In 2017, marketers were able to find different ways of tracking their social media campaigns in order to determine their conversions. While it was just a start, 2018 is going to be the year of some advanced working in this regard. Tracking on of online conversion is possible on all major social media platforms. As a matter of fact, Snapchat and Facebook are now offering a way to track offline conversion as well.
With this ability to track conversions, users now have good reason to invest in social media marketing. However, the game has become more advanced than likes, clicks and views. Now, on-site and in-store conversions and purchases are also being tracked.
T3 president Ben Gaddis says, “All of our clients now understand that just having engagements on social — while it can be a great brand metric, it can also be very much a vanity metric. There has to be some tie-back to transaction. In 2017 a lot of the work was laid to determine what those metrics should be”.
Dominance over digital
With this trend of success in sales-drive strategies, it has become quite understandable that marketers would shift their primary focus on spending on social media marketing than other marketing channels.
VP of strategy and special programs at Ignite Social Media, Lisa Braziel, says, “Next year will be where [brands] get more serious about allocating more dollars from their traditional digital spending and where the comparison between digital banner-like advertising and other efforts will be compared against social and social will dominate digital”.
While it may be too early to declare winners and losers, Facebook is definitely going to make head start and is expected to stay ahead because it has been dominating social media since its inception. One of the agency executives says, “The dominance of Facebook is going to continue. We’re seeing a big move away from publisher direct deals, and the growth of programmatic and paid social is significant. A lot of that is, unfortunately or fortunately, moving to Facebook”.
The opportunity to experiment
While 2018 is going to be the year in which we may see social media marketing as a mature way to drive conversions, it is still going to have imperfections due to the fact that people will need time to see which platforms serve well. Having that said, it is worth remembering that there isn’t going to be any all-in-one package. Hence, one platform may perform well as compared to others in a particular perspective. And 2018 is going to be the year of identification of platforms.
Sanford Cornish 