Throughout the years that social media marketing has been recognized as a viable form of advertising, we have seen a dramatic change in trends of what works best. These trends vary from platform to platform, but there are a few that appear across the board that are key to understand and utilize in your digital marketing strategy.

What are top social media marketing trends for 2018?

Check out what we think are going to be the four biggest trends in social media marketing in 2018 below.

Chatbots

Chatbots are artificial intelligence that can be used for various business purposes, from marketing to customer service. This programming allows brands to take manpower away from these facets of their business, which saves money and time in the long run. These chatbots can be customized to answer specific questions customers may have or questions that brands receive in bulk.

Many companies are opting to use chatbots on Facebook Messenger to have the initial customer service conversation. Then, only if necessary, a representative will take over to help the customer with more complicated issues. You can learn how to set up these bots for Messenger here.

Stories

Stories will remain at the forefront of social media trends in 2018. After only one year, Instagram stories had more than 250 million daily users and are still increasing every day. Users aren’t the only ones taking advantage of these stories, either. At the beginning of 2018, over one million advertisers registered on the platform. Utilizing Instagram and its stories capabilities is showing advantageous to brands. According to Sprout Social, from a brand perspective, one in five organic Instagram stories from brands see at least one direct message from a consumer. Obviously, these stories are increasing engagement and brands should continue to utilize them to their greatest ability as an additional source of conversation with their clients.

More Augmented Reality

In line with the popularity of stories, social media platforms will continue offering a wide variety of augmented reality features (for example, Snapchat filters that change your face). Many advertisers have taken advantage of augmented reality in the past to announce new launches both on social media channels (like L’Oreal’s Snapchat filter for its Infallible Silkissime eyeliner in 2016) or on brand’s websites (check out how Benefit used AR to promote their brow products and how Covergirl helped shoppers find the right products at home).

Even More Video

Video continues to gain in popularity on social media and shows no sign of slowing down. With more than one billion users, social giant YouTube has played a major role in bringing video to the forefront of content strategies. On other platforms like Facebook, and Twitter video reigns dominant, with 500 million video views on Facebook daily and over 82% of Twitter users watching daily.

In addition to users heavily favoring video, the social platform algorithms themselves prefer to showcase this type of content.

What does this mean?

Essentially, when choosing what content to showcase to users, the platform will more than likely choose video over photo or text based content.

What social trends do you think will take over in 2018? Let us know in the comments below.