Marketers and business owners are constantly on the lookout for ways to derive more return on investment from their marketing efforts and improve their bottom line.

Gone are the days when businesses treated social media as a supplemental marketing channel. Today, brands must leverage social media to reinforce their presence/voice and consistently demonstrate value. As such, improving their social media presence and reach has become a top priority for marketers.

However, social media is a constantly changing landscape. It’s hard to keep up, especially when it comes to marketing efforts. To help you stay ahead of the curve, here are some top social media trends to address in 2019.

Omnichannel and multichannel marketing

Experts believe that 2019 is the year of authenticity on social media. Brands and marketers will need to become better storytellers to cut through the clutter. They should share moments, secrets and stories that matter to people, not the brand. This would involve more intimate, behind-the-scenes stories and less static updates.

To find content that matters most to people, brands should cross search with social. Marketers can leverage cross-platform content by creating one-minute videos around their best performing content and sharing these videos to LinkedIn, Facebook and other social channels.

Brands can also take their best performing posts on social and convert them into articles, thus leveraging the power of social to drive traffic and search rankings. It’s also a great idea to repurpose Facebook podcasts and live videos to articles, tweets and listicles.

Vertical videos and social media TV

In 2018, we witnessed some transparency wins: Facebook battling data sharing and privacy concernsand Twitter shutting down troll accounts and making it easier to report harassment.A Sprout study showed that 55 percent of customers perceived brands’ activities on social media to be somewhat transparent. Shocking statistics also showed that millennials expect more transparency from brands than their friends/family or even politicians.

Brands must bow to pressure and look for ways to become more transparent to audiences. One way is by leveraging vertical videos and social media TV (stories) to give audiences more behind-the-scenes looks at their business, demonstrate company values and publicize product iterations/updates. This helps create a more meaningful and transparent relationship between brands and consumers.

The rise of private groups and accounts

In 2018, brands began to leverage groups as a way to directly connect with consumers and fans and prevent algorithms from meddling in their posts and reach. Most major influencers also created private Instagram accounts to avoid Instagram’s algorithms and brands quickly followed this trend by creating private alternate accounts to drive up interest.

With Instagram adding the Close Friends feature in Stories, brands can create a more insider look and feel to their accounts. They could also leverage this to create more conversational content.

Produce in-the-moment content

Facebook introduced new features into Groups during 2018, including the ability to post Live videos within groups, the creation of social learning units, status updates via the Stories features and the ability to participate as a business Page.

Twitter added live tweeting features while Instagram allowed brands to leverage live stories. These updates enable brands to produce in-the-moment content that better engages audiences and reaffirms their position in the hearts and minds of their consumers.

Get ahead of the competition with social media

Social media channels have become the go-to platforms for customer inquiries, complaints and consumer feedback. As social media presence effectiveness (or lack thereof) influences how target audiences perceive a brand, businesses can no longer afford to ignore social media channels.

Creating and implementing an effective social marketing strategy around the above trends can place brands miles ahead of the competition.