Social Media Trends You Should Be Paying Attention to in 2019

Has your social media marketing felt a little stale as of late? Looking to switch up your strategies and liven up your feed?

One surefire way to keep any content marketing plan fresh and relevant to consumers is to pay attention to what's trending in the social sphere. As you map out strategies to build a digital presence for your brand or business, it's crucial that you pay attention to what is exciting your target audience at the moment.

Social media trends may be often dismissed as fad, but they reflect what is current, what your audience is paying attention to, and they are what will help you better connect with prospective users. Many trends will be here to stay for the long term.

Here are four social media trends to consider implementing in your digital marketing strategy this year.

No Longer Passive.

In the old days of social media, your audiences could see what advertisements or content you had to offer and be content to make a simple assessment based on what you presented. These days, audiences are always online, and they are looking to get more involved. This is where you can help. Consider creating interactive content, which generates twice as many conversions as passive content. 

Podcasts.

Increasingly, successful brands are delivering podcast experiences to the ears of consumers. Brands and businesses are on the hunt for different ways to diversify their content mediums, and podcasting is at the forefront of new trends. Podcast revenue is forecasted to surge to $659 million by 2020.

Paid Media.

Pay to play. According to Hootsuite, 25% of Facebook pages run paid advertising content. Social media ad space is a major part of marketing campaigns in 2019, and all marketers should consider investing in paid social to reach customers and stay competitive.

Personalized Social Experiences.

Try to make the consumer experience as one-on-one as possible. One way to do this is by using popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, or WhatsApp to connect with your users. With messaging apps more popular than ever before around the globe, it makes sense that the top messaging apps account for around 5 billion monthly active users.

As a brand, you can make messaging apps integral to your social media marketing plans — 56% percent of consumers prefer to message a business, rather than call a customer service representative on the phone, and over 50% report that they are more likely to shop with a business they can message (Nielsen).

When it comes to the kind of content you can publish in order to attract and maintain the attention of a target audience, the possibilities are endless. Pay attention to emerging trends and you will find increased business success in no time.