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The Rise Of The Social Influencers Or The Digital Form Of Word-Of-Mouth

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featured-imageSocial media and free publishing platforms have made it easy for anyone to voice their opinion about any subject and build an audience of followers by becoming a blogger. This growing trend gave birth to what we now call “influencers”, the go-to opinion leaders that every brand is seeking to collaborate with.

In the following article, we discuss the advantages that influencers have over brands, and how to choose the right influencer for your campaign.

 

Influencers promote authenticity

People turn to blogs before making a purchase decision, because they can trust bloggers more than they trust the brand itself. After all, unlike a brand, a blogger is an unbiased human being who will give his honest opinion without coming across as too promotional.

Influencers share more content

Social influencers are effective at starting, sharing and spreading online conversations that brands need be part of in order to understand their consumers. Partnering with a social influencer allows a brand to broaden its reach and access larger online communities.

Influencers reach more targeted audiences

Anyone with knowledge in a particular area can develop a blog and become the trusted reference for people who are interested in the same topics. This has led to an availability of different influencers covering most of the industries such as fashion, technology, health and food, who in turn were able to recruit relevant audiences. Resorting to an influencer’s outreach means higher chances of reaching the right audience.

 It’s great for SEO

In a nutshell, Google likes it when people mention your brand on social media; so expanding your content to be published on the sites of influencers – which in turn will be shared by the audience of said influencers – will translate into a higher search engine ranking.

Although partnering with social influencers sounds like the perfect deal, it is a wasted investment if you are not working with the right ones. So take the necessary time to understand your target audience, the social networks you’re looking to reach them on and the structure behind what makes an influencer campaign successful.

5 Social Media Trends To Keep In Mind For 2017

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featured-imageDigital marketing in general, and social media in particular, has been evolving rapidly and becoming crucial to any brand looking to stand out and be noticed amid the crowd.

“Social media is not just a spoke on the wheel of marketing. It’s becoming the way entire bicycles are built.” – Ryan Lilly, author.

Social media’s evolution has been growing exponentially and it’s important to keep up with the trends, which is why we have put together a list of things to look out for when working on your 2017 digital strategy.

Live video

The rise of Snapchat, Periscope and Facebook Live has changed the way we share our stories and offered a real way to engage with an audience in real-time. While this trend is still in its early stages, market research studies have found that more and more viewers are moving from TV to social, which will push broadcast stations to consider developing a solid digital livestreaming strategy for the years to come. Brands will have to bring out their A game to stand out in this area and attain high exposure; and the competition has already started to get hot and heavy. Take a look at Paco Rabanne’s interactive Facebook Live game for example: https://www.facebook.com/Million/

Video Content

If you haven’t included video in your digital strategy yet, now is the time to do so. Video content has proven to be a successful component in any digital marketing strategy due to its interactive nature. Not only does video allow you to increase brand awareness and customer loyalty, it also leads to positive ROI compared to regular social media posts and blog posts.

Expiring Content

Snapchat has paved the way and raised the bar for the expiring content trend, which led most of its competitors to “borrow” this feature. Consumers are attracted to the idea of having exclusive access to disappearing content, and a limited timeframe in which they consume this content. It will be interesting to see how creative brands can get in adopting this tactic in 2017!

User Generated Content

One of the most important things for a brand to do is to keep its content as human and personalized as possible to build trust with fans. And what better way to do that than to let your community do your work for you? Your fans will get their 15 minutes of fame, and you will collect content for your digital strategy at zero cost, all the while increasing engagement on your social networks. Sounds like the perfect win-win situation, doesn’t it?

Mobile First

This may not come as a surprise to many, especially when mobile traffic is greatly exceeding desktop traffic, with more than 90% of consumers owning a smartphone. It’s important to take mobile into consideration when working on your content, and optimize it for mobile, especially when it comes to having a responsive website that Google considers “mobile friendly”.

A new era begins for Facebook

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As Facebook F8, the company’s annual developers’ conference, comes to an end, it’s time for us to go over the major changes the social network is bringing to the table.

Messenger as a platform

Arguably the most important and most discussed new feature announced at F8 was Messenger. It has gone from app to platform, allowing developers to integrate their own application inside it. Do you see the three little dots next to the microphone? Tap them and you’ll discover an array of GIF makers, voice modifiers and a lot more fun things to play around with, but the best is yet to come as non-featured apps will soon make their way into you smartphone.

Messenger for businesses

While we’re on Messenger, there is now a new feature dedicated to businesses that will allow direct interaction between brands and customers. When a user gets to the checkout page of a website, he will be prompted to use Messenger to fulfill his purchase, allowing the customer service to use the messaging platform to confirm orders, track deliveries and provide direct support.

360 Video

With the release of Oculus VR approaching, Facebook is preparing its social platform to embrace the change. It will soon support a new format: 360 videos. It will allow users to virtually navigate around a room or given space within their news feed.

Parse gets involved in the internet of things

About two years ago, Facebook bought Parse, a mobile app development platform. This year, Parse will release new tools to help developers make apps that interact with connected objects without having to worry about the backend too much. The SDKs will handle app analytics, sending push notifications to people at the right time, and collecting crash data.

Embeddable videos

Facebook is going all out on video, and for a good reason: the platform generates 3Bn views daily. In a grand face-punch to YouTube, the social platform will now allow users to embed videos anywhere with a single line of code. This is a powerful move that will drastically increase the number of views and definitely impact videos advertising on the long run.

App analytics

Facebook wants you to know your users better. It probably also wants to benefit from the data your app can generate. Regardless, the company has developed a tool that allows developers to gather behavioral analytics, measure how people use their app and improve their marketing campaigns.