Social media is a very new aspect of our businesses that have taken over significant parts of not only our marketing plans but also our personal lives. Major platforms battle for prominence and significance by adjusting their business models to provide better returns for their shareholders while intending to improve the user experience. As these systems develop, how you use these platforms for your business must change as well. Here are 10 social media challenges to face in 2018:

1. Keeping pace with changing algorithms and platform innovations.

Organic reach is the elephant in the room, because of its direct impact on budgets, but there are changes, advancements and opportunities across the social media spectrum. Some of those changes can be key to a platform’s effectiveness for a particular brand.

2. The Unstoppable Rise of Video.

You already know the importance of video in your social strategy, but there is one common mistake many marketers are tripping up on – making video just for the sake of having video. Many marketers overthink their video content and end up wasting time producing something that falls flat with their audience. Video is still one of the biggest social media challenges, though there are many simple yet effective solutions. Keep it simple yet captivating. Remember to grab emotion with your video content and make the messaging relevant to your audience’s problem and how you can solve it. Brainstorm a few scenarios where you can go live on Facebook to showcase your culture (which is also great evergreen content). Encourage your employees to share your posts on their personal socials and share on-the-job photos when applicable.

3. Social Media Return-on-Investment Monitoring.

Short-sighted social media vanity metrics will no longer cut it in 2018. It is time to let go of follower counts and page likes and instead focus on factors like customer service expenditures, brand perception monitoring, talent acquisition, supply chain analysis, and reputation risk management. Developing a social outreach strategy focused on ROI monitoring will require brands improve their analytics measuring if they hope to achieve ongoing success.

4. Higher Engagement Rates Between Brands & Customers.

Brands are suddenly realizing the impact of social media engagement and creating lasting relationships instead of just treating social as a platform to advertise their products. It’s absolutely essential to keep your followers happy by providing a network where they can reach you. According to Instagram, at least 80% of its users already follow a brand on the network. Don’t leave your golden chances for communication behind. In 2018, it’s going to continue to be about making relationships and providing feedback when users need it the most from you.

5. Proving the ROI of strategies.

Even when implementation goes flawlessly, effective measurement of your success is crucial. New tactics employed to meet platform changes are especially important to evaluate.

With so many new features on each social platform, how are you supposed to know which ones you really need to spend time getting familiar with? Many smaller brands are growing weary of the influx of new updates. No one can blame anyone. Everybody loves it, but everyone should understand that it is hard to keep up with social trends when you’re not in the thick of it every day.

Every effective website starts with a strong design and quality content. However, if you really want to maximize the effectiveness of your site, you’ll want to use social media to drive engagement. If you’re only providing opportunities for passive consumption, you aren’t tapping into your visitors’ desire to participate in your content. The good news is that you can use social media to drive engagement. After all, that’s what social networks are for – enabling people to interact with content and spread it to their friends and contacts. By leveraging these existing tools, you can create more participation on your website and see better results from your marketing. Here are 4 ways on how to keep the ball rolling:

1. Your Blog Posts. Blogging is a top strategy to positioning your brand as a leader and expert in your industry. Ranked as the 5th most trusted source for accurate information, blogs are awesome tools to showcasing your knowledge and sharing advice. Your audience will appreciate the value given that offers solutions to their problems. Your social media networks are excellent platforms to promote your blog content. When sharing, include an image that complements your text for increased exposure. Also, be sure to tailor your message to the appropriate audience. For example, Facebook is more family and friends oriented whereas LinkedIn is geared towards professionals. Modifying your post accordingly so it speaks to that audience makes your social content effective.

2. Infographics. Infographics are incredibly engaging.

Since humans process visual information faster than words, it only makes sense. The human brain tells us “reading is hard” and “looking is easy.” An infographic uses the power of visually appealing content to trick the brain into reading. Besides, we understand the content better when it’s paired with pictures. It’s no surprise that kids like picture books. But it’s not just kids; adults are the same way! The brain itself likes pictures. The takeaway is simple: Share infographics socially, and the social world will share it right back.

3. Quizzes.

Quizzes can be used as a fun way for brands to engage customers. Marketers can use quizzes for brand awareness and a “fun” factor, or as a means to gauge customer interest in products. Results can be useful for recommending relevant subsequent content that drives back to the brand. With quizzes receiving 75% of their traffic from social media, it’s important to establish a promotion strategy to get the word out and generate buzz. A great way to encourage engagement, provide a score users can share on their social media channels.

4. Tickle them with humour.

Humor is likely to enhance brand recall and influence buying decisions when well integrated with your marketing message. Also, everyone needs more laughter in their lives. Bring that, and you instantly create a connect with your viewers, and then you can give them your message. Unfortunately, although we all believe that we’re hilarious, not all of us can make high-impact humour. To pull this off you’ll have to hire the right comic talent and be well informed on the preferences of your Target Audience.

The resources and options are out there to make content that attracts attention. Find the best content for your brand and audience. From there, form a content strategy around that. If your posts are relevant, valuable, and have interactive features, you will notice a positive effect on your social media engagement.

Why in these latter days has the landing gained such a large popularity? The answer is simple. It allows the designers involving their imagination to create a really wonderful picture that is easy to distinguish from the competing sites. The effective landing (as, indeed, any web resource) has its own rules and regularities.

1. Professional design.

A salesman must always be well-dressed, right? Your landing page is also like a salesman. So, you need to give it a professional look. The more professional your page looks, the more visitors will believe your story. Don’t hesitate to spend some money on hiring an experienced web designer, as it will pay you high dividends.

2. Never send traffic from an ad to your homepage.

You should never drive traffic from your promotional campaigns, whatever they are onto your website’s home page. Home pages are usually cluttered with information, there are many possible actions a visitor can take, and the most important one might be missed. Hence you want to drive traffic from your promotional campaigns to a page that is aimed at only one thing getting them to take the action that is the goal of your campaign. An effective landing page is a crucial component to helping you convert browsers into buyers.

3. Declutter.

Cluttering landing pages is one of the top reasons why they fail. You don’t want too many high-density images. A widget or two is fine. If you have an excessive amount of content boxes, your customers become overwhelmed, and it takes away from your content. In bad cases, it can even be hard for the customer to know where to click. You don’t like clutter in your house or yard, so don’t put it on your page. Watch for information overload and providing too many choices. Keep it simple.

4. Probability of conversion.

Any conversion rate optimization work is simply trying to increase the probability of conversion. You’ll never achieve 100% conversion, you’re increasing customer perception of value and decreasing perception of cost to maximize the amount of people who convert when they wouldn’t have otherwise because they now:

♣ Better understand the value your product provides and how it ties into what they really want
♣ Have to endure less cost to take that conversion action

5. Get to the point.

We all know people have short attention spans, so why aren’t we considering that in landing page creation? Online audiences tend to avoid reading through an entire page of informatoin. They will, however, “forage” for information by visually scanning the screen until they find what they’re looking for. So when designing your landing pages, get straight to the point. People came to the page for a reason, so make sure you address that reason clearly and succinctly by highlighting the value of what you’re offering and how it addresses their needs, interests, or problems. Use clear headers and sub-headers, use easy-to-scan bullet points to explain what they’ll get from the offer, emphasize key points using bolded text or italics, and keep things as brief as possible.

Do not waste your time on allegories and hints. You need the result, don`t you? So, learn how to promote and sell your products properly. Speak directly, but avoid the aggressive tone and don’t irritate the potential customers.

About three billion users worldwide have at least one account in any social network and the social media users number is growing every day. Let’s consider Instagram as an example: it’s already used by about 700 million of users among them there are famous brands and bloggers, movie stars, popular singers and models and, of course, individual users.  The most common reason to build a presence on Instagram is to gain more popularity and influence on Internet. This way there is a great chance to have an opportunity to make money by promoting multiple products and services, attracting more audience to your account, collaborating with influencers and more. But to succeed on Instagram, you should have a huge number of followers and multiply it every day. The Internet is full of different tips and tricks on how to grow your account and your Instagram community – just use Google search with the query “grow my Instagram account”. It will provide you a plenty of blogs with the advice how you should behave on Instagram. But actually all the methods of growing an account can be associated with organic and automated ways of social media growth.

What is an organic growth?

What is supposed by the term “organic method of growth”? It means that you behave naturally on the social network and your actions draw other users to follow you. The natural behavior may include: posting the photos and videos, creating an unified theme for your posts, use of the popular and niche hashtags, organization of the contests and surely the engagement. As Instagram is all about social communication you should take part in making likes, comments, follows which are required to attract more users to like and follow you back. This way your account grows organically — so only your Instagram actions matter.

What is an automated growth?

They will engage other users instead of you: your task is just to target the specific hashtags, geotags or users otherwise this method won’t bring you your target audience but just random users and the bots will like posts, comment them and follow/unfollow users on behalf of your account. This method helps you to save much time and effort and obtain a larger exposure so real people will follow you on Instagram.

What are other strategies for instagram account growth?

You can use the most general one: follow a specific user on Instagram and see in your following feed how many likes, comments and follows he makes regularly. This way is the most well-known but indeed has a lot of flaws: you need to spend much efforts and time to highlight the activity of a certain user, and even if you succeed the results won’t be accurate as Instagram following feed algorithm doesn’t display all the user actions.

The both ways have their pros and cons and it’s always up to you to decide which of them will be useful for your engagement strategy meanwhile automated or bot-driven growth considered a grey scheme by many social media experts.

With the help of entertaining content, better brand positioning, and improved customer experience, Facebook Messenger can be used to establish a long-lasting relationship with customers. Owing to the tremendous popularity of Facebook as a potent social media platform, Facebook Messenger has also got a huge traction in recent years. As a conservative estimate, there are over 1.5 billion Facebook users today who are actively sharing, commenting and liking various interesting posts day-in and day-out. Most if these users are using Facebook Messenger as a preferred medium for individually communicating with each other.

However, this profound messenger platform has more potential than meets the eye. Businesses can implement and integrate Facebook Messenger into various service processes in order to simplify business-customer interaction. Since users have started communicating rich content through pictures, videos, GIFs, emoticons or even PDFs via messenger also, this creates a great opportunity for businesses to make messaging an important part of their strategy. Here are benefits in using Facebook messenger for your business:

1. Provide Service. Some customers post questions in comments, but others prefer private messages. They don’t want to share their personal information publicly, so they send you a message through Facebook messenger. With the help of messenger, you can directly send a private email or message with required information to your customers and clients.

2. Messenger is “safe” but it’s also far more engaging because it’s so versatile. In the mold of China’s WeChat, Facebook Messenger does it all: video calls, emojis, stickers, mobile games, payments, group chats, music, bots, and integrations with services like ride-hailing apps. The ways to engage are endless. And unlike static Facebook brand pages, which resemble the bulletin-boards of yore, Facebook Messenger is a truly 21st-century channel: it’s a never-ending personal conversation.

3. Provide real-time customer care. The Facebook Messenger facilitates a live conversation platform almost as if you are speaking with your customers face-to-face. You can instantly help them choose the size, color and quantity of products they require, you can immediately send them order confirmations, and let them check their shipping info as well. From customers’ perspective, it is always welcome to be given a private support – which is possible via FB Messenger. Using this strategy, you can send your prospective customers a sharable link, which will let them initiate a private message when they click it. Moreover, customers always love to get a real-time response whenever they seek solutions for their problems. In a survey conducted by Sprout Social, as many as 1,000 people were approached; it was found that most consumers expect a response on social media within 4 hours. This clearly makes a case for Facebook Messenger to deliver a real-time customer service.

You can quickly receive and send messages automatically, like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications. Also, answering common questions like; business hours and locations, appointment scheduling and confirmations, product or service feedback. This will not only, save you time, but it will also improve the quality of your interactions so you never miss a lead, or opportunity to engage with your customers and clients.

Every effective website starts with a strong design and quality content. However, if you really want to maximize the effectiveness of your site, you’ll want to use social media to drive engagement. If you’re only providing opportunities for passive consumption, you aren’t tapping into your visitors’ desire to participate in your content. The good news is that you can use social media to drive engagement. After all, that’s what social networks are for – enabling people to interact with content and spread it to their friends and contacts. By leveraging these existing tools, you can create more participation on your website and see better results from your marketing.

Here are 4 ways on how to keep the ball rolling:

1. Your Blog Posts. Blogging is a top strategy to positioning your brand as a leader and expert in your industry. Ranked as the 5th most trusted source for accurate information, blogs are awesome tools to showcasing your knowledge and sharing advice. Your audience will appreciate the value given that offers solutions to their problems. Your social media networks are excellent platforms to promote your blog content. When sharing, include an image that complements your text for increased exposure. Also, be sure to tailor your message to the appropriate audience. For example, Facebook is more family and friends oriented whereas LinkedIn is geared towards professionals. Modifying your post accordingly so it speaks to that audience makes your social content effective.

2. Infographics. Infographics are incredibly engaging. Since humans process visual information faster than words, it only makes sense. The human brain tells us “reading is hard” and “looking is easy.” An infographic uses the power of visually appealing content to trick the brain into reading. Besides, we understand the content better when it’s paired with pictures. It’s no surprise that kids like picture books. But it’s not just kids; adults are the same way! The brain itself likes pictures. The takeaway is simple: Share infographics socially, and the social world will share it right back.

3. Quizzes. Quizzes can be used as a fun way for brands to engage customers. Marketers can use quizzes for brand awareness and a “fun” factor, or as a means to gauge customer interest in products. Results can be useful for recommending relevant subsequent content that drives back to the brand. With quizzes receiving 75% of their traffic from social media, it’s important to establish a promotion strategy to get the word out and generate buzz. A great way to encourage engagement, provide a score users can share on their social media channels.

4. Tickle them with humour. Humor is likely to enhance brand recall and influence buying decisions when well integrated with your marketing message. Also, everyone needs more laughter in their lives. Bring that, and you instantly create a connect with your viewers, and then you can give them your message. Unfortunately, although we all believe that we’re hilarious, not all of us can make high-impact humour. To pull this off you’ll have to hire the right comic talent and be well informed on the preferences of your Target Audience.

The resources and options are out there to make content that attracts attention. Find the best content for your brand and audience. From there, form a content strategy around that. If your posts are relevant, valuable, and have interactive features, you will notice a positive effect on your social media engagement.

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