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Social media has changed the way businesses promote their brand, interact with customers, and sell their products. According to Sherpa Marketing, 57% of business owners in Canada use social media, which is a 17% increase since 2012.

As more businesses join online communities and new platforms emerge, social media is becoming a necessary component of a business. However, not every social channel is right for every business. This is especially true for small businesses, so being strategic and choosing the right platforms is necessary if you want to see a positive return.

Because there are tons of new platforms and technologies emerging almost every day, we’ve gathered a few valuable trends, best practices and upcoming features that small businesses should look into in 2016.

Buy Buttons

In 2015, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest began rolling out Buy Buttons in the US, which allow users to make purchases directly from these social media sites. In Canada, Shopify has introduced similar buttons for Pinterest and Facebook. Since they are still fairly new they have yet to take off, but Forbes predicts buy buttons will take over in 2016.

Social media is no longer just “social”—it’s fast turning commercial, too. – TIME

This e-commerce feature is particularly useful for those who may not have the resources to launch their own e-commerce site, which is becoming increasingly important for small businesses offering products and services.

Video

Video is a powerful marketing tool for businesses, and it is quickly becoming the most prominent internet tool. Cisco reports that by 2019, video will account for 80 percent of global internet traffic.

YouTube has seen lots of momentum in the past few years, and it doesn’t look like its growth will be slowing down any time soon. According to YouTube:

• YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.
• The number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40% year-over-year since March 2014.
• The number of hours people spend watching videos (aka watch time) on YouTube is up 60% year-over-year, the fastest growth it has seen in 2 years.

If your business has yet to create a YouTube Channel, 2016 looks like the perfect time to launch one. YouTube allows small businesses to showcase their uniqueness on a large and growing platform. Check out this flowchart to get inspiration for your channel.

Live Content

Live broadcasting is another trend you should be aware of in 2016. Periscope is the most well known platform for sharing live content. Going live not only means real-time engagement with your customers, but it also brings a whole new meaning to transparency. There are endless possibilities of how your small business can use it, but here are just a few:

• Offer tips to other aspiring small business owners – in the small business community, helping each other grow and succeed is what it’s all about
• Conduct focus groups – great for small businesses that may not have resources available for extensive market research
• Live Q & A – answering questions live makes your answers genuine, which will help create loyal customers
• Give tutorials – this will be ideal for artisans, and restaurant owners to give their customers a look at the work that goes into the final product
• Go behind the scenes – customers are always curious to know what happens outside the frame
• Offer flash sales – a great incentive to build your follower base

With more social media platforms than ever before, you may be asking yourself how your small team can manage it all. We spoke to our Social Media Specialist here at 411 to help answer that question.

“If you’re managing more than one social media channel, it’s definitely worth it to create a free account on HootSuite or Buffer. These tools allow you to schedule content in advance across multiple channels. In terms of content creation, it can be pretty hard for a small team to come up with engaging content often. Tools like sniply allow you to add in your own message to bigger site’s news content. So you can share content your customers and community will find valuable, but put your personal stamp on it. If you’re not seeing the engagement on your content that you’d like, share the content with your own personal network who you think would be interested in the content, as well as employees. If these people like, share or comment on your content, it will increase the organic reach exponentially.

Most importantly, you want to make sure you’re sharing engaging content to reach your intended audience. The tips above are a great starting point for figuring out what type of content is working in 2016. From there, find out which channels your target market is most active on. All of these things will cut down the time you spend on social media marketing, and improve your ROI.”

Now is the time to start planning your marketing strategy for 2016. This is part 1 of an ongoing series of posts we will publish to help small businesses better understand the ever-evolving social media marketing landscape.

Have questions or suggestions? Tweet us @411dotca!

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