2013 Social Media Trends

Nowadays almost 61% of smartphone users access social media sites using their devices. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn or Instagram have seen an increase in the amount of users that get to them through mobile. Marketers are noticing this, and mobile social media is now being used to promote brands. Reviews, comments and posts mentioning a brand, product or service, or offering deals are something usual today.

Multimedia engagement is the order of the day, and e-commerce has become m-commerce. Direct marketing is becoming more relevant as it connects with the consumers in a better way, so traditional campaign marketing is bound to give way to social media marketing. Until recently, social media marketing has been only a peripheral strategy, mostly viewed as a supporting tool to bigger marketing campaigns. But more and more companies appear to be considering social media marketing as a main tool to their marketing campaigns.

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But social media don’t work in the same way as other marketing tools. For instance, the old word of mouth is a current trend when it comes to social sites. People spend a lot of time on their social media sites apps, and they are bound to talk about what they see on them. A study says that WOM (word-of-mouth) reaches from 1-6 physically, but when it comes to online sites, this figures escalate up to 1-600,000.

Also, advertising in social media is treated differently than in other places. 35% of social media sites users find advertising banners on their sites annoying, and while some of these ads may actually be relevant, more than 25% of users have said that they pay more attention to recommendations from friends than to these ads. So this kind of social media trends is worth watching in order to deliver a more ad hoc marketing for users. Here are some tips to help you channel your marketing strategies for social media in the current year:

• Shift towards mobile channels
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  Clik here to view.Mobile is becoming the preferred channel for social media. It used to be the PC, but according to a research by Nielsen, mobile access to social media apps has increased more than 60%. Research says that internet surfing and Facebook are the two main activities of users on mobile, and this is even more true of developing countries, where users skip the desktop computers and directly use their phones to surf the internet, accessing social media sites using their apps. This is indicative of a trend that marketers of social media sites, and those who use them as a marketing tool, should take into account in order to deliver their content. Quality content, mobile-tailored, should be given priority over other kinds of advertising, especially now that 3G and LTE networks are coming more into use.




• Micro-blogging will grow at a quick pace
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  Clik here to view.Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter will see an increase in their number of users, with shorter messages becoming more appealing for social media users than, say, Facebook interactions. An example of this is what has come to be called social TV. When viewers are watching a programme on TV, it is likely that they’ll be also using Twitter to comment on what they are watching with the people they know. This is in great part due to it being the only real-time platform. But also, with a number of upcoming features, Twitter is likely to continue to be the preferred method of communication in these instances.




• Twitter for customers
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  Clik here to view.A recent study by Nielsen has found out that social media is the preferred channel for customers to communicate with a company, as opposed to phone or email. So attending customer enquiries through Twitter or Facebook has become very popular among companies. However, these companies have also started to realize that their online presence must have a real-time component in order to be relevant, placing Twitter on top of the race for customer relations channels.




• Images are powerful
  An image is worth a thousand words. This has never been more true than today, with social networks like Pinterest or Instagram, which have demonstrated that internet users love image-based posts. Both platforms were big last year, and this trend promises to continue over 2013, generating more consumer engagement and interaction for brands that are smart enough to use them for online marketing.
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• Monetization of video
  Online video has become something worth considering recently. According to a report from FreeWheel, television advertisements are now competing with online video ads for monetization. Also there has been a shift from 15 second video ads in 2011 to 30 second videos in 2012, meaning that viewers have grown more receptive to this kind of advertising. However, video channels like YouTube are still to be fully exploited for what they have to offer towards video monetization. This platform is mainly used by companies as a place to get famous by means of viral videos, but there is no real engagement with the users. Also there has been much talk about Vine during these few first months of 2013. Vine has emerged as the new video alternative, allowing only 6 second videos, which is interesting as it makes the videos more shareable.
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