Today's scenarion of Social Media and shift in Social Media Trends
29.12.2018
Source : Globalwebindex Key Insights
“Be a Master of change rather than a victim of change”
Are you in the bracket of 1.2 billion digital consumers? Does your business fall in the 96% of businesses using social media platforms? Let us read without a real surprise about virtual reality.
Overwhelming statistical figures and the latest reports of internet users shows the critical drivers for the transformational shift in the global social behaviours. It also gives us the market insights into social media engagements. Below are the figures of digital consumers, which most of us already know. Here it goes,
- 1. More than 1.2 billion users use mobile phones , worldwide.
- 2. Users spend an average of 2.8 hours on mobile phones daily, as compared to 2.4 hours on the desktop
From above it is clear that mobiles are the primary device or the key drivers for the trending digital consumption. Mobiles have overtaken once-dominant PCs/Laptops.
Now, let us deep dive into the points to find out the shift in social behaviours of masses. According to Globalwebinex’s flagship report, 2018, on the latest trends in social media:
- 1. Time spent per day on social media through mobiles: 98% of digital consumers use social media and an average of 2.26 hours spent per day on social media. That is typically 80 % of their total time of mobile phones’ hours. So, the ubiquitous use of social media and its importance attributes to the rise of smartphones. As a corollary, almost every internet user can now be reached out via social media.
- 2. Multi-networking is a norm: Digital consumers have an average of 8 social media accounts per internet user, each of them is used for different networking purposes.
- 3. Passive social networkers are high: According to Hootsuite 2018 Social Trends Survey, 42% of digital consumers use social networks to stay in touch with friends. 39% of digital consumers use social networks to access news. Similar, 39% of digital users consume social media to fill their spare time, especially among 16-24s age group. It means social behaviours have become more passive but more purposeful.
- 4. Mobile-first social videos are the mainstream: The surge is mainly due to the five driving forces for video consumption among users. These forces are smartphones, shorter attention spans, binge-watching, brevity and novelty
- 5. Social commerce: Social media plays a vital role in researching, information gathering, and purchasing decisions. Social media influencers attribute to the social commerce too. Almost all digital consumers use social media channels in their purchase journey. Upcoming points explain how organisations and e-marketers are trending to the billion users using mobiles. It gives a market insight from where to reap audiences, either for business, recruitment, entertainment, marketing, selling or socialising purpose.
- 6. Brands as broadcasters: Social networks have encouraged the brands to become broadcasters and not just content publishers as mobiles have fuelled the growth of social-TV. Consumers prefer watching videos on mobile devices. Mentioned above are the five driving forces for the increase of social-TV.
- 7. Chatbots on the rise: Customer service to the digital consumers through integrated chatbots is gaining acceleration. The chatbots provide the consumers with humanlike interactions and serve as an automated channel between the brand and the audience. Bots help in establishing an effective way of mass communication and a 24/7 two-way communication intermediary between the audience and the brand. It helps them in boosting their response rate on social platforms and improving Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for the brand recommendation. By the year 2020, automated interactions by chatbots would increase to 85% of the customer interactions.
- 8. Brands up for snack ads: Snack ads are typically 10 seconds long videos. Social videos are gaining momentum for its brevity, novelty and short attention span of consumers. Most of the consumers are using smartphones for social media, and snack ads on social platforms come into play keeping the audience’s interest span.
- 9. Social media influencers for marketing: An old trend but this subtle approach by e-marketers have earned the organisations a high Return On Investments on social media investments for their brand promotions.
- 10. Blockchain as a promising future technology for marketers: Consumers being exposed to overloaded content these days, and keeping them engaged only through advertisements and posts is arduous for marketers. Now, they are achieving the engagements by using blockchain to incentivise their audiences. Basic Attention Token (BAT) is one such cryptocurrency to incentivise audiences.
- 11. Content clustering to improve SEO: E-marketers are keeping away from the rich keywords content instead clustering the content with necessary backlinks/hyperlinked keywords to support their content on a particular topic is a trend. If one page performs better, then the entire cluster in the content gets a boost thereby improving the SEO page ranking.
Social media platforms would continue to see the surge of internet users in the coming years. The organisations and the e-marketers are maturing dynamically to keep pace with the trending patterns of digital consumers.
by Pallavi
