The State of Social Report

When writing your social media strategy for 2019 it is important to consider social media trends. So we take a look backwards at social media trends of 2018 and the predictions for 2019.

A great resource for this sort of thing are third party applications that collect and crunch data – like buffer.

Social Media in 2018

Messenger apps and chatbots were talked about as one of the trends for 2018. At the beginning of 2018 research showed that only 20% of marketers have used messaging apps for marketing. Therefore there were plenty of opportunities in this space up for grabs. Another stat that I heard last year was that chatbots would be handling 85% of customer service by 2020. So clearly this trend is set to continue to grow in 2019.

The 2018 State of Social Report 2018 told us that 37% of businesses post video content once a month, whilst 25% never post any video content. Facebook (70%) is the most popular platform for video content ahead of You Tube (54%) and Instagram (40%).

Social Media in 2019

This week Buffer released their State of Social Report for 2019. It reports that the Stories format has taken the social media industry by storm, and data suggests that more than one billion accounts now use stories globally on Facebook-owned properties. The survey revealed that brands and business are planning to increase their spend on Stories Ads.

There is little increase in the use of messenger apps.

Only 37% of businesses have been using Influencer Marketing although 88% of those brands that use influencer marketing are also planning to continue with the strategy in 2019. Instagram is the most popular platform for influencer marketing.

Use of video is still increasing. Just 14.5% of businesses don’t publish any video content — down from 25% in 2018. Facebook remains the king. Although other platforms are gaining, but a surprise was that just 12.2% of respondents said their business had used IGTV in 2018 and 72% said they have no intentions to create content for IGTV in 2019.

Read the full round-up and report here.

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