Paradigm shifts in social media strategies from 2017 to 2018

While the 21st century has witnessed more than ever changes with the power of digital business hovering over the traditional mode of business, the digital market has also come a long way with the apparent changes. Although the convenience stores are not going out any sooner, the digital market is here for the long haul too.

The only way to promote your business is to reach out to the maximum people. Since more than three-fourths of the population of the world is active on social media, the business-minded people took grabbed the opportunity of promoting their business to a broad audience. Ever since then, there is no stopping. There are tons of social media platforms for you to expand your business, but the idea of having a business page on social media is all about increasing your followers, likes, shares, and then converting those viewers into leads.

Here are six major paradigm shifts of 2018, one should adopt to elevate their business:

1. Communicational shift
You think to communicate with every possible client, and to fill their social media inbox with your promotional messages, will generate customers? Perhaps, not! With the mode of communication being same, the Facebook chat box has come up with numerous things to keep the spam away. You can set up automatic replies on page settings to revert to your potential customer, instantly.

Facebook provides you to add your response time, with its ‘typically replies within…’ to the bio of your business page. Be honest with your prospective clients by telling them the correct estimated time to them. You can also send generalised messages or custom your responses based on keyword detection, or allow users to choose their query from a selection.

Specifically for business pages, Facebook messenger provide some unique tags for the page manager. Managing the projects through conversations could be tough, and so Facebook lets you now mark the conversation complete, save or star a particular message, follow up the discussion for future purpose. The messenger allows you to make payment request from the client in a click, and not asking the client directly for that. While you can also make an appointment with your client on Facebook to make it as a reminder, Instagram’s direct messages do not aid you with all these benefits.

2. Shifting followers
With the shift in popular strategies, business page holders move their followers on every platform they are available on, for the mass population. Facebook has been dominating as the social media platform to promote business for a long time now, but with Instagram coming in the industry, people started to shift their followers.

The followers made a shift from Facebook to Instagram, and now from Instagram to Snapchat and Youtube. Since new platforms are emerging and will continue to do so, you would have to shift your existing followers on your every page.

As you shift your existing clients from one medium to another, they get varied content on each network, increasing your followers on all the social platforms.

3. Temporary stories
With the advent of Snapchat, came the era of adding passing images for the viewers. Starting around five years ago, Snapchat has spread the story feature to all other social media networks. Today, Instagram and Snapchat stand side by side when it comes to the function of temporary stories.

Instagram stories allow you to add links, unique features like boomerang and rewinds, polls, events, geotagging, and funny filters to make it more creative and engaging for the users. Although Instagram began with the story feature by copying Snapchat, Snapchat already had the rewind, location, and filter feature to be even more creative.

Snapchat started small with the temporary story feature, but now it is far ahead of its time. You can subscribe to various pages and groups to follow them on Snapchat, while you follow popular bigwigs. The network lets you share your geolocation with your friends with the snap map, and make your story public with the ‘our story’ available feature.

We all know that stories vanish after 24 hours, while you can save it on Snapchat in your memories, you can highlight your Insta stories to keep it forever for the viewers.

4. Live!
Streaming live online dwells more people in than any other thing on the social media network. 78% of the population will rather watch a live video than read a blog on a social business page. The live feature is available on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, for your followers to stream in with you and talk one on one with you.

You can stream live and ask the reviews of your customers, face to face and revert them there itself. Although it may become dull and boring to revert to the reviews every time you stream live, you can show your storefront business to them or talk with your social media family. More than 67% businesses use live video report to bring a positive result to their return on investment.

Around 56% of the people look for video quality to join in the live stream and engage themselves with the users. Live streaming builds the trust of your followers that the page is authentic and the other person takes care to communicate with the potential customers.

5. #Hashtagging The Trend
Instagram and Twitter have brought a revolutionary change with the emergence of hashtags. The use of hashtags has gone so viral that even Facebook has started with it. Every picture you scroll down on Instagram has a minimum 2-3 hashtags to make it engaging for the viewers and find your post through that hashtag.

Business pages create their own brand hashtag for the ease of followers to find their brand images on the internet. As pictures are the new form of content for the viewers; Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr are moving ahead in the social media market. You can add the product images, or the picture of your blog on Pinterest for the viewer to directly link to your website. Hashtags are also used on Pinterest and Tumblr, apart from Instagram and Twitter.

Making your way with the help of hashtags is a right way to bring your business into the limelight. However, try to use 4-5 hashtags not to spam your images. Use trendy hashtags for users your content in the related keyword hashtags.

Get your business going with these major changes in 2018!