Hello Everyone,
In the exciting world of social media and marketing, nothing ever stays the same for very long. Let’s go ever some trends:
- Rise of Video content
Sites like youtube where you can post videos to manage your brand and entertain customers and give info about promotions and limited time offer discounts will become more popular.
This also means any story telling video-interactive content will be on the rise. Mixed media, crisper and smarter marketing campaigns, better acting, producing and script writing.
those pesky facebook videos have really taken over!
- Ello
What we couldn’t have predicted last year was the emergence of a new social platform intended to go head-to-head with social media giant, Facebook. The platform, which is still in public beta (meaning invite-only), has caused quite a stir; dubbed by some as the ‘hipster social network’, Ello offers a forever ad-free experience and promises to never sell its users’ information to third parties.
- Facebook ad pricing and demand will significantly increase
It’s no secret that Facebook post reach is significantly decreasing, and has become a serious problem for business owners who are using the platform for marketing purposes.
- Twitter’s new business advertising model will skyrocket in popularity.
With Twitter’s move to offering businesses more choice and flexibility in how and what they pay for in terms of advertising, more small and medium sized businesses will jump on the Twitter ad bandwagon. The new fee structure allows businesses to pay for certain performance-based actions rather than just retweets or clicks.
These objective-based campaigns, which are still currently in beta, will offer more flexibility including tweet engagements (retweets, replies, etc.), website clicks or conversions, app installs, new followers and leads. These campaigns will be particularly appealing to small business owners who want to pay for results, not just for brand visibility.
- Google+ will begin to fade into obscurity
With the failure of Google’s Authorship experiment, Google+ now brings no unique value that Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook don’t already provide. Analyts therefore expect it to die to the mainstream.
- Instagram will become essential for image-based social media marketing
Instagram isn’t showing any signs of slowing down; not by a long shot. With 200 million monthly users, Instagram has become the network when it comes to image-based social media marketing. Instagram is an app designed for mobile and tablet users.
- LinkedIn will widen the gap as “the” B2B social network
LinkedIn has been the top network of choice for the B2B crowd for years already, and I believe we’ll see the gap between LinkedIn and other networks continue to widen in 2015.
- Social media marketing will finally be embraced as a core pillar of content marketing
In 2015, marketers will finally realize that there are two core pillars of a content marketing strategy: publication and distribution. Marketers will learn that social media is the most effective method of expanding the reach and visibility of their content, and because of this, will come to view social media as more of an “amplifier” for their published content rather than as the content itself.
- Integrated Social Advertising
Expect to see exciting new ways of firmly integrating social advertising with brands’ data bases and omnichannel strategies for sophisticated and contextual targeting.
- Fighting Through Information Density
By 2020, the amount of information on the web is expected to increase by 600% (and some believe that number is low!). The challenge of cutting through the content shock and earning a share of the limited customer attention span is the marketing challenge for the foreseeable future.
Content like mixed media or Video that presents many messages with multi-channels is key to grab the attention of your audience.
- Business migration away from Facebook.
The drop in organic reach has been apocalyptic for many businesses. Why? There’s too much content on Facebook and the company is forced to ratchet down the reach. Teh cost benefits of the ROI of facebook reach vs. $ will force some businesses to reconsider Facebook as a viable channel and enable a migration to less noisy venues.
The market is ripe for more Video, short visual mixed media services and perhaps even another social network where advertising is different. The younger generation only uses Facebook as a means of communication, so visiting corporate brand pages doesn’t do much.
SlideShare Becomes the YouTube for Business
SlideShare is currently where you create, distribute and consume presentations, and it’s a great tool for B2B marketers to do content marketing for their target audience. Good presentations drive page views, leads, SEO juice and often long-lasting evergreen content. In 2014, SlideShare added video capabilities for LinkedIn influencers. In 2015, SlideShare will extend video to their entire audience. Watch for SlideShare video to become YouTube for business.
YouTube Declines as Social Networks Embrace Hosted Video
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will show preferential treatment to video content that is hosted on their own platform. This means that marketers will be uploading original video content to each social network (and not just short videos).
The social networks will give extra exposure to uploaded videos because they keep users on the platform longer and provide unique advertising opportunities. This distribution of video will radically transform the way marketers work with video.
Paid Ads Become Unavoidable
In 2015, social networks will continue to find ways to push businesses into their advertising programs. As much I dislike it, the invasiveness of these adds has noticably increased! Which makes add-free zones and networks that much more valuable (like Ello plans to be).
We already know that Facebook plans to stifle organic promotional posts in the news feed starting in last month, and that Twitter hasn’t ruled out implementing a Facebook-like algorithm for their news feed. Instagram is still busy expanding their advertising platform, and since they’re owned by Facebook, an algorithm that limits organic posts from businesses and brands could easily be added into the mix.
Hence, social media marketers who might have avoided social advertising in 2014 will be forced to embrace it in 2015. I think consumers and the public will be attracted to networks that are clean.
Campaign Focus Shifts to Authentic Experiences
In the information-driven and consumer-empowered world, relationship capital is the only business metric that stands the test of time. Brand love and customer advocacy is what takes care of the business bottom-line.
To truly earn the trust and loyalty of educated, tech- and social-savvy, global, connected millennial consumers, it isn’t enough to distract them with short-term dazzle campaigns. To ignite and keep customer advocacy long-term, companies need to show that they care by repeatedly enabling meaningful experiences.
What does this mean? Well it depends on the audience. But I think the word “authenticity” sums it up. People need to feel that corporations or brands actually care about the world they live in….
