Brian Honigman Interview on Future Social Media Trends

Brian Honigman is the CEO of Honigman Media, a content marketing consultancy based in Philadelphia. As a content marketing consultant, he’s worked with or spoken at the United Nations, the Weather Company, Wix, Entertainment Weekly and others. He’s also an adjunct professor at NYU and a contributing writer for the Next Web, Entrepreneur, and Forbes.

Here’s what he said!

Can you suggest a technique for social media marketers to grow their social following by analyzing social media data?

Take a look at the data available around content performance. The best way to grow an audience and drive worthwhile results on social media is to continue to share worthwhile content that is of interest to your audience. Reviewing what content drove the most interactions, traffic, and views in the past can help inform where to focus your time in the future.

How can marketing and PR agencies benefit from social media listening?

Social listening can help an agency better understand the pulse of the customers they’re trying to reach. Whether they’re trying to understand their share of voice in their vertical or the demographics of their audience, social listening provides you with the insights to make more informed business decisions.

What would you consider as the most important social media trends for the next couple of years?

Being adaptable is and will continue to be one of the most important trends in social media because the organizations that are able to quickly pivot how they use social media are the businesses that’ll be able to achieve their goals with the medium for the long-term. With new channels, feature sets and algorithms emerging frequently, the brands that thrive on social media are able to learn quickly and change the way they use social media and what channels they are active on.

Do you believe Social Media monitoring should be outsourced to an Agency/Marketer, in-house or both?

It depends on the goals of the company. There are pros and cons to each approach to social media monitoring, but what matters most is that your team is able to quickly draw insights from the real-time conversations happening on social media. Whichever arrangement allows you to make decisions in marketing or otherwise more quickly and effectively is the most ideal setup for your organization.

What do you think will be the “next big thing” in Digital Marketing?

The next big thing in marketing is focusing more on the experience a customer has. Every company is doing the same thing: producing content, active on Facebook etc. There are certainly ways to stand out across the mediums you’re active on, but at the end of the day, one of the most effective ways to scale word-of-mouth for your business is to provide an exceptional experience to your customers.

Whether interacting with them over a customer service issue or publishing a video series, focus on making every touchpoint with customers a better experience than they expected.