The success of social media lies in the right mix of fruitful strategies. The wrong combination will simply reduce the traffic from targeted customers instead of attract them. If you devise your social media marketing strategies such as social media optimization based on current trends, it is possible to increase profits and use social networking sites effectively for marketing. Listed below are the recent trends highlighted within an article published by Forbes in line with the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Low Usage of Social Bookmarking Sites
According to the research reports, using social bookmark creating sites has decreased to ten percent from 26 percent in 2011. This considerable drop of usage clearly indicates nov bookmarking sites. Even though the sites including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Pinterest remain popular among marketers, most sites (e.g. DIGG, Friendfeed) are almost dying. Therefore, it isn’t an excellent practice to trust a bookmarking site blindly for marketing purposes in the current scenario. Instead, check for the websites that are hottest and perform the bookmarking very cautiously.
Decline of Daily Deal Sites
Daily deal features or just daily offerings of deals are regarded as a powerful way to attract a lot of targeted customers at the same time. The research report says that around 80 percent of marketers aren’t interested in using the most popular daily deal sites including Groupon or Living Social for his or her campaigns in the near future.
Now people concentrate more on the considerable amount of returns that they receive from their purchases over time. Hence, you should use social networking sites for longterm marketing goals instead of daily goals.
Top Sites for SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING Campaigns
Marketers who use social media for marketing will obviously perform social media campaigns (using social networking sites for promotion) because of their services or products to attract targeted customers. The campaigns will be successful only if the relevant site is popular among the customers.
The study report indicates that marketers who spend more than 40 hours weekly for social media marketing carry out their campaigns more intensely through Google+, You Tube, Pinterest and Instagram in comparison to those who spend six hours or less weekly on social media. Also, around 92 percent of marketers who’ve five or even more years of experience prefer LinkedIn than 70 percent of marketers having significantly less than five years of experience. Forum marketing has also decreased to 16 percent this year from 24 percent in 2011.
Around 67 percent of marketers are planning to increase campaigns through Twitter even though it is a slight decrease from 69 percent last year. Young marketers, more than older ones prefer photo sharing sites including Instagram for launching campaigns. 62% chose blogging because so many suitable platform to master, that is the highest one accompanied by Google + (61%) and Facebook (59%).
Trends of B2C and B2B Marketers
Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers use Facebook at a higher rate of 67% than other platforms. In the case of Business to Business (B2B) marketers, both Facebook and LinkedIn have equal most 29% each. Given below may be the pie chart showing usage statistics for each platform with regard to B2C and B2B marketers.
B2B marketers use a more diverse array of platforms in comparison to B2C marketers. Both of them usually do not completely utilize blogging and also have minimal You Tube usage.
If you are a B2B or B2C marketer, try to encourage blogs as they are regarded as the most used social media platform. YouTube being the next largest search engine, you can enjoy the benefits it includes by posting low-cost videos. Orabrush (B2C Company) and Blentec (B2B Company) have grown to be strong brands by using low cost YouTube videos.
As B2B marketers increasingly use LinkedIn, they will have a chance to utilize SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn). This social media entity may be used for generating leads for B2B organizations.
Personal Development Check-ins Online
As per the study reports, there is a decrease in the usage of geo-location services including Foursquare from 17% in 2011 to 11% this season. These services allow check-in to your locations automatically online. The decline in these kinds of services indicates that people are actually concerned more about privacy and safety. Marketers can tackle this situation by introducing contests and rewards. This will encourage people to check-in more.
If you are still following the old strategy for social media marketing, then it is the time to develop new strategies based on all these current trends. It is better to entrust this tedious task to an established social media marketing company that offers reliable social media services rather than try implementing the strategies all on your own.