Social media marketing might just be your beacon of light for digital marketing in 2021, as it saw a significant increase in engagement and a complete turn around from all other types of marketing and advertising. Here is a combined list of trends and predictions for the new year that can help digital media marketers take informed decisions based on predictions by the pros of social media marketing:
- Instagram exposure via Reels:
Instagram might be one of your top favorite apps as a user, but as a marketer, it gets tricky to make content that is unique enough to come above the noise and overtake competitors in terms of audience attention. With Instagram coming up with new features every once in a while, creators and advertisers get a variety of formats to diversify their content. Their newest feature, Reels, which was thought to be a direct competitor against the global giant TikTok, is a feature bringing in fresh engagement from the users. Brands can utilize this feature creatively in their Instagram marketing strategy to increase brand awareness and engagement.
- Empathy is everything, brands need to be more humanized:
2020 made us all realize the importance of empathy for others. This rule applies to brands just as much as it does to people. Consumers are generally pulled towards brands that are more transparent with them. A very common and recent example is the McDonald’s thread where the social media manager took things into their own hands and the results were too wholesome with many big brands such as HBO, Facebook, and Target among others playing along that made things even better. Apart from this, brands that are known to be more conscious about social issues and work towards making a difference are liked better by consumers.
- LinkedIn is shifting to a conversational platform
A majority chunk of 2020 was spent at home, with employees and employers working from home alike. LinkedIn is one of the most commonly used social platform for professionals and work from home affected LinkedIn’s use positively too. With the traditional team environment broken, employers and other team members looked towards utilizing LinkedIn as more conversational than it was previously. This meant utilizing the many different features the application released in the year, which will continue to increase and grow as the new year progresses.
- Organic Instagram Visibility driven by SEO
Instagram doesn’t market its platform using keywords, but in recent updates the platform announced that it would become more search engine friendly, meaning when you look up specific accounts with usernames, pictures, or videos, posts or profiles might pop up in the search engine result page. As an Instagram advertising agency, this move will be game-changing as it would increase reach and visibility on posts as well as profiles. As creators and advertisers that need their work to be more discoverable, you need to make sure you inculcate trending topics and keywords into your captions as well as posts as that will now affect your ranking and visibility through SEO.
Regardless of some ups and downs, it has been an all-around positive year for digital marketing platforms with much growth packed into a year that was expected to span at least 5-6 years. Therefore, professionals in the field should expect and gear up for the same in this coming year.
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