The Future of Influencer Social Media Marketing

When we talk a look at the second decade of the twenty-first century, we find that marketing has grown to a whole new level in social media. Although some brands were using people on MySpace and Facebook in its nascent days, the real trend for brand marketing and the emergence of the so-called "influencers" is something unique to the 2010s. If we analyze their growth, we will find that the rise of the influencers has been at the forefront of the development of new marketing techniques that are exclusive to social media platforms. So now we have different brand marketing techniques for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and personal blogs. This has propelled the influencer into the limelight. Let us now examine the future of influencer based social media marketing.

Brands

One common factor across all platforms where influencers are active is that in recent years they have seen exponential growth in the choice of brands that is on the platform. So while there used to be only a few sports stores and brands who gave their audience the option to purchase from Facebook and other platforms, we now see a plethora of brands using these platforms to not only advertise but rather to offer direct sales to their customers. This has had a drastic effect on influencer marketing. As more and more brands appear on the scene and this trend of offering direct purchase options becomes the norm, we will see the influencer marketing of the future shift towards retail goods being placed directly in the post. This means that a brand, for example, Nike, will not use its influencers to showcase Nike shoes. Instead, they will showcase a specific Nike Shoe design that will be available for purchase from that very post.

Instagram Views

Another significant trend that is going to become the norm in the future is that the metric of Instagram views will gradually replace the use of Instagram followers to create a presence on the platform. Followers do matter, but it is the view count that will surpass it as the better metric. The same will occur on YouTube and Facebook as well as other platforms. The actual following of a person will become the best gauge for how much they are worth as a social media influencer instead of how many people are in their follower tab. This is because there are many people and shady enterprises that sell followers. These are usually old accounts that are only used to follow others. As there is no use for such attention to brands, they will switch their focus to Instagram views.

Interaction with Neighboring Companies

Another important aspect of the future that has just started to appear in the latter half of 2018 is the rise of posts that are not actually from the leading brand, but rather from one of their sister companies. This allows the user to not only engage with something that has a broader influence, but there are also higher chances of the audience gravitating towards the product from the specific brand if they do purchase it. So, for example, a brand like Nike may buy influence to advertise a sports drink that is produced by a subsidiary. So when the users who are more into sports drinks will get that ad, they will automatically be influenced to buy the merchandise Nike is selling, even though they did not buy influence for their sports brand.

Conclusion

All in all, we can rest assured that the future is going to see some new trends emerge in influencer behavior and the social marketing skills that have been used till date will have to evolve to keep up with them. Many brands will most probably hire in house influencers to escape from the ever-changing social media trends, but in the end, it will be the trends of the outsider influencers that will have the most significant impact on the audience.