Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but the stories you tell. The world of marketing has changed. Companies like Snapchat and Instagram have risen to prominence. Social storytelling has become the new brand marketing.

A rare person enjoys surveys. They take up much time and don’t offer any instant gratification, unless you offer incentives, which is a way that not every company can afford. And yet you need customer feedback: it’s one of the greatest sources of learning and ideas. Not collecting any means limiting your growth and understanding of the customers. So what's the answer? It's social media.

Being a digital marketer means always staying up-to-date with the new and upcoming trends. Changes happen fast. New SEO rules, new social media advertising costs, new tools that transform the life of a marketer. Sometimes, almost unpredictable things happen, like the appearance of a new super-cool social media platform that simply wasn’t there yesterday. But sometimes the trends rise and fall relatively slowly. It’s important to pay attention to them, see how they progress from year to year, stick to them whenever it makes sense and abandon them whenever the hype or the usefulness has decreased or is about to. This post is mostly about the second type.

Not satisfied with Facebook, Twitter, and other social giants? Try looking at niche social media platforms. It's where your target audience is and it's where they don't mind you getting involved. Granted, not every area has a popular niche website - you'll need social media monitoring to discover all the hidden places. Here, though, I have a list of the most popular industry-specific social platforms.

Stats are always fun to look at. Okay, well, for some people. It gives you an understanding of what is going on in the field with minimal effort. Besides, there is nothing like starting a new year with some solid numbers. So I've gathered some important, some weird, and some equally both important and weird social media numbers. Here they are.

There are two ways of understanding people: research and the wrong way. Today we’ll talk about researching your existing and potential customers using social media. Why using social media? Because according to Generator Research, the total number of global social networking users will be 2.5 billion by 2017. And this isn’t even ambitious: Facebook alone had 1.2 billion monthly active users already in 2014.