Marketing, Social media

7 Social Media Marketing Trends for Small Businesses in 2020

Social media has become synonymous with digital marketing these days, and that is due to people spending a large part of their day on social media. Thus, today one of the leading ways to market your brand is on social media platforms.

However, the nature of social platforms is far from static, meaning what used to work last year or a few years ago might not give you the same results today. You might ask why?

Well, there can be a couple of reasons behind this, some of them are as follows:

  • Shifting user preferences, for example, people moved from Facebook to Instagram since video content became more popular.
  • Sometimes even new social channels come into existence, this is apparent with TikTok, which is growing its user base at an aggressive rate.

These changes determine the way people react to social media and how well marketers can reach and engage their audience.

Therefore, it is integral that marketers understand the trends and stay ahead of the curve if they want to utilize social media to their ends. Understanding the latest trends is the key, and for that, you have to keep yourself updated and regularly check what’s new in the social media marketing industry.

That’s why every business, whether small or large, is flocking to social media with the hopes of connecting with their target audience. The content overload that comes with using social media for marketing makes the competition very tough, so to make your brand stand out from the herd, you need a clear social media marketing strategy for your business.

Social Media Marketing Trends You Cannot Miss

Small businesses can also leverage the benefits of social media with an elucidated marketing strategy and with the help of this article we want to suggest a few trends that small businesses can monetize upon in 2020.

1. Build Social Media Communities

Social media communities are not new, but they are still an efficient way to engage the audience. Social media communities are social groups that are created by brands to provide a networking platform for their customers. They are usually private groups that like-minded people join to talk about their common interests.

A good example of this is Facebook Groups, which are utilized by many brands to bring their audience together in a meaningful way. The point here is to build communities around your content, this way you can deliver the right content to the right segment, and therefore, maximize engagement.

2) Include Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral means short-lived, hence, this type of content is available for only a small duration of time and then disappears. Snapchat and Instagram stories are a perfect example of this type.

This content type evolved keeping in mind the short attention span of the people nowadays. That’s why this content type is so popular these days. People spend hours scrolling from one story to another because they are short, engaging and addictive.

This trend is noticed by marketers and they are including it in their social media marketing strategy. A study suggests that the average brand, regardless of its audience size, posts about seven days a month.

3) Promote User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is another way to grow your social media presence. While UGC is not new, its usage is increasing as marketers recognize its importance.

Some brands encourage their users to create content and tag them to get a chance to feature on their page. Similarly, others run marketing campaigns and encourage their users to take part by submitting their entries to the campaign.

Though there are many creative ways to leverage UGC, the important thing is that you integrate it into your marketing strategy. Because UGC is considered more authentic than branded content and can do wonders for your brand image.

4) Collaborate with Social Media Influencers

Social media today, has no dearth of influencers who are getting paid steep amounts to promote brands on various platforms. This sudden abundance of influencers is due to the growth of the use of social media as a marketing platform. That’s why businesses nowadays are more inclined to invest in influencer marketing.

There are many benefits of influencer marketing, some of them are :

  • It delivers good results despite being cheaper than a paid campaign.
  • It helps to generate leads and achieve a variety of marketing goals as well.

You can collaborate with a network of small, relevant and niche influencers. This is cost-efficient and promises higher engagement as well, which is a great way for small businesses to grow brand awareness.

5) Generate Video Content

Video is one of the most engaging forms of content and is a clear winner among other types of marketing strategies. A study from Cisco claims that by 2022, 82 percent of all IP traffic will be video traffic. This clearly demonstrates that video is set to take the center stage among all types of content on social media. It is necessary to adhere to this trend and start utilizing it to stay relevant in the social media domain.

If you are not generating videos, it is high time that you include them in your social media strategy. You can start by using Stories for your social media content and advertisement. Even if you are an image or text dominated platform, you can still start adding videos to your content.

6) Social media as Customer Service

Good customer service is important to provide a great customer experience. Nowadays it is easy to look for services, reviews and customer complaints online as a lot of them are shared on social media, which is more transparent and visible to everyone.

This trend came to light when customers started reaching out to brands on social media. Then brands started responding to such messages and directing their customers to the right channels. Adopting this strategy offers an easy way to speak with the customers and directly and deal with the issues.

This kind of online interaction helps with increasing advocacy for your brand. In other words, it increases customer loyalty. But make sure to develop an interactive customer support team as a failure to respond to such issues also decreases brand loyalty since it is visible to everyone on social media.

7) Use Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools make it easy to acquire data and insights on your customers and refine your social media strategy. Social listening has become an indispensable tool for every marketer. Brands are using it for many different use cases due to the ease with which you can tap into social conversation and gain meaningful insights.

You can acquire a lot of information using social listening tools, for example, your brand’s identity among your audience, the impact of your social media strategy, your customer demographics, etc. Hence, it is very important that you integrate these tools into your social media strategy. There are many social listening tools,(like Hootsuite) you can choose from, start using the one that is the best fit according to your needs.

Final word

These are some of the trends that small businesses can leverage to develop a strong social media strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

Social media is a dynamic and ever-changing landscape and there is a lot of competition these days, so you have to adapt to new trends to gain an edge. We hope this article helps you to develop an efficient social media strategy for your small business.

Stay Tuned!

If you have any questions, please ask below!