Users increasingly tend to favor human connections and trust brands that have a strong personality and identity. Brands promote personal relationships with their customers and offer them relevant content for better engagement.
1. The triumph of the video format
The video should be part of your priorities in 2018. According to the moderator's blog, it is expected that videos will represent 80% of internet traffic by 2019. This type of content is very popular. It is thus necessary that the creation of videos has the objective of getting traffic to your website in order to convert this audience in prospects. With a video, you create a certain transparency and sincerity. Values that are particularly favored by Internet users: Snapchat, Youtube and Facebook record 20 billion videos viewed each day.
You do not need to be a professional editor to be able to embark your community in your world. There are several popular formats for users:
- The live consists in sharing live event or achievement,
- The story is an ephemeral format broadcast for only 24 hours. As an example on Instagram, the time spent watching videos has increased by 80% since January 2018 compared to 2017.
- The tutorial is a learning guide
- The backstage of a company
2. Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots take place
Although artificial intelligence is seen as dehumanized actions of sales and marketing, it helps marketers to focus on a more authentic customer experience. The machine learning comes into play as it recovers the diversity of data (posts, video, images ...) unstructured from social networks, in order to classify and outline relevant information about their customers.
As for Chatbot, its main goal is marketing because it accompanies buyers. They are the ones that discussed with you on Messenger, they are useful to improve customer services, send contents or promotions.
3. Evolution of SEO with voice requests and content to index
According to Forbes, in 2020 it is estimated that 50% of searches will be vocal. Recently Alexa, the new voice assistant of Amazon, has made a triumphal entry. You can ask it all kind of actions and researches for you. As a result, US marketers recommend that you start optimizing your SEO content for voice search; because SEO continues to advance in an ultra-competitive climate. Google does not drag it out to assign the best positions to the most relevant content.
4. Counter the "organic reach" decline
There is a significant decrease in the organic reach of the pages. This usually refers to the audience obtained by a brand, when the latter addresses subscribers on a social network without going through a paid advertising format. Now, things get harder because Facebook changed its algorithm to promote friends’ content in the news feed rather than businesses. To adapt to these changes, companies will be increasingly forced to go through advertising campaigns to reach more people. However, seeing the rising cost of advertising on Facebook, it also pushes companies to turn to other social networks. For example, Instagram, which has more than 500 million active users a day.
5. The efficiency of instant messaging
With its many features: sending photos, videos, documents... Chats are growing more and more because this new messaging facilitates communications in real time wherever we are. Instant messaging apps are exploding across the world. According to Le Point, the two leaders, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, both exceeded a year ago one billion users. Beyond personal use, this tool is increasingly valued in companies, the most used being Skype. The main reasons for use mentioned are efficiency and optimization of teamwork thanks to group conversations.
6. Micro-influencers on the front of the stage in 2018
Conventional advertising is less and less tolerated by consumers. However influence marketing is a strategic direction for brands. The goal is to find the right personality, reputed in their industry, to make themselves known and by extension sell their products and services.
Influencers, followed by an active community, are people passionate by different themes and that wish to share their experience on their networks. The influencer is an opinion leader who must be transparent and honest with its community. So this is a real opportunity to promote its visibility and choose its image.
7. The mobile in pole position
It plays a central role in consumption and buying behavior of web surfers. Indeed, these cybernauts spend majority of their time on social networks so this should encourage marketers to develop contents that are thought to be "mobile first". This concept starts with designing a mobile website prioritarily, and then gradually adapt it for larger screens. This method is opposed to the ordinary way of progressively degrading a website to fit a display on smaller screens.
8. Longer but more relevant content
The length of a post is often difficult to manage on the network. Indeed, you have to be synthetic for your content to be read, without falling into the facility of providing empty and disappointing contents, only in the hope of generating reactions as likes, comments or shares. Twitter has itself increased his characters from 140 to 280, allowing to better express opinions.
It is preferable to provide value added to targets by demonstrating expertise on a topic. The upgrading of the proposed services combined with the research of both quantitative and qualitative commitments become then priorities.
9. Infographics, a new niche
Social networks can quickly turn into a perilous jungle for unwaries. Internet users are constantly solicited by publications of any type. Whether it is from their circle of friends, or from companies’ pages they have subscribed to, their feed is saturated by many posts that do not always capture their attention.
To catch it, it is necessary to publish relevant and synthetic content such as infographics. Those are images of facts and data, often statistical, summarizing a situation. They can be read quickly and shared a lot. Indeed, we can see an increase in traffic of business pages that posted infographics, and more importantly, an excellent storage of data by the readers.
10. The GDPR, the key word of the year
This is truly a major upheaval for small businesses as well as for giants such as GAFA who must comply with this new regulation. Since May 25th, 2018, the RGPD has come into force. These new European data protection rules have two goals : to protect the private data of users but also to ensure the smooth flow of data within the European Union. RGPD gives more control over information shared by users. To collect those information, businesses must explicitly request an agreement and inform users how they will use their data. Winning trust from web surfers becomes a priority for companies. Marketers are now starting to use data protection and security as a selling point.
Conclusion
With the decline of the organic reach of publications on social networks, it is essential to find levers to increase visibility, credibility and especially to keep its community. Advertising, influencers and video contents are tracks to explore for the coming months or even years for small structures!
Good to know: The advertising expenses on social networks are growing by 20% per year worldwide and should catch up with the newspapers spending in 2019, according to a study by Zenith, media agency of the Publicis group.
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