The success of social media marketing lies in the right mix of fruitful strategies. The wrong combination will simply reduce the traffic from targeted customers rather than attract them. If you devise your social media strategies such as social media optimization on the basis of current trends, you can increase profits and use social networking sites effectively for marketing. Here are the recent trends highlighted in an article published by Forbes based on the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Low Usage of Social Bookmarking Sites
According to the research reports, the use of social bookmarking sites has decreased to 10 percent from 26 percent in 2011. This considerable drop of usage clearly indicates the fall of bookmarking sites. Even though the sites including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Pinterest are still popular among marketers, majority of sites (e.g. DIGG, Friendfeed) are almost dying. Therefore, it is not a good practice to trust a bookmarking site blindly for marketing purposes in the current scenario. Instead, check for the sites that are most popular and perform the bookmarking very cautiously.
Decline of Daily Deal Sites
Daily deal features or simply daily offerings of deals are regarded as a powerful way to attract a large number of targeted customers at a time. The research report says that around 80 percent of marketers are not interested in using the most popular daily deal sites including Groupon or Living Social for their campaigns in the near future.
Now people concentrate more on the considerable amount of returns that they receive from their purchases over time. Hence, it is advisable to use social networking sites for long term marketing goals rather than daily goals.
Top Sites for Social Media Campaigns
Marketers who use social media for marketing will obviously carry out social media campaigns (using social networking sites for promotion) for their products or services to attract targeted customers. The campaigns will be successful only if the relevant site is popular among the customers.
The research report indicates that marketers who spend more than 40 hours a week for social media marketing carry out their campaigns more intensely through Google+, You Tube, Pinterest and Instagram compared to those who spend six hours or less a week on social media marketing. Also, around 92 percent of marketers who have five or more years of experience prefer LinkedIn than 70 percent of marketers having less than five years of experience. Forum marketing has also decreased to 16 percent this year from 24 percent in 2011.
Around 67 percent of marketers are planning to increase campaigns through Twitter even though it is a slight decrease from 69 percent last year. Young marketers, more than older ones prefer photo sharing sites including Instagram Buy Quora Followers Paypal for launching campaigns. 62% chose blogging as most suitable platform to master, which is the highest one followed by Google + (61%) and Facebook (59%).
Trends of B2C and B2B Marketers
Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers use Facebook at a higher rate of 67% than other platforms. In the case of Business to Business (B2B) marketers, both Facebook and LinkedIn have equal majority of 29% each. Given below is the pie chart showing usage statistics for each platform with regard to B2C and B2B marketers.