Social media is slowly losing its popularity, so marketers have to use more and more tools to keep their campaigns performing at a high level.
Which of them will remain effective in the near future, says Maya Mukhamedzhanova, CMO of the TGclick project.
According to Hootsuite and We Are Social, by the beginning of the new decade, the number of social media users exceeded 3.4 billion - that's 45% of the world's population! With such a colossal reach, it is clear that social media skills are becoming one of the key skills for every marketer.
Microinfluencers and hidden advertising
In the second half of 2010, the trend for a constant decline in audience confidence in direct advertising, large celebrities and the most famous bloggers formed and strengthened. In combination with the high prices of millionaires, this has led to the fact that the focus of business has shifted to micro-influencers - bloggers with a small audience.
This marketing ploy has several important benefits.
The prices of micro-influencers are quite low, many of them generally agree to work on a barter basis (for example, for a product submitted for review). Usually, within the budget requested by the top blogger, you can organize cooperation with several dozen micro-influencers, achieving almost the same coverage.
The level of subscribers' engagement in communication - both with the blogger and among themselves - is noticeably higher among microinfluencers.
The audience of mini-blogs is usually much more loyal to the author than the subscribers of a large channel.
The only problem is that instead of choosing one suitable blogger, you will need to find a dozen micro-influencers. Services such as Buzzsumo, Influence.co and other similar platforms will help with this.
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Digital detox and multi-reach
The more popular social media becomes, the more often people feel tired of them. A huge amount of information and FOMO (fear of missing something interesting, forcing constantly updating the feed) cause a very serious nervous overload - it is not surprising that sooner or later users begin to perceive their hobby for social networks as a problem.
To combat this addiction, most people choose the easiest way: they just try to give up social media. Taking the UK as an example: exposure ninja claims that 35% of the country's adults make a conscious effort to reduce their time on social media.
A similar picture is observed in the whole world, and several important features remain everywhere:
People are more likely to delete social media applications from smartphones than an account on the social network itself - that is, they do not dare to break with the social network permanently, but simply take a temporary pause.
As a rule, users refuse only the social network in which they spend the most time (usually Facebook or Pinterest). At the same time, the dependence does not disappear anywhere, so they begin to pay more attention to other platforms - Instagram, TikTok, group chats in instant messengers.
From this we can draw a simple conclusion: you will no longer be able to manage with a bunch of Facebook plus Instagram - for maximum coverage, your campaign should affect absolutely all popular social networks.
Accordingly, you need cross-platform analytics tools: Amplifr, Popsters, Socialbakers, etc. - such services allow you to evaluate key metrics for different social networks in one window, which is very convenient when planning a cross-platform campaign.
Messengers - social networks of a new generation?
From Fidonet's nodes to forums, from forums to ICQ, from ICQ to social networks - with the development of the Internet, people interested in communication and content have always switched to those platforms that are most convenient to use.
This list already had a period of dominance of instant messengers, which ended only with the beginning of the era of social networks: the same instant chats plus a feed and a lot of opportunities simply took most of the audience from ICQ.
Now, many users perceive social networks as unnecessarily overloaded with information platforms and prefer to focus on the main process - communication. Messengers are perfect for this.
According to Business Insider, already in 2015, the combined audience of the four largest social networks - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google+ - was less than the number of users in the four popular messengers: Viber, WhatsApp, WeChat and Messenger.
In the future, this trend has only strengthened, which is clearly seen in the example of Telegram: in 2016 its audience was 100 million people, in 2018 - 200 million, today it is estimated at 450-600 million, and by 2022 the messenger plans to overcome the bar of a billion users.
Digital detox, data leaks from Facebook (with a loss of trust in major social networks), overloaded interfaces - there are enough reasons why users are paying more and more attention to messengers
lot. And this must be taken into account.
Moreover, in terms of functionality, the same Telegram is rapidly catching up with social networks, albeit in a simplified form. Already, advertising in Telegram channels, when used correctly, gives excellent results, without requiring too much from the marketer.
Telemetr and TgStat will help you choose the channels that are right for your product, TgClick will allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising in different sources and will give you the opportunity to conduct contests - all the main SMM tools are already at your disposal, it remains to use them.
How to get the most
The main trend of the decade is decentralization and cross-platform. Here are some tips to help you successfully promote your product online. This is the only way to protect yourself from audience hesitation and get the most out of your campaigns.
Use all available social networks, your audience can be represented in any of them.
Place ads with micro-influencers, it is beneficial from all sides.
Pay attention to promotion in messengers.