Social’s changing. Fast. Customer service is booming, social commerce is exploding, and TikTok isn’t going anywhere. Getting lost is easy. Every year, and sometimes even more frequently, brands, individuals and marketing teams have to reconsider what they’re doing in terms of promotions. Why? To keep up with social platform algorithms, audience preferences and trends.
Enter #SocialTrends2022, your road map to taking all the correct risks and landing safely on the next social frontier (looking like a total expert).
This is your guide to taking all the risks-
User-Generated Content
Your audience creates the content for you, and you just reap the benefits. With creative strategies, like branded hashtags or competitions that encourage people to share their experience with your products or services, you can get your audience working for you. Bonus: this increases social proof and word-of-mouth marketing. Talk about best of both worlds.
Creator communities
The global brands stand today where they are because they invested tons of resources over time but today the smartest way of building your presence especially for new brands is tapping into creator communities who already have a loyal customer base and vast community reach. This way you don’t have to start from scratch. Creators now are lifeblood of online communities from gamers, readers, makeup lovers to home improvement buffs and they offer brands much richer opportunities for customer engagement without costing an arm and leg.
Social Selling
Consumers are getting more comfortable with shopping online, especially via social platforms. For example: Instagram’s personalized ads, which change format based on who is seeing it – and brands have the opportunity for customer targeting. Consumers can purchase right through the social platform instead of being redirected to another website. That means they’re more likely to go through with the transaction because there are fewer roadblocks. For example: You can now add WhatsApp number to your brand’s Facebook page in that means faster and more convenient communication.
Customer Care
Between lockdown and halts, basically when the whole world went upside down, the need for customer care servive saw a major surge. Customers wanted to know where their package is, when it will arrive; all on their fingertips instead of waiting on hold. They want their voices to be heard and problem solved on the platform they are using that is instagram, twitter,facebook etc. This has provided an opportunity to forward thinking business to deliver more proactive customer care experiences.
Carousel
Interactive Content that is quick, brief, and instructional is on the rise. We all know that good infotainment, such as an infographic or animation, is a terrific method to distil complex information into a more consumable manner. Carousel posts can contain up to ten posts, and it is used for instruction by accounts of all kinds. Mental health, finance, share market, racial justice, relationship guidance, and everything in between are all covered.
Audio/ Podcasting
People are going back to the old ways, if this pandemic taught us something it was the importance of loved ones. 2021 saw a major surge in audio/video communication because that was the closest to real human interaction at that time. Due to this increasing popularity of audio, we will be seeing more of podcasts and such apps. Clubhouse is such example of an audio-based social media which allows people from everywhere to talk to anyone on any topic thus bringing them one step closer and giving them a sense of belonginess or a feeling of being heard.
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Brief Profiles
Dr Amit Nagpal is President & Co-Founder, Bloggers Alliance. He is also a Visiting Professor at BIMTECH, Greater NOIDA.
Sushmita Grewal is an MBA 1st year student at BIMTECH.
