Social media marketing trends is a sphere that is constantly evolving. It has transformed from being a platform to communicate with family and old friends to the most powerful took of digital marketing. If you are a digital marketer and are not active on social media, your entire profile will lose its relevance. Social media marketing trends is all about being super active on social media platforms for survival of any digital marketer or a company. Staying up to date with the different updates that the various social media platforms come up with is also very important for your success as a digital marketing professional. Updating oneself with the changing trends in marketing is the best way to reach the top. Marketing and social media go hand in hand today and missing out on the important updates that social media platforms have to offer can be quite brutal for your business.So, here are the top social media trends that you definitely should know about.

Live videos are still a big thing

When live video contents started off in 2017, it became a huge thing. And to be honest, it is a very big thing and is in fact, thriving in 2018 as well. This is because live videos are loved by almost everyone. According to research, 80% of the audiences choose to watch live videos by the different brands over reading a blog. In fact, 82% of consumers say that they would definitely prefer watching a live video than read through social media posts. Facebook is the social media platform that has been leading the way in live streaming, as per reports. Live streaming is a big thing now and more and more marketers are grabbing the opportunity to use this feature to their advantage. Not just marketers, but regular people also use live streaming to showcase their talents in a live platform as well as talk to their family and friends. Since the popularity of live streaming is increasing now, it will be very beneficial for companies to adopt to this trend and get the most out of it.

Boosted usage of chatbots

Usage of chatbots in businesses is a growing trend now. Chatbots are now integrated with social media platforms and are used in communicating with customers. The number of chatbots jumped from 33,000 to more than 100,000 in the first year of Facebook Messenger platform.

The influencer marketing strategy is evolving

Companies use celebrities to post pictures or shoot ad videos for their products and that is how influencer marketing is carried out. However, companies have started collaborating with micro and macro influencers too, which is a great thing. Micro influencers are those people who have a follower count of anywhere between 1000-90,000. Macro influencers are those with hundreds of thousands of followers. There are major reasons why micro influencers are partnered with. Firstly, the engagement rates are 60% higher than celebrity influencers. Secondly, customer conversion rates are higher and a 22.2% increase can be noted in average weekly conversions through this tactic.

Taking advantage of paid advertisements

Brands are taking more advantage of paid advertisements now than ever. Paid advertisements are the best new trend now with an increasing number of sponsored ads coming up on Facebook and Instagram. It helps giving a good coverage to good advertisements and getting the brand name out there. Facebook has six million advertisers and in September 2017, Instagram reached two million advertisers who paid on a monthly basis. According to research reports, social media advertisements will be surpassing newspaper ad expenditures by the year 2020.

Increasing usage of user-generated content by brands

Getting customers to talk about the company through social media posts using hashtags is one of the most effective forms of modern day advertising. Encouraging customers to post about your brand on social media platforms is a great way of getting your brand name out there and this is an increasing trend now. When posts related to your brand are posted by customers, their entire friend list on Facebook or followers list on Instagram gets to see it and this further increases brand awareness.

Augmented reality

If you have used those funny Snapchat and Facebook filters to alter your look, then even you are a user of augmented reality. Now, what exactly is augmented reality? Augmented reality is when something real is altered or transformed using technology. It all started off with the global hit game Pokemon Go where you could open the camera to see fictional characters added in real surroundings. From there, Snapchat’s face filters became a major hit as they update and add new filters every day. Facebook took to this feature to increase audience engagement as well, as people started using augmented reality in live streaming too.

Short-lived content

Short-lived content grew in popularity because they targeted people’s fear of missing out on the things they love to follow. Brands followed this strategy to create an active engagement of the followers. Snapchat came up with this and Instagram took to this idea as well. Short-lived contents are those contents which are temporary and automatically disappear after sometime, say 24 hours. Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook stories are the best examples of short-lived content. Short-lived content also do not spam the followers timeline or news feed, thus eradicating the possibility of annoyance.

Increase in progressive web applications

Progressive web applications are those web applications that are a regular webpage but have the appearance of a mobile application. Such an approach delivers great optimization and are highly responsive no matter in which device they are opened. Many modern browsers have now added a feature to deliver this experience to you. They have a low data usage and are great for SEO as well. Progressive web applications are rising and are a major trend now. Kolkata School of Digital Marketing is the best digital marketing training Institute in Kolkata where a professional course on social media marketing is offered to students as well as marketing professionals that are helpful in planning and executing the social media campaigns.