The turn of the year is a great time to look back and look forward on Social Media Trends and changes so here’s my blog on where I see things going the stuff that’s hot and the stuff that’s had its day – it’s a personal opinion but I have taken notice of many Social Media Experts and put my thoughts into it. So here goes and feel free to comment and add to this
Facebook – reports of its demise are over exaggerated! I see people everywhere saying that it’s dead not worth bothering with and not for business. Well my take on it? Facebook for business needs to be approached in a different way it’s still a great place to make connections trial ideas and heighten awareness, however range of Facebook posts continues to decline in real terms due to the way it distributes posts known as EdgeRank, the algorithm that it uses to determine what articles should be displayed in a user’s News Feed. Styled paid-for advertising is the way forward and is a highly targeted cost effective way to increase reach on the platform that remains number one in the Social Media Charts.
Video will play a bigger part in Social Media marketing in 2015. That’s video hosted on all platforms not just the obvious YouTube although it would be wrong to overlook the world’s second biggest search engine as a real source of business leads. Well-crafted videos will aid business search results and are invaluable in driving leads to websites.
Community will be at the centre of things social too. There will be a shift towards Brands developing conversations rather than direct marketing. To this end I see a bigger part for Google+ in business social plans. There continues to be longevity in posts on Google’s platform where content continues to be found in search results long after posts made on Facebook and Twitter.
I see a continued growth for Instagram and Pinterest as consumers continue to share ideas visually however both platforms shouldn’t be considered the exclusive domain of those with visual product to sell – be creative!
The use of LinkedIn articles which should be available and rolled out to everyone by February should be top of my list to be adopting on the B2B site this year don’t forget to notice to get noticed, participation remains important.
One thing that should not be forgotten is content and engaging content at that continues to be the most important part of any Social Media strategy, so whichever platform (or indeed combination of platforms) you choose make sure you take care to put thought into that.
So – what platform will you be using in 2015?
