The success of social media marketing lies in the right mixture of fruitful strategies. The wrong combination will simply reduce the traffic from targeted customers instead of attract them. In the event that you devise your social media strategies such as social media optimization on the basis of current trends, you can increase profits and use social networking sites effectively for marketing. Listed below are the recent trends highlighted within an article published by Forbes using the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Low Usage of Social Bookmarking Sites
In line with the research reports, the use of social bookmark creating sites has decreased to ten percent from 26 percent in 2011. This considerable drop of usage clearly indicates the fall of bookmarking sites. Even though the websites including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Pinterest are still popular among marketers, most sites (e.g. DIGG, Friendfeed) are almost dying. Therefore, it is not a good practice to trust a bookmarking site blindly for marketing purposes in today’s scenario. Instead, check for the websites that are hottest and perform the bookmarking very cautiously.
Decline of Daily Deal Sites
Daily deal features or simply daily offerings of deals are regarded as a powerful way to attract a large number of targeted customers at a 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 soon.
Now people concentrate more on the significant amount of returns that they receive from their purchases as time passes. Hence, it is advisable to use social media sites for longterm marketing goals rather than daily goals.
Top Sites for SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING Campaigns
Marketers who use social media marketing for marketing will obviously perform social media campaigns (using social media sites for promotion) for his or her services or products to attract targeted customers. The campaigns will be successful only when the relevant site is popular amonst the customers.
The research 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 compared to those that spend six hours or less weekly on social media marketing. Also, around 92 percent of marketers who’ve five or more years of experience prefer LinkedIn than 70 percent of marketers having less than five years of experience. Forum marketing in addition has decreased to 16 percent this season from 24 percent in 2011.
Around 67 percent of marketers are planning to increase campaigns through Twitter even though it is really a slight decrease from 69 percent last year. Young marketers, a lot 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 followed by Google + (61%) and Facebook (59%).
Trends of B2C and B2B Marketers
Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers use Facebook at an increased rate of 67% than other platforms. Regarding Business to Business (B2B) marketers, both Facebook and LinkedIn have equal majority of 29% each. Given below is Premium Vacation Packages showing usage statistics for each platform with regard to B2C and B2B marketers.
B2B marketers work with a more diverse selection of platforms compared to B2C marketers. Both of these do not completely utilize blogging and have minimal You Tube usage.
If you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, try to encourage blogs as they are regarded as the most used social media marketing platform. YouTube being the second largest search engine, it is possible to enjoy the benefits it offers 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 have an opportunity to utilize SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn). This social media marketing entity may be used for generating leads for B2B organizations.
Fewer Check-ins Online
As per the research reports, there is a reduction 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 most of these services indicates that people are actually concerned more about privacy and safety. Marketers can tackle this example by introducing contests and rewards. This can encourage visitors to check-in more.
If you are still following a old strategy for social media marketing, then it is the time to develop new strategies predicated on all these current trends. It is best to entrust this tedious task to a reputable social media marketing company that offers reliable social media marketing services instead of try implementing the strategies on your own.