Happy New Year! What will 2015 hold for social media? Here’s what the thought leaders in the industry believe the trends to look out for are!
Social media marketers will be dealing with similar problems as they’ve faced in the past, it’s still all about making the most out of marketing opportunities on social media, the most important thing here is strategy.
1. Personalizing social media
Optimization is king, brands need to focus more time into seeing what is most effective with people. According to Max Kaehoff, senior vice president of marketing for SocialCode. Personalization is extremely effective when it comes to marketing and using personalization across multiple devices. An advertiser will be able to target where and how the user will be reached.
Such awareness is of primary importance when it comes to determining the best ways of designating resources.
In the past the approaches were much less specific, the data was gathered, advertisers targeted it to the best of their abilities and then they hoped for the best. This simply won’t fly anymore, giant targets are just expensive and wasteful.
2. Getting smart about using metrics
The best way to optimize and personalize social media is to track its performance. It’s not just a matter of how many likes you can get, there’s so much valuable information at our hands these days and it’s imperative to use this information wisely in order to meet business goals effectively.
3. Invest in social media
There are no surprises when you hear that people are spending a lot of their time on social media, so targeting this area seems like the natural thing to do. Kalehoff referred to an example of the World Cup that was held last summer, and how several millions of dollars were spent promoting brands around the world cup.
“That’s TV scale,” he said. “If you look at the advertisers around the Super Bowl, there might be one that comes close to that level of spend around the Super Bowl.”
There is great value in using social media to reach objectives, the reach is immense, Facebook alone has 1.3 billion users.
4. Social media companies become digital platforms
It runs deeper than websites and apps, big companies are targeting and measuring their users using their digital platforms.
Take Facebook as an example, Facebook is very aware of what the average person is up to when they’re online. Recently Facebook purchased Atlas, an ad server. This way advertisers will be able to target people even more specifically based on information that they already have as well as their Facebook profile. This further extends the opportunities for targeting far beyond the constraints of Facebook.
5. Keep on Converging
Even in the recent years there has been an obvious increase in the amount of advertising through social networks, mainly Facebook. However, newer platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram are also churning out the advertisements. This will drive the necessity for advertisers to pursue paid options on such platforms.
Marketers are constantly being faced with the pressure of ensuring their content is seen by the right people at the right time. Amber Osborne, CMO for social media management tool MeshFire, she believes that social media will converge with multiple mediums, this includes television.
An example Osborne used was when NBC aired their live version of the Sound of Music last December, Nielsen’s SocialGuide showed nearly a half million tweets during the broadcast. It blasted them to the top spot for tweeted shows that week.
There are huge opportunities within combining something used by people everyday, Osborne’s example is a great way to show how social media can be integrated with traditional media to raise interest.
6. Mobile, mobile, mobile!
Living in the digital world one is constantly attached to their mobile devises. Marketers will be paying more attention to this in 2015. Focusing special attention to mobile means creating time and location relevant targeting.
7. Focusing on the visuals
The popularity of apps such as Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, and Pinterest, are super suggestive of how visual people engaging with social media truly are.
Forrester reported in April that Instagram alone had a 4.2% engagement rate compared to Facebook’s 0.07% and Twitter’s 0.03%.
So, adapting and creating visual social media strategies is the best way to go about it. Incorporating visual aspect into your business model is an affective way of gaining more attraction.
What have we learned here? The not so secret fact that marketers need to get creative, they’ve got the information at their fingertips, now they have to work out the best way to use it in order to reach the right people at the right time. It’s important to invest in social media, and targeting mobile for optimum effectiveness.
What are your thoughts? Tell us in the comments!
via Tech Republic
