Social media changes at a relentless pace. Every year there are new social media marketing features, tactics, and best practices to build your brand and visibility, market your services and make your impact. But you don’t have time – or the inclination – to stay abreast of all these trends. And why should you? You’re a high-performing businesswoman with big goals and a lot of responsibility.

This overview of the most important social media marketing trends for women leaders gives you a bird’s-eye view of new social media marketing tactics to explore this year. You’ll learn what you need to know so you don’t miss any opportunities to capitalize on social media and get your true voice out there this year.

As you read, notice how these tactics make you feel: Excited? Anxious? Curious? These gut reactions are a valuable signal for which tactics are a good fit for your voice, brand, and business.

Social Marketing Trend 1: Rebuilding Trust

It’s probably no surprise to you that trust in social media declined in 2018. Only 41% of people trust what they see on social media, compared to 66% trust in traditional media and 63% in search engines (source). No wonder: there was the Facebook data privacy scandal, plus lingering problems with fake news and other data breaches. Brands and leaders on social media were called out for “woke-washing,” and criticized for sharing glossy highlight reels over genuine connection.

You already know that the best marketing comes from empathy, authenticity, and vulnerability. To keep this ethic alive on social media, experiment with intimate spaces like Stories; respond to comments; share candid photos; and be unpolished on video.

Tactics to Build Trust With Your Community

Brainstorm with your marketing strategist on how to increase trust and nurture relationships between you and your clients and prospects:

1. Create private spaces: and not just for your clients. If you want to cultivate a community of prospects and fans, try private or secret Facebook groups, Mighty Networks, LinkedIn groups, a Slack channel or WhatsApp chat groups. Intimacy and trust grows in small, curated, private spaces.
2. Branded hashtags: make sure your hashtag strategy includes low-volume, niche hashtags that align with your community’s value. One way to do this? Create your own unique hashtag.
3. Be available consistently: make unstructured time for your audience by running regular Q&A sessions or FB/IG Live appearances. You’ll gather powerful data about what your community needs from the questions they ask and the topics they respond to. Then repurpose segments of these videos on other networks to get more mileage.
4. Be prominent and visible: comment on important trends and news in your industry, both on the outlet’s websites and on social media. Are you following and interacting with influencers on LinkedIn and Medium? Are there popular Tweet chats in your industry? These are opportunities to share your expertise and increase your visibility.
5. Stories: see trend 2 for detail on this popular medium.
6. Share powerful stats: include killer stats and metrics in your written and video communications. Connect global trends and the zeitgeist, or current mood and news, around gender, work, and more to what you do.

Social media will never have the trust-building-ability of in-person interactions, but the shift to video content is a step in that direction. Live video mimics what makes events powerful: seeing your expressions, hearing your voice, and being able to interact with you in real time.

Even if you have strong rapport with your audience through your podcast, videos, blog posts, and events, nurturing relationships further always gains you greater trust, which leads to greater influence and impact.

Social Marketing Trend 2: Stories Have Arrived

Did you know that Stories are growing 15 times faster than feed-based sharing? Facebook Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, predicts that in 2019 Stories will surpass the feed as the primary way people share things with friends (source).

Stories are those 15-second posts on Instagram and Facebook that disappear after 24 hours. They are informal and ephemeral, ideal for quick updates or day-in-the-life snapshots. Unlike traditional posts, Stories don’t live forever on your Facebook Page or Instagram grid. Their fleeting quality gives you a content alternative to your branded, permanent posts, and a here-and-now way to connect with your audience.

They reflect the shift in social media usage from desktops to mobile devices (source). Whereas social networks were originally text-based platforms designed for desktops, more people now use social from their phones. Mobile-only capabilities like Stories allow people to capture in-the-moment experiences that are immediate and personal.

Ways to Add Stories to your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Stories have a spontaneous, intimate feel that can help you connect with your people throughout the day. They are great for building trust because they are quick, personal, and less polished.

While Stories are a perfect tool for sharing quick glimpses of your work and life, they are most effective when they are integrated into your overall content promotion strategy. Discuss these tactics with your marketing strategist to decide what makes sense for you and your clients and prospects.

How to start using Stories:

1. Content promotion: use Stories as an extension of the content you’re already producing. For each new blog post or podcast episode, share a different Story for several days to promote the content. (My colleague Quinn Tempest is fantastic at this)
2. Behind the scenes: share short, behind-the-scenes videos of you going about your workday, preparing for an event, marinating on a topic, or doing strategic planning. Lo-fi, “real” stories perform best and are more genuine than high-production, polished videos.
3. Live action: Hootsuite found that live-action outperforms professionally animated Stories (source), even for professional brands. Remember, this is about you connecting with your audience. Your people would rather see you than a cartoon.
4. Highlight: use the stories highlight feature to save your Story on your Instagram profile. This is ideal for time-bound promotions (but be sure to delete the video after the promo ends), extended promotions (like a podcast), and how-to and brand storytelling content. If you get a lot of comments, questions, or other engagement on a Story, that’s a sign it’s worth highlighting.

If you keep your permanent feed branded and on-topic, Stories are ideal for sharing updates without having to think about your brand colors. Even if your permanent feed is varied, some updates are personal and not meant to live forever! No matter your current social media content strategy, Stories will increase your reach, build trust, and grow your visibility so you can make greater impact.

Social Marketing Trend 3: Paid Ad Problems

First it was “free” organic content, until that became saturated and social networks started monetizing by killing organic reach and offering ads. Now everybody’s doing paid promotion, which is driving up costs and competition. (I predict monetization of/ads in messaging apps, videos and Stories is coming next.) Facebook ads alone account for 23.0% of US digital ad spending in 2018! (source)

It didn’t take long for people to start skipping ads or using ad blocking software, yet paid promotions still often offer better ROI than organic content on social media. If social media is one of your prime marketing channels, you want paid ads to be part of your strategy.

Paid ads that convert:

Touch base with your marketing strategist to gauge how your paid ads are performing and what could improve. Consider:

1. Revisit your goals and KPIs: are you using the right metrics to measure your success? Are your goals for your ads truly tied to the impact you want to make?
2. Get creative: experiment with humor and controversial topics (as long as you meet Facebook’s ad guidelines). Invest equally in the creative of your ads as you do in ad spend itself.
3. Get personal: the more personal you can be, the better your ads will perform. LinkedIn’s dynamic ads allow you to personalize the ad with people’s profile details, such as their photo or name. These dynamic ads have shown up to 2x the click-through rate of their non-personalized counterparts (source). On the Facebook side, take the ad my friend received (see below). He said, “it immediately caught my attention and I actually clicked on it.” He’s a programmer, and the ad copy was positioned just right to pique his interest.
4. Laser target: the more you understand your audience and target accordingly, the better your ads will perform (duh). In my 6-step paid ads process, we A/B test different audiences to gather data about your prospects.
5. Repurpose: test your ad concepts with your organic audience first to get proof of concept. Once you see what performs best, you can tweak and repurpose it with a paid version.
6. A/B Test: there are so many variables that go into paid ads, which is why it’s critical to isolate and test each element so you can gather data about your audience and optimize your ad.

Paid ads are a powerful way to introduce your work to new people and to nurture connections with your current community through retargeting ads. Being more creative, focused, and you in your ads will only increase their effectiveness and help you grow your influence and visibility.

Bonus Trend: Don’t Kill the Messenger

People are spending more time in messaging and less time sharing news on social. This shift from public to private spaces is not surprising given concerns about privacy and exhaustion with the social media “highlight reel” – those curated, stylized images people share online. As one focus group participant put it,

“The whole thing about social media is like wearing a mask. So when I am in my messaging groups with my friends the mask comes off and I feel like I can truly be myself.” (source)

Messaging tactics for your business:

Brainstorm with your marketing strategist how you can use messaging to improve customer service and make your work accessible:

1. Respond: have your assistant or social media manager respond to messages regularly, with a protocol to determine the messages worth responding to.
2. Instant Replies: use this Facebook message feature to respond immediately to Facebook messages with relevant links, answers to FAQs, or even by taking a leaf out of Barbara Corcoran’s book.
3. Automate: for repetitive and transactional conversations, set up chatbots to free yourself and your staff to have high value exchanges.
4. ChatBots: consider adding a chat feature to your website for greater customer service and efficiency. When it’s time for someone on your team to respond personally, use templates with links to your resources and offer to add them to your email list. My client She Negotiates gets plenty of leads from their chat feature. Many are looking for free advice, which reinforces the importance of using strategic templates when your team responds.

The challenge with this swing towards messaging for high-performing women CEOs and leaders is that they are time-intensive. It’s critical to put a trusted person in the role of managing messages so you don’t have to think about it and you don’t compromise the service to your prospects and community.

The trend towards messaging is a reminder that it’s important to make your work accessible to the right people at the right time. Making sure you have the systems in place to manage your leads and make them feel welcome goes a long way towards building goodwill and growing your reputation and visibility.

What Now?

Which trends and tactics resonated with you? Which ones turned you off? Use your finely-honed instincts to decide what to add to your social strategy this year. You wouldn’t have gotten this far if you didn’t trust yourself.

Social media networks, algorithms, and tactics are always changing. Marketing is always changing. Your business is evolving. If you wonder what you could be doing, whether you’re following social media best practices, or if you’re missing the boat by skipping the latest trend, let’s talk about it! Book a 30 minute discovery call here >>

Now, it’s time to send this article and the tactics you want to explore to your social media marketing strategist. Let them do the research, work out the details, and add these fresh ideas to your social media marketing strategy. Meanwhile, it’s time for you to go back to the revenue-generation and business-development activities that you do best!

Additional tactics for your marketing strategist or team:

Quick Tips for Building Trust:

1. Your face vs your logo: use a headshot or team photo as the profile picture for your social media profiles – especially on Instagram.
2. Videos: you do not need to polish and perfect them. The less rehearsed, the better. Facebook and Instagram Live are perfect for this, as are Stories.
3. Old-fashioned email: consider sending emails from your actual email address, as opposed to an email service provider.

Quick Tips for Creating Powerful Stories:

1. Orientation: shoot your Stories vertically, since that’s how people watch them.
2. Add a cover image: for Stories that you want to highlight, save them with a branded cover image (put the over image at the end, so it’s not the first thing your community sees when they click your Story).
3. Swipe up: if you have over 10,000 followers on your business account, you can add a “swipe up” link to your story directing people to a landing page. Make sure you use UTM tags so you can track the traffic to your landing page.

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Social media is a critical tool for women of influence and purpose – is that you? Stay up-to-date on preeminent trends and share these tactics with your digital strategist so you can grow your business and increase your impact: http://bit.ly/social-media-trends-for-impact #SocialMediaMarketing #SocialMediaTrends #WomenInBusiness #WomenEntrepreneur via @SimplyPutStrategies (Facebook) @Eva Jannotta (LinkedIn)

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Social media is a critical tool for women of influence and purpose – like you! Share the latest tactics + trends with your digital strategist so you can grow your business and increase your impact: http://bit.ly/social-media-trends-for-impact #WomenInBusiness via @evajannotta 

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