Week 5- Trends in Social Media For Businesses

Whether a business is using social media actively or not these trends will be sure to help them get on board and stay on board. Each year something new in social media comes around whether it's a new way to share something or it's an update on something that already exists. The bottom line is that social media changes constantly and businesses have to be able to keep up with it and be updated as well.

The first trend that is mentioned in the article by Ryan Holmes "Top 5 Social Media Trends for Businesses in 2017" states The "reachpocalypse" peaks which means that the way businesses used to reach their users is no longer going to work. So what networks are doing is using their own ads, promoted post and updates and that's what businesses have to start doing. The second trend is Employees become your social media army this is very important for businesses that don't want to spend a lot of their money on social media but want to get their brand out there. Ryan Holmes states" Employee advocacy--encouraging and incentivizing team members to share brand messages on their own social media accounts"(Holmes.2016). This  is killing two birds with one stone it's engaging your employees to work together and better the company and it's also allowing the company to save money and put it towards other things. The example that Ryan Holmes mentions in his article is "Top golf enlisted 300 of its associates to start sharing updates and saw Likes increase by 220 percent during the initiative's launch last year"(Holmes.2016).

The third trend is social media skills gap widens this is a big thing that creates a lot of problems for companies is that their front line employees don't have the skills to leverage social media as a business tool. Ryan Holmes states" Social media coursework is slowly being incorporated into university programs, and not just for students pursuing marketing and communications degrees"(Holmes.2016). This is a great tool to be able to learn just as I'm learning in the social media class I am currently in. Trend number four is CEOs finally get the hang of social media a lot of CEOs don't see the benefit of them personally being on social media but as compared to 2015 in 2016 the numbers of CEOs on social media were increasing. The last trend is Sales and customer service get more social which is incorporating chat boxes that allow customers to directly ask someone a question on a topic.

Each trend mentioned above is vitally important for businesses to keep up with their success.

https://www.inc.com/ryan-holmes/top-5-social-media-trends-for-businesses-in-2017.html