2019 is fast approaching. New year, new plans to perfect your social media game. We know social media managers and teams are already scrambling to create a successful Social Strategy for 2019 and we’re here to help.
We analysed the Social Media Trends for 2018 and worked on a list of things you absolutely NEED to have as a part of your 2019 marketing strategy. Let’s get started 💫

1. Maintain a healthy balance of curated content and original content

Content curation was a big part of 2018 and will continue to be an important part of social media posting in 2019 as well.
Original content definitely does better than any other type of content, BUT! It’s very time consuming and expensive to make, which is why you can’t have your whole content strategy depend on the creation of original content.

Adopt a 50 : 50 strategy between posting curated and original content. This will help you maintain a good looking feed and make sure your feed isn’t just filled with self-promotional posts.

Benefits of Curating Content —

⭐️ Ready-made high-quality content.
⭐️ Creates goodwill with other creators since you’re sharing their content and linking your audience to their work.
⭐️ Makes you appear less promotional.

Original content is great when it comes to building your brand’s identity and being more authentic.

On the other hand, curated content attracts more likes and social sharing, maybe even by the original creator with their audience.

It’s super important to develop a healthy balance between the two in 2019 for your social media strategy, so get to it!

2. Create more Video content

“Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined” — Wordstream

2019 is not a time you want to be lax with video content, folks. It’s known to be more effective than any other type of content and for good reason. Our social feeds are filled with videos, so much that I’m sure you come across at least one video, every time you launch your favourite social media apps. Every single time.
Videos aid in building brand stories, provide educational material to consumers and encourage engagement and interaction a lot better than any other type of content.

Turn your feed into a 60% video focused timeline compared to any and all other types of content.

Here are some of the types of video content you can create —

1. How To Videos, focused on helping users and consumers learn how to use specific features of your product. These type of videos help support teams support better.
2. Brand Videos, focused on telling your brand’s story, its mission and showcasing the BTS human side of the otherwise faceless company or product. These type of videos prove to be a great advertising tactic.
3. Success Story videos, focused on highlighting some problems faced by actual users and how your product helped them overcome these. These kind of videos are great in increasing your conversions.
4. Webinars, focused on providing an industry-wide education and not just information related to your product. These type of videos help in establishing you as an industry expert and can be a great way to build a loyal community of people who look up to you.

If you’re not comfortable with making original videos, or do not have all the resources — Curate Good Content or Outsource.

In any case, your content team needs to include video marketing in your marketing strategy in 2019 or you risk being outdated.

Benefits of video content —

⭐️ Video is more useful in building brand stories, as compared to any other type of content.
⭐ ️Videos have a higher recall value than any other type of content.
⭐ ️Social platforms are becoming more and more video friendly, so you don’t want to be left out.
Here’s our detailed guide to help you get started —

VIDEO MARKETING IDEAS FOR 2019

3. Build a Community

Your product might be good enough to attract a new user, but a sense of community is what will help turn them into a lifetime customer. A community is a place where a group of people from all walks of life come together bound by their love for something. In this case, your audience will come together to celebrate their love for your brand and product.
Notice how I counted the brand separate than the product? Your brand might have an audience who may or may not be actual customers in real life. While this audience isn’t increasing your revenue directly, they’re loyal and will often encourage their friends and family to use your product if they recognise the pain points your product aims to solve.
Remember,

Word of mouth is the best and the least effortless marketing tool there is.

People don’t want to remain plain, faceless customers, anymore. They want to feel more involved, so don’t underestimate the need for a Community this year.

It’s super important to build real connections and relationships with your audience in order to instil a feeling of loyalty within them. Loyalty to your brand and product. Loyalty which will turn them into brand and product evangelists.

Your Community will have a lot of good impact on your company, but the main reason to build a good Community?

It’s to provide people a place where they can belong. A place where they come together to share new ideas and help each other grow.

Where to host the Community?

1. Social media. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are great places to build your community on. You can build your Community by creating Facebook groups housing your audience or even host Twitter weekly chats to attract interactions and engagement in a dedicated time period. We’ve done both and have found immense success in these.
2. Online Forum style Communities. Platforms like Twitch and Discord are known to be some of the of best places to host an online Community on.
3. Slack. I know this is a Communication tool, but we found it to be one of the best places to build a Community on. Crowdfire experimented with creating a Slack Community in 2017, which thrived due to the ability of real-time chat with other audience members. Buffer and Support Driven are some of the other known successful Slack Communities.

Benefits of having an Online Community —

⭐️ It’s a great place to bounce new ideas off of.
⭐️ It provides a ready-made set of users to test beta features on.
⭐ ️Communities are a great way to have a bunch of people gather around, share ideas and inspiration with each individual.

4. Post regularly and consistently

Content has become a big part of marketing strategies, so your content calendar in 2019 needs to be pretty strong. I’ve seen way too many companies and brands not posting regularly, or only posting a couple of times a week and taking big breaks between every new post. Which is an absolutely wrong way to go about it.
Consumers are surrounded by a plethora of content on their socials. Their timelines are flooded with newer and better posts, each more beautiful than the last one they saw. So if you only post once a few days and have irregular posting schedules, then you risk your audience forgetting about your existence.

Brands need to post every day, multiple times a day on their socials, to make sure they always stay in front of your audience.

Organic reach on Socials has gone down exponentially in 2018 , so you need to work on being more present on your audience’s timeline all the time. Consistent posting will lead to better brand recall and make sure your audience always remembers you and your story.

Consider using a scheduling tool to help you plan and schedule posts days, weeks and months in advance. Tools like Crowdfire help you schedule posts so that you always have a steady stream of content ready to go out. Scheduling in advance takes all last moment worries away and makes sure you have a consistent schedule ready to be published.

Benefits of posting consistently —

⭐️ Higher brand recall.
⭐️ More engagement opportunities.
⭐ ️Build authority and credibility in the minds of your audience.

5. Focus on Competitor Analysis

Execution without proper research will amount often lead to underwhelming results. Shooting arrows in the dark is not a good plan of action anymore, folks. In 2019, you need to invest more time and money in your research efforts and focus more on developing strategies.
“We’ve generated 10% more likes than last month”
“We’ve seen 12% more increase in followers compared to the last quarter”
Presenting your past growth in numbers might sound good on paper. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing well in the market. It’s extremely important to compare these numbers with that of your competitors to see how you stack up against them.
Brands are becoming bigger and better than ever on social media. No matter what you do, there will always be a few brands around you doing the same things you are, maybe even better than you. So it’s important to observe them and learn from them.

Competitor Analysis provides you with real numbers for you to benchmark your metrics in comparison with others in your industry.

It gives you valuable insights into the likes and dislikes of your audience, what works in your industry and how you can improve your social strategy. There are some useful competitor analysis tools in the market like Mention which help you do this better. Coming soon for Crowdfire, so stay tuned!

Benefits of conducting competitor analysis—

⭐️ Helps you understand what’s working for your competition and what’s not.
⭐️ Helps understand your industry and audience better.
⭐️ Gives a wider understanding of how you’re performing compared to others in the market

6. Make Customer Support a bigger part of your Social Strategy

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Customer is Queen and us, her subjects. Customer Support experiences can make or break your company, which is why you need to do everything in your control to be better at it everyday. With the evolution of social media, more and more customers are going online and interacting with the brands they use.

Customers expectations have evolved a great deal owing to the emergence of social media. They desire quick and swift support responses from the brands they use. Provide anything lesser and you risk losing current, and potential customers.

Which is why you need to get your support team on your socials in 2019.

Things to keep in mind to provide good support on social media —

• Be quick
• Give effective solutions, avoid long back and forths
• Do not ask customers to reach out again via some other platform. Always take the first step and do the heavy lifting tomensure your users have to do the least amount of work.

Remember, for every bad customer experience aired online — your current and potential customers are watching.
Take sensitive issues to private DMs, emails and calls if need be, though. Don’t air every issue in the public.
With so many customers reaching out to you online, keeping track of each and every conversation can be a little cumbersome. With the help of social media tools like Crowdfire , you can now streamline your support process on socials. Crowdfire Mentions lets you track all of your Twitter mentions and conversations in a single place , so that you don’t miss out on replying to any of these. Check it out right away!

Benefits of taking customer support to socials —

⭐️ Helps in tackling issues quickly
⭐️ Helps maintain a positive image online for every good support experience
⭐️ Helps convert potential customers
Read more about how you can make sure you respond to every single conversation on Twitter — https://blog.crowdfireapp.com/introducing-crowdfire-mentions-a-customer-service-tool-for-your-business-c4cba4720280

7. Make friends with people in your own space

Customers expect brands, companies and influencers to be kind now. Hostility and unhealthy competition is unattractive to look at. Which is why you need to start making nice with the people in your space. They might be your competitors, but it’s time to keep the competition healthy and in good spirit.

Follow your competitors, engage with their posts if you relate, congratulate them on their victories and be kind to everyone.

Besides, engaging with your competitors/ similar accounts will make you more visible to their audience, who’s YOUR target audience as well. It will make them more aware of your brand and let them know that a similar product/account to the one they follow, exists.
But again, keep it healthy and in good spirit. Build connections with similar brands and you’ll see how much this eventually benefits you.

Benefits of befriending similar accounts —

⭐️ Makes their audience more aware of your own brand.
⭐️ Opens doors for possible collaborations.
⭐️ Helps maintain a healthy and positive image with potential and current customers.
These are the things that need to be a part of your social media strategy for 2019. Have I missed anything? Do you have some points of your own you plan to focus on? Let’s discuss in the comments 😇