Social Media Optimization trends for 2019

Posted by Joe / November 5th, 2018 / 9 Responses

It won’t be wrong to say that about one million active users join the different social media platforms every day. According to We Are Social, there are about 3.03 billion active users worldwide. It would unfair to avoid such a wide audience and with the awareness of the same, the brands are paying so much money on social media promotion and advertising. According to Clutch survey done in 2017, the following are the social media platform value.

Picture credit: Imgur

With the change and the evolution in the social media, every eCommerce marketer needs to evolve with the trends. With we being there laying down the social media optimization tips for 2018, it finally time that you prepare your eCommerce businesses for the year 2019. So, with the year 2018 almost gone, let’s take a look at social media optimization trends for the year 2019 in this blog.

Have a focus on Generation Z

What is Generation Z? Generation Z comprises the age group 4-19 years old. This is the group who’s growing up with social media technology as an everyday reality of their lives. With the passage of years and them growing up, it would be necessary for the online stores to work harder on their social media promotions as well as social media optimization tricks.

Picture credit: Forrester

In the year 2019, pay special attention the Generation Z because social media marketing is highly progressive and you have to change your optimization tips accordingly to stay in touch with Generation Z.

Why is focusing on Generation Z important for the eCommerce marketers?

The marketers who are ahead in the competition are the ones who realize that digital-first Gen Z presents a unique opportunity to instil brand loyalty early. After all, if a user becomes a customer at a young age (i.e., Generation Z), there are more chances of him/her to spend more time on your website over their lifetime.

Why is focusing on Generation Z important for the eCommerce marketers?

The marketers who are ahead in the competition are the ones who realize that digital-first Gen Z presents a unique opportunity to instill brand loyalty early. After all, if a user becomes a customer at a young age (i.e., Generation Z), there are more chances of him/her to spend more time on your website over their lifetime.

Invest in Influencer marketing

Remember when we talked about influencer marketing trends that you should follow in 2019? We talked about what exactly influencer marketing and it is actually the type of marketing that incorporates influential personality to brand your products to the larger masses rather than you doing it yourself.

YouTubers and Instagrammers are the best examples of people who market products and businesses to their viewers. Talking about both YouTube or Instagram, if you find a sponsored videos by anyone who has a huge number of followers or subscribers, you’d want to call them Influencers. According to this survey done by Collective Bias, 70% of the millennials prefer product endorsements by non-celebrity influencers. Moreover, Instagram seems to be the popular choice for micro-influencers. 80% of them said that they use Instagram to post original content.

Picture credit: ShaneBarker.com

As a part of the social media optimization tips, you should start focusing on branding your content through influencers on the social media platforms. With a growing popularity of the influencer marketing, you should focus on generating content that users would rely on and put their faith on in the coming year.

Depend on User-generated content

If you have ever been through in that place where you’re shopping a product and before doing so, you go through the reviews section. Well, that’s what user-generated content looks like. In order to know a few important statistics about UGC or User-Generated Content, take a look at the image below.

Picture credit: Walls

The user-generated content is not paid and this is one of the reasons why other users believe in the content offered by the users themselves. According to CIO. Customer reviews are trusted 12 times more than marketing coming directly from the organization. The user-generated content can be in the form of text, videos, images, gifs and more. Doing this is an extremely useful way of getting the customers involved with the business strategy, which — as you can probably guess — leads to a better, overall customer experience.

The below-mentioned image on Imgur states that 60% of the go for content by consumers.

Picture credit: Imgur

In today’s time, the consumers are constantly looking for an authentic connection with other consumers who are like-minded, not just another line in an annual report. That’s where social media comes into the picture and that’s where consumers meet people like themselves. The social media platform allows them to create communities and UGC is one of the best ways to do it. For example, this #IWorkFromHere campaign by Hootsuite, encourages their clients to share pictures of their working place and in return, it got them 2.2 million and more daily views, which translated into more than 2,000 new mobile users.

UGC is a powerful tool as it gives other potential customers the social proof they want. In fact, what’s better is that the content generated by a user can be something that could be useful for others. The user-generated content can be anything photos with hashtags (#), product feedback, shopping experience, queries, discussions and a lot more.

Augmented reality

According to Statista, In 2022, the augmented and virtual reality market is expected to reach a market size of 209.2 billion U.S. Dollars.

Picture credit: Statista

Augmented reality was also in the top social media optimization trends in 2018 as well. In the year, augmented reality has grown widely leaving a long-lasting impact on the eCommerce industry. More and more games are being developed on the augmented reality and the latest one is PUBG. Coming down to augmented reality trends for social media, Snapchat was among the leading social media platforms to explore the Augmented Reality integrations. The Snapchat users have started exploring the latest of augmented reality integrations and the trend has started to spread far and wide on the other social media platforms. The social media marketing managers have this on their radar and take advantage of these features that are sure to reach new heights on other platforms too further their reach while personalizing interactions.

Summary

Social media optimization trends in 2019 are all catered to personalizing the customer experience by putting the customer in charge. The eCommerce marketers can take a cue from this and start preparing their online businesses with the best social media promotions tricks.