Since social media is always evolving and what was hot yesterday could be ice cold tomorrow, you need to be flexible and ready to adopt new technologies quickly in order to keep your business on the leading edge of social media. With so much going on right now in social media, this is the ideal time to create your social media strategy for next year. Here are three trends to keep in mind:
- Paid placements aren’t going away. Does buying sponsored posts, promoted tweets and other paid social media placements work? It depends on the platform. Facebook just pulled their promoted posts option without really announcing it, but on Twitter, Nielsen reports a 22 percent increase in stronger message association in a promoted tweet. Paid social media placements are affordable, so your best bet is to try it out and see how it works with your audience.
- Marketing automation works. Marketing automation means using software and tactics to cultivate prospects with highly personalized, useful content and convert them to customers. Research from The Aberdeen Group shows using marketing automation tools can increase conversion rates by over 50 percent. The most effective marketing automation not only collects data from multiple channels, but also uses those channels to send marketing messages.
- Quality content counts. Quality content will improve your website’s organic SEO. But quality content is also going to cost you. To get the most for your money, look for professional writers with experience in writing compelling copy on a variety of platforms and the ability to write to narrow target markets.
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