Ting Ting. Your phone just beeped again.

Notifications of messages, likes and comments come your way day and night. According to Global Digital report 2019, the number of social media users worldwide in 2019 is 3.484 billion, up 9% year-on-year. This user base is clear enough to indicate how involving social media has become.

Therefore, in today’s fast-paced marketing environment, for your brand to not get lost in the crowd, we have curated a list of top 5 social media trends of 2019, which should be leveraged to their full potential. They could be the catalysts to your niche brand development this year.

What’s your story?

Stories are the new posts. We can clearly see how the Snapchat’s stories feature has been quickly adopted by most social media sites and it’s getting huge audience engagements, almost everywhere, be it Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp. Gifs, Stickers, Geofilters, tags have made them way more interesting.

And the Live feature that comes in the package! This is the most direct form of engagement with your customers. Social media is conversational and your profile is an extension of your business. Interaction with your customers and addressing maximum queries with an immediate serving response will make your consumers feel connected to your brand. The idea is to give them a supreme brand experience. This will help in brand building and garnering long term loyalty.

I loved that episode!

The involvement of streaming on-demand services like Netflix, Hotstar, and Prime is swelling day by day. Everyone is literally binge-watching their favorite shows. Web series can also be seen getting extremely viral by their evolving content. Hence, it would not be wrong to say that these shows have formed outrageous fan-bases to their dialogues and characters. Any triggers related to them will lead to massive involvement of people, as it holds sentimental value.

So, the drill comes to tap these tactics into your brand marketing. Audiences nowadays are bored with the same bland copywriting and would be thrilled to see some exciting inserts from these popular shows. It’s often said that if a brand is not contemporary, it’s temporary. It’d time to hit the millennials.*So, let the winter come and let joey do not share his food.*

Influenced by influencers

Influencer marketing is still abuzz, with paid partnerships on a steep rise. It’s like a scaled-down version of commercial celebrity advertising. As the influencers have very segmented audiences, it is easier to focus and penetrate your brand deep-down to your relevant customers. Influencers usually have a very dedicated following, which makes the ads impactful and therefore it’s called ‘influencer’ marketing.

Though you need to understand that the ads need to seem genuine to customers. Nowadays, people have little tolerance for mendacious promotions. Therefore, the influencers should *actually* believe in or use the product and refrain from doing promotions, just for the sake of financial favors. Smart consumers seek authenticity and will catch the pretentiousness easily.

Videos serve better

It’s time again, that videos are taking the center stage. According to Forrester research, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. The new feature of IGTV on Instagram is a crucial example. Thanks to modernized editing features and refining technology, creating top-end graphics and content is no longer seen a herculean task.
It’s been proven that humans have stronger visual memory than verbal memory, so make it memorable. Think of a hook, that makes the customer recall the brand. Your brand should have a narrative, which essentially speaks out the essence of your company’s vision. The videos should strike a chord with customers and create an ever-lasting impression. Whatever you create, create it meaningfully!

Augmented reality is the way to go

As can be seen recently, there is great potential in the rise of augmented reality and marketers are increasingly leveraging it in creating different formats of marketing campaigns. The powerful combination of social media and AR is instigating truly awe-inspiring experiences. Something really out of the box which users haven’t experienced yet.

Numerous brands are investing in AR in order to dominate their sectors and make their advertisements more captivating. Besides, even mobile app developers are integrating attributes of AR within the apps to improve messaging and customer experience. A trending example is Animoji by Apple.