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3 Effective Social Media Trends of 2019
1. Trusted Brands
After 2018 brought us a year full of scandals, trust in brands on social media platforms are at an all-time low. The result of fake followers, distrustful influencers, and Fyre festival documentaries have turned audiences away from big brands and instead to close friends, family, and acquaintances on social media. Brand trust is the new KPI (key performance indicator), as companies shift efforts from maximum reach to cultivating trust. Investing in online community building and personalized interactions are now of the utmost importance. According to Hubspot “4 in 10 consumers say that they are unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless they are interacting via social media,” but in 2019 consumers are looking for those interactions to be authentic and personalized. Ex: Companies like Adidas and The New York Times are working to develop a personal, impactful dialogue with smaller, more valuable audience groups. They’re creating communities and sharing insightful content—then getting out of the way and letting passionate consumers talk to one another.
2. Use of Stories
According to Instagram, at the end of 2018, nearly 400 million users were actively using stories every day. Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, said that stories are set to surpass feeds as the primary way users share on the platform, and nearly 1 billion users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat currently use stories as their preferred way to share. Beyond its large vertical area, and its visible position at the top of user’s newsfeed, stories feel authentic, immediate, and intensely personal. Much like the early Snapchat adaptation, stories are mostly temporary, cultivating a strong need to view and comment before they are gone. According to Hootsuite, 64% of their users have implemented stories, or plan to, as part of their marketing strategy in the next 12 months. While Instagram stories have been widely adopted by brands, less than 9% of major brands post to Facebook stories.
3. Vertical Format Video
A recent report from Statista, more than 50% of digital videos are now viewed on mobile in vertical format, a consistently upward trajectory since 2013. Experts believe this adaptation goes beyond what displays nicely on mobile, instead it is directly connected to us as users. Imagine for a second you are at a birthday event, and right as the cake is brought out and everyone is ready to sing “Happy Birthday,” a person yells “someone record this!” You reach for your phone, turn on your camera and hit record just in time. Now, did you imagine yourself holding the phone vertically? Or horizontally? If you answer is vertical, you are in the majority and advertising adopters are finally catching on and simply following suit. Instagram’s new push, IGTV, which allows up to 60-minute long videos, requires all content to be vertical. Jim Squires, VP of Business and Media for Instagram says we are now living in a “vertical world,” further proof that social media is turning that direction.