2020 has proved to be a significant year for social media and social media marketers. Take a look at what we think are some of the top 10 strategies for brands in social media marketing in 2020.
Social media is becoming synonymous with everything marketing and it forms the major chunk of digital marketing, even with the coronavirus. Social media is however evolving every day and social media tools and platforms are far from static. If anything, they are constantly innovating and adding features that tie technology into the community model of human beings.
People’s usage habits, likes, and wants cotinually change, and platforms and functionalities evolve, which means that there are little to no stagnant social media trends. This means that the ability of marketers to reach their audience and how users look at social media is constantly evolving.
Hence, it is imperative for marketers to constantly stay above the curve and innovate when using social media to reach out to potential audiences. Understanding new age strategies, being in sync with rapidly evolving platforms, and having the right skill set is important in using social media optimally.
Keeping all of these in mind, we have put together a list of the top 10 social marketing strategies for 2020. This list is a mix of what we think is crucial for social media marketing for 2020 as well as what most industry experts are talking about.
Read on to find out what strategies you and your organization should be keeping an eye out for or inculcating in your social media marketing plan for the year 2020.
10 Social Media Marketing Strategies
No matter what audience, demographics, market, or industry, social media has changed the way we interact with brands, products, services, and even people. Social media influences purchases as well as purchasing decisions for users and hence it is important to stay up-to-date and current with social media marketing strategies that will help you market better as well as stay above the curve.
We have put together 10 of the top strategies that we think will help brands innovate in 2020 as well as help you separate from the chaff. These strategies are independent of types of organizations, buyer profiles, operating markets, marketing spends, and other micro-segmentations. The trends in no particular order, are:
1. Build social media communities and engagement
Social media marketingOpens a new window has evolved from plain likes and shares. It is now becoming increasingly important to create, manage, and maintain a vibrant community of users. Developing a model of co-creating consumers is important to a brand since it offers an insight into the mind of the consumer while staying relevant.
Very often you can see brands that have huge follower numbers but are limited to no interactions on their posts. It is important to cultivate an ecosystem of interactions and that is best done through the community model.
Social media communities aren’t a new concept but if brands utilize them right in 2020, they can help pivot a brand to doing a lot more with their target audience. Creating a community is the easy bit – creating engaging content and collecting ongoing feedback and data from the audience is tricky. It is important to use data and analytics together with the community model.
In addition to this, applying a gamification module to a social media community not just helps increase the interaction with the brand, it also provides the ability to create “super social media users†and advocates for the brand.
LinkedIn has completely overhauled their personal branding and messaging to depict a social media community because they are increasingly understanding that without the participation of users, the platform cannot innovate and grow.
Learn More: What Is Social Media Marketing? Platforms, Strategies, Tools, Benefits and Best PracticesOpens a new window
2. Employ an omnichannel social media marketing strategy
Brands tend to use mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram but due to the fluid nature of that audience, smaller platforms get overlooked. Also, due to fatigue of usage of these platforms, audiences tend to reduce their consumption of these platforms or completely drop out.
With a large number of users, it is also becoming increasingly difficult for brands to organically reach users while the spends to advertise on these platforms is skyrocketing.
TikTok, one of the fastest-growing social media tools has over 500 million monthly active users. Pinterest has over 200 million users. Brands can leverage these platforms to create an omnichannel model to approach users.
Using these alternative methods to market can also help deliver content in different forms while reaching out to a larger audience base that may not necessarily be on the core social media platforms. This also aids with simplifying e-commerce as the scope to target a user is now widened. It also helps broaden the scope of the social media strategy.
Another use case of an omnichannel strategy is the digital detox that some users are going through with certain platforms. This may be due to them not trusting certain platforms or simply outgrowing them. Having a model that they can be reached out to and engaged with elsewhere ensures that you don’t lose customers who decide to drop off certain platforms.
3. Add storytelling to your arsenal
Telling stories is one of the easiest ways to engage and captivate an audience. With the ability to create stories on many social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube, the use of deploying content in the form of stories is increasing.
A recent study showed that 25% of brands use social media stories daily; 25% use between 2-4 times a week and 20% of brands use them at least once a week.
Due to the direct nature of content sharing and an easily consumable format, this is going to become even more important in 2020 than sharing posts. It is also easy for users to interact with stories in the form of quizzes, polls, reposts, etc.
Brands are increasingly using stories to share content in a non-direct manner but with higher engagement rates due to the scope to experiment with different content types.
Two very interesting facts that Instagram published was that in 2019, there were more than 500 million daily stories users across the globe. The second bit of interesting facts that Instagram published was that 45% of the ad spend on its platform was for stories rather than for feed-based posts.
Stories can also be used to push users to more long-form content, for example, Stories to IGTV and links.
4. Tap into augmented reality
Augmented reality (AR) is not the same as virtual reality and should not be confused with VR. Providing a gamified or virtual view to the user’s real world view is allowing users to interact with brands better.
Snapchat has created an ecosystem with deep-level augmented reality integration that can allow brands to market better to their audience.
Ikea is using its mobile app to help users employ AR to showcase how their furniture would look in their home or office space.
Incidentally, Facebook has recently launched the Facebook AR Studio that helps brands and marketers stay ahead of the curve by creating niche AR experiences for users. Tapping into the limitless possibilities of AR can help brands become thought leaders and also create a wowed audience.
5. Use social media as customer service
Customer service is important for customer experience. In the digital age, however, the customer service provided to users is available for everyone to see. While it is easy to find positive customer reviews, negative comments usually find themselves on social media very easily.
Users take to social media to vent or complain must faster than they do to praise or provide positive feedback.
A recent study showed that both B2B, as well as B2C brands, see 5 times more negative comments on social media than they do, positive. This is including customer grievances and complaints.
Due to the ease of use of social media, 2020 is a pivotal year for brands to spend more time and resources to use it as a vital cog in customer service. The use of phone calls in customer service is slowly diminishing and social media is making its foray to the forefront.
Southwest Airlines encourages users to write to them on social media for a 24*7 resolution mechanism. In the recent past, a lot of fliers have said that they prefer flying with Southwest due to its mature and easy to access customer service.
6. Leverage social media influencers and direct marketing
One of the biggest trends at the start of the new decade is how social media influencers are being perceived. While 2019 saw a $5.6 return for every $1 spent with a social media influencer, there was also a 61% reduction in trusting macro-influencers.
One of the biggest changes in 2020 for social media influencers is the rise of micro and nano influencers that form the larger part of social media communities. Users are reportedly trusting influencers that they most relate to and feel a connection to. In fact, most users have shown that they trust family and friends and even smaller but specialized influencers because they are more likely to be honest while canvassing a product or service.
Smaller influencer and direct marketers have a more honest but direct connection with the audience and are relatively cheaper to engage with, which translates to a higher return for money spent. These influencers can not just push content but also engage with the audience and act as true brand advocates.
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7. Bring the point of sale to social media – social commerce
What is obvious is how social media has brought about a change in purchasing and the buying decision-making process. But what is not obvious is that it is now easy to make purchases directly from social media or easily in few simple steps with the point-of-sale as an extension to social media.
Adidas has been extensively using Instagram to market and sell products online including showcasing prices of merchandise inside the image on the feed making it a non-intrusive but effective method of making a purchase.
2020 will see an increase in the creation of shoppable posts. If anything, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms are making it increasingly easy for brands to use social commerce.
Social media brings users and brands closer to each other and provides the ability to make instantaneous purchases reducing the sales funnel and time to purchase. In fact, shoppable posts are already becoming the norm in 2020 as online businesses are most used during lockdowns and social distancing.
8. The subtle art of social media contests
Social media contests have traditionally been associated with increasing follower counts and unimportant engagement metrics. They are however making their way back in the form of mature models that increase engagement with the brand.
Garmin has been using social media contests to not just stimulate and indulge a wide audience, but also to collect product usability and fondness feedback from their users through contests. These contests have also been used effectively by Garmin for new product launches and to increase the brand value during traditional purchasing holidays.
Social media contests are also being used as a marketing strategy to create communities of niche and loyal users and in-turn to co-create content with them.
9. Swear by live & video content
Video is highly emotive and stimulating to users as well as is an effective way to reach out to and engage with an audience. Live content is 3 times more likely to be watched than pre-recorded content. However, video content, in general, was widely consumed in 2019 and its importance will only increase in 2020.
Live video content is 6 times more effective in engaging users and hence this is one of the most important social media marketing strategies to employ going into the new year.
YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have spoken about investing higher budgets on video ads and ads on video thereby cementing the importance of such content in 2020.
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10. Consider social listening and evaluating data
Social media can be a whole lot of white noise and unfiltered data if you don’t know what you are looking for. 2020 is going to be an important year for a brand’s social media marketing strategy to listen to users and consumers on social media as well as evaluate and make sense of data.
It is also important to be able to use AI, machine learning-enabled suite of tools that provide insights about data that isn’t visible to the naked eye. Insights are ubiquitous on social media if you know what to look for!
To Sum Up
Due to the ease of use as well as it’s effectiveness, social media is going to be the cornerstone strategy for most mature brands. 2020 will be a milestone year to push social media to its boundaries to stay relevant during the pandemic while continuing to grow a userbase. The above 10 strategies are what we think will make a difference to brands and their social media marketing strategies for the year no matter the type of organization, the market you operate in, or the consumer base.
It is important as marketers to recognize your brand’s objectives and use these or a combination of these strategies in conjunction with what you already have planned for the year to achieve your business goals!
Which social media marketing strategies are you trying this year? Tell us in the comments below. For the latest news and trends update in the world of marketing, follow us on TwitterOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .