The Future of Social Media Is Here: These Are the Trends You Need to Know

It’s time we talked about how you’re using social media. That’s right, this is an intervention.

我们关心你在做什么,等等importantly what you’re不是doing. Your lack of adoption of new channels. Your total disrespect of mobile first users. Your reluctance to try video. Your fear of spending money on social ads. Your results. We’re concerned.

我们出于对您和现代营销的热爱而引起了这些关注。你看，social media marketing has changed, but most social media marketers haven’t.A modern social strategy is light-years away from the definition we used in 2012 and it’s time to adapt.Adapt to a mobile first, video obsessed audience.Adapt to new tactics that take advantage of new tools. Adapt how we measure success and what we’re trying to achieve.

This isn’t a matter of making tweaks, we need to start over.

We know this because it’s something our own marketing team has gone through here at HubSpot. Over the last few years we’ve had to constantly reinvent ourselves. We’ve learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Why do we need a new start?

Things have changed -- and that all starts with Facebook.

Flash back to 2012with me for a moment。It was an eventful year: we were all watchingGangnam Styleon our iPad 3’s, mourning the loss of Whitney Houston, and eagerly awaiting the Facebook IPO. An IPO that we were excited but unsure about.

It wasn’t clear at all in 2012 that Facebook had a viable business model. Investors were concerned if they could actually monetize. After the first few months of their IPO their stock was down and the future looked grim.

The fact that this was only 5 years ago Facebook seems ludicrous. Today Facebook is one of the fastest growing, most well known, most trusted, and most valuable companies in the world. Its only rivals may be Apple and Google.

Facebook作为一家企业的成功与他们在移动方面的成功直接相关。2012年，移动仅占Facebook收入的10％today it accounts for 82%。They were able to move with users from desktop to mobile and create a totally new stream of revenue that corresponded with a big shift in consumer behavior.

这一成功使Facebook可以扩展，鉴于他们有能力购买Instagram和WhatsApp，并花时间开发Messenger等新产品。

The average person globally now每天与Facebook一起度过50分钟。

。。。there are only 24 hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than one-sixteenth of the average user’s waking time is spent on Facebook. -纽约时报

这些新产品是他们希望对他们的业务产生与移动移动相同的影响的大赌注。下面是Facebook的十年路线图。一个惊人的雄心勃勃的计划，旨在创建多个新产品和收入来源，最著名的是围绕消息传递，视频，虚拟现实和人工智能。

Facebook has never been more important than now. They are innovating incredibly fast and changing the meaning of social media. It’s critical to figure out how your audience lives in Facebook (Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) because they are there, everyone on the planet is. Once you do figure out how you can use the tools Facebook offers to connect with them.

The Trends: New Channels, Video, Mobile, Ads, AI

There are five major trends that are defining this next wave of social media.

1) New Channels

不要错过这个虚拟生活事件与Facebooknd HubSpot on how to grow your business faster than ever with Facebook

Facebook最近的热门歌曲之一是Facebook Messenger。它是少数几个新频道之一，以及Instagram，WhatsApp和Snapchat，是在社交上花费的时间。

在2012年，社交媒体是三巨头：Facebook，Twitter，LinkedIn。而已。您的目标是通过桌面在这些渠道上吸引和发展社区。这个想法是要获得足够的喜欢和关注者，以便您拥有一个可靠的内容分发渠道。

Social media usage hasn’t slowed down one bit since 2012, it’s grown and diversified.

To make this happen, the role of the social media manager / marketer needs expand.他们需要了解您的目标市场，以及他们花费时间的任何社交渠道。这可能包括Facebook，Twitter和LinkedIn，但现在已扩展到Snapchat，Reddit，YouTube，WhatsApp等新网络。

They should know how those networks work and be able to create the content that does best in those channels. This means that social media marketers need to be experts in ads, creating video, stories, messaging bots, and more.

此外,他们的目标不应该试图病重n these places into a distribution channel. Instagram for instance isn’t interested in having users leave their app. They’ve made it hard for marketers to drive people from their app to a landing page without an ad.

A modern social media marketing strategy doesn’t try to drive people out of these sites, they turn these sites into a conversion funnel in and of themselves. They create amazing content that brings attention and use ads and technology to convert those users in network. No landing pages, no emails. This is true for all networks now, not just Instagram. More on this later.

2) Video

Instagramwas one of the first totally visually focused social networks, at first it was almost all pictures. Its massive success served as a spark for the rest of the industry. Quickly other social networks started leaning away from text into images, and that trend continued to evolve towards video.

现在，我们所有人都有具有强烈WiFi和蜂窝网络的口袋中的超级计算机。这使托管，共享和服务视频成为快速，愉快的体验。

The result is that video has become the currency of social media.

People want video. You may have noticed how much more video you’re seeing in your Facebook and LinkedIn feeds -- expect more.

This may have impacted you,but for even younger audiences social has totally replaced TV.They still want to consume video and now these cord-cutters turn directly to YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook to get it.

All of this has already happened. It’s not new. This means if you haven’t figured out how your company or brand can produce relevant video you must act now or risk becoming irrelevant. Producing video should be something you add to your personal repertoire, but isn’t easy, and unlike blogging a bad product can hurt your brand and image. If you can't do it yourself, get help. Lean on good freelancers or hire folks with experience to guide the way and help you build your video strategy and production arm.

Video should be part of all your marketing campaigns. It can be live, pre-produced, casual, or polished. You’ll figure out what works for your audience, but you have to get started now if you haven’t already. An easy way to figure out what to create is to always ask, “What’s the video element?” about every single marketing campaign your team creates. Once you get started start reviewing the data. Focus on metrics like watch time over views, and let that be your guide to decide what’s working.

3）手机

You, me, and everyone else in the world have relatively cheap, extremely powerful, mobile phones in our pockets. Wifi is now everywhere, and 4G networks can be found in all corners of the globe. This has made accessing the internet and consuming content on mobile much easier. And it turns out that as long as the experience is good, people prefer using their mobile devicefor everything.

A result of this is that social media is now almost all mobile.80% of social usage now comes from mobile devices。社交媒体变得像疯狂一样，几乎所有的都来自移动性的第一或仅移动用户。没错：某些地区的某些用户仅从其移动设备访问Internet。您将如何联系这些用户？

显然，重要的是要了解您自己的观众趋势，但是短篇小说是您的营销现在也应该首先移动。假设您与您互动或想在社交活动中互动的大多数人都来自他们的手机。

For most B2B marketers this is a hard pill to swallow. The school of thought is that mobile marketing doesn’t work for B2B. That mobile users on the go aren't interested in a long white paper like someone accessing it from a desktop would be. And that forms with several fields turn off mobile users.

Those concerns are valid and true, but it doesn’t mean mobile marketing doesn’t work for B2B, it just means we need to change our tactics -- and Facebook is eager to help.

最近Facebook推出了潜在客户广告，它们可以成为您的移动营销策略。There aren’t many shortcuts in marketing or life, but Facebook’s created a big one with Lead Ads.

The ad unit brings your content to users on the Facebook mobile app and Instagram. Its format allows you to feature your lead gen content, and a strong call to action. This is all great, but the magic comes after a user clicks on the ads CTA, they are served a form that is auto populated with their information by Facebook.

这大大提高了转化率。我们已经看到这完全为某些营销人员翻转了脚本。现在，他们实际上从移动活动与桌面的转换率更高的转换率中获得了更高的成本领先优势。

转换移动用户的另一个不错的选择是Facebook Messenger。Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar最近写道, “Facebook Messenger will be the next great marketing channel, and it is arguably the best way to engage with the Facebook community as a marketer.”

第一步是鼓励用户通过Messenger开始对话。客户或潜在客户希望通过Messenger与您聊天的原因有很多。也许是aid communications at an event you're托管，或者也许要处理customer service question。

无论出于何种原因，开始这样做都是一个好主意。通过消息传递访问人员意味着对人们有直接的移动第一渠道。在一个人们忽略电子邮件并将大部分时间花在Facebook物业上的世界中，这将很重要。

Start building a plan for how you can start messenger conversations now. That can also mean you will need achatbot buildersolution.

4) Social Ads

Most people would agree that a modern social media marketing strategy has to incorporate video and mobile, but do you have to use ads? The answer now is yes.

您不必总是在每个广告系列中运行广告或使用广告。但是，如果您无法有效地使用付费媒体来扩大您的入站营销策略，那么您将输给竞争对手。

Earlier I mentioned we are now in a world where pushing people off of social to your site to convert no longer works. That means ads are your main path to conversion in social now. Before you grab your pitchfork and start chanting “pay to play is wrong” let me say this: a good social ad strategy will make you way more money than it will ever cost you, and will help you compete with much larger businesses.

You also don’t need to have a massive budget to be successful. Ads can be easily scaled up and down, so when you figure out the right conversion path and reach profitability, dial things up.

All of the major social networks are aggressively trying to monetize their audiences. Most of them have been for awhile. Those monetization efforts started with exciting marketing solutions for big consumer focused brands, and they work.

现在，Facebook和其他人正在寻找新的受众群体。如果您正在阅读本文，那么您可能是B2B营销人员，他不在Fortune 500公司工作。bob全站app如果您想开始使用广告，那是一个很好的地方。

Facebook and LinkedIn both now have great lead generation solutions built for a mobile audience. This is a big opportunity -- and one you don’t want to miss out on. It’s important to build a strong social media advertising muscle now. Ads don’t have to be part of every campaign, but you should always consider it.

When you do decide to use ads, use them in conjunction with inbound. An ad that is only an ad is boring and disruptive. But an ad powered by great content that is part of a well targeted inbound campaign is something your audience will welcome.

5) Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are ideas that marketers are chomping at the bit to put to work. But the question that hasn’t been answered ishow? Social Media and Social Ads are the answer.

No other marketing channel has grasped AI like social. It defines what content you see, what ads you're served, and how you engage with your friends. In many ways AI defines social, and it’s important to keep this in mind when creating content. There is no more optimizing for time of day or keywords in social, everything is defined by a machine learning algorithm specific to individuals. When you're thinking about content try to think like the machines.

Facebook and others have now made the same AI that powers what content is shown to whom, available to better target your ads. When you run Facebook ads for instance, you have a powerful tool set of AI at your fingertips, even if they don’t make that obvious. Leaning on Facebook to target and optimize your ads is a very good idea.

将您最有价值的客户或最高优先级潜在客户列表上传到Facebook，然后实施看起来像观众。With this data Facebook will put its AI to work by combining with their global user data to serve your ads to only the most valuable people.

在HubSpot，我们自己的广告专家用于手动测试和优化创意和定位的组合，以获得最佳结果。但是在2017年的过程中，只是决定停止。他们无法击败Facebook的AI。在这一点上，我们已经决定最好摆脱自己的方式，让Facebook做事。

Look, things are different. Facebook has changed the world, mobile and video are here to stay, ads are they way forward, and it’s time to leverage AI. But for all the change that has happened, inbound is still the way forward.

The best marketing will always be remarkable and focused on attracting people with the quality of its substance. And for all the advanced technology we have, the best marketing will still always be about people and personal connections.

当他们觉得您只与他们交谈时，没有技术可以取代某人的感觉。It’s important to root everything you do in those concepts. It’s time to grasp these new concepts, tools, and tactics. If you can combine them with the fundamentals of inbound marketing, there is no stopping you.