5 Upcoming Social Media Trends of 2018 You Need to Watch Out For

Social media brings forth endless opportunities for new brands and old enterprises to open new streams of revenue and connect with their potential customers. Just like any other marketplace, social media is competitive, and it is difficult to find footing in the domains without a little knowledge of the more recent trends and the upcoming social trends. Many social media marketing oracles are already taking out their magic crystal balls to predict this year’s trends. Thankfully, we do not need crystals because we have last year’s trends and years of marketing experience to foresee the immediate future of social media marketing.

Here are the top 5 upcoming social media trends of 2018 you need to watch out for:

The rise of AI and chatbots in social media marketing

Chatbots and AI are transforming the customer relationships for almost all brands with a digital presence. Even the smaller start-ups that started yesterday now have chatbot applications on their social media pages to engage their customers. You cannot view chatbots and AI separately. One fuels the other, and the chatbots finally strive to deliver unforgettable customer experience.

Even the most basic chatbot systems engage with customers on the basis of keywords. They work on the basis of document retrieval systems. Right now, these chatbots are evolving holding hands of AI to understand the contextual meaning of the keywords or customer intent. It is an excellent step forward towards the improvement of user experience or UX. It is true, chatbots will NOT be replacing human customer service agents in the immediate future, but the chatbot and AI game is becoming more relevant by the day.

AI is today’s tech and you need expert help to be able to accommodate this change. Now, you cannot look away from this trend and wish for it to blow away merely because it is costly! You need financial help that can see you through your current monetary distress and can carry you forward to the next leg of the marketing journey. A consolidation loan should be able to help you take care of your smaller loans and offer you funding for shifting to an AI-based customer interaction system.

Short-lived content is alive everywhere

Ephemeral content became strong with the third quarter of 2018. Although social media was more about posts, comments and long-lived textual content even a couple of years ago, the birth of Snapchat, Instagram Stories and Facebook Live has brought a significant change to this concept. Content that lasts about 24 hours initially didn’t make much sense to the marketers, yet we saw the mighty rise of this kind of content in the last six months. Ephemeral content brings with it signs of authenticity.

Most marketing teams use short-lived content for sharing promotional offers, exclusive insider videos, QR codes and Snap codes with their followers. FOMO (fear of missing out) triggers the users to regularly follow, check and interact with almost all the brands that rely on short-lived rewarding content. Even brands like Daily Mail, MTV, and Mashable, are believers of transitory content on social media platforms for brand promotion purposes.

Organic social traffic will become more difficult

When Facebook and Instagram were new, it was so much easier for anyone to gain attention. Brands and entrepreneurs could merely share a blog or a post and garner hundreds, sometimes thousands of posts from one platform. It was the truth till the advent of social media consolidation and widespread availability of social media optimizing tools. In fact, Facebook and Instagram are gradually making it more difficult for companies to stay visible unless they are pulling out their credit cards!

Sponsored ads are becoming more common and more competitive by the day. To optimize posts for social media now the digital marketers have to optimize their posts for search engines first. Regular authentic and non-promotional social media posts are not getting as much importance and visibility as they used to even a couple of years ago. Popular social media channels are weighing the posts in terms of interest, creator, type, time of posting (how recently it was posted) and post-performance to pick a position for its display on the wall of a follower cum potential customers.

Automation is becoming a mainstream reality

Over 92% of all businesses from various fields can save more money and avoid losses by adopting automation. Automation can change the way many companies manage their marketing strategies, promotional strategies, email campaigns, market analysis and measurement of ROI. That means there is room for automation in every step of business.

Automation makes businesses smarter and the processes more intuitive. Automation of social media was already an emerging trend when the clock struck 12 on the New Year’s Eve. Right now, it is one of the most influential trends that are overtaking the marketing realm of social media in 2018. Social media automation tools can set up scheduled posting at regular times, set up proactive responses to customer comments in real-time, create keyword-based leads, improve visibility and organic traffic to your websites, and collate all social media platforms on a single dashboard for the digital marketer to manage.

Social influencers are still super hot!

Influencers are no longer the underdogs of social media marketing. Almost all brands (over 81% of them) are looking for social media influencer marketing techniques to strengthen their social following. Bloggers, Twitteratis, Facebook friends and Instagram celebrities are critical influencers of social media when it comes to brand building, brand popularity and business promotions.

3 billion people are right now on social media using multiple social media platforms for a myriad of purposes. The noise is gradually increasing and reaching out to the target audience is becoming progressively difficult for almost all digital marketing experts. These influencers and thought leaders have become the gatekeepers of these groups of target audiences. Finding the right influencer will help you find a keen audience in their followers. All you have to do is look for the social media influencer whose thoughts and actions reflect your brand values and business ideals.

Social media has the power to transform the business economy in today’s world. From short-lived, viral content to long-term campaigns, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn are bringing forth a new world of promotions and marketing campaigns that will make the life of the digital marketers a lot easier. The upcoming trends are going to make the process a lot more rewarding, and you can always measure the returns with the help of the latest tools that measure social media marketing ROIs