How Social Media Will Influence Businesses in 2022
Although businesses have been taking advantage of social media to market their products and services for more than the past two decades, there have been considerable shifts in marketing approaches over the years. New trends — triggered by the current pandemic situation and advancing technologies — are compelling marketers to frequently revise their strategies.
Whether your business is big or small, at a local, national, or international level; a social media marketing strategy is the one thing you cannot afford to ignore. Businesses that focus solely on traditional marketing only capture a small piece of the marketing puzzle.
Unfortunately, the traditional style of social media analysis is no longer functioning. According to experts, they are convoluted, slow, and no longer effective. To boost such exposure for your brand, it would be best for you to practice up-to-date social media marketing strategies or choose a leading social media marketing agency to promote your brand on all relevant social media platforms.
Keep in mind that what worked in 2021 may not be the right move for 2022. To boost your brand and team to stay ahead of the curve, here are some insights into social media's influence on businesses that you can utilise in the coming year.
Improving Brand Connection and Personalisation
A brand’s social media engagement must be capable of recognising the interests of those on the other side of the screen. As such, it is important to engage on a more personal level to attract more people to your brand.
Storytelling has a commendable influence on engagement. There is no better space to tell your story than on social media. Even businesses follow concepts, causes and content that combine their desires and standards. Make engaging videos and content — the more personal, the better.
Your brand, as a collective, must take on and maintain its identity. People need to see what you value. Put clients before profit in order for others to engage with your brand.
People Expect Products via Social Media
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, social commerce was a flashy opportunity for the most state-of-the-art businesses. However, increased social media consumption related to work-from-home mandates built the excellent conditions for the social eCommerce outburst we see today.
81% of customers were already handling social media to explore new brands and products before the pandemic. With such expectations, brands have discovered that allowing customers to checkout on the same platform just makes sense. Navigating to a site requires extra effort, which is a possible leak in your conversion funnel; especially on mobile devices, where cart abandonment rates are excessive.
Most social networks have in-app shopping facilities now that are inclusive of live videos, thriving on new features to meet the increased demand. Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest are on board with such shopping trends, while TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube currently lag behind.
Generate Loyalty
Social media has another constructive influence on businesses - it helps to develop loyalty. An initial step that brands can take to achieve loyalty is by enhancing their page on one or more social platforms through interactivity and connectivity.
By sharing your clients posts, social media will favour you by encouraging a loyal following and allowing you to see how people use your products after purchase. Before you know it, the appreciation for your products from hundreds of brand evangelists will become contagious!
Another incredible way social media supports brands to build a loyal following is through the ability to create private groups. Since your followers on social media are already attentive, there’s no need to combat the hurdle of trying to convince customers to open emails or click links. Simply attracting your following to a private and dedicated group is another easy way to build customer loyalty.
Boost Your SEO
Search engine crawlers can instantly find their way into any website and assess which websites receive steady traffic, and those that remain dormant, abandoned, and ignored by everybody. Although the most compelling component in your search rankings is your killer content strategy, generating an audience that will optimise your pages can help to boost them on SERPs.
When your content is shared with the help of social media, it has a constructive influence on the search signals within search engines. Believe it or not, social media helps to boost traffic and promote numerous backlinks from credible sources. Content that receives countless likes and shares will help redirect traffic to your website.
An increase in traffic to your site will in a way also enhance your marketing exercises by boosting and delivering more relevant traffic to your page.
Currently, the full potential of social media has not yet been fully realised. However, in the future, people and businesses will ultimately be aware of its true capability and see how deep social media presence and its influence is. An effective strategic plan will require the help of the Social Media Marketing professionals to develop a social media presence and grow their business.
