Top social media trends to tap into now

The social media scheduling tool Hootsuite has outlined what it expects the top social media trends of 2019 to be after completing a comprehensive survey of more than 3000 of its business users. If you’re in the middle of planning your social media strategy for the next few months, these findings could well help your efforts to gain more traction and more engagement than ever before…

Trend 1: personalised content will matter Privacy, transparency and security were words we heard over and over again in relation to social media last year, fuelled by the Facebook Cambridge Analytica saga and knowledge that Twitter and Instagram were both fighting an onslaught of bots and forced to delete millions of fake accounts. This means that users are more distrustful of brands and influencers and more reliant on people within their social and family circle. To overcome this hurdle, your social media marketing should focus more on personalised content and connections. Hootsuite expects efforts will also be made to make brand content more transparent and more meaningful, which could see a shift from reach to higher quality engagement from key audience members. Trend 2: Stories will continue to soar in popularity With most major social platforms now having a Story component, this is one content format that looks set to soar in 2019. This type of update is said to be growing as much as 15 times faster than a traditional update posted in a regular feed. Facebook expects Stories to be the primary medium for social sharing in the next 12 months.For you as a brand, this trend for less polished, more natural disappearing video content could force you to have a rethink about your entire approach to social media. At the very least, these stats should encourage you to add Story-style updates to your schedule. Four in five major brands use Stories already so there should be someone within your niche already using this format to provide inspiration if needed. Start sharing and experimenting as soon as you can! Trend 3: Expect to spend more on paid social promotions It’s a known fact that organic reach is declining across the major social platforms as networks seek to monetise their business users and audiences. In the USA Facebook ad spend consumes 23% of all digital ad spending and a quarter of Pages now use some form of paid promotion.Because ads can be very targeted and there is a lot of scope for cross-platform promotion and a wealth of content creativity, this is one of the tougher trends to master. Not only do you need to up your budget but you also need to take time to learn who your audience is and where they are. Once you have found your tribe, you need to craft compelling and high quality content and have measurement and reporting metrics in place to refine your approach and targeting next time round. Trend 4: Social shopping If you don’t yet sell via your social media channels and instead rely on your ecommerce website design to fuel your bottom line you’re not alone, as many companies have struggled to make social sales work for them. However, Hootsuite expects that the tide may be about to turn thanks to the emergence of new social selling technologies such as Shoppable Posts on Instagram and Facebook Marketplace.