Editor's note: 2018 is a year of social media upheaval. How can companies that use social media as an important public relations channel cope with this change in 2019? Recently, Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, a social media management system company, published an article on Fast Company that outlines six trends in social media in 2019 based on his annual survey Social Trends Report report. The original title of the article is "Social media predictions for 2019: a return to personal authenticity", compiled by 36 krypton, hoping to inspire you.
If social media is full of turbulence in 2018, it's a little understated. Questions about privacy and data integrity have been buzzing on Facebook, and senior U.S. government officials are feeling the impact.
Social media networks surveyed by Congress in the United States have to consider their own power and the possibility of abuse, and users have to begin to consider the domination and influence of social media on politics, culture and the right of citizens to speak.
What does that mean for 2019? How will users and social networks cope with these earthquake-like changes? As attitudes towards privacy and other issues change, how should companies use social media?
Hootsuite surveyed more than 3,000 businesses, from small start-ups to large ones, to see how they plan to use social media in 2019. Here are some of the most remarkable conclusions and outlooks for the coming year.
Waves of scandals have had a real impact on people's trust in social networks. According to Edelman's Trust Barometer Report, 60% of people no longer trust social media companies.
In the context of "false news" and data manipulation, users are beginning to distrust influential people, including celebrities and media personalities. A major reversal is the return of trust to friends, family and acquaintances who are directly connected in social media.
For companies using social media, this will be the challenge they face in 2019. The use of social media as an advertising channel feels more and more inconsistent with social norms and user preferences.
On the contrary, progressive enterprises will no longer focus on maximizing their influence in 2019, but on creating transparent and meaningful participation. 50% of the respondents in our survey agree that personalized social content will be a key challenge.
Brands such as Adidas and the New York Times are examples of this new spirit. They are creating focused content communities, sharing insightful content, and connecting enthusiastic users.
Social media content has shifted to more personalized, and has also been echoed in the type of content shared. Users are increasingly sharing "Stories" on social networks rather than on their NewsFeeds.
Compared with standard content updates, these short videos usually disappear in a day, growing 15 times faster on feed-based content sharing, with more than 1 billion users using Stories on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Chris Cox, Facebook's own chief product officer, points out that Stories will surpass Feed as the main way people share things with friends over the next year.
In 2019, companies that want to stay focused on social media will need to invest more resources in Stories. In our survey, two-thirds of the respondents either used Instagram Stories or planned to use them next year.
This means that rethinking social content updates is no longer a static text block, but an intimate, often primitive, multimedia behind-the-scenes glimpse. Integrating video, simple graphics and narrative clues is key, but it is important not to ignore authenticity.
Pioneers like the Guardian have found that less elaborate, more realistic Stories can generate the highest level of participation. Obviously, Stories are second nature, especially for Millennium and Z users, and News Feed may lose its throne.
Although scandals and controversies have shaken other social networks, one has quietly emerged: LinkedIn. This conservative business social network broke through the threshold of 500 million users in 2018. As a content giant, users now publish more than 100,000 articles a week on the LinkedIn blog platform.
Enhanced group functionality, native videos, and new APIs integrated with third-party applications all show that today's LinkedIn is much more than just a resume library. LinkedIn's serious professionalism is more attractive than ever at a time when other subscription sources are increasingly filled with toxic roars and viral cultural genes, as evidenced by the accelerated growth of users.
Companies that succeeded in social media in 2019 are companies that find creative ways to take advantage of LinkedIn's unique position in social media. LinkedIn, as the intersection of "individual" and "professional", is the natural choice of B2B marketing, and has increasingly become a channel to reach affluent consumers.
Of the 500 million users, 44% have annual revenue of more than 75,000 US dollars, and more than half have attended university. At the same time, in an unprecedented tight labor market, recruitment is a life-and-death challenge for many enterprises. LinkedIn also provides an ideal platform to display employer brand, that is, the culture and reputation of a company as a workplace.
A good example: We published a blog article on LinkedIn about how much we value the Hootsuite sales team and how difficult it is to find good technical salespeople. Then, we visited more than 1,000 job pages and received more than 100 applications.
Facebook Groups are not new innovations. Space where people gather to discuss specific topics -- from pets and hobbies to celebrities -- dates back to the early days of platform development. However, users are also interested in privacy and intimacy, which means that groups suddenly have their own moments.
In the past year, the number of members of Facebook Groups has increased by 40%, and now 1.4 billion people use Groups every month. In fact, long before the Cambridge scandal reached its climax, Facebook had readjusted its algorithm to prioritize interaction with friends, family and groups, while reducing the weight of public content shared by businesses, brands and the media.
Success on social platforms in 2019 means finding ways to take advantage of users'renewed interest in groups and their desire to have a secure discussion place on uncontrolled social platforms.
And here, exclusivity can help. Brands like Conde Nast have achieved remarkable success in well-designed "closed groups," where users must obtain permission from administrators before viewing or publishing content.
Expanding groups without losing intimacy is not without challenges: when it comes to open marketing, restraint and restraint are key. But companies that take advantage of changes in user tastes and network algorithms will make huge gains this year.
Advertising hits us in various forms - sponsored stories, sponsored posts, promotional posts and so on - and has now become the main content of every social channel.
In fact, Facebook alone accounts for nearly a quarter of all digital advertising spending in the United States, and more than three quarters of respondents have invested in social advertising or plan to invest next year. But advertising is not without challenges.
Competition for limited feed space has driven up prices: on Facebook, the cost of exposure per thousand times (a standard industry measure known as CPM) has risen by 112% over the past year.
At the same time, users are flooded with promotional advertisements. They are more and more alert to click bait. They are more and more good at filtering advertisements. They either skip these advertisements or use advertising screening tools.
In other words, although companies may pay more for advertising in 2019 than ever before, this does not guarantee that anyone will pay attention.
What is urgently needed now is to combine advertising revenue with equal investment in time, creativity and targeting capabilities. Just inserting a plain banner advertisement in the news can't solve the problem.
Brands like Spotify and Netflix are turning to social advertising as a mature "activity" - a high-concept, high-value initiative designed to trigger participation and discussion.
They combine video, motion pictures and even augmented reality technology, and make full use of multimedia Stories format. They are also increasingly relying on advertising positioning tools, which can easily conduct A/B tests in hundreds of variants to fine-tune audiences and optimize advertising spending.
Another manifestation of social user introversion: the rise of instant messaging platforms. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) now have a total of more than 2.8 billion users. Coupled with popular platforms such as micro-mail and QQ in China, users in most parts of the world are now using instant messaging applications.
Instead of sharing content publicly on social networks, they choose to engage in private or small group conversations. For enterprises, this brings new challenges in 2019. Will instant messaging become the next hot platform to reach customers as attention shifts to private subscription sources? Or will users hate advertising intruding into their space?
Although the conclusion has not yet come out, there is one area that obviously needs more information services, that is, customer service. Nine out of ten consumers want to use instant messaging to communicate with enterprises, although less than half of the enterprises responding to our survey use instant messaging applications.
Artificial intelligence-based instant messaging robots represent an attractive option to bridge this gap, but they are not panaceas - it is estimated that 70% of Facebook instant messaging robots fail to interact, requiring manual intervention.
Expanding without losing humanity is always easier said than done, which will be the key. How to do this in 2019, cosmetics company Sephora provides a model, which deploys a large number of chat robots to help provide tutorials and product advice, but when customers need more help, they will have human customer service on call.
To magnify it, the most important thing is that the social paradigm is changing.
Initially, social media was a place to connect with people you really knew or wanted to know in a meaningful way. The dramatic growth and global popularity have turned these private spaces into crazy, sometimes terrible digital jungles filled with dubious actors, dubious statements and aggressive marketing. But users are clearly fed up.
They insist on more value and transparency in exchange for their time and information. They want to be seen as real individuals, not demographically. The pendulum is returning to its social roots: authentic, personal and reliable.
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