Top 24 social media marketing trends for 2016

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016

Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Copyright Š 2016 by Richard Santoro All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,â€? at the email address below. info@socialmedia-authority.com Ordering Information: Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the email address above.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Contents Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 .................................... 0 Introduction ......................................................................................... 3 Mobile will be the first priority ............................................................. 5 Social media will have diverse in-app functionalities ........................... 7 Grab your customers during micro moments .................................... 10 Search engines to be used in social media ......................................... 13 Videos dominate social world ............................................................ 15 Facebook Ad Targeting will likely improve ......................................... 18 Customer Service will go personalized ............................................... 19 Social interaction in apps and private groups .................................... 22 Investment on social ads for traffic .................................................... 24 Focus on Engagement, not viral ......................................................... 25 Strengthening of social media team ................................................... 26 Social media advertising moving on fast pace .................................... 29 Social shopping elevates .................................................................... 32 Quality relationship goes critical ........................................................ 33 Privacy concern continues to rise ....................................................... 35 Obsession for live-streaming .............................................................. 36 Real-time engagement with consumers ............................................. 38 Social shopping continues to rise ....................................................... 40 2


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Audience demand more quality on content ....................................... 41 Influencer Marketing is on rise ........................................................... 42 Social decisions will be highly data-driven ......................................... 43 Visual Content for cross-platform engagement ................................. 45 Social networks continues to focus on commerce ............................. 47 Content is still the king ....................................................................... 48 Conclusion: ......................................................................................... 49

Introduction Social media trends have continued to diversify over the last few years and 2015 was no exceptions. Last year we saw a number of exciting social media developments and milestones reached. We’ve seen the growth of live streaming on social with apps like Blab, Periscope and Meerkat being launched. Facebook hitting the 1 billion mark for users in one day and even Google making changes to its search to reflect the importance of social media posts. It’s a constantly changing field, but now as we are in 2016, the big question is: What does this year have to offer? With the help of my friends over at Social Media Authority and some of the world’s most knowledgeable social media influencers, we have outlined the social media trends that every business will need to track in 2016. For marketers who are about to begin kicking off their social media campaigns and anyone else concerned or passionate about social media 3


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 marketing, who wants to make a difference this year, then this book is for you. In this detailed report you are going to get all the up-to-date social insights required for predicting your social marketing efforts, and to achieve social media marketing success. To acquire new ideas about the most effective social marketing strategies and decide how best to execute the right plans that will generate maximum revenue, you must keep up to date with the trends that will take place in 2016. So here are the top 24 social media marketing trends that are going to dominate this year.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Mobile will be the first priority According to a survey by Statista on the forecast of smartphone users in the US, “For 2016, the number of smartphone users in the United States is estimated to reach 207.2 million.�

Since 2015, there has been a considerable amount of shift in social marketing trends with more focus on mobile users than desktop users. According to research by comScore, there has been a huge rise in number of mobile users as well as their visit to websites using their mobiles.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016

In 2016, mobile marketing will be one of the best social media mediums for marketing campaigns to focus on. You will now need to optimize for mobile perfomance in every possible way and in order to make this happen, its vital to always know where and how your audience is reaching you, through device and channel. Your audience must be able to discover and access your social media content smoothly. In addition, understanding the detail’s about your audience, customer journey and interaction with your brand, prducts and services is criticle to ensure a seemsless expereince across mobile applications, interfaces and apps. Big data and analytic tools have become increasingly more important.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Social media will have diverse in-app functionalities According to comScore, “U.S. users are now spending the majority of their time consuming digital media within mobile applications.” According to the report, 79% of smartphone users use mobile apps almost every day whereas only 52% found among tablet users.

Michelle Goodall, social media consultant & and tutor of Econsultancy’s Social Media & Online PR Training, says, “Social platforms are becoming increasingly competitive about keeping users in-app for as long as possible.”

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Social media platforms are trying expand by incorporating more functionality into their app so as to engage and retain users for longer period of time. In 2016, users will be spending more time on social media and thus giving social media marketers more opportunities to engage with their audience inside one platform. It seem like there will be new technologies coming up for users to interact with social media more diversely and intimately. Facebook is already doing a great job for social media marketers by adding more functionality (Instant Articles, in-post search engine, instant playing videos added last year) to its app.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Facebook is considered as the most used app in terms of audience size and amount of time spent among audience.

Their next target is being built which is a digital assistant. Other social media platforms are already copying this and are on their way of adding more functionality to expand their users’ engagement on social media.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Grab your customers during micro moments According to thinkwithgoogle, “Mobile has forever changed what we expect of brands. It's fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments. Each is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences. After analyzing data, researching and talking to real people, we have some insights to share.”

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, says, “These moments, or “micro-moments,” are when we act on a need—to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something or buy something. They are intent-rich moments where

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 decisions are being made and preferences being shaped� in one of his articles on Wall Street Journal.� Now is the time to capture customers during their micro moments being spent on social media, right then and there! It makes perfect sense: if your customers are functioning in micro-moments, so should your brand. Social media marketers are not going to wait for the right time to grab their customers in 2016 because they have now become aware that social media are used by customers spontaneously (for researching of particular information, shopping of an item or updated news) and they should be captured right in those moments. Forget about the late-game shows and forget scheduling posts in advance. One popular example of this is Twitter’s Periscope where users can broadcast their videos live.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Instagram and Snapchat are also well-known for posting in-the moment updates. As per Google, social marketers should now pay attention to 4 types of new moments: I-want-to-know moments, I-want-to-go moments, I-wantto-do moments and I-want-to-buy moments. Consider what your customers want and post them on time before they ask for it. And don’t forget the factors like geographical location, age group and behaviors.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Search engines to be used in social media

“More than 88% of consumers are influenced by other consumers’ online comments. Customers are also starting searches in places such as YouTube, Pinterest and also in apps directly�, as mentioned in the article by Brian Solis 25 disruptive technology trends for 2015-2016 2016 is the time to focus on optimizing your content for social media, besides Google. The idea of search engine optimization is gradually fusing with social media, giving it a rise to social media optimization. Although most users still prefer to search information about products

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 and services on search engine, there are users who love to search on social media directly. You can see that hashtags have made this job much easier. Social media has been able to offer more desirable and trustworthy search results, offering more visual contents than boring text contents. Apart from that, users love to see reviews and feedbacks of products before they buy it online and such information are easier to find on social media than others. According to Pamela Vaughan, principal marketing manager of Hubspot’s marketing team, contents can be optimized for social sharing in various ways. But this does not mean that SEO is going to disappear.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 It’s just that people are identifying the value of search functionality and if you pay attention to this particular customer behavior, you might increase your revenue to a whole new level. In 2016, social marketers can pull a great amount of revenue by increasing their visibility on search results and this can be done by sharing your discount offers, limited-platform promo codes and featuring the true comments and reviews made by your users in your social media page. Many brand companies have already begun to publish case studies and success stories. And since searching on Facebook gives public posts as results, it is important that best practices of hashtags and relevant keywords are well-incorporated in your post.

Videos dominate social world It was estimated long back by Emarketer on how powerful video content can be to get the best return on investment. It was found that 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide cite video as the type of content with the best ROI. The chart below illustrates it all:

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016

As per study made by Hubspot in 2015, videos generate around 57% of customers’ traffic and it is estimated to increase up to 74% in 2016. According to a report by Invodo, videos are becoming major part of social media marketing strategies in all kind of businesses. Even just inserting the word “video” in subject line of email has increased open rates and click-through rates by 19% and 65% respectively. As per Cisco Visual Networking Index estimation, global internet traffic hiked up to 77 exabytes and will continue to exceed up to 100 exabytes in 2016 and the largest contributor to this elevating traffic is video content which is providing more than 50% of the global internal traffic.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016

In 2016, you will miss out BIG thing if you don’t incorporate video marketing trends into your social marketing strategy. Since last few years, marketers have been measuring video performance by watching out various factors about videos like: number of views, number of shares, number of reach and number of views, etc in real time. However, in 2016, you will need to focus on new metrics like: how much of video is watched and whether or not a call-to-action is incorporated in the first few seconds. Social media knowledge like this will give you the base to create right kind of content for your upcoming 17


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 videos as well as to find the right audience for your business. Furthermore, all the social media are working to add in videos this year and so there will be more videos being uploaded to different social networking sites, not just YouTube. Keep in mind that 2016 is not just about publishing videos on YouTube and other social media platforms. Be ready to witness video contents migrating to branded URLs this time as some business brands are already on their way to put video into their websites, making the sites more interactive than ever. Just keep learning about why video is a critical social media trend for 2016. Plus, there are chances that there will be a battle between Facebook video superpowers and YouTube as the top 1,000 profiles on Facebook and YouTube are uploading 4 times more videos natively on Facebook.

Facebook Ad Targeting will likely improve Facebook has introduced some communication tools that will help marketers to know more about their targeted audience. Facebook At Work and improved comment management are the latest updates made on Facebook to make advertising more effective and focused towards customers. Moreover, as a page owner, one can now tag the users in the notes too. In 2016, we will see Facebook going more serious about advertising in customer-driven way, emphasizing on what kind of ads people might be interested in. Therefore, you will now need to interact with audience in 18


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Facebook more on personal level rather than targeting them blindly based on assumption. Besides, there are a few more trends you need to watch out in order to succeed Facebook advertising such as effective and interactive ad formats, elevating ad price, increased feasibility on international markets and increasing worth of Facebook ads on mobile over desktops. Learn 4 major trends of Facebook Advertising to act in 2016 written by Andrew Waber, an author at Nanigans.

Customer Service will go personalized According to a recent research, social media customer service requests increased more than 2.5 times in the past two years. Out of that, 80% of them were found to be coming from Twitter. Social media has become indispensable for businesses in providing customer services. See below image to gauge challenge of social customer service for your brand.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 With the rise of social networking usage and customer-driven social marketing in businesses, marketers have now realized how personalized customer service on social media can bring more sales. Meaning, businesses are now turning to social platforms where customers mostly stay in order to cater their customer service even more this year. Those businesses who hadn’t initiated this step in 2015 are now moving to it. Facebook is in the process of adding capabilities for brands to reply to the customers’ comments through private message. Plus, it is developing a Messenger plug-in to be installed in brand websites which will help users to send them Facebook message directly via website without any interruption. Be it Facebook or any other social media, smarter innovations are on the way to automate customer interaction so that customers can get relevant information more easily and effectively. In 2016, brands will be looking for better social media tools to serve their customers. Facebook Messenger is already popular. Twitter is leading in requests for customer service. More tools are to come on the way. Business brands can, however, expect automated options being added on social media sites this year, reducing their real staff cost which will be replaced by better responding system.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Social interaction in apps and private groups Most of the activities of social media are now happening in private and controlled places, i.e. in messaging apps and private groups. It looks like users are getting more worth from private groups that they now seem to be more engaging in private groups of particular interest. This emerging social trend is already popular on Facebook and LinkedIn and is likely to go further ahead in 2016. According to a survey made by Pew Research Center in 2015, “36% of smartphone owners reported of using messaging apps like WhatsApps, Kik or iMessage and use apps that automatically delete sent messages such as Snapchat or Wickr.�

It was found in 2015 that top 5 apps in the world in terms of frequency of use are all messaging apps and users are using them more often than Facebook and Instagram. 22


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 So, if you want to accomplish something out of social marketing in 2016, a marketer will not only have to focus on private groups but also on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp which helps to connect with people more intimately and on personal level in social media. The strategy will not only save money spent on wrong audience but will focus on groups of right people. As a marketer, one needs to personalize their communication and sharing content on deeper level providing more value to audience this year by integrating messaging and private groups into their social marketing plan. Last but not the least, one must be serious about giving their website a mobile experience (if they haven’t) because both of the social interaction trends discussed above are possible only in mobile.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Investment on social ads for traffic

Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics and blogger at NeilPatel.com, says, “My prediction for social media in 2016 is that more social networks will start charging for traffic. As social media networks adjust their algorithms, the only way brands can ensure they generate a decent amount of traffic is through advertising� in an article. 2016 scenario is different as you can no longer wait for a good amount to traffic to come by just sitting around and posting your valuable content.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Unlike in the past, you will need to boost your social media post for more visibility in order to get maximum traffic because the competition is extremely high and your content might just extinct from social media world if you don’t pay for advertising. Social media algorithms are rapidly aligning towards businesses and profits and there is almost no hope from organic reach in today’s crowded social world. So, invest on advertising if you want to drive more traffic to your post.

Focus on Engagement, not viral Viral went quite viral at a time but now the focus is shifting onto engagement or quality interaction with people after realizing the fact that “viral happens” and that it cannot be created with intention. Let’s face it! Viral contents can surely inspire us to create better contents but planning to get content viral is too ideal to go real. Although viral content is extraordinary in generating huge amount of traffic, since it’s too unrealistic to plan, 2016 will focus on creating social media content that appeals and engages audience. This way, businesses will be able to give value to their people who already know their brand, making the relationship even stronger than before. The important key to unlock engagement potential on social media is to find out what kind of content your fans or audience is interested in. Once you deliver the right content to your audience, they will start engaging by liking, commenting and sharing it in their own networks.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 And since organic traffic has fallen, it seems wiser to focus on delivering the best customer service to your audience because when audience are happy, they start advocating and your brand popularity will expand among several other networks. This is a great way to pull maximum advantage out of organic reach.

Strengthening of social media team

As J-P De Clerck puts in his article This is your real social business strategy challenge, “Strategies are about people, good strategies involve all people you need to involve.� As per Altimeter report 2013, most 26


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 people characterize themselves as intermediate in social business maturity. This means there is much more attention needs to be paid on human dimension or a dedicated social media team, apart from marketing and businesses.

It is found that content shared by employees get eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels as 52% of people seem to trust an average person than a company CEO, according to Nicole, Co-Founder and SVP of Strategy at SocialChorus.

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According to Ryan Holmes, “Word-of-mouth messages from friends and colleagues are almost always better received than blasts from corporate accounts.� To have employees to want share updates about company, company will need to focus on building right company culture, sharing updates with them and encourage them to make connection with professional social networks as well as providing basic social media training to the staffs.� From above, it is clear that how strengthening of social media team can help your brand advocacy in the long run. Empowering and encouraging humans sounds more genuine and humanly than any other social marketing strategies. New tools are being developed in order to facilitate

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 employee sharing on social media. Take a look at one developed by Hootsuite that helps to amplify employee advocacy.

Social media advertising moving on fast pace

“The way brands advertise will change and become much more social as new mobile formats and social media products offer advertisers efficiency and promise relevance for consumers,� says Merinda Peppard, EMEA Marketing Director at Hootsuite. According to Matthew Marley, social strategist at PSONA Social, “We expect Facebook and other popular social platforms to continue to 29


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 tweak their news feed algorithms making it harder for businesses to reach their target audience organically. I also predict a surge in social ad spend due to increased use of ad-blocking software.” If you haven’t noticed the massive growth of ads on your social media feeds, the reason is probably because the ads are the ones you want to see. Sponsored ads you see on Facebook and the promoted tweets are instances of today’s social media ads ruling your news feeds without you noticing it because they look like normal updates from your own friends and followers. Plus, the ads are targeted with high precision based on several factors like age, gender, interest, geography, company affiliation, etc. That’s the reason the ads look so normal to you, like the one you asked for. Social media advertisers will spend $29.91 billion on paid media to push their content to audiences on social media in 2016, according to new figures from eMarketer, which is 26.3% increase from 2015.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Now this calls for current social marketers to pay for social ads in few clicks. Even small businesses might be able to do it via new emerging tools. Social shopping elevates Social shopping has been elevating on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest since past few years. Users are now buying products from their news feed using the buy buttons. As per study made by BigCommerce, among ecommerce site on what people value why shopping online, majority of them reported that posts from their friends directly influenced their purchase decision.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 The worth of ecommerce functionality was realized by overseas countries like China, and Korea long back and their social channels had incorporated it too. In 2016, one can expect social media as a platform where users can make purchases directly and more conveniently rather than just providing referral traffic to the ecommerce site. Quality relationship goes critical As social marketing is evolving, it is being more focused on human relationship than the products than ever. Customers now seem to demand more of how well they are treated rather than how compelling the company ad messages are pushed to them.

As Elena Prokopets, a digital nomad and travel writer, writes on her article, “Having a good product is not enough. Having a brand story and unique brand value is a now a necessity.� 33


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 It is evident how internet marketers are already focusing on providing personalized service to the customers. Meaning, they are now realizing the importance of building quality relationship as well as giving them unique and personalized experience. Thanks to the social media analytics today that is helping us to obtain huge amount of information about their interests and behavior, helping us to make better marketing decisions.

As Lou Dubois Executive Director, Digital Content at NBCUniversal, Inc puts it, “Companies in all industries and of all sizes understand that customers are perhaps their most valuable assets. Improving the overall customer experience is vital for continued success and survival, and 34


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 always has been.� The Last Selfie campaign run on Snapchat by WWF had proved how powerful consumer relationship can be by raising donations by winning hearts of billions of people. Therefore, what social marketers really need to find out is what buyers mostly value and share which also goes along with your brand. Quality relationship also means how you communicate with your customers; whether you just push sales or also let them speak and put views. Are you giving away rewards to loyal customers? When it comes to today’s customer-driven businesses, quality human interaction like face-to-face interaction and timely response to their problems have become extremely important. In case, you are not sure of what your customers actually want and what your brand lack, there is a platform, where consumers and brands comes to the common ground and mutually share their views on product feedback, strategy and brand story.

Privacy concern continues to rise Privacy concern continues to rise in social media platforms as people seem to be attracted more towards secure and private environment for engagement. It is exactly the reason why SnapChat became popular. It’s the reason social interaction is now taking place in private groups and messaging apps as discussed in #8 above. Realizing the gravity of privacy concerns, Facebook has developed new privacy plans to compensate the dissatisfaction of real name policy. However, privacy means a lot more than just a name. 35


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 While providing customer service on social media, it is important that you maintain confidentiality about all their private information, not just their names. A quality customer service means you always highlight privacy policy by asking for private information in private messages only and informing your users about cookies they want to share. Email marketing is great way to keep your communication private and personal. It is also great in leveraging significant amount of ROI, i.e. $40 for every $1 spent, and thus still continues to be a big part of internet marketing game.

Obsession for live-streaming When we talk about the trend of faster response that will likely dominate in 2016, we do not only talk about instant messaging, instant post and real- time engagement, but we also talk about real-time events like live streaming. Live streaming is the next big thing in social media marketing after apps like Meerkat and Periscope became popular in 2015.

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“2016 will be the make-or-break year for mobile live-streaming, as Meerkat and Periscope seek mainstream consumer use cases”, says Merinda Peppard, EMEA Marketing Director at Hootsuite. “Periscope has all but won its battle with Meerkat but will have to continue to innovate, as multi-way broadcast platforms, such as Blab, gain popularity”, says Michelle Goodall, social media consultant & and tutor of Econsultancy’s Social Media & Online PR Training. Sarah Mawson puts on her article, “Periscope, Meerkat and other livestreaming channels are fast becoming the next big thing in social networking, bringing with them their own set of stars and influencers.” She discusses about the things she learned about live-streaming from Festival of Marketing.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Live-streaming has just started and it seems like it will make-or-break social marketing in 2016. The new trend, although unsure at first, gave rise to Meerkat channel which was able to get 1600 views in two weeks. To incorporate live-streaming in marketing plan might be a good opportunity for innovators in 2016. However, marketers should not expect traditional KPI from live streaming but they can expect to have real-time interaction with consumers, giving a room for quality engagement and strong relationship building. It is not certain whether live-streaming will become hit or flop in 2016, but marketers are expected to apply innovation, creativity, authenticity and customer relationship to pull the best out of those channels.

Real-time engagement with consumers According to NewVoiceMedia, poor customer service in the US costs companies $41 billion each year. And a good customer service today means caring for customers and engaging and listening to them on time. According to a research by Lithium Technologies, more than 20% of users expect to hear back from brand they interact with on Twitter out of which 53% want response within an hour and 72% wants to hear back from brand within an hour when they are complaining about an issue.

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When brands cannot respond to consumers on time, 60% would tell negative things about the brand to their friends and family. Social media platforms have been well-used to complain about the brands when people are dissatisfied and among them, Facebook is on the top. In 2015, 7 out of 8 messages were found unanswered within 72 hours on Twitter and this fact calls for better and timely engagement with customers in 2016 if one is really serious about engagement factor in social marketing. Social marketers, thus, now need to respond to their customers fast and in real time if possible. Social media marketing is evolving at a speedy rate and if one doesn’t want to lose presence on platform, one must move along with the trend. Take advantage of social listening and automation tools that have been developed for marketers to better connect and respond the consumers on social media. 39


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016

Social shopping continues to rise Social shopping or selling via social networking site seems to continue and rise in 2016. Referrals to ecommerce site via social media were found to have increased by 200% between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015 according to a report by Business Insider.

The main reason why social media shopping has been increasing is because of the buy button showing up on social networks like Twitter and Pinterest which allows users to buy products directly from social networking sites. This trend will likely improve the conversion rate in 2016 and advertisers might go on buying more social ads than before.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Furthermore, it is also important that companies know which social networks can drive maximum amount of sales for their products. As per an infographic by Shopify, Facebook drives nearly 63% of social visits to Shopify stores. Besides, one must also watch out the ecommerce factors like conversion rate, average order value, income generated by shares, likes and tweets as well as the latest ecommerce trend and social media marketing strategies. Audience demand more quality on content Since the inbound marketing has been popular and increasing, the amount of content required to display to the audience has also been increasing in the same pace. Contents today offer a variety of forms and thus, users now demand high quality and show their specific preference for content. In 2016, users will now give more preference for attractive visual contents like images, infographics and images to plain boring text. Not only that, social media audience now demand for highly useful and valuable content rather than sales message that brands have to display. They prefer custom content to shared content on social media. To conclude, if you want to leverage maximum sales out of your social audience, you will have to emphasize on what their true preferences on content are and deliver them accordingly rather that pushing your brand message in their feed. It is also important for business marketers to know that this strategy is currently on trend, both in B2B and B2C sectors. 41


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Above chart gives an idea of the factors that social marketers should consider while delivering content to their targeted users. While the demand for high quality and engagement is high, one must also consider the amount of content they’re expecting, the money to be spent on content, lack of C-level buy-in and producing variety of contents.

Influencer Marketing is on rise According to Kissmetrics, “Influencers sharing your content can lead to a 3 to 10 times increase in conversion rate.” According to The Shelf, “Influencers can turn into brand evangelists. 77 percent say they’re more likely to buy from their sponsors.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 In 2016, users on social media are going to seek more peer-to-peer advice before making any decision because if you are going to boast about your brands and products on social networking sites, they are never going to listen anymore. It was found that 70% of people rely on online reviews before making a purchase according to a survey. So if you, as a marketer, are able to connect and partner with social media influencers, there is high chance of your brand to become more visible in front of massive number of audience. A socially famous person is someone people want to trust and follow, when he/she writes or shares something on social media. It is found that 92% consumers trust recommendations from people over branded content, according to Wersm.com. In case, you are a start-up, you can search for influencers online via an online tool such as 1000leads. Social decisions will be highly data-driven Data has become the major base to determine success of social marketing today. In 2016, brands are going to be really serious about social media analytics and will make decisions on the basis of those gathered data. We’d never had so much of information about consumer behavior before that would enable us to make further decisions on our further social strategies like making your message personalized, building loyalty stronger and making engagement instant as well as long-lasting.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 This data can help you personalize your message and focus on building stronger loyalty and long-term engagement rather than short-term achievement and individual sales. As it is evident that blanket approach or pushing sales to random audience has stopped, data-driven marketing plans are in, which incorporates more emphasis on the consumer than ever. Customer behavior insights across social platforms and keeping updated about the latest trends are helpful to create the desired experience for your customers. However, one shouldn’t, make decisions based on numerical facts alone, such as the number of likes or follower counts. More important are relationship building and personalized care to the customers which are fluid, but the very essence of social business strategy today.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Visual Content for cross-platform engagement

Donna Moritz, founder of Socially Sorted, “In 2016, smart brands will include visual content strategy as an integrated part of their marketing, not just an afterthought.�

According to an infographic by Socially Sorted, videos and image posts drive highest engagement on Facebook as illustrated in the chart below:

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In 2016, visual content strategy across social media platforms becomes more critical. Visual contents or multimedia contents including images, videos and graphics are essential for blog and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. A video can be embedded to a blog post and a graphic can go with a tweet message. The messages can be shared further on Pinterest as a quote or Instagram as a graphic and they will again link back to blog contents creating more traffic. Brands will now need content strategy for all kind of video contents because just posting a picture on a blog post is no longer enough. They 46


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 now need to focus on planning a strategy that will allow them to share visual contents across different platforms. For instance, an image share can travel across Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. Tools like Canva for Work and Relay are great tools developed for brands to quickly and easily create a suite of images. Social Warfare and Yoast SEO are famous tools used to ensure that Twitter, Facebook and website have the right pinnable images for fans to share across their own social media platforms accounts.

Social networks continues to focus on commerce Social networks, although, started off as a platform for social interaction, they are now transforming to commerce sites more every single day. The more audience are engaged in your published content, they better you are likely to sell your products to them. In United States, the number of sales tracked to social media was found to be $3.3 billion in total in 2014. The trend continues to grow ever since and social media is driving more sales from people than the websites. In 2016, marketers and advertisers are going to exploit more of commercial potential of social media like they did in 2015 which was quite evolutionary. Last year, different social media networks had upgraded their platforms to give audience more immersive, convenient and engaging experience to gain, involve and retain customers in shorter span of time. 47


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 For example, 360 Ads introduced by Facebook, 360 Ads added by YouTube, action-oriented ads developed by Instagram, limited level of buyable pins by Pinterest and Buy button tested by Twitter. It is clear that all the platforms are working to give greater user experience to conveniently pull the audience for sales. Smart brands are going to work on incorporating these features in their social marketing strategies this year.

Content is still the king Content is still is the king. 2015 was the year of growing multi-media contents for engagement sake, but the need for visibility has grown even more than before. While some brands are implementing their best content strategies with social ads, demand for optimizing organic content is growing even more. Social media has indirect way of influencing your visibility on search engine. When your posts are shared and drives more traffic to your website, you are likely more visible on search engines based on those active social signals. According to Chitika Insights 2013, Having good SEO content and showing up as a result of average search on first page means the page

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 acquires 91.5% of all traffic from that search whereas it drops down to 4.8% for the second page. A drastic fall, indeed! But when you are listed as the first item, you’re likely to get 33% of traffic from Google’s organic search results. Due to the reason, social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have had deals with Google to make their contents visible in search results. In 2016, the distance between web and social media will decrease even more. Conclusion: 2016 will be another year of learning, testing and experimenting. After looking back at what kind of social media marketing strategies were used in the past and what’s trending for 2016, it will be a lot easier for brands and business to prepare for the coming changes and make wise decisions for their social media strategy in future. It’s impossible to predict everything, but it will be great if you keep in mind the important highlights: use of micro moments, mobile marketing as the first priority, social interaction in messaging apps, rise of privacy concerns, real-time engagement with customers, obsession for live streaming videos, need of strong social media team, personalized care for customers, building quality relationship, increasing demand of paid ads as well as optimized contents for SEO, improved Facebook Ads and elevating trend of visual contents in 2016.

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 Social media is evolving into a standard operating system at companies and a major platform to generate revenue. Major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are constantly upgrading themselves in how brands can reach targeted customers, interact with them personally, offer products and services in convenient manner and communicate with employees. Make sure you have the best and up-to-date social strategy planned for success this year, including all the possible trends. About the publisher This report has been produced by Richard Santoro and published by Social Media Authority, learn more about this study and find the latest updates on the social media authority blog www.socialmediaauthority.com Social Media Authority is boutique digital marketing agency that helps large business, SME’s startups, entrepreneurs, and even individuals to enable social media for their business. Let social media authority grow your business, brand and authority through social media marketing. Find out more about social media authority’s marketing and social media management services. Email: info@socialmedia-authority.com Visit the website at www.socialmedia-authority.com

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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 About the author

Richard Santoro is a digital marketer, growth hacker, business strategist and entrepreneur. He is the author of several books and reports, including: A Beginners Guide To Ruby on Rails, The Ultimate Ideas Guide To Starting An Online Business and Top 41 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2015. Besides his own personal research and writing, Richard has worked in media, publishing, advertising, finance and technology sectors for over 51


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Top 24 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 20 years. He has held positions at Haymarket Publishing Group, McCann Erickson and Microsoft. He currently works full time for Dow Jones as Director, Digital Sales APAC & EMEA for the brands The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. Richard also is a board member of the Society of Publishers in Asia. Follow Richard on Twitter at https://twitter.com/richysantoro On LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/richard-santoro-75b3271 And on the blog at: http://socialmedia-authority.com/blog/

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