the best aspects of marketing your business on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook is that you will have access to influencers, which gives you the opportunity to engage in influencer marketing. Influencers are individuals or celebrities who have become exceedingly popular on social media and have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. If you can get one or more influencers to talk highly about your products, you will open up your brand to a new audience, which should increase your ROI by a very high amount.
If you want influencers to market your product, you should first build a relationship with the influencer before requesting that they review your product. Make sure to follow them, share some of their content, make comments on their content, and even converse with them from time to time. Once you've cultivated a relationship, you'll have a much higher chance of having your request accepted. Users trust influencers on social media platforms and may listen to what they have to say, which is why you shouldn't forego this aspect of social media marketing.
Social media platforms are a fantastic way to build a community around your brand. While it will take a significant amount of time and effort to build a community, many businesses have begun to focus on cultivating a strong community of individuals who use the brand to spread the word about the brand and widen the customer-base. If you interact regularly with people on your social media platforms, you should be able to create a strong community base over time as you increase brand loyalty.
Once you've built a community, these individuals will help your brand by promoting your startup, allowing you to obtain customer feedback, and interacting with various influencers. To maintain this community, you should focus on providing them with valuable content on a regular basis, which may attract more people to become engaged with your brand.
Another social trend that will help you grow your business is developing relationships instead of followers, which is tied into the aforementioned trend of messaging online becoming more popular. The modern customer wants to be engaged with the brands that they use, which means that these customers will want to interact with the online content that you post and the social media community that you've created. As touched upon previously, it's important that you provide your customers with premium customer service.
If you notice that customers are asking questions or have concerns in the comment sections underneath the content that you post, you should take the time to address these questions and concerns. When you actually respond to a customer query, they will likely find that you've exhibited good customer service, which will help you create a strong foundation and relationship with these individuals. This is a great way to increase customer retention rates. As your reputation for providing exemplary customer service grows, more users will gravitate towards your brand.
It's absolutely essential that you focus on mobile marketing with your social media marketing campaign. To better understand just how important mobile marketing can be, it's currently estimated that more than five billion people across the world own a mobile device. It's also estimated that over 51 percent of all social media users in the U.S. will have accessed social media platforms with only a smartphone in 2019, which means that you need to gear your content towards these users.
The best way to get the word out to users about your brand is with mobile marketing, which means that some of your social media campaigns need to be solely focused on mobile customers. When mobile customers feel like their needs are being tended to, you should be able to draw in new customers and build a strong brand identity. Some of these customers may also want to visit your website, which is why it's important that your site has been integrated with responsive functionality.
There are a myriad of additional social trends to follow that will help you create a strong and successful business. Before you decide to gear your marketing campaign towards these trends, it's important to understand that the trends you follow depend entirely on your startup and the needs that it has. If you want your startup to be successful, you should use social marketing techniques that match your brand and will appeal to your target audience.
By being more informed about the different social trends and marketing techniques available to your business, you will increase your chances at engaging with your customer base and ultimately finding success.
Whether you decide to leverage Instagram stories or believe that focusing on videos is the best option for you, altering your social media marketing campaign to accommodate the latest social trends should help you increase customer conversion rates. If the startup that you've created is a life science startup, a great way to heighten your chances for success is by joining a wet lab incubator.
Here at University Lab Partners, we offer a feature-rich wet lab incubator that will provide you with all of the lab equipment and space that you need to grow your business.
Contact or apply now at University Lab Partners to get started with the application process!
Revised 11/18/2020
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