Create social media posts that your audience care about to keep them interested and engaged in your content! Every audience has different interests and to make things more complicated, the trends are changing all the time across different social platforms.
It’s really important to keep on top of the trends to make sure you’re reaching your audience in the most engaging way, so read on to learn about 5 of the most notable social media trends so far this year.
- Video is becoming ever-more popular
It’s no secret that video on Facebook is becoming more and more popular. Just think how many times you’ve heard about ‘Facebook Live’ over the last couple of months – they’re advertising it on TV and promoting it on your news feed every time you log on to the site. Facebook wants you to record your life and share it with your friends and followers on their platform – and the social audiences of 2017 are ready to watch.
Apps like Snapchat and Instagram give us the ability to record snippets of live content and share them with our followers, with Instagram’s new Live Stories function helping to show the growing popularity of live video feeds.
Live videos are definitely ‘in’ right now, but pre-recorded videos are still popular! If you already have a YouTube channel that posts vlogs or regular videos, think about promoting that content on Facebook to keep your feed active and show your audience you know social posting is changing direction.
- Paid social ads are dominating social networks
Whether you’re producing paid or organic posts, the need has never been greater for brands to produce high quality content that delivers a purposeful message. With an increase in the amount of paid social adverts and boosted posts, it’s looking pretty competitive in the world of social media.
 points out that the move towards paid media and the associated algorithms are making it increasingly harder for brands that only publish organic social posts to get their content seen. To make sure you’re audience sees your posts, whether they’re paid or organic, it’s important to make sure the content you’re creating serves a purpose for your readers and grabs their attention from the offset. What’s more, some social sites like Facebook and Twitter use relevance and quality scores to make sure their users only see what they want to see.
- Using images in your posts can improve engagement
You might have heard this one time and time again – but it’s a trend that’s undoubtedly sticking with us for as long as images continue to make an impact! There’s loads of articles out there with stats to back up how great using the right image can be, like  that says Tweets with images get 313% more engagement than those without!
To put it simply, adding a high quality and relevant image to your social posts will help to…
- – grab your audience’s attention
- – enhance the message you’re trying to give, and
- – improve the chances of people engaging with your content!
Luckily for you, 17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß has the world’s largest collection of stock images, meaning you can find the perfect image for your social posts right here. What’s more, we’ve even written a blog with some tips to help you increase engagement using images.
- Customers are getting more control over what they see
With every update or enhancement to a social media channel, users are being given more power over what they see to tailor their social experience. More choices mean people can filter down their feeds so they only see content that suits their interests and the way they use social media.
The more you know about your customers and what their preferences are, the easier you’ll find it to adapt and bring the posts you create in line with user behaviour. The key here is to make sure your content meets your audience’s needs – if you tell them things they’re interested in, they’re more likely to stay engaged with your brand.
- The face of social sharing is changingÂ
There’s a rise in the number of social media users who no longer choose to share content publicly. Instead, as this article from Social Times points out, almost 70 percent of online shares are now taking place on a one-on-one basis, either by private messaging functions or social applications like Snapchat.
With users moving towards a more personal type of conversation, there’s opportunity for brands to engage with customers in a new way by exploring one-on-one interaction. This opens up a way for people to reach out to customers in a conversational style and in fact, many brands are already using this style of communication to revamp their customer support systems by introducing live chat functions to the customer service they already give.
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