The success of social media marketing lies in the right mix of profitable strategies. The wrong combination will reduce the traffic from targeted customers rather than attracting them. If you develop your social media strategies such as social media optimization on the basis of current trends, you can increase profits and can use social media sites effectively for marketing. Here are the trends highlighted in an article published by Forbes based on the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Decline in Usage of Social Bookmarking Sites
According to the research reports, the use of social bookmarking sites has declined from 26% to 10%. This considerable drop of usage clearly indicates the fall of bookmarking sites. Even though the sites including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Pinterest are still popular among marketers, majority of 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 the current scenario. Instead, check for the sites that are most popular and perform the bookmarking very carefully.
End of Daily Deal Sites
Daily deal features or simply daily offerings of deals are considered as a powerful way to attract a large number of targeted customers at a time. The research report says that around 80% of marketers are not interested in using the most popular daily deal sites including Groupon or Living Social for their campaigns in the near future.
Now people concentrate more on the considerable amount of returns that they receive from their purchases over time. Hence, it is advisable to use social media sites for long term marketing goals rather than daily goals.
Top Sites for Social Media Campaigns
Marketers who use social media for marketing will obviously perform social media campaigns (using social media sites for promotion) for their products or services to attract targeted customers. The campaigns will be successful only if the relevant social media site is popular among the customers.
The research report indicates that marketers who spend more than 40 hours a week for social media marketing carry out their campaigns more intensely through Google Plus, You Tube, Pinterest and Instagram compared to those who spend six hours or less a week on social media marketing. Also, around 92% of marketers who have five or more years of experience prefer LinkedIn than 70% of marketers having less than five years of experience. Forum marketing has also decreased to 16% this year from 24% in 2011.
Around 67% of marketers are planning to increase campaigns through Twitter even though it is a slight decrease from 69% last year. Young marketers, more than older ones prefer photo sharing sites including Instagram for launching campaigns.
Here is the picture which shows almost 14 social media platforms and the percentage of marketers that prefer them. The results shows around 62% chose blogging as most suitable platform to master, which is the highest one followed by Google + (61%) and Facebook (59%).
Trends in B2C and B2B Marketing
Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers uses 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 majority of 29% each. Given below is the pie chart showing usage statistics for each platform with regard to B2C and B2B marketers.
From this chart, we can understand that B2B marketers use a more diverse array of platforms compared to B2C marketers. Both of them do not completely utilize blogging and have minimal You Tube usage.
If you are a B2B or B2C marketer, try to encourage blogs as they are regarded as the most popular social media platform. YouTube being the second largest search engine, you can enjoy the benefits it offers by posting low-cost videos. Orabrush (B2C Company) and Blentec (B2B Company) have become strong brands by making use of low cost YouTube videos.
As B2B marketers increasingly use LinkedIn, they have an opportunity to utilize SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn). This social media entity can be used for generating leads for B2B organizations.
Fewer Online Check-ins
As per the research reports, there is a decrease in the usage of geo-location services including Foursquare from 17% to 11%. These services allow check-in to your locations automatically online. The decline in these kinds of services indicates that people are now more worried about privacy and safety. Marketers can undertake 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 hand over this deadly task to a professional SEO company that offers reliable social media marketing and search engine optimization services rather than trying to implement the strategies on your own.
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