While some marketing experts may be tiring of hearing about changing social media trends, social media marketing is never more important than during the Fall season as businesses begin preparing their advertising for the holiday season.
Businesses will especially have to adjust the way they use traditional advertising in the wake of a recent study by Fractl and Moz last week that showed 63 percent of millennials use ad blockers. Ad blocking software is free and easy to download and removes many of the ads that previously bombarded web surfers on their mobile and desktop devices. Fractl and Moz also found that only 6.5 percent of consumers as a whole think ads on mobile devices are even relevant, lowering confidence in the use of mobile advertising overall.
Marketers are instead transitioning towards creative usage of Facebook and Instagram. eMarketer forecasted that Facebook would make $16.3 billion off of ad revenue this year. This accounts for 65 percent of total social-media budgets across all businesses. Instagram alone is responsible for $600 million of this, and it is projected that this will grow to nearly 1.5 billion by 2016.
This projection is due to a growth of 100 million users since January of 2015, largely millennials who post 80 million photos every day. Marketing strategies need to reflect this to stay successful. Part of this means adapting overall marketing to be more accessible through social media channels. It also means understanding how social media works.
A study by Mavrck found that there is a low volume of posts on Instagram in the early morning hours, but people are still checking their phones. Companies posting during that time period stand to gain a larger audience because there is less competition for screen time.
To stay competitive this holiday season, marketers are going to have to use every tip and trick they have in their arsenal as ever changing social media trends are quickly turning the marketing world into the wild west of advertising.