10 Trends Of Social Media Marketing In 2020

• By Melisa Marzettis
• 02-05-2020
• Social Media

Social networks are changeable. New trends, ideas for content, and presentations are changing from year to year. Most often, these changes are not sudden - they are easy enough to predict. Some of them are already rapidly gaining momentum, although you may not even know about them.

We decided to collect 10 main trends of marketing and promotion in social networks that will be relevant in 2020:

1. Monitoring in social networks

This is the process of scanning social networks for brand mentions. Monitoring (social listening) also includes analysis of brand mentions without marks on social networks, mentions in blogs, forums, and news sites and analysis of keywords that indicate interest in a particular product.

The main goal of social monitoring is to manage brand reputation and make customer service better. Also, there are additional benefits. It is expected that this year, monitoring will be transformed and be one of the main tools for generating leads and make it to where the amount of sales will grow in social networks.

2. Engagement is more essential than it was before

Back in 2018, it was announced on Facebook that the algorithm, which was updated takes into account the quality of user interaction and content. This meant that it started to give preference to what organically engages users. The change inspired many brands to come up with something more interesting.

Getting organic reach is becoming increasingly difficult. Survival in this ultra-competitive social space directly depends on your ability to create attractive, interesting, and capturing stuff.

Meanwhile, the algorithms of social media are becoming more complicated. Gone are the days when you could just ask people for liking, commenting, and sharing your publications to make the reach bigger. To get a good engagement in 2020, the brand needs an improved promotion strategy for each social network.

3. The increasing popularity of live broadcasts and live video

The fast-increasing popularity of streams has made it to where a perfect opportunity for marketers to use this channel for promotion in 2020 appeared. The top levels of activity and the uniqueness of real-time video make it a powerful tool for marketers who seek to attract a new audience and strengthen the connection between the brand and its subscribers.

Live streams build trust and brand loyalty. Even though there is every chance of a technical malfunction while the live broadcasts go on, persons are sympathetic to it and "penetrate" the brand, even more, forgiving them possible mistakes and overlays. All because it is live organic content.

4. The increase in the amount of micro-opinion leaders

There was a time when for famous personalities (singers, actors, etc.) to have millions of subscribers on social networks was something revolutionary. Such a large number of people immediately saw their every post, video blog, or tweet that the creators of TV advertising could only envy. But in the last couple of years, more and more opinion leaders of various scales have appeared on social networks. So now we have our own Instagram stars, influencers on Twitter, and YouTube millionaire bloggers scattered across the Internet.

The amount of opinion leaders in social networks increased, the amount of their subscribers increased, and along with them the prices of their advertising services increased. So, there were more brands, which started to look for alternative bloggers for their budget and turned to micro-opinion leaders for promotion of their items.

Unlike their mega-opinion-leaders, micro-opinion-leaders exist in almost every marketing niche. Most of them have fewer than 10,000 followers, but their audience is more engaged in expert content from a blogger and trusts his recommendations more. Micro-opinion leaders are experts in their niche. They do not receive many offers from brands, therefore they are open to cooperation and contact simple as that. So advertisers have a huge chance before competitors to reach a suitable micro-opinion leader.

5. Customer support based on artificial intelligence

It is easy for clients to access the brand. Now they can easily contact them and quickly receive an answer to their request. This leads to make the amount of chatbots bigger and automated messaging, which are available today in many client services.

Chatbots have become popular due to the Facebook Messenger app. Brands realized it to be a simple way to provide additional support to customers, although not all clients were convinced that this was the perfect solution. Today, automated answers are getting better thanks to artificial intelligence.

Brands need time to program bots for more "human" answers. Here are instances of such solutions: endowing bots with their character and adding the maximum possible number of reactions to questions. This makes bots more progressive and efficient.

Every day, AI is increasingly being used as an automated support service for clients who feel like receiving an answer to a popular request. Brands can set up a bot that will save their time and will constantly answer the same questions for them. Customers are positive because they get an answer instantly. It is unlikely for 2020 to become the year that most companies see AI as an organic part of the customer service ecosystem on social networks.

6. The increasing popularity of stories

In accordance with a research by the consulting company Block Party, the popularity of stories (fast-fading short videos) is growing 15 times faster than classic posts in the tape. These numbers are astounding.

Facebook Product Director Chris Cox shared a chart showing that storytelling has every chance to become quite famous way to share information with other users on social networks. Nearly a billion users on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat already use stories daily.

There is a shift in social networks. Originally designed for desktop computers, they transform into platforms tailored for mobile devices that allow users to quickly publish content and broadcast events that occur in real-time.

Stories are both created and consumed by users on the go. A standard smartphone and creativity will be enough to create unique content. Also, they are fleeting (usually disappear within 24 hours), and bloggers have plenty of opportunities for experimentation. All this makes the story so popular, real, and personalized.

Yes, publications with a quite high engagement rating are still essential and certainly play an essential role in digital marketing. But today, when users quickly get tired of the usual scenarios, brands and influencers simply need to be able to use different styles of text delivery.

The Guardian conducted a study and found that realistic stories work best with minimal retouching. Advertising stories with "text on paper" look inorganic and worse perceived by users.

7. Fighting fake subscribers

Instagram today is one of the most popular social networks. Many current major influencers have increased their audience by several times, or even “risen from scratch” thanks to the application.

But it is no secret to anyone that some of them used prohibited methods to increase their popularity and receive large advertising contracts. There are a huge number of services that provide fake subscribers, and simply, bots, to the user for a fee. Instagram knew this and felt that it should put an end to this trend.

A few years ago, the first major “purge” took place, which was a warning to all users who want to trick the system. And, although this kept some bloggers from questionable practices, the attractiveness of quick account promotion still seduced others. Thus, services continued to struggle with this, and users continued to inorganically increase the amount of subscribers, but more carefully.

Instagram announced last year that it began again to remove fake likes, subscriptions, and comments from accounts that used third-party apps. The problem was so widespread that machine learning tools were created to identify such actions and prevent them. It was a grandiose step to maintaining their reputation as an honest social network for Instagram in which people and brands can develop their community thanks to the sincere interest from other users, and not to the likes. The amount of followers is not the main sign of the popularity of influencers anymore.

8. Organic reach

Not so long ago, Facebook announced changes to the algorithm so that users can see more content from friends and family, rather than from the brands and pages to which they are subscribed. Brands with high organic reach did not experience a sharp decrease in engagement and a catastrophic decline in performance, unlike companies that do not pay special attention to organic reach.

So one of the key areas of growth in 2020 is the increase in organic reach in social networks. Remember that using the other trends listed in this article will help strengthen the brand’s position on social networks and stimulate the growth of organic traffic and real subscribers.

9. Narratives

Brands will continue to create narrative content and improve it. The advantage of this type of content is that it captures the user experience from contact with the product.

Narratives reflect what the community thinks and says about the product on social networks. Brands that can build a strong story around themselves will be more successful. For a brand story to be effective and beneficial, it must be natural, compelling, and motivate the audience to act. Look at the history of your brand from the side and make sure that it inspires users and stands out from the competition. Finding the best mobile app development agency in India influences your business success to a great extent.

10. Selfie videos and branded masks

Selfies are still relevant to social networks. What started as shooting yourself was transformed into video format. These are not only blogs but also shooting stories, etc. Such videos allow users to more seamlessly convey the moment "here and now" than using ordinary photos.

Brands should take this into service: people watch their friends' videos on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook for hours every day. Therefore, marketers need to find a way to organically incorporate the company mentions in such videos.

Besides, branded masks are becoming increasingly popular among users. You just need to come up with an interesting effect that will be distributed by the subscribers themselves without the participation of the brand and integrate it into competitive mechanics.