Social media trends 2021: Optimize your digital marketing strategy for social success.

Social media has proven itself to be a valuable channel for marketers to reach and convert customers. Renowned for an agile approach, social media marketing requires channel managers to keep up to date with the latest social media trends in technical and social developments to make sure they are exploiting all the opportunities available.

It’s no surprise that this year has seen unprecedented change in social media usage, alongside a whole host of other customer behavioral factors. Highlights from the studies Digital snapshot confirm that nearly half of respondents have spent more time on social media due to COVID-19.

Within this opportunity, there are challenges: How do I keep my social media audience engaged? What content is appropriate for today’s environment? You’re not alone in asking these questions, and it’s more important than ever to get it right!

From rising platforms to worthy causes, utilizing social media for shopping, live events, or forming relationships, it’s time to dive into the 2021 social media trends.

 The organic social media relationship funnel

Who do your customers trust the most? With rising concerns over privacy and fake-news, forming a trust relationship with your customers in 2021 is going to be harder than ever.

With studies showing that 75% of people don’t accept advertisements as truth, there is a lot to be said for a relationship marketing approach to building trust with your social media audience. These stats speak for themselves:63% of social media users feel consumer ratings are #1

70% of consumers believe customer opinions (more than double those who trust advertisements)

To cut through in 2021, social media marketers must invest in their relationships with employees, customers, and influencers, to ensure our key brand messages are backed up by the voices our customers value the most.”The new normal requires every company to put extreme importance on all things digital marketing. While search and email are two major components of digital marketing that can be done in-house, social media is both the most popular activity people do online as well as the most challenging for businesses.

This is because companies still look at social media as a promotional and advertising channel rather than as a grand arena to collaborate with social media users, primarily customers and influencers, and work them through a relationship funnel to incite word of mouth marketing for your brand in social media.”

“COVID has impacted the lives of every audience, every age group, and users spend more time than ever online, on social media specifically. There are limited ways to reach users in the real world, so, in order to catch up, every channel has to be utilized.

Companies will be (and already are) investing into social media platforms they stayed away from previously, be it the new sensation TikTok, somewhat stale Facebook, or any other previously unexplored platform.”

87% of e-commerce shoppers believe social media helps them make a shopping decision and with half the world’s population on social media, social commerce is the next logical step for online shopping.