Over the last three decades, social media has turned from a grouping technology to connect local communities into a global phenomenon with billions of active users. The sphere of social media for businesses continues to grow, expanding to every corner of the world and accruing new accounts as it does so.
As social media continues to grow, it has continually shaped and reshaped itself, morphing through different trends, popular apps, and core communication methods. Anyone who’s been on the internet for more than a couple of years can notice a distinct shift that occurs, with phases of social media coming in and out of fashion.
As a core tool for connecting with customers, social media is one of the top priorities in the world of business. With a pool of billions of users to access, businesses need to constantly improve their social media strategies to align with what’s currently popular.
In this article, we’ll discuss the most recent changes in social media for businesses, demonstrating exactly why companies should strive to adapt to the times.
Let’s dive right in.
Why Is Social Media Marketing Important in 2024
Social media for businesses is one of the leading landscapes to tackle. By 2027, social media is predicted to have 5.85 billion active users, encompassing the majority of the world’s population.
While formats like email marketing, in-person marketing, event marketing, and digital advertisements still have their place, social media for businesses is currently the king of all strategies.
What’s more, of all of the available platforms people have to engage with business content, social media is the biggest unifier. As we discussed, there are billions of active users on social media, each posting, engaging with, and following accounts they come across.
Considering the active and bustling social media community, which grows year-on-year, businesses that tackle this sphere are able to reach a larger audience and capture new customers with lower acquisition costs.
Yet, organizations must know how to correctly utilize social media for businesses if they are to succeed.
How Has Social Media for Businesses Changed Over the Past Few Years
The most popular platforms within social media at any one given time often have a direct influence on the forms of content that businesses find success with.
For example, when Instagram was a leading social platform for businesses, the vast majority of businesses focused on posting picture content to engage with audiences.
Yet, over the past few years, with the falling attention span of the average person and the rise in access to platforms like TikTok, more people than ever before are engaging with short-form videos.
Currently, short-form video has the highest ROI of all video formats, with 39% of users stating it as their preferred medium. As video content has risen from a staple of sites like YouTube into a phenomenon on TikTok with over 1 billion active users, the best marketing strategies have shifted to match this.
Let’s explore the most prominent changes to social media marketing strategy based on the rise of video.
The Rise of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become a staple of the modern world of marketing. In short, this influencer marketing strategy involves paying a person with a sizeable follower count to promote an organization’s products or services.
Instead of sending out PPC ads or social media advertisements, this allows a business to gain favor with a select group of people.
Influencers cultivate an audience of users who trust in their opinions, giving businesses direct access to a trusting and supportive community.
The form of trust that influencers hold can take years to establish, giving businesses the opportunity to shortcut through years of PR building and access trusting communities with ease.
Video platforms, where people are actively in front of the camera and sharing their personalities, have led to a whole generation of YouTubers and TikTokers to follow.
On these platforms, businesses can find people who have a great rapport with their followers and use them to launch products and gain new customers.
Influencer marketing is one of the hottest marketing strategies right now, mainly in part due to the rise of video content.
Taking Personalization to the Next Level
Personalization is a marketing strategy that businesses can apply to absolutely any of their other existing strategies. Instead of launching generalist content, businesses can segment their audiences into smaller user groups.
Based on shared personality or demographic factors, they can then realize highly-tailored advertisements that have higher click-through rates with that audience.
Personalization and segmentation go hand-in-hand, allowing businesses to build precise and effective campaigns. Social media for businesses thrives on personalized content, with the main algorithm of all social media platforms using user data to inform what they show.
Businesses use a similar tactic on a different scale, creating content and sharing it with user groups that are most likely to engage and enjoy that content.
When creating business social media content, businesses need to always consider their audience demographic and psychographics. By crafting precise content, they can expect more engagement, leading to a high ROI for each social media post.
That said, social media isn’t the only sphere where personalization has become important.
Email is one of the first spheres that marketing teams began to personalize on. Simply by including the name of the recipient on the email, open rates began to soar.
Modern-day emails thrive on personalized content, with people engineering emails to have high open and click-through rates. An example of this optimization is with social media icons for email signatures, using additional outbound links to direct people to business-owned content.
Personalization is a highly powerful marketing strategy and one that’s only become increasingly available as we continue to collect more user data from social media sites.
Also read: Collect Customers’ Data for Email Marketing
Final Thoughts
Social media reflects popular culture, assimilating into what new technologies people are using and reflecting the wider hegemony of the time. Businesses that want to stand out in this over-populated world need to understand that the changes that occur within social media will directly inform the strategy that they use to connect with their wider communities.
The most prominent changes that we’ve seen over the past few years have been a large-scale movement into video content. Short-form video is now one of the most popular tools that users have available to them, which has launched this new generation of influencers and popular accounts.
By adapting to the most dynamic forms of social media for businesses, they can stay on top of popular trends, methods, and communication mechanisms, connecting with larger audiences as they do so.
Once a business understands social media, it can effectively acquire new customers from the largest pool of clients we have available to us.
