![]() The issue however is that content is already plentiful and needs to be more compelling, specific and differentiating. All businesses started to produce content en masse after reading this book, even though content marketing is far from new (I have practised it since 1996). Insight #4: “confluence” (content + influence) is KingĬontent, at the heart of any compelling social media strategy, has been on everyone’s agenda since 2014, when Joe Pulizzi wrote Epic Content Marketing. Things are brightening up in that area, but too many businesses are still struggling with the implementation of such strategies. This will need to be fixed: Marketing and Sales will have to work better together. Secondly, there is a tendency to urge salespeople to push content towards leads and call it inbound marketing. ![]() Firstly, social media is not a short-cut for hard-sellers. My prediction for 2016 is that businesses will have to learn a few things about social selling. Sales navigator is on everyone’s lips and the name of the game is how to use social media for sales. As far as B2B is concerned, LinkedIn is punching in the major league and there are no other contenders. It’s safe to say that social selling for B2C will develop sharply in the next few years, around a mix of consumer recommendations, customer engagement and direct sales. But Instagram has shown results in that area of social selling. It’s hard to say how this will fare, with major concerns over the legal aspects of some of the sales of certain items. We have seen it develop in two directions: on the one hand, Instagram has been pushing hard with ecommerce and Facebook is also trying hard to grow its brand new marketplace, which has only recently opened in 4 countries including the US. Social selling has been buzzword of the year 2016. As Facebook announced it would diminish the amount of advertisements in its timelines, Word of Mouth and UGC are bound to play an increasing role with brands. Besides, inbound marketing is a major source of lead generation, mostly when it is coupled with marketing automation. To them, UGC and WOMM is a credible alternative. Few B2B players have the means of investing in advertising. B2B companies seem more mature in this area. But things are changing and I see more and more businesses attracted to inbound marketing. Social media is still seen as the old way of bringing eyeballs to an owned Web asset, rather than as a major WOMM tool. Most of them have struggled with this idea that users, be they employees, customers or the average Joe, would talk about their brands on their own social media pages rather than go to the brand’s account page. The old mantra of brand engagement in social media has been often repeated but not always understood by brands. Figure 1: social media is one of the main tools for Word of Mouth Marketing, this needs to be remembered and understood Social media Insights – #2: more Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) and UGC (User Generated Content) As 2016 is nearing its end and speculations on the survival of Twitter abound, Periscope may well prove to be a real opportunity for the struggling social network we like so much. We are also experimenting with it as a means to increase engagement in webinars (thanks to this, in one afternoon we managed to get a record 117 job applications for the cloud computing arm of local telco Orange). It has already become a usual tool in live event streaming. My hunch is that businesses will be increasingly experimenting with live video. It will take time before the dust settles but a new social media giant may be born. S napchat is appealing more to B2C companies and is also attracting attention, but many businesses are still struggling with its unusual features and unwieldy interface. Enter Periscope, Facebook Messenger, Facebook live and Snapchat. Exeunt Vine (definitely killed by Twitter this year), Viadeo or Xing (cornered to very definite geographies). One thing struck me when looking at the results of our new barometer: the list of social media tools quoted by marketers is evolving. Social media Insights – #1: Some tools are born and others disappear In this piece, I will make a few guesses at what this maturing social media landscape could look in 2017 and beyond. ![]() A market can be defined., and indications that there is still a long way to go. The insights we are deriving from it are showing clear signs of a maturing market Market definition in B2B and B2C - The very notion of "market" is at the heart of any marketing approach. We are wrapping up the 2016 version of our Hootsuite/Visionary Marketing barometer of social media use by marketers in France. Judging by the number of tweets and interactions we had on our post, I sense that we had struck a chord. In 2013 I recorded a video on behalf of Hootsuite in which I was introducing the concept of social mass media. Here are my 5 Social Media Insights for the year ahead.
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