PPB February 2019

MARKET SHARE Social Media Takeover Businesses are experimenting with new ways to reach potential customers. There’s no slowing down when it comes to social media. With pictures taken and posted in mere seconds, to tweets updated by the millisecond, to live video feeds and viral content spreading like wild re, if you miss just a days’ worth, you’re sure to miss a lot. Hootsuite, a social media management platform, published a list of international social media trends that were prevalent in 2018, noting ve key themes. Here’s what you should know about the direction that social media took last year, and the direction it’s headed, to bring your business up to speed. Creative use of social media. No longer are brands solely using social media just for, well, posting. Veering away from the traditional sharing capability, businesses turned creative and starting using social media to collect data, lower costs and even to attract potential employees. Speci c usages included identifying changes in customers’ brand perceptions, connecting with customers directly to lower the costs of customer service, foreseeing potential problems and drawing industry talent. TV at your ngertips, anywhere. With more ways to access content via mobile, more people are watching more TV—they’re just doing so outside of their living rooms. Users today demand instant grati cation and generally have shorter attention spans. As a result, they’re looking to their phones for immediate entertainment—no surprises here. But this has created a need for brands to develop more broadcast-esque content and, consequently, to experiment with new means of engagement. It also translated into booming business for streaming services like Hulu and Net ix, which have more than 20 million and 100 million subscribers, respectively. We trust less, but we’re in uenced more. This is a pivotal moment for media, because for the rst time in history, customers trust their peers the same as they trust professionals, and more than they trust company leaders, government of cials and scholars. Marketing professionals have also become distrustful of heightened social media in uencer stats, placing more emphasis on micro- or nano- in uencers—people whose social media pro les have 1,000 followers or less—which are more personal, local and like the customers themselves. In other words, people want to hear more from people they are like. The machines are coming. There’s been heavy emphasis placed on arti cial intelligence (AI) across all industries, with claims that AI can reduce human labor in tedious, routine-like jobs, like ling customer orders and addressing FAQs. In 2018, the amount of chatbots on Facebook Messenger, speci cally, surpassed 100,000, indicating a 233 percent year-over- year growth from 2017, when this number was 33,000. AI is anticipated to affect how customers search for products, with a greater push toward developing visual search engines that use images to browse for products, as opposed to keywords. Social data isn’t as easy as we thought. Sure, social media can be scoured in search of trends and to better understand customers, but it’s time-consuming, and who has the time for that? To collect data, people (not machines or AI) need to conduct thorough research, much of which spans over time. Many companies don’t have the time or resources for this, and while social data can provide valuable information, companies are rethinking how to do so more ef ciently. In 2018, social media remained wildly relevant and increasingly popular for people worldwide, ages 16 to 64, according to Hootsuite. This suggested that for brands, it has become crucial to advertise products and services using social media channels. In 2018, nearly 3.2 billion people worldwide were on social media, a 13 percent increase from 2017, and 98 percent of these users used social media every month. (Today, this number has surpassed four billion.) And in the United States, Americans spent more than two hours each day using social media. This translated to 730 hours per year, or more than 30 full days per year—a major commitment. But, this provides brands with an added space to reach potential customers anywhere, at any time. A sale could make or break at 3 am, when a potential customer momentarily wakes up from his or her slumber and peruses social media before falling asleep. Or, during those free moments when someone is waiting for transportation, like an Uber or Lyft, or in line at the grocery store. In other words, if businesses use social media effectively, they could be generating impressions around-the- clock. But your competition already knows this, and has already been using social media, in leaps and bounds, to do the same. Consider the pool of competitors that are out there—and get your brand up to speed for 2019. Around The World And Back Again Worldwide in 2018 social media statistics. 7.593 billion the world population 4.021 billion internet users worldwide 3.196 billion active social media users 5.135 billion unique mobile users 2.958 billion active mobile social users Source: Hootsuite 66 | FEBRUARY 2019 | THINK Fas t Fo rwa rd