How Companies Will Use Social Media In 2017

How Companies Will Use Social Media In 2017. In the years afterward, millions of companies raced to build up audiences they can reach directly and on-demand, through the sheer magic of social media. Later, it was reported that large brands who post to Facebook were reaching as few as two percent of their audience, or just one in every 50 of their own followers. And in the majority of cases, the McKinsey report found, these social updates had a direct impact on buying decisions. Some of the most innovative companies are increasingly taking a three-pronged approach—blending paid social media ads with strategies that tap customers and even their own employees to spread content further and more effectively than before. It’s absolutely true that, like it or not, pay-to-play is becoming the foundation of effective social strategies, with more than 80 percent of companies reportedly planning to deploy a social ad campaign in the next year. Not to mention that content shared by employees reportedly gets eight times more engagement, on average, than content shared by brand channels—and is re-shared 25 times more frequently. Employees have to actually want to share company news, and it needs to be relevant to their own followings. Plus, encouraging your own customers to create and share branded content represents a sort of end-run around algorithms that limit the reach of posts from corporate accounts. Get more out of your advertising dollars by using Hootsuite to create, manage, and optimize your campaigns.

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How Companies Will Use Social Media In 2017 | Hootsuite Blog

Let’s travel back to a simpler time, shall we? It’s November 6, 2007, and Facebook has just launched something called Pages. Now, companies can have an official presence on the network, just like real people! The first day, 100,000 Pages launch, with brands from Coca-Cola to Verizon to Blockbuster getting onboard. In the years afterward, millions of companies raced to build up audiences they can reach directly and on-demand, through the sheer magic of social media.

Fast-forward to the waning months of 2016, and the magic is a little harder to feel. Certain corners of the social world have become uglier places, with some in the business world calling for a draw-down. But the pitfalls of political partisanship weren’t the only things companies struggled to circumnavigate last year. From a more practical standpoint, it turned out that just having an audience on social media doesn’t mean you actually get to reach it.

And as we head into 2017, the fact that social media is paying ever fewer dividends to many brands and their marketers is becoming more apparent. So what comes next?

How we got here

Starting in 2012, Facebook began to curtail the percentage of a Page’s followers that actually see a brand’s updates. At first, it was cut to around 16 percent. Later, it was reported that large brands who post to Facebook were reaching as few as two percent of their audience, or just one in every 50 of their own followers. After the latest tweaks last summer, the average reach for some branded posts has been cut again by half.

This isn’t part of some grand conspiracy. More content than ever is being shared—photos, GIFs, videos, and more—and the space in our news feeds is at a premium. So Facebook prioritizes, using its own algorithms to auto-select what we see. Content from friends and family members takes precedence, meaning that company updates, more often than not, don’t make the cut.

Facebook is hardly alone in elbowing companies to the social margins. Users of Instagram, which the social network owns, now have their feeds curated by algorithm, with the order optimized based on “relationship with the person posting.” Even Twitter, long celebrated as the place to see real-time, streaming updates in the raw, is increasingly algorithm-driven, with the “best Tweets” auto-selected to appear at the tops of users’ feeds.

To lovers of the free-wheeling early stages of social media—where the only limit to a company’s reach was creativity and cat-GIF curation—these changes add up to nothing short of an obituary. The days of being able to engage with users for free on social media through so-called “organic posts” are undeniably numbered.

This is hardly a secret or a news scoop. We’ve known it for years, in fact. But many of us have been in a state of denial. It’s time to come to grips with the hard truth that 2017 presents us with: social media as we know it may not be dead, but it’s surely dying. This doesn’t mean businesses should give up the ghost, though. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

The social paradox

Social media is more pervasive than ever and poised for a unique metamorphosis. It’s about to be reborn over the course of this year as a hyperfocused business tool—more targeted, simpler to use, and possibly more effective than before.

If that sounds Pollyanna-ish, think again. A curious thing has happened as companies’ ability to reach users organically on social media has tanked: the power of social media to influence buying decisions has surged. In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, McKinsey recently surveyed 20,000 consumers in Europe and found that social recommendations are behind more than a quarter of all purchases made. This is well above the 10 to 15 percent that’s been estimated in earlier research. And in the majority of cases, the McKinsey report found, these social updates had a direct impact on buying decisions.

For companies, this presents a thorny challenge. Social media has never been more influential, but getting updates in front of users has never been more challenging. To shun Facebook and other networks altogether is to ignore the more than 2 billion users around the globe who rely on social media for news and updates. But to embrace them requires jumping over ever-higher hurdles…

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