3Jan

Social Media: New Year, New Strategy

Last week, we highlighted social media trends to watch for in 2017. Now that the year’s finally here, let’s look at how you can utilize those trends for your business.

Think Visually.
Written content was king in 2016, but the advent of new avenues for advertising have opened the door for major opportunities. So what’s getting buzz this year? Well, here’s a snapshot;

• Facebook Live – Live video lets you engage with customers in real time.
• Social Storytelling – Like Facebook Live, Instagram and Snapchat’s “story” feature allows you to connect with users by sharing short videos and photos.
• Interactive Campaigns – A photo contest on Instagram or Facebook, for example, is another way to generate interest in your brand.
• Virtual/Augmented Reality – This new technology has the potential to make advertising a fully immersive experience for customers.

The present is visual.

Be Relatable and Reliable.
If 2016 taught us anything, it’s that customers want content that resonates and that isn’t a flat-out lie.

The key to being relatable is understanding your audience. Teenagers in high school have a different perspective than recent college grads, and both of those groups may not find resonance in content geared towards established professionals or new parents.

Look at your customer’s demographics. Look at the content that demographic likes. Learn from that content, then adapt it to your brand.

Being relatable pays off. Remember, brands get followers on Facebook and Twitter for posting content their customers like.

Reliability seems like a no-brainer. After all, who wants to be lied to? However, in this era of “fake news,” there’s a healthy dose of skepticism in the average consumer.

It’s imperative that everything you post or share or create online reassures the customer of your brand’s reliability. Like relatability, being reliable requires research. This time, you’re looking into your brand’s reputation and working from there. This may mean disproving negative claims or emphasizing positive feedback from trusted sources.

Here are some examples of content that conveys reliability.

• Videos that demonstrate an application of your product – tutorials, recipe videos, and other examples
• Influencer marketing – Social media “influencers” use your product or service and encourage their fans to do the same.

Smarter, not more, content.

There’s this idea in marketing that you need to be everywhere at once—on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn. While this seems like a good idea in theory, you can end up spreading yourself extremely thin across multiple platforms instead of building a solid audience on a single platform.

Think of it like this: If you have a limited amount of time and money to spend on marketing, where will that time and money be best spent? That is, what strategy or platform will yield the most benefit your business?

Key Tips For Your 2017 Marketing Strategy

• Recognize Your Audience’s Primary Social Media Platform – If you’re a B2B service, it makes more sense to emphasize your LinkedIn presence than keeping up-to-date with Snapchat. Or, if you’re a business marketing to teenagers, you should spend more time on Instagram and Snapchat than on Facebook or LinkedIn.
• Become More Interactive – Engage with your customers directly through social media or create interactive experiences for your customers. This can range from a quiz on your website to a full-fledged game or video on VR.
• Rethink Old Content – Your business shared a written post a year or two ago, and it garnered a lot of attention. Instead of sharing that same post again, think about how you can reiterate that same information in a more relevant format.

2017 isn’t just a year of developing new strategies; It’s a year of experimentation. Take the New Year and create a New Strategy designed specifically for your brand.