Recent Trends in Social Media

Marketing in a nutshell is identifying the target market, informing people about the product and creating desire in them to buy the product. It is very important for any marketer to find whether the target market will spend more time watching television, reading print media or using digital media. The intelligence of the marketer lies in identifying this and providing the relevant content to grab the attention of the consumer.

Gone are the days when people used to meet personally to share information. Gone are the days when people used e-mails to share photos. Gone are the days when buzz was created through word of mouth.  All this now happens on social media. Social media has brought a widespread change in the lifestyle of the people.

“1.15 billion+ users on Facebook”.

“500 million+ users on Twitter”.

“500 million+ users on Google+”.

“238 million+ users on Linkedin”.

“Social media has become #1 activity on web”.                                       

The above statements give an idea of how much time is being spent on social media. It proves that a marketer cannot simply ignore it. More and more brands are using social media to create a buzz about their brands and grab eyeballs.

Social media has assumed such an importance that over 22% of Indian marketers are spending more than 50% of marketing budget on social media with a majority spending more than 70%.

As social media is already popular, it does not take much time for the companies to garner publicity on it. But the crucial factor is how to attract more and more users and how to retain the existing ones. The clutter on the social media is increasing day by day. Hence to reap the expected results, the companies have to come up with novel ways to catch attention of users. Here are a few of the current trends:

Visual Content:

Visual content is garnering importance across all various social networking sites due to the attractiveness and the interesting content being shared in visual form. More content is being shared through image and video compared to text-data. Growing popularity of Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram mirrors this. Other sites like Tumbler, Path and Mobli are yet to gain momentum. The ‘sharability’ factor makes them more popular.

Few brands which have identified this trend have focused more on this. Brands are releasing their ad-videos first on social networking sites to create buzz. Monster.com launched its new campaign ‘wake-up call’ without the brand name on social media which created enough buzz. Later on the company revealed its brand name before extending the campaign to other traditional marketing platforms. Few brands are also posting confessions of their consumers or celebrity endorsers in the form of videos. Example: Pantene video featuring Pareneeti Chopra.

Visual content creates interest depending on how attractive it is. Hence the onus lies on the brands to make the content more interesting to drive the point home.

Increasing popularity of Twitter:

Social media was a synonym to Facebook for many till few days back. But now other social networking sites are also becoming popular. The one that is close to Facebook in terms of number of users is twitter. Twitter, the micro blogging site is becoming more popular by the day. The hash tags are becoming the scaling factors to determine the trending topics. Though Facebook introduced hash tags, it is yet to become popular.

The consumers can be engaged through conversations on Twitter easily. Twitter is also widely used to take customer feedback. Companies are coming up with innovative ideas to engage Twitter users with their brands. Starbucks launched a campaign-‘Buy your friend a coffee with a Tweet’. This campaign provided the users with the provision of gifting coffee to a friend publicly.

‘Bingo’ used Twitter as a platform to identify the retail outlets where the product is not available. It offered goodies to the consumers who tweeted. This helped the company to expand its distribution. It resulted in nearly 150% increase in the sales.

The micro blogging site is still untapped to a great extent. The brands have to come up with more interesting ideas to engage more users.

Engaging the users:

Just providing the users with content about the brands is no more sufficient. Number of likes or shares is no more a measure of popularity of the brand on the social media. How well are the brands engaging users on their site, is more important. Campaigns which engage the users are gaining popularity on these sites. They are coming up with new campaigns according to the occasion. On the eve of Christmas and New Year, Britannia Good Day came up with a campaign where the users can post customized greeting cards on the walls of their friends.

Few brands are also offering professional advice to the customers to engage them. Revlon India launched the campaign ‘Choices by Revlon’. It chooses one topic for discussion every month and offers professional advice through twitter. Starbucks has its own way of engaging with customers. It follows back the users who follow it on Twitter.

Engaging the audience must be done very carefully. The brand must respond positively even if it receives negative feedback.  Utmost care is to be taken while engaging in conversations with the customers. Otherwise it will tarnish the image of the brand.  

Viral marketing:

Viral videos, memes, pictures, tweets, status updates, blogs etc that gain huge popularity in a very short span of time. It shows an immediate burst of interest. It is a result of generation of mass curiosity. Brands are creating content that creates interest in the users to make it viral.

It is not easy to evoke interest in the public to make the content go viral. The content should either evoke strong emotions or it should be humorous. It should generate curiosity and also should be able to use multiple platforms.

Recent example of viral campaigns is that of Volvo trucks. Van Damme`s split on two Volvo trucks vent viral. The benefit of viral marketing is the message reaches wide number of people in a very short time. It is also inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing.

At times these post may go viral accidentally. But these posts will be forgotten once the interest dies. The company does not have control over spread of the content. It may lead to spamming resulting in ‘negative marketing’.

But the success formula lies if the brand could handle the viral content appropriately.  

These are a few current marketing trends on social media sites. Social media is helping brands to build their image and getting closer to their consumers. It is helping them to drive their point easily and effectively. The brands which haven’t forayed into social media are losing a large chunk of consumers. The future of marketing definitely lies in social media. 

This article is written by Shivani Kolala, PGP 2013-15. She can be contacted at pgp13028.shivani@iimraipur.ac.in