By Agbolade Omowole

Looking ahead to the future is not a walk in the park and you can’t feature effectively in a future you don’t picture. The core of this article is to provide you with the top seven social media trends that will get you ahead of the curve.

SocialMedia

Why social media? The way to grow your business is exponential not linear. In the linear marketing model, you have to get your messages across to consumers numerically – one by one. If for instance, you send an email to 100 persons, only the intended recipients will get

the message and that’s all. But that model is slow and unfit for the 21st century entrepreneur. Social media can help your business marketing campaign get to customers in lesser time and produce more result. That’s an exponential curve. One out of every seven person in the world is on Facebook and each one of them has at least 150 friends. This means

that your sales pitch, through social media, can get to their intended person, their friends and their friend of friends. The possibilities are just endless. Investment on social media is a must: For serious entrepreneurs, allocating a reasonable budget for social media marketing is absolutely necessary.   It’s no longer an option. Every business, no matter how small or big, should have a Facebook business page.

Benefits of social media marketing are: increased exposure, increased traffic, provided marketplace insights, generated leads, developed loyal fans, improved search rankings, increased business partnership, reduced marketing expenses, improved sales.

*. Tell Stories: The art of story-telling when implemented across all platforms will engender exponential result and increase return-on-investment. There will be rise in visual story telling by increased use of micro videos and info-graphics.

*.Content is King. Content has always being king and it will be fuelled by 3 core pillars – creativity, context and care. On social media how you say it is more important than what you say. When building content for social media marketing, target basic passion points: fear, anxiety, love, and fear.

Context is about adapting your content to your audience and ‘care’ refers to showing others how your ‘offerings’ will solve their problems. People are only interested in the solution to their problems, not how beautiful your products/services are.

*. With the increase of instant messaging and chat-based social networks WhatsApp, Snapchat, Line and others will be the new competitor of facebook. It is therefore reasonable to include the aforementioned chat-based social networks in your social media campaigns.

5. Content Marketing Mastery: build an effective content marketing strategy by giving valuable information away. Attract clients by inviting them to your blog, create viral content, and provide value to the client.

* Image is everything: creating great information with high quality graphics is a great way to reach your target audience. Use comics, memes, infographics, photos, videos and visual note-taking.