Over half of the world's population use social media, making this resource an important part of your small business marketing strategy. Social media helps your brick-and-mortar, online or home-based company connect with current and potential customers, but this effective marketing strategy changes and evolves over time. To fully leverage social media, review these five small business social trends.

Consumers participate in a social media digital detox when they temporarily or permanently delete social apps or stop accessing social sites. People reduce social media usage out of privacy or data concerns, distrust of a specific platform, or to improve their mental health and well-being. Your small business can navigate the detoxing trend as you:

• Post positive, engaging and valuable content that impacts visitors beyond a passing glance and builds consumer trust in your brand.
• Improve your company's online presence, search engine marketing and email list to connect with customers who step away from social media.
• Encourage and practice regular digital detoxes to support the health and well-being of your audience and employees.

Brands can use "likes" to measure the popularity of social media posts. Consumers can "like" a post without actively engaging with your brand, though. To focus less on vanity metrics and turn up the engagement:

• Plan content that demonstrates the ways your company meets the needs of your target audience and puts individual customers first.
• Prioritize posts that support conversations and take steps to stay engaged.
• Track shares, mentions, comments, link clicks, and click-through rates, metrics that verify the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

Customers use social media to ask questions, offer suggestions and post complaints – and nearly 43% of consumers want a response to their online contact within five seconds. Your company could boost customer confidence and brand trust, build your public profile, and support a positive online reputation if you respond properly. Utilize social media's customer service potential when you:

• Monitor social media for brand mentions and posts.
• Respond quickly to posts and messages either online or offline depending on the situation.
• Match your response tone to the customer's tone as you demonstrate respect, care and concern for the individual.

The average person watches 16 hours of video content weekly. Increase your company's visibility when you create and post videos. To start creating video content or improve your current video content strategy:

• Develop video production skills or outsource this task.
• Post how-to and explanation videos to introduce, explain and troubleshoot your product/service for current and potential customers.
• Focus on clarity, quality and engagement with each video.

The primary goal of social media is to build relationships with current and potential customers and clients. Your audience members want to know that they matter individually to you. Strengthen your brand's community ties as you:

• Use hashtags. Connect with like-minded individuals through hashtags in your company's content and other online interactions.
• Be human. Talk about wins and losses, happy times and disappointments. Your human audience craves a genuine and authentic connection to the humans behind your company's brand.