Social Media Trends: Top 10 Trends

Social media is developing day by day. This platform is no longer a place where your family or friends can freely share your old or funny photos to make fun of you. Rather than all of this, social media now represents a great summary of one’s identity and life.

If you are interested in digital marketing , as a candidate digital marketing specialist, you need to learn how to use social media platforms and social media trends to your advantage.

Being active on social media has become almost vitally important for individuals today. I can hear you say “No dear”, but look around, how many people do you know who do not have a social media account? Or, let’s change the question, how many people around you have not shared anything on their Instagram account?

At this point, when it comes to social media and digital marketing, you need to constantly produce content and be active. But you can’t be successful this way alone because you also need to keep up with the latest marketing strategies and social media trends and adapt them to your business.

Today, digital marketing and social media are two different internet revolutions that go together. Following social media platforms and social media trends can make you successful.

As we approach the end of the year, I would like to describe the most important social media trends of the year.

I analyzed the data of the past years and determined which trends showed a stable trend. Also, although the year is not over yet, I discovered new shining trends of the past years and at the beginning of this year.

I predict that these trends, which I will share with you, will continue next year. If you use these trends correctly, you can continue to drive your brand, your services, and the popularity of people within your business.

Social Media Trends

1. Live Stream Videos Remain Popular

In 2017, live broadcast videos and content published in this way created a great success. In my previous articles, I mentioned that you should actively use live broadcasts.

It should come as no surprise that this continues to be a popular trend in 2020.

Although live broadcasts continue to be the focus of attention of approximately 95% of brand managers according to their content, it gives the impression that they will continue to be used in marketing strategies in the future. This will be enough to keep live streams (like Facebook Live) popular for creators and brand owners alike.

So why?

Consumers find live streaming videos candid and worth watching. I guess a feeling of knowing that it won’t happen again triggers this situation. Because this is not a YouTube video that is always at hand .

Research shows that 80% of viewers would rather watch live stream videos from brands than read blog posts.

Another study tells us that 82% of consumers would rather watch videos than read the captions under social media posts.

Considering all this, giants such as Facebook and Instagram “Why did they activate the live broadcast feature?” We also answer the question.

Brand managers and digital marketers are also actively following these details.

Social Media Platforms With The Most Live Broadcasts

When it comes to live broadcasts, Facebook leads the way in Buffer’s social media report, which highlights the developments between 2017 and 2019. According to the data of the report:

In 2017, only 25% of businesses were shooting live-streaming videos to promote their brands. This year, this figure is expected to double all over the world.

Digital marketers and brand managers aren’t the only ones benefiting from live streaming. People are also broadcasting live on social media to interact with their friends and family.

This rising popularity of live streaming means your company must now face this social media trend and take action.

All brands and businesses need to be familiar with this social media trend and learn the details of how it can help their business.

Start broadcasting live on all your social media channels.

It’s okay if you don’t know what to broadcast about, sometimes even showing your business around will be sincere for the audience and very useful for your brand. This type of event will help you maximize your reach and generate new leads for your company.

2. Chatbots Take Over Live Customer Service

The chat system on the Internet has been around for a long time. Remember the times of instant messaging with AOL (an old messaging program).

With the social media trends, chat applications are also developing like everything else. Even today, I think it would not be wrong to say that chat systems are being integrated with social media platforms.

Businesses are using chatbots to communicate with their customers on social media, and this trend is growing fast.

With the new system and updating of the Facebook Messenger platform, we saw that the big companies in the social media increased their chat systems in the first year.

This means going from a numerical value like 30 thousand to 100 thousand. Of course, these are the big companies that we can only count. If we want to calculate all the probabilities here, the result will be equivalent to an infinite number.

Let’s take a look at how Pizza Hut uses chatbots to make it easier for customers to order food via social media:

These bots recognize phrases submitted by users.

Bots give themselves predefined answers and these are fixed with predefined ones.

As you can see from the Pizza Hut example, these bots can be used directly to drive more sales and increase revenue streams.

We will see more businesses take advantage of these tools by the end of the year. A recent  survey shows that around 80% of marketing executives plan to use chatbots by 2020.

Chat Bots;

Chat bots are a perfect solution to make the job of real customer representatives easier and reduce personnel costs.

Customer support services managed by chatbots are estimated to save healthcare and banking businesses $8 billion annually by 2022. This figure was only $20 billion in total until 2017.

Of course, nothing can replace a person’s personal reactions and communication, at least not for now. But right now these chats and those who use these chatbots are definitely on the right track. Because with the developing technology and the slowly changing world order, chat bots are becoming one of the biggest social media trends of the century.

Feel free to invest in this too and program a few small bots.

3. Influencer Marketing Continues to Develop!

Influencer marketing is not a new concept. However, the way it is used in social media channels started to change in 2018 and beyond.

More specifically, companies are starting to collaborate with micro-influencers to increase their credibility.

What is Micro Influencer?

They are people who have a strong following on social media channels but are not actually famous.

Although there is no definite limit, we can say that micro-influencers have between 1,000 and 300 thousand followers.

When we start reaching hundreds of thousands of followers, we enter the macro influencer territory. When we pass hundreds of thousands, we can now consider ourselves famous.

Here are some of the top reasons why brands partner with micro-influencers:

Studies show that micro-influencers have 60% higher engagement rates than traditional influencers. Using this technique alone, you can expect an average of 22.2% increase in weekly conversions.

micro-influencers;

Another reason why brands are so interested in micro-influencers is that they are cost-effective compared to other advertising expenses.

Also, micro-influencers are more niche-focused, so you can find influencers closer to your industry.

To give an example, instead of a 1 million humor page that appeals to a very general audience, it will be both cheaper and more profitable to cooperate with an influencer who has 100 thousand followers but is related to your industry.

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Attention: There are thousands of micro and macro influencers with fake followers today. Before making long-term deals with influencers, look at how follower count is reflected in post engagement.

You can try 1 campaign before signing long-term deals to find the right influencer.

Collaboration with micro and macro influencers is still a new trend, so there is no standard payment scale, you should send a message and try your luck about collaboration. If you can agree on the price, it will be an excellent opportunity to evaluate.

But sometimes influencers may not even be able to earn you the advertising fee you paid them, so be careful about it. There is no such thing as every influencer will make you money.

This year and the coming years will be times when influencers and brands collaborating with influencers gain tremendous benefits.

Micro-influencers may not be very experienced to do business with, so be clear on terms and earnings on both sides. Remember, cooperation with micro-influencers from these social media trends, which are quite good for their cost, can bring great benefits to your business.

4. Brands Harness the Power of Digital Advertising

We have left another year behind, many companies have learned the importance of social media in one way or another, and those who cannot learn have already begun to disappear.

Companies that act right have social media profiles on many platforms and they create content on a daily basis.

⚠️ If you do not have time or sufficient workforce to manage social media accounts, you can get consultancy from our agency. We would be happy to assist you with social media consultancy .

Creating content and regular sharing on social media can save lives, but don’t expect your posts to give good results right away. You can use the power of digital ads for a particularly strong start.

Take your social media strategies to the next level and advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Let’s underline that there are more than 8 million advertisers on the Facebook platform alone.

In September 2017 , Instagram reached 2 million advertisers and celebrated this. Because it is very easy to give ads to the audience you want or to choose the location of your potential customers and advertise only in that area.

Businesses should not ignore such a sensitive advertising tool.

To see how easy it is to advertise on Facebook, go to Facebook ads manager and review the details:

In addition to reaching such a sharp and precise audience and showing ads, Facebook also makes it easy to set your budget. You can set a daily or weekly budget and spend accordingly.

It is also possible for brands to set their budgets according to the duration of each advertisement and the revenue they plan to generate from the product.

There are many different options for the type of ad you want to run.

Don’t be afraid to experiment as you try to find what works best for your company based on your targeted location and interests.

Research shows that by 2022, social media ads will surpass newspaper ad spend.

I predict many companies will dedicate a larger portion of their marketing budget to paid social media ads in 2020.

5. Social Follow

Social media platforms are listening to your conversations. You may not want to believe it, but it’s a fact.

I’m sure you’ve encountered the example I’m going to talk about before. You are talking about a subject with your friend, and after a while, when you go to the internet, an advertisement about the subject you are talking about appears.

Creepy isn’t it? Yeah. But that’s the reality of the world we live in right now. However, it is possible to turn this chilling truth to your advantage.

Use digital ads to your advantage, as we mentioned above.

We, on the other hand, recommend following what is happening on social media and the internet and correcting if there is a problem. The tool we will use for this can be Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a system that allows you to receive e-mails when your company’s products, news, new developments or any article about you appears in the Google search engine.

When you do this, you can track what people are talking about online about your business. Following a new internet news or a post about your company will also be an excellent solution for your reputation management.

This tool has evolved a lot over the years. It also helps you to follow a hashtag on social media, but also to prevent an unconscious mistake or a misunderstanding before it gets too big.

You can also monitor your marketing strategies with such monitoring software and have information about your target audience.

6. Brands Use User Generated Content

User-generated content is basically like free advertising. This is one of the best ways to grow your business by doing less. It also makes you look friendly.

Get your customers talking about your company. Encourage them to use hashtags and post about your brand on social platforms. One of the simplest ways to achieve this is to share user content on your company’s profile.

When people see that you are open to showing user photos, they may want to create content for you themselves.

See how Thule uses this strategy on their Instagram page:

As you can see in the comments section, the user who shared the photo thanks Thule for sharing their content.

By doing this, this firm has encouraged hundreds of other followers to do the same. This will also spread among friends of friends, helping the brand to circulate profiles for free.

When a client posts something about your company on their personal profile, they are promoting your brand to all their followers. Some of these people may not even be aware of your brand’s existence, but as a matter of fact, isn’t that the main purpose of all advertisements?

Another great opportunity!

Also, people rely more on recommendations from friends and family. That’s why increasing user-generated content is the ultimate lead generation strategy.

Social media platforms are an excellent distribution channel for this type of content.

7. Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is an excellent technology that is real and changes what is real.

One of the examples of augmented reality that has been successfully applied to the consumer market was the Pokemon Go game application.

The app accessed the user’s camera and added fictional elements to the screen and brought a pokemon to life in your garden. This seemed incredible at first.

Nowadays, most of the social media channels also benefit from augmented reality technologies. We all know about Snapchat’s face filters, right?

Facebook also includes this technology with its camera effects platform . As you can see, it’s an interesting trend, but impressive.

Features like these take augmented reality to a whole new level. Even augmented reality studios are now being created for developers to design unique animations.

These filters respond to movement and interaction in real time, even in live streams.

Here’s an example of what it looks like during a Facebook Live broadcast:

Since Facebook also owns Instagram, many such features are also used on Instagram.

I expect to see a big change in the augmented reality of social media in the near future. I’m sure this will be more impressive than a dog face filter.

8. Temporary Contents/Story

If you haven’t heard anything about temporary content before, that doesn’t mean you haven’t seen any temporary content.

The definition of temporary content is content that is 24 hours or less than 24 hours.

Does it look familiar now?

I’m talking, of course, about the stories we see on Snapchat and Instagram.

After the concept emerged on Snapchat, Instagram quickly realized the popularity of this system and implemented it on its own platform. We can say that it was successful in this regard.

The reason stories are so popular is because people think they are more original than traditional sponsored ads. Users love content like this and add it to their personal profiles daily.

If used correctly, brands can also benefit from the ephemeral content trend.

This is a bit of an alternative to live broadcasts because in general user interaction and structure are very similar.

You may not want to post 5 photos and 5 videos a day on Instagram. Instead, it’s better to message your followers multiple times throughout the day without spamming their timelines. Because otherwise, when you post too much, it will fill your profile in vain and your followers may get bored of it.

To put it simply, too frequent posts can cause users to unfollow. Instead, you can use the story/story trend I just mentioned if it’s something important.

24-hour stories are a pretty good alternative to regular sharing. Posting a 24-hour temporary content in the story will draw the attention of your followers if it is important, but if not, it will cause them to pass quickly and not see you the next day.

If your business starts posting content temporarily, users will check your stories frequently to make sure they haven’t missed anything about your brand. Isn’t it nice that customers keep your brand in mind?

I recommend using this strategy to increase sales, to make quick sales or promotions. In the future, both normal people and businesses will think much more about this issue.

9. Referral Traffic and Organic Reach Declining

Social platforms are changing their algorithms, and such changes also affect what users see on their homepage charts.

As a result, social media platforms limit the display of ads in order not to lose users and not become annoying. So homepages and timelines aren’t flooded with ads from brands. Instead, posts from family and friends are prioritized.

In the past years, these algorithm changes have caused organic reach on Facebook to drop by more than 50%. That’s why you can’t rely 100% on all social media platforms to drive traffic and bring people to your website.

For this reason, brands need to develop their marketing strategies with alternative social media marketing methods such as paid ads and micro-influencers to increase referral traffic .

10. Small Businesses Increase Their Social Presence

No one can ignore social media anymore. It has become a regular part of our daily life.

A decade ago, small business owners may have thought it unnecessary to build a social media presence, but now many realize how important it is to stay competitive.

52% of small business owners now post content on social media daily.

While Facebook and Instagram are still the most popular options, other social channels are also seeing an increase in small business users.

With so many social media platforms and new generation content, small businesses are constantly updating themselves. They also get the opportunity to get to know their competitors better. They hire social media experts and use time-saving social media management tools to help automate and schedule social media businesses.

Businesses without active social media profiles may have to make huge sacrifices to survive today.

Conclusion

Social media trends are constantly changing.

If you are a marketing professional or a business owner, always keep social media and these trends close to you, analyze your customers and targets, and use trends in the right area.

Based on the data I found, I tried to fit the social media trends that are popular in 2020 and the coming years, and that will also contribute greatly to your business, into 10 items.

If you have started to take time for digital transformation and want to position your digital marketing strategies, you can use this list as a reference.

My predictions are that Twitter will undergo a major transformation in the coming years, I didn’t add it to the list because it hasn’t happened yet. I can’t wait to write a few more words on this subject when this change takes place.

You can still start making small Twitter investments. 🙂

What social media trends will your company focus on in the future to generate leads and convert?

Do not hesitate to write the social media trends that you have noticed and used yourself in the comments.

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