Social Media Trends for 2015

As we sort through the plethora of information regarding various trends to watch for in 2015, we came across a fascinating article from MAVSOCIAL about Social Media Trends in 2015. We found this article to be so full of vital information about all the “ins and outs” of Social networking, we decided to repost it for you here. Enjoy!

Nostradamus may have predicted the Great Fire of London and the discoveries of Louis Pasteur, but he was less forthcoming about the social media trends of 2015.  No worries, we’re here to fill the knowledge gap and bring you some of the hot social media trends that you can expect to see over the next 12 months.

Making predictions is of course an inexact science, but we have thrown away our crystal balls and tea leaves to base our projections on surveys, reports, an analysis of current developments and the buzz amongst social media marketers.

Social media has come a long way in the last few years and with more than one quarter of the world’s population (approximately 1.7 billion people) on social media, change is inevitable, constant and rapid.

One of the biggest shifts is that more resources and effort are going to go into content, visual and written.  Great storytelling will come into its own as a key way of attracting and keeping an audience.

What follows are some of the key social media trends of 2015 that we think businesses need to know about:

We will be telling more visual stories – the use of images and videos is going to get even BIGGER in 2015 as more companies wise up to the importance of well-crafted visual stories, not just to differentiate them from the rest of the digital noise, but to engage and provoke strong emotions among users.

Throughout 2015, Facebook will continue to challenge YouTube as an online destination for uploading and sharing videos.  Currently, there are 1 billion daily views of video on Facebook, with 65% of them being viewed on mobile devices. And don’t forget Twitter’s Vine.  There will be even more interaction with this channel for short form videos.

Evidence of the importance of images and videos is seen in new apps and platforms such as Hyperlapse from Instagram and MavSocial. These allow for faster curation and creation of visual content.  Remember, visual content is social media ready and friendly, easy to share, easy to digest and instantly memorable.

But none of this means the death of the written word – on the contrary.

Great written content will be paramount – when users are searching social and online for information, they want engaging, information rich content that answers their problems and tells them things they don’t already know.  What they don’t want is poorly written material stuffed with keywords that’s been hastily cobbled together by content farms.   Words can make a company look smart and trustworthy or cheap and slapdash.  Not every marketer is a writer and more companies will start to employ good content writers to provide their followers with meaningful articles, posts and other forms of written web content.

A greater emphasis on ad targeting – Social is putting more resources into customer data and developing new ways to target ads.  Facebook has been promoting its targeted ad services for some time now and buying ads on Twitter is on the up.

By virtue of the way people use Facebook and Twitter, the social networks glean a lot of information about their users which can be used to send them adverts about the things they’re into. Being able to understand this form of advertising and tapping into it will be one of the keys of success for companies looking to succeed on social media.

Expect social targeting tools to become ever more sophisticated and for more brands to use this method of reaching consumers.  Snapchat also has an ad service, however it isn’t targeted which has led many commentators to question its effectiveness.  As one journalist wrote in an article in Business Insider, untargeted advertising is just “spam”.  It will be interesting to see how Snapchat’s ad service evolves over the year and whether there is a lot of take up from companies.

Ad retargeting will increase its effectiveness – this is a practice that’s spreading faster than a video viral sensation of a cat playing the piano.  It is where consumers see adverts on one site for something they searched for on another. The technique works by using the same cookies that sites already deploy to track websites that consumers visit.  For brands, it is a powerful way of keeping contact with consumers even once they have left their site.  With so little traffic converting through a first visit, it is a great way of staying in the consumer’s mind without bombarding them with sales messages.

A greater emphasis on privacy – privacy concerns will experience a resurgence as more people worry about their cyber footprint and who’s tracking and recording their online and social media activities.  In 2015, we’ll hear a lot more aboutEllo, an ad-free social network currently in beta that’s been dubbed the “anti-Facebook”.  The network claims it will never carry ads or sell user data.  To join, you have to be invited by someone who is already active on the site, so there is an air of exclusivity about it.

Also, expect to see a rise in the popularity of services with self-destructing messages at their core such as Snapchat,Confide, Clipchat and Wickr.

Mobile is going to dominate – a recent report from businessinsider.com revealed that 60% of social media use is via smartphones and tablets and not desktop computers.  With free Wi-Fi access springing up everywhere from town centres to cafés, airport lounges and shopping malls that percentage is only going to increase.  Consider this statistic provided by Facebook – 30% of its worldwide monthly active users are already mobile-only.  More people want to stay more connected more of the time.

This means that your website and all your social activities must be compatible with smaller devices.  Don’t assume that your beautifully produced, but large infographic will be easily readable on someone’s iPad or Kindle.  Some commentators are even going as far as saying that mobile first is not going to be enough. Companies should start thinking, mobile only.

A bigger social media marketing push – social media marketing will experience a huge upswing next year.  According to figures by eMarketer, 89% of US companies will use social media for marketing purposes in 2015.  The two most popular networks will be Facebook (84.7%) and Twitter (65.8%).

Marketers will also allocate more of their budgets to social media marketing. Currently, 9.4% of marketing budgets are designed for social endeavours.  However, according to the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, that figure will go up to 13.2% in the next 12 months.  More businesses will discover that successful engagement with consumers will come from meaningful original content rather than paid for adverts in print and on TV and radio.

We’ll be wearing our technology – wearable technology seems like one of those science fiction predictions that will never come true, like the personal jetpack.  However, a lot of industry insiders are getting excited about wearable tech, from devices that can monitor and improve our health to products that can keep us entertained.

Unless there are any last minute delays, the Apple Watch will be launched in early 2015.  The product will come locked a loaded with a mother load of features and apps as well as being able to tell the time.   What’s this got to do with social media?  Well, Apple Watch will put social media on your wrist as a wearer will be informed by feeling a discrete push when someone likes their Facebook page, retweets one of their tweets or gives them a +1 on Google+.

The market is new and volatile, but this is definitely one to watch out for (weak pun intended).

More sophisticated ROI – that thorny old issue of social media ROI will still plague many business owners as they clamour to find out if their online social activities are making them money. There may be a plethora of analytics tools out there, but marketers still struggle to determine social’s business value.  According to the findings of the latest annual content marketing study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute, only 23% of B2C markers say they are successful at tracking the ROI of their organisation’s content marketing programs.

More companies will make more noise about the need to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns, and indicators of their social performance will steadily improve.  Facebook and Google Analytics already provide tons of data and Twitter and Pinterest have improved access to audience insights.

According to the social media gurus at eMarketer, one of the ways of cracking ROI will be to get input from multiple stakeholders such as clients and their research departments.

And finally, management of visual content – obviously we are biased with this one, but we strongly believe that centralized storage and organization of all visual content (images, videos and infographics) is the final piece of the social media management jigsaw and will be on most people’s radar in 2015.

Everyone knows that the amount of visual content shared across social media channels in increasing almost exponentially and brands will want to have greater control over what is going out. They require the ability to have a library of approved consistent visual content that is easily accessible and sharable and then be able to analyze what visual content is working and what is not. Platforms such as MavSocial are well positioned to help them with this.

The Future is Now…well, Nearly Tuning into social media trends can help businesses stay ahead of the curve.  Brands that understand change and embrace it will gain a powerful advantage over their competitors.  What do you think of our predictions? Do you agree or have thoughts of your own? We would love to hear from you and either way, here’s to a cracking and successful 2015!!

This blog was reposted by Derek Schwitters, Chief Digital Officer at lodestar marketing group.  If you would like help with your social  media efforts, please contact us at digitalmarketing@lodestarmg.com