Where is Social Media Marketing Headed Right Now?

Social media marketing is stepping into the future with a lot of promise, anticipation, and concern. The platforms for social media marketing are changing, but the social media marketers are not! More than focusing on what you are doing right now with your resources, we thought, it would be more interesting to observe what you are not doing!

What you are NOT doing right now

One of the first things we have seen our marketers NOT do is invest money in paid social media ads. If you see Facebook IPO in recent times, you will notice a sharp decrease in organic visibility of brands. Stunningly enough, it is not only Facebook adopting this method. Other social media platforms including Instagram and Pinterest are also cutting back on the organic visibility of new brands and companies to capitalize on the capital. Now, this does not mean decreased reach for more brands. It only means increased pay to maintain the same reach for these brands. You need to jump on the “pay-only” visibility bandwagon before it leaves the station. Instagram offers a variety of very functional video tools that give a multi-prong strategy to providing your company. It’s simpler than ever before to produce excellent video clips whether you’re utilizing a video production firm or just the very best mobile phone in the office. The most effective Instagram analytics tool to help you comprehend exactly how your video clip is performing is SocialFox.

Let’s ruminate a bit

When Facebook started out, it was a fad most people were trying out to look cool, some to stalk their old crushes and others to stay in touch with their friends. Well, today, an average user spends about an hour on Facebook each day. An average person spends about 8 hours to sleep per day. It means that your average customer is spending close to 1/16th of their awake time on Facebook looking at what others are saying. Today, Facebook’s closest rivals are possibly Apple and Google. Back in 2012, during its nascent years, Facebook received about 10% of its traffic from mobile. Now, over 82% of the traffic comes from mobile-only! About 67% of a site’s customer shops from mobile devices only and it is up to you to do the rest of the math.

What is here NOW?

Social networking and social media are not yet mature. They are rather adolescents trying to find their one true calling. For example, Facebook took time until 2014 to buy WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion and bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when Instagram had no revenue and turned it into one of the strongest platforms for visual marketing. Contrary to what many skeptics had surmised, Facebook kept growing along with all other social media platforms since 2012. In now includes channels like SnapChat, Reddit, and YouTube. New social marketers need to be able to grow with these channels to reach out to their target audience at the right time.

Video, GIF, Image and interactive marketing is not the future. It is now! So, if you are already not using these to reach out, you are missing out on a huge section of your potential audience.

What IS the future then?

Well, aside from at least ten more mergers and acquisitions by Facebook in the next five years, we expect VR and AI to make a tremendous impact on the social media marketing methods.

AI will make it a lot easier for any company to find their target audience by nifty usage of consumer data. Marketing will become more about science that random hit and miss campaigns, we now see on multiple platforms. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will rely heavily on consumer data from the company database. For that, you will need to up your RDBMS game. Now, we know how costly it can become to maintain an in-house DBA, who can wing the data in real-time. However, you can surely try getting a remote DBA assistance before time beats you.

Everyone will play a little bit of Tony Stark

RemoteDBA.com lists the benefits of having a remote DBA in your team for collating your customer data for future use. You may not be a “believer” in AI, but you will need your customer data even if you want to analyze them using any traditional marketing algorithm to find your sales trends or offer outcomes. Consumer data is a goldmine for any company. If you lose your customer data, you may end up losing the better part of your business. Customer Data does not only mean name and contact. It also includes sensitive details like their physical address, account numbers, and credit card details. A remote DBA is not just a data organizer; he is also a data protector.

Less labor, more output

It is certainly not possible for a marketing manager to take care of his marketing campaigns and protect consumer data. That is exactly why you need your senior DBA. From firewalling your storage to encrypting the data in the cloud, your remote DBA assistance can guarantee authorized access only for members of your team or your company employees. Modern day data protection often involves multi-step authorization and data encryption. It prevents brute force attackers from gaining entry to the consumer information inside the cloud.

Once AI comes into the mainstream things will be a lot different. Since they use machine learning to train themselves and better equip themselves with relevant information, tools, and algorithms, you can simply “ask” your AI assistant to fetch marketing models that will work the best in the current scenario for your company, and your AI assistant can do so within a couple of minutes. Almost reminds you of JARVIS, doesn’t it? That is quite how it is going to be in the future.

Conclusion

Marketing, at least social media marketing is not going to be about endless hours of audits, reports, and analysis. Your AI assistant can do that for you, while you can sit back relax and see the numbers pop up on your screen. Social media marketing is becoming less human-dependent by the day. Therefore, wishing for personal Artificial Intelligence assistance is not a fantasy.