Increasing Trend of Social Media for Content Marketing

As the world evolves so does the world of digital marketing. I have created this blog to keep all keen and edgy markers up to date with the latest trends and changes of digital marketing and for those who work on the agency side. I hope my blog encourages you to be creative and accommodate forward thinking to stay ahead of the competition in the marketing industry. 

This week I have scanned various digital marketing blogs and news websites to obtain a clear view of where digital marketing is heading, specifically the benefits of the increasing trend of using social media – particular content sharing.

Online consumers of social media are becoming more interested in programs such as Instagram and Pinterest. This ‘huge growth over the past year has reinforced the fact that pictures are more engaging. The increased use of infographics provides more proof that image-based content is key (Nissim, 2013). Take Pinterest, for example, it has overtaken both LinkedIn and Facebook as the fastest-growing platform for online content sharing (Nissim, 2013).

Along with the growth of Pinterest, as mentioned above, Instagram is also taking the lead as a content sharing platform. Instagram has established the trend ‘Hashtag marketing’. The ‘Hashtag’ acts as a URL on integrated marketing and are short and easy to use over a range of social media platforms. They drive brand recognition and support customer loyalty (Bar-Joseph, 2014).

To connect with audiences, storytelling is a must for your brand. Pinterest does this best by using a simple layout, which people are proving to use and shows that you must tell a story as succinctly as possible. This is evident in the simplicity of Google’s homepage, with simplicity and not clutter (Nissim, 2013). The increased consumption of video on mobile devices continues to grow in 2014, and short video storytelling is essential. For example micro-video sites, such as Twitter’s ‘Vine’ service, allows people to upload 6.5-second videos and has almost 14 million users.

Not only does Greg Nissim explain micro videos brilliantly on an article in Marketing Mag but he is also supported by an article in Marketing Mag UK, by Jarrod Payne, who explains that “due to the small time commitment required by consumers and the smaller file size, it is anticipated that micro videos will create more sharing and marketing opportunities than previous mediums” (Payne, 2014). Making it important for things to be “as short and as punchy as possible” (Nissim, 2013).