Four ways to spice up your social media strategy

Working with micro-influencers

Giving your brand credibility and the clout that it needs is essential if you want to stand out from other businesses trying to reach and engage with your audiences. There should be a much more significant emphasis on partnerships to produce meaningful content, such as by working with influencers and publishers.

It will bode in brands’ favours to work with influencers and publishers to get that cut-through on the channel.

Rich Burgess, Social Media Manager at Audi UK

Micro-influencers – influencers with a smaller audience between 10K and 100K – are a fantastic way of reaching and engaging with a broad audience, particularly on Twitter and Instagram. Not only are they way more cost efficient per engagement, but they also deliver a 60% higher engagement and drive 22 times more weekly conversations than the average consumer.

Inspirational stories, case studies and diversity are three critical pillars when thinking about getting influencers involved in telling your business’s story. Eco-luxury shoe brand Atelier Alienor, for instance, runs an ongoing campaign with eco-conscious micro-influencer Natalie Kay, who regularly shares photos with her followers.

This particular post – supported by a micro-influencer – is proving to be beneficial for the brand, because it has received significantly more engagement than her latest brand posts.

Standing out from the crowd with AMP stories and 3D posts

It is evident that the Stories format is becoming an increasingly popular way to share content on social. Snapchat started the idea, Instagram copied it and then Facebook integrated it into its platform. At the start of this year, Google began testing a Stories format to appear in Google search: AMP stories.

This is a vital and significant opportunity for brands to concentrate on original, simple storytelling. This is one of the greatest tools brands have to cut through the noise.

Instagram has reported that Stories encourage users to visit a platform more often and be engaged for a more extended period, demonstrating the format’s value when it comes to connecting with your audience.

To stand out, brands and publishers will have to focus on original storytelling that ‘brings people together.’

Peter Heneghan, Head of Communications at LADbible

Engaging with your audience through video content

Video content will dominate on social platforms for the foreseeable future. According to WordStream, businesses that use video in their marketing strategies grow revenue 49% faster than those that don’t adopt this strategy.

87% of online marketers use video content, and on top of that YouTube has become one of the most powerful social media platforms for brand promotion. So, if you’re serious about content marketing, you should be serious about video too. Plus, one of the best ways to give your content more reach is by repurposing video content for social media.

Furthermore, Facebook has big plans to connect AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) and newsfeed through 3D posts, making these a fundamental part of the Facebook ecosystem. The social network has gone from text, to photos, to videos, to immersive media.

We’re trying to lay the foundational steps, so that Facebook can go with users into their 3D world of VR and AR.

Peter Heneghan, Ocean Quigley, Facebook’s creative director for social VR

In the future, we envision a digital world where people can share content across VR, AR and Facebook Newsfeed. Therefore, this is a perfect time for brands to start experimenting and adopting the newest content formats to remain appealing to their audiences and on top of the latest trends.

Final thoughts

Including micro-influencers in your next piece of content could drive a 60% higher campaign engagement rate. Adding original stories, 3D posts and video content to your digital strategies should also have a direct impact on your business’ and engagement rates, with a social video producing 1200% more shares than a combination of text and imagery. Additionally, it should also indirectly affect other aspects of the business – such as incoming traffic and revenue – because of a growing audience driven by engaging content.

This is not a final and exhaustive list of strategies. In fact, social platforms are constantly introducing new features to keep users engaged, such as Instagram’s latest Emoji Slider or Snapchat’s face filters. So, if you haven’t yet jumped on the social media bandwagon, then now may be the time to bite the bullet and embrace its plentiful and ever-changing features.