You really cannot have a successful digital marketing strategy without having social media, but it can be difficult to determine which social media trends to follow to get the most out of your social media strategy.

There are so many platforms available now, and each has its own demographics, that you may be unsure of whether you should be focusing mostly on Instagram or Twitter or if you should try one of the newer niche platforms.

Here are some social media trends that can help you boost your social media strategy.

Personalization

Personalization has been an important part of digital marketing for years now, and it continues to be true. Having your brand on social media allows you to customize your content to target segments of your audience, as we can see the most clearly in social media advertising; platforms offer advanced targeting features for ad campaigns.

You can use the advanced targeting features to pinpoint the different segments of your audience and customize your ads accordingly. Audiences like to see content that is explicitly selected for them; it forms an important part of the customer experience.

Video

It has been proven repeatedly that video content is one of the most popular forms of content available. Whether they are watching a TikTok short or lengthy YouTube video, it is clear that video is the most captivating form of content for most audiences, and it can help you retain them too.

TikTok has been growing rapidly in popularity and quickly became the best way to engage with the Generation Z crowd. You can use the TikTok shorts to experiment with new types of marketing strategies, too, as you look to see what strategies can engage Generation Z if they are your target audience. People want relatable content, so keep that in mind when you work on targeting a younger crowd.

Niche Platforms

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are typically the three platforms that come to mind when someone mentions social media. However, there are quite a few niche platforms that also deserve attention and should be utilized to help maximize your reach.

LinkedIn is great for the professional crowd and B2B marketers who want to create business connections.

TikTok, while a newer platform, gained a large amount of popularity among the younger generations quickly, and its popularity grew even more when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed people indoors.

Stories

Social media stories have become increasingly common in the last couple of years since they emerged. Since Instagram Stories were first created in 2016, they instantly became extremely popular, and now reach 500 million users daily. The feature is also available on Facebook, and it is popular there as well, but Instagram is by far the most popular platform for Stories.

You can add music to your Instagram Stories to make them more appealing, and you can make them interactive; this is often seen in the form of a prompt to “swipe up” for more information, which then leads you to a landing page regarding whatever the story was about, giving you a well-rounded advertisement. You can also add animated stickers to your Stories, turn them into polls, and much more.

Additionally, if someone tags you in something, you have an option to share it to your Stories right away, getting the most out of that tag as soon as it emerges. You can also share multiple photos in your Stories, so you are not limited to only posting one Story per day; each one will individually last for 24 hours from the time it is posted.

You can also share your Instagram Stories on Facebook, so you can cross-promote your Stories with ease. Between the two platforms, you can help boost traffic to your website and interact with your audience in a new way.

Instagram is Hiding Likes

Tracking engagement on your social media platforms is important, and Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms available. Likes can play a big part in tracking that engagement.

Last September, Instagram began testing hiding likes from users, and it has been spreading since then. Likes have been something that people use to measure as popularity and validation, and fake likes can mislead brands who think their reach is much bigger than it actually is. While you can still see likes on your own Instagram posts, you will not be able to see them on other people’s posts, so you cannot compare the number of likes on your post versus a similar one from your competitor.

Officials at Instagram said that the reason they made the decision to hide likes is because “the platform is getting too competitive and people are focusing more on likes rather than posting quality and engaging content to encourage interaction with other users. It is found that in many cases, users tend to take off their posts since they do not get enough likes on their posts. With many studies conducted on the impact of social media on human interaction, researchers have found an unhealthy obsession of likes among many users which is quite harmful to the mental wellbeing.”

If this move works well for Instagram, other social media platforms may begin using it as well, so influencers and marketers will need to find a new way to measure their engagement before this happens. We may be finally seeing an end to vanity metrics, so marketers need to begin to think about how to measure engagement in a more meaningful way now before other platforms do away with vanity metrics.

Conclusion

While social media is constantly evolving, the one thing that will not evolve is that each platform is designed to help you interact with and engage with your customers. Strategy to help you reach them is important but try not to get so caught up in your social media strategy that you lose sight of the most important part of social media: the people.

If you need help with your social media strategy, contact the experts at Bellevue Public Relations today!