Social media marketing has become a bit more popular in the past year, with companies beginning to invest more in these campaigns given the advancement of platforms and stronger reception of the medium among prospects and customers. Whereas social media was once viewed as a tool that would be far more advantageous for customer relationship management processes, Facebook, Twitter and others have focused upon building more effective solutions for marketing-related ventures to quell this issue.
Small businesses have been among the most active in this regard, especially when it comes to Facebook, which has had somewhat of a hot-and-cold relationship with entrepreneurs for several years now, but is also making headway in an effort to enable successful campaign performances. At the end of the day, though, the best practices and most effective strategies are still in a state of constant change given the relative novelty of these campaigns.
As such, entrepreneurs must ensure that they are keeping up with research when it comes to trends in social media marketing, and strive to maintain pace with the progression of relevant customer preferences and demands in these matters. One thing has become clear, though, and that is the fact that social media is finally beginning to gain traction from a marketing perspective, enabling affordable methods to drive visibility, conversions and loyalty across industries.
Social media marketing’s evolution
Social media is most often used to share content and get the word out about goings-on in a business to prospects and loyal customers, all the while generating buzz and conversation around the brand. While this was once a matter of posting words and links, multimedia is now taking up a greater portion of campaigns and strategies given the strong results many marketers have enjoyed from these types of pursuits.
Marketing Land recently reported that the use of GIFs in social media marketing is gaining some steam, and for good reason, as today’s consumers and corporate purchasers have appeared to be drawn in by these moving images. As a note, this is part of a much larger trend in which content distribution is moving decisively in the direction of more videos and other multimedia, and some analysts believe that the popular formats of the past few years will continue to fall off as time goes on.
According to the news provider, some social media platforms have been a bit more proactive in enabling the use of multimedia than others, most notably in the case of GIFs. For example, the source pointed out that Facebook has yet to begin allowing small business marketers to use these digital files in their campaigns, while Twitter has supported that formats for months now. Marketing Land added that Google and Tumblr – which are not necessarily the most prominent names in social media marketing – have also started to enable GIF use among marketers.
Small business marketing metrics and evaluation
Another major trend in social media advertising – as well as the digital and traditional marketing landscapes at large – has been the more widespread use of effective metrics tools and strategies by businesses. This has quickly gone from a somewhat optional matter to one that is simply a requirement of marketing in the modern era, as companies will be far more likely to enjoy continuous performance improvements by way of customer engagement, conversions and visibility when they are closely tracking metrics within campaigns.
Entrepreneur Magazine recently listed some of the key metrics that all business leaders should be referencing in their measurement programs for social media advertising, beginning with brand search volume. It provided a relatively surprising statistic that asserted consumers will be nearly 180 percent more likely to try to find a brand once it has been exposed to the business through a social media channel.
This is a novel idea given the fact that social media marketing comes with far lower conversion rates when compared to email advertising, but does hint at the need for converged, comprehensive strategies. The news provider went on to assert that lead growth, consumer sentiments toward brands and inbound links should also be considered in a measurement strategy.
The more small businesses put into measuring campaigns and integrating new forms of media, the better their social media marketing strategies will perform over time.
