Whilst we focus a lot on our core business of SEO here at Digital Hothouse, we never look at one thing in isolation. Between us, we have over 25 years’ experience in the sector covering all aspects of digital marketing which helps us to provide a more holistic approach for our clients. One area that we have seen a huge growth in over the past couple of years is companies, specifically in New Zealand, investing more time and money into managing their social media platforms effectively, and with good reason. Smart Insights reported in January of this year that of the world’s population of 7.395 billion, there are now 2.307 billion active social media users, a growth of 10% from 2015. In the Asia-Pacific region where New Zealand sits, the growth rate was up 14% to 145.8 million active social media users. So with that huge market out there, what are the new trends you should be keeping up with for 2017?
Instagram Stories
We know how big Instagram is becoming. Another cog in the Facebook wheel along with Messenger and WhatsApp, Instagram is the social media site when it comes to engagement with your fans. According to the same Smart Insights report, Instagram dominates the social media landscape when it comes to interactions and the greatest level of engagement per follower. You can see from the tables below that Instagram is streets ahead when it comes to engagement per 1,000 followers and they are looking to take this to the next level with Instagram Stories.
Some of you will already be familiar with Instagram stories as they have been around for a while now, however the latest development is a bid to really engage with companies and increase the adoption of stories. Currently, there is no place other than your bio to link out of Instagram but this is all set to change. Using Instagram stories, companies (or individuals) will be able to include an embedded link within your Instagram story, allowing you to send traffic to your site directly, without having to pay for an ad.
This will allow you to track and monitor the effectiveness of your activity on Instagram and assign an ROI to your work on that platform. This is only available to those using Instagram Stories in a bid to get more and more people using this feature and is set to go head to head with Snapchat which is a closed system with no links out.
If you’re not using Instagram Stories, we urge you to think about including them in your digital marketing strategy moving forward and work out whether there is a genuine business case to create these compelling stories.
Influencer Marketing
We talked about this in one of our most recent posts, however we feel it’s going to be an important trend for the coming year and deserves its place on our list. Influencer marketing is huge. When done correctly, it can lead to increased engagement, brand loyalty and most importantly, more sales. You can read our post which goes into more detail about influencer marketing and the part it is playing in many company’s digital marketing strategies. We are working with a number of our clients to make sure it is included in their next strategy as we feel it is a largely untapped market here in New Zealand…but not for long. We can see from the Google Trends data below how quickly the search query is growing around the world and this is only set to continue:
Employee Recognition and Reward
If you work in an organisation that has a medium to large number of employees and you’re not tapping into them to help improve your reach and engagement online, then you’re missing a trick. If you ask most members of staff, they will usually only have positive things to say about a company when they get talking in person. They are most often a company’s best brand ambassador as they have a vested interest in the success of the business – they buy into what you are trying to do and hopefully they work hard to make sure you succeed. The question is, are you tapping into this positive sentiment from a digital marketing perspective? According to Social Media Explorer, employee social advocacy programmes have grown by 191% since 2013. That is huge growth.
What these social advocacy programmes enable you to do is increase your social reach through scaling. You tap into your employees who have already built a following on their personal social networks. The best thing is that many of their family and friends meet the target profile of the people you are trying to reach. There are a number of tools to help you to introduce a social advocacy programme including Social Toaster but we urge you to put plans in place to tap into your own staff.
Video/Live video
Video is hardly a new trend for 2017, however with the introduction of Facebook Live, Instagram increasing their video length to one minute and Twitter’s Periscope continuing to perform well and YouTube joining the live streaming party, 2017 is set for an all-out battle as all the major players vie for top spot.
Video content and live video in particular is not for everyone so you need to carefully analyse whether it fits with your overall strategy but if it does, we urge you to invest time and money in good quality video content (live or otherwise). You do have to think out of the box with your live video strategy and produce something that is different from everyone else. If however you get it right, there has never been a greater opportunity to reach people ‘anytime, anywhere’ as live video can be streamed on any device.
Air New Zealand are one brand in New Zealand who have really embraced Facebook Live and tried to use it in fun and interesting ways to generate interest in the brand by streaming relevant live video content. They recently filmed their latest safety video, which are known through the world for their quirky approach and celebrity lineups and their live stream allowed users to go behind the scenes at the filming and get a sneaky peak at what’s coming up:
Messaging apps/Chatbots
The final thing on our top five social media trends for 2017 is the rise of Chatbots inside of messaging apps. As you know, the messaging app space has been hotting up for some time now as companies try to leverage some of the control away from Facebook although with the number 1 and 2 messaging apps in the market in terms of active monthly users (Messenger and WhatsApp), this seems unlikely. One thing that is true is that the messaging market is not a monopoly. People definitely have their preferences when it comes to messaging apps and many people use multiple messaging apps for different purposes.
The big players aside from Messenger and WhatsApp include Snapchat, WeChat, Google’s relatively new app Allo and Viber. One thing that is going to get big in 2017 across most or all of these platforms is chatbots – automated responses to customers engaging with brands through these messaging apps. These automated chatbots allow a company to be ‘on’ 24/7, providing timely and (relatively) accurate responses to customers. As time goes on, these answers will get more and more accurate as the ‘bot’ learns more about the customer.
These chatbots will basically be coded to handle typical queries from customers and provide answers to the majority of those queries. They will be complementary to a company’s social media activity rather than a replacement but they will enable you to deal with customers 24 hours a day. Adoption of chatbots will most likely be fairly slow initially until the bugs are ironed out but expect this to be more mainstream by the end of 2017.
Conclusion
So that’s it – our top five trends for 2017. One thing is for sure, it’s going to be another crazy year in the world of social media so buckle up and embrace it – don’t get left behind!