Digital marketing is crucial in reaching the audience. Businesses now plan on investing more time and money on social media marketing while also optimising the websites. As all of these trends progress so do the trends of the various platform on which digital marketing strategies are implemented.

The all-new “Amazon Advertising” in Amazon

Amazon announced that it will be bringing Amazon Media (AMG), Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and Amazon Platform (AAP) under one brand “Amazon Advertising”. This is for the marketers who are struggling with the acronym. It, however, does not change things from an operations point of view. It brought about many new advertisers from third-party sellers to major brands. This step forward was in respect to providing advertising solutions that are simple and useful for thousands of advertiser.

“Shopping app and ads in Stories” for Instagram users

The new standalone app of Instagram “IG shopping” has been on the news for quite a while. This app lets people buy products directly within the app from the collection of goods and products they browse. This is a major expansion into e-commerce and a huge utility for the social media marketing agencies. This standalone is to provide a dedicated home for the increasing business activities on Instagram and expanding revenue opportunities.

Instagram is now making ads more relevant and effective by placing them in Stories. This is helpful for the small businesses that not have the resources to reach out to the right audience.

Major updates in the “Facebook Canvas Ad”

Canvas Ads have been around for a not quite a long time now. Many social media marketers are yet to get used to its full capability. Facebook has changed its branding completely. It is now called “instant Experience ads”. With this change, Facebook is also adding additional pixel capabilities for the best engagement analytics. Adding pixel abilities is useful for re-engaging the users who have already visited your site.

This new introduction helps the marketers to get a deeper insight from the data-

  • The advertisers can re-engage with the customers who interacted with their “Instant Experience”.
  • The performance of Instant Experience can be compared with other campaigns using the analytics tools.

Twitter’s “an audio-only broadcasting feature”

The latest feature of Twitter allows the users to Livestream as audio only. This is an excellent opportunity for the podcasters to enter the platform. This feature now lets users share news more than 280 characters, live news, and mini-podcasts. The stats like a number of live listeners, replays and times listened are also available. It is currently through Periscope or the iOS version of the Twitter app.

Creators can now “monetize their content on YouTube”

YouTube is soon to launch a Channel Membership program which allows the creators to offer a subscription fee of $4.99 monthly. This is currently available to channels with 50,000 or more subscribers. The creators can provide some sort of perks such as exclusive content to their followers to join the paid Channel membership program. This update gives an opportunity to the YouTubers to grow their fan base in more ways than just ads.

New “search features” in Google

Activity card: Just like the “you viewed” feature in most e-commerce sites that shows customers of their product browsing history, Google too is introducing a new version that shows “where you left off in search” which shows the previous pages and sites visited.
Improved Collection: Users will now be able to save their previous page visits and queries to their collection. A form of the collection already exists. But Google is looking to ramp up their usability and make them more relevant.
Topic Layers: Currently a particular search query bring up images and further information that links to more reading, all of which are pulled off from different websites. For instance, if a user types in Yorkshire Terries, he or she tends to want more information on its grooming tips, characteristics, history etc.

This is valuable for social media marketers and content marketing agencies as structure data is about to play a major role in making content discoverable.

Snapchat and Amazon’s partnership

This feature is currently being rolled out to only a small percentage of US Snapchat users. The new feature “See, Snap, Sale” lets users scan a particular object or barcode and that brings up a card which shows that item or similar items along with their price, title, image and review scores. Tapping on one sends them to Amazon’s site.

In conclusion

These are the latest social media marketing trends that are about to change marketing strategies for 2018 and beyond. As a business owner or digital marketer, get ready to face the disruptions coming your way. Come up with the most optimized digital marketing campaign to get optimum results.

Author's Bio: 

Content Writer at Red Dash Media