Force Feeding ads on Social Media Websites: 2015

Sunday, May 17, 2015

The future of social media is in paid content, which requires a different strategy than organic. How can you prepare?

Social media started as an organic marketing tool with an emphasis on creating engaging and interesting content that people actually liked. Over the past three to five years, paid (or sponsored) content has become a staple of most social media marketing efforts. While Facebook has been the clear leader in driving paid social media content by actively reducing the exposure of organic content, most other social networks are testing paid content (including newer networks like Pinterest and Instagram).

The Future of Social Media Is Paid

There is no doubt that the future of social media includes paid as a significant component for a number of reasons:

Social networks have to pay their bills, and ad revenue is the primary way that they do it.
The growing popularity of social networks and their rise as the number one activity online makes them the place that businesses can go to achieve mass awareness. Big brands are paying for social (and driving up the price of advertising).
Most social networks will have paid content in the future.

Paid Requires a Different Strategy vs. Organic

Organic social media is based on the assumption that you have to earn your way into the newsfeed with great content that people love. Most organic social media posts aren't directly selling, because selling is rarely interesting enough to drive engagements. The premise of organic social media content is permission-based marketing, which means that your marketing must be good enough for people to opt-in.
Paid is a different animal. Paid is about creating posts that both grab attention and stand out in the cluttered social media newsfeed, but also clearly build your brand. Paid social media marketing is often closer to interruption marketing, which is when you pay money to interrupt people with your marketing message.
Each of these approaches requires a different strategy. The best social ads include the elements of interruption marketing as well as permission marketing. They are interesting posts that people would choose to share and look at, but are also clearly building business value. Not every social media update is appropriate for paid support, and not every paid post would make a great organic post.
The search industry has been divided into these buckets for years, with search marketers specializing in paid or organic search. Both require different skills and approaches to getting attention in search engines. While they are strategically linked, the skills to execute each strategy are different.
Social media, over time, will evolve to have specialists in both paid and organic since both require different skills.

How to Prepare

To prepare for the future of social media, there are a few things that you can do:

Establish BOTH a paid and an organic strategy. Clearly define the type of content that you'll promote.
Determine which people on your team have the skillset for organic vs. paid and treat them as related and linked, but not necessarily requiring the same skills.
If you are a social media marketer, determine which (if not both) skills you want to hone.
Start experimenting with paid sooner rather than later. Paid social ads (perhaps with the exception of Facebook ads) are still in their infancy. By experimenting now, you will be better positioned as it grows.

10 pros and cons of social media

Because of the way the internet has changed the way we communicate and interact with one another on so many levels; it’s become necessary to explore the pros and cons of social media and its effects on our society.

The Pros

1-Increased criminal prosecution because of social media
The NYC police department began using Twitter back in 2011 to track criminals foolish enough to brag about their crimes online. When the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in 2011, their Vancouver fans took to the streets and rioted, but local authorities used social media to track and tag the people involved, and they caught people who were stealing during the riot.
2-Social networking creates new social connections
Statistics show that 70% of adults have used social media sites to connect with relatives in other states, and 57% of teens have reported making new friendships on social media sites.
3-Students are doing better in school
This is an interesting statistic about the pros and cons of social media and its effect on students doing well in school. Students with internet access at a rate of 50% have reported using social networking sites to discuss school work, and another 59% talk about instructive topics.
4-Better quality of life
If you want to talk about the pros and cons of social media, take a close look at all the support groups on Facebook. Members of these groups discuss their health conditions, share important information, and resources relevant to their conditions while creating strong support networks.
5-Social media as a source of employment
Job sourcing has gone modern thanks to social media. Sites such as LinkedIn are a major resource that 89% of job recruiters take advantage of when looking to hire potential employees.

Now let’s take a look at the Cons of social media.

1-Social media and the news
Much of the news information that people read about comes from social media websites, and that figure estimate is around 27.8 %. This figure ranks just under print newspapers at 28.8%, greater than radio’s figure of 18.8% and far outpaces the figure for other print publications at just 6%.
2-Too much misinformation
With the advent of the web, people started to create their own websites and blogs. While many of those blogs were just basic diaries, a few of them were about topics like health and politics while others were how to blogs.
Many blogs have turned into rumor mills, spreading misinformation that people tend to believe just because it’s on the web.
Rumors about hurricane Sandy and gunfights in other countries like Mexico have been picked up by reliable news services, and this misinformation has been shared without the proper vetting of the sources providing the information.
3-Pupils spending too much time on social media sites have lower academic grades
Here is another argument about the pros and cons of social media as it pertains to students. Statistics show that pupils using social media too often tend to have GPA’s of 3.06 compared to GPA’s of 3.82 for pupils who don’t use social media.
An even scarier fact is that students who use social media tend to score 20 % lower on their test scores then their counterparts.
4-Social media sites to blame for lost productivity
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a direct cause for lost productivity at the workplace. In a survey 36 % of people said that social networking was the biggest waste of time in comparison to activities like fantasy football, shopping, and watching television.
5-Social media is the cause for less face to face communication
One last discussion about the pros and cons of social media is a lack of one on one communication. In a 2012 study families who reported spending less time with one another rose from a level of 8% in 2000 to 32% in 2011.
The study also reported that 32 % of the people in the survey either were texting or were on social media sites instead of communicating with each other during family gatherings.

The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns

Procter & Gamble ‘s Old Spice was just another guy brand with an entertaining spokesman in its TV commercials until the brand’s agency, Wieden + Kennedy, put Isaiah Mustafa on the Web recently and invited fans to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to pose questions that he quickly answered. The questions poured in–even celebrities asked a few–and Mustafa responded in more than 180 Web videos shot quickly over a few days. The real-time effort was the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.
Marketers are eager to find clever new ways to engage consumers online with branded content and interactive advertising that is good enough to make people want to share it with their network of friends. Consider Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken,” who has been taking commands on the Web since the guy in the chicken suit was introduced in 2004.
The Old Spice effort and Burger King’s order-taking chicken are among the best-ever social media campaigns identified by Forbes.com and a group of experts. Forbes tapped three experts to rank the 20 best-ever social media campaigns. The judges–David Berkowitz of the New York City agency 360i; Brandon Evans of the social marketing agency Mr. Youth in New York City and Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship, a digital ad shop in Brooklyn–were asked to take into account the success of the campaigns as well as the quality of the execution and creativity of each one.

In Pictures: The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns

The judges shared the same opinions on some campaigns, such as the marketing effort behind The Blair Witch Project, which came in as the best-ever social media campaign–and one of the first of its kind. They were divided on others, such as Hotmail’s decision in 1996 to promote the e-mail carrier at the bottom of each e-mail sent. One judge gave it high marks because it was the first such effort. Another gave it a big yawn.
The final list included planned, strategic social media campaigns, like Bing’s partnership with the Facebook game Farmville to lure players to the search engine with a Farmville money reward. Others were quirky, small-budget Web efforts that started small and became big, such Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” Web videos. This series of fun-to-watch Web videos feature company founder Tom Dickson destroying everything from a vuvuzela to Barbie dolls in a blender. Does it work? The company says home sales of blenders have jumped 700% since November 2006.
One key to a viral campaign is a message that is compelling and interesting enough that a viewer or participant wants to share it with a friend, says Issa Sawabini, a partner of the youth marketing agency Fuse. And social media is a tool that makes creating a viral or buzz-worthy campaign easier.
“A company can’t just create a viral video, put it on YouTube and hope that people will come,” he says. “You need to have something that is worth talking about.”
Some social media efforts disappoint marketers. In March 2009 Skittles redesigned its website to function as a Twitter page, with new updates for every Skittles-related tweet. Pranksters decided to lace Skittles tweets with vulgar language and profanities so they would end up on the candy’s website, forcing the Mars brand to abandon the campaign.
The bottom line is that a successful social media campaign requires creativity, a clear message and needs to make a splash at the right time. A good-looking guy in a bath towel doesn’t hurt, either

Courtesy : Forbes

5 Steps to Social Media Advertising Success

5 ways social media changing your brain RIGHT NOW !!

A Peek Inside How Facebook Decides What Goes Into Your News Feed

There’s nothing more central to Facebook, literally, than its news feed, the middle column of posted stories from friends and business connections, or on the smartphone, the only column. Besides serving as the key place where ads run, it’s what makes people keep coming back to Facebook–though all too often they wonder why the heck they got this viral video post when their sister’s post got lost in the scrolling depths.

Today during a presentation at its F8 developer conference, Facebook opened up just a little bit beyond its official guide and advice to explain how it determines what goes into that news feed, and how it’s constantly trying to improve it. Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, said the goal is to deliver the 20 things that really matter every day to Facebook’s nearly 1 billion active daily users.

Three major buckets of data go into what you see from your friends and publishers and marketers you’ve decided to follow, said Adam Mosseri, product management director for news feed.

* Your relationship with your friends and how you interact with them.

* Content, so for example if you look at a lot of photos, you’ll keep seeing more posts with photos in them.

* Activity on posts. For example, Mosseri recently saw a post at the top of the page in the morning featuring a photo of his sister, because it had a person whose posts he interacts with often; it was a photo, which he likes to look at; and there were lots of comments from cousins and other relatives.

By the way, despite what you may think, all the posts from your friends will show up in the news feed, but they may be buried far down in the feed, topped by newer posts or those the Facebook algorithm deems more relevant.

The methods by which Facebook surfaces what it thinks are relevant posts have evolved over the years, and continue to evolve. Lars Backstrom, engineering director for news feed, said Facebook used to look mainly at how many likes and comments a post got.

But they were missing some of the human element, he said, so the team built tools that asked people what they want to see in their news feed. Facebook would present two posts and ask people to decide which one they’d rather see. If they got it right, great. Otherwise, back to the algorithm work.

Over the last year or so, he added, Facebook has also built up a large set of contractors, Facebook members who get paid to tell the company which particular posts they want in their news feed. They rank them up to 5–definitely want to see–which is only 1-2% of stories. A ranking of 4 is want to see too but not definitely. A ranking of 3 means they don’t mind seeing it, but wouldn’t mind seeing other ones instead. And so on.

Facebook also has been proactive recently in culling out posts that may appear popular from click count or sharing but that people say they don’t want to see:

Courtesy "Forbes"

Social Media Statistics Australia – April 2015

Over 2015 we have seen fairly static growth for most social networks in Australia. Facebook is the only network to consistently report a substantial increase in active users – now with 1.44 billion monthly active users. Their photo application Instagram also continues to see strong growth in Australia.
Social Media Statistics Australia – April 2015
1. Facebook – 14,000,000 users (steady)
2. YouTube – 13,700,000 UAVs
3. WordPress.com – 5,900,000
4. Instagram – 5,000,000 Monthly Active Australian Users (Facebook/ Instagram data)
5. Tumblr – 4,600,000
6. LinkedIn – 3,500,000
7. Blogspot – 2,800,000
8. Twitter – 2,791,300 Active Australian Users (see calculation)
9. WhatsApp – 2,400,000 Active Australian Users (see calculation)
10. TripAdvisor – 2,000,000
11. Tinder – 1,500,000 Australian users (my estimation)
12. Yelp – 1,500,000
13. Snapchat - 1,070,000 Active Australian Users (see calculation).
14. Flickr – 680,000
15. Pinterest – 340,000
16. Reddit – 155,000
17. MySpace – 110,000
18. Google Plus – approx 60,000 monthly active Australian users (my estimation *revised*)
19. StumbleUpon – 48,000
20. Foursquare/Swarm – 25,000
21. Digg – 18,000
22. Delicious – 16,000
(All figures represent the number of Unique Australian Visitors [UAVs] to that website over the monthly period – unless otherwise stated above).
Key Points to Note:

Instagram is continuing to grow and there are now 5 million monthly active users in Australia. Instagram now overtakes Tumblr as the 4th most popular social network in Australia.
Small movements for most social networks over the month, no large changes.
Facebook remains the largest and most used social network.
The app eco-system is far from stale as we constantly see brand new apps gain popularity, EG Wickr – but often these services are not traditional social networking sites.
Facebook’s Australian user base of 14 million is less than 1% (0.97%) of their total worldwide user base.

Like our monthly stats? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Contribute data – Do you have any of your own research from your work or social media agency than can help us with our Australian stats? Feel free to contact us and share your information.
Want to source our stats/ copy and paste them onto your website? Our work is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-ND 3.0.
You are welcome to copy and paste our stats, just include the following text and links at the start of your article:
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Statistics compiled by SocialMediaNews.com.au for April 2015.
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Stats courtesy: Vivid Social Research Division. Figures correct as of 30/04/15

California's Wealthiest Are Being Drought Shamed on Social Media

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

28 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2015 From the Pros by "Cindy King"

Are you wondering what 2015 might look like for social media marketing?

If the changes in 2014 are an indicator, there will be a lot more changes in 2015.

To get a grip on what the near future may look like, we tapped the knowledge

of 28 social media pros .

#1: Video Becomes the Content of Choice

Heidi Cohen

In 2015, video will dominate as the social media content format of choice. Further, regular video segments, like podcasts and blog posts, will come into their own as a form of content that drives social engagement and other marketing goals.
Let’s look closer. In August 2014, Facebook surpassed YouTube in the number of video views via desktop according to comScore. It’s important to note that YouTube still has more views across all devices. As of September 2014, Facebook attracted a billion video views per day, a roughly 30-fold increase since July.

Facebook surpasses YouTube in videos viewed on desktop.

Based on SocialBakers’ data, video posting moved away from YouTube towards Facebook in 2014. While these results still show YouTube ahead, the trend favors Facebook.

The number of video posts continues to increase on Facebook.

Also, Facebook videos receive significantly more shares than YouTube. This makes sense because sharing and engagement are at the heart of Facebook interactions.

Videos are shared more on Facebook than on YouTube.

YouTube is the best-performing social media platform to drive trackable sales, according to AOL’s Convertro research. It’s the first, last or only platform touched.

YouTube drives more trackable sales.

Earlier in 2014, Convince and Convert’s Jay Baer introduced his Jay Today, a 3-minute video. Baer cross-promotes and posts this content.

Check out how Jay Baer uses video to cross-promote his content.

Here’s how nimble marketers can jump on this 2015 video trend:
Create your own regular video episodes. Take a page from Jay Baer’s playbook. His cost is under $125 per episode!
Provide the five key types of content your target audience seeks. Use Marcus Sheridan’s “They ask, you answer” approach. Record your employees who know the information, but are challenged to put their words in print.
Get your customers into the act. Videos captured with a smartphone are much easier than writing a review. Make it easy for customers by setting up an area of your establishment to encourage them.
Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies.

#2: Information Density Creates Hurdles

Mark Schaefer

To me, there is one mega-trend that is like an enormous hammer forging nearly every idea and innovation in our marketing world today: 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.
This reality is behind important shifts occurring in the next year:
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. We’ll have to either spend a lot more money on Hollywood-quality content, a lot more money on advertising or both. This will force some businesses to reconsider Facebook as a viable channel and enable a migration to less noisy venues.
Emergence of new content forms. As the web adapts to and adopts these new realities, it will drive innovations that help businesses stand out. I predict that we’ll see some interesting new content forms develop in 2015. A couple of areas ripe for innovation are interactive video and new types of short-form visual content.
Fighting through filters. New apps and filters are emerging to help consumers make better content choices. One example is Zite, which filters content for you as it learns about your preferences. As more people turn to these apps to sort the clutter, the marketer’s attention will turn toward the new challenge of getting messages through these new filters.
These are just a few of the many implications of this trend. The conversation on the web will turn from “content” to “ignition”—how do we get our message to cut through and compete?
Mark Schaefer, educator, consultant and author of Social Media Explained: Untangling the World’s Most Misunderstood Business Trend.

#3: SlideShare Becomes the YouTube for Business

Dave Kerpen

Instagram is to Facebook as SlideShare is to LinkedIn. In other words, look for SlideShare to emerge as the key social network for business professionals to find and share bite-sized pieces of content while on the go in 2015.
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.

SlideShare becomes an essential tool for many B2B marketers.

If you’re a B2B business or a marketer who represents B2B clients, make sure SlideShare is squarely on your radar for 2015.
Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Local, chairman of Likeable Media and author of Likeable Leadership: A Collection of 65+ Inspirational Stories on Marketing, Your Career, Social Media & More.

#4: YouTube Declines as Social Networks Embrace Hosted Video

Michael Stelzner

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.
Michael Stelzner, founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner and author of Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition and Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged.

#5: Social Conversions Become Easier

Douglas Karr

Social micro-conversions will become an active and successful strategy with every business in 2015.
Currently, businesses look to promote on social media, direct traffic back to their site, introduce a call to action and then drive the visitor through the conversion. The needed behavior is rife with trouble, because it requires the consumer or prospective business to take many steps.
I believe we’re going to see a lot more methods across social media that provide direct action through engagement. It may be a purchase through a tweet, mobile click to call, a Facebook registration or a Pinterest purchase, which bypasses the funnel and drives the social user directly to a conversion.

Social media will provide direct action through engagement.

Some of the technologies will be integrated directly into the platforms, but others will be available through third-party applications. Either way, the ability to convert will be drawn closer to the audience and the activity.
This is a fantastic evolution in social media, because of the apparent lackluster conversion performance that companies are seeing when attributing conversions directly to social media activity. I believe its impact is vastly underestimated by businesses right now. By minimizing the steps and complexity, the conversion can be accomplished much easier. As a result, we’ll see a growing improvement in social media conversion performance and attribution.
Douglas Karr, CEO of DK New Media and founder of the Marketing Technology Blog.

#6: Paid Ads Become Unavoidable

Kristi Hines

In 2015, social networks will continue to find ways to push businesses into their advertising programs.
We already know that Facebook plans to stifle organic promotional posts in the news feed starting in January 2015, 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.
Kristi Hines, freelance writer and professional blogger.

#7: Local Search Expands Google+

Martin Shervington

The rise of Google+, through Google Local Search results, will be a phenomenon in 2015.
Google has created the infrastructure to enable businesses to easily appear in Google search, and so many businesses still haven’t claimed their listings.
Once they have five reviews, the stars will be shown. The ‘star game’ will start to play out in 2015: authentic reviews will rise to the top and small businesses will have the chance to shine.

Google has created the infrastructure to enable businesses to easily appear in Google search.

Even though stars are generally not considered to be a main ranking factor, we may all be surprised by their importance in search. By coincidence, above, the listing with the most stars is showing first in the local listings box. Yet generally, stars are considered as social proof, which in turn allows people to feel trust in their decision to click. More stars, more trust.
Combining this with the ability to access good-quality local data through tools such as Spheres (will be live by the end of December 2014), many offline businesses will be taking their first steps into social media.
Once this happens, further social media services can then be supported, including content sharing across multiple platforms.
Google is not in a hurry to bring business into their ecosystem, but this time next year will see a push where it gains even more ground and connections back into the real world.
Martin Shervington, author of The Art and Science of Google+: A psychological, user friendly and sometimes even humorous guide to this new social layer and a marketing consultant.

#8: Tech Innovations Change Marketing

Viveka von Rosen

I don’t think we’ll recognize the future of social media! It’s hard to know what will have a greater influence on social media in the future—hardware design or software innovation?
With hardware innovation like Oculus Rift and D-Wave’s Quantum Computer popping up seemingly overnight, there’s no telling how hardware will affect the way we interact on social. And it most certainly will affect it, making engagement more intuitive, more in-time and more realistic than ever. Imagine what fully experiential quantum data integration will do to social interaction. The most active post on my Facebook page right now is a raging debate over having chips implanted like they’re doing in Sweden.
And then you have folks like Dr. Mark Sagar who recently introduced the first fully responsive, CGI, artificial intelligence baby.

I was sitting in the audience as his baby evoked very real emotional response in myself and in those around me. The future is here and the hashtag is #CrazyCreepyCoolTech!
What hopefully will remain the same, as the future of social spirals into the stratosphere, is the necessity and continuation of true engagement and connection. Whether these technologies will make them easier or more difficult, and whether people will rebel or adopt, remains to be seen.
Viveka von Rosen, a LinkedIn expert, speaker and trainer and the author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day.

#9: Silos Break Down

Rebekah Radice

In 2014, there was still a massive disconnect between brands and consumers due to a misuse of social media as a communication tool at the brand level and a misunderstanding of who the customer actually is.
This will be the year brands wake up to the reality that social media is a relationship-builder and not a one-way bullhorn. They will embrace the conversation, knowing that in order to establish meaningful connections, they must break down the social media silo they have created.
Brands will also recognize that the continued humanization of the brand is essential. As digital marketers, we talked about this at length in 2014. However, I continue to see brands speaking at consumers rather than with them. The mental shift to “tell a story,” not simply push a message, will happen.
Look to brands like Charmin, Oreo and Barkbox as prime examples of social media done right. Each one has created a fun, entertaining and interactive brand persona. They understand their audience and work to deliver content that is targeted and consistent in message, voice and branding.

An example of a fun, entertaining, interactive brand persona.

But brands won’t make this shift on their own. To succeed, they must align themselves with the correct individual who can transform their vision and mission into a vibrant online personality. Gone are the days of knowing “a little something” about social media and claiming expertise.
In 2015, brands will ask potential social media marketers: Can you create a voice and inspire customers to take action or do you simply publish pre-created content? Do you have a deep understanding into integrated strategy and can you lead a team efficiently and effectively? That distinction will become glaringly evident as brands seek top talent to put a face on the brand.
While most brands will not transform overnight, there’ll be a significant push and willingness to embrace risk in order to get there.
Rebekah Radice, founding partner of Imagine WOW.

#10: Campaign Focus Shifts to Experience

Ekaterina Walter

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.
But to do so, they need a full 360-degree view of their customer, located centrally and accessible to any department within the company. That way—no matter where the customer comes from, who (s)he reaches out to and what the issue is—the company can enable the best experience possible at every touchpoint. Businesses also need to employ people who not only possess the right skillset, but also the right mentality; people who are passionate about serving their customers. And last but not least, they need to have integrated technology that can support the cohesive company-wide strategy.
It will take time and effort to accomplish. Executives will need to work on breaking the internal silos (not the easiest task), bringing the right people and technologies on board and establishing the integrated processes internally. But in the fast-changing digital era, where just having a great product isn’t enough anymore to gain a competitive edge, relationship-building and experience enablement is the only answer to not only business survival, but long-term prosperity.
Ekaterina Walter, Global Evangelist at Sprinklr and a bestselling author of T hink Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg and The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.

#11: Paid Media Becomes Necessary

Francisco Rosales

In 2014, we witnessed several changes in the way businesses are forced to approach Facebook marketing—first with the drop in organic reach, then the death of the like-gate and now the announcement of how Facebook plans to reduce the amount of promotional content coming from brands in the news feed. We should not be surprised if other networks eventually follow the same path.
In 2015, we’ll see the rise of paid media. Small businesses will have to get more educated about how to accelerate the distribution of different types of content at different stages of the sales funnel if they want to survive.
But we’re past the like-collecting days and more businesses are understanding the need for a well-designed structure that delivers different types of content to segmented groups of their audiences at the right moment in the marketing cycle. The best way to control the potential reach and manage the segmentation is through paid media.
There are two key things we learned this year that we need to consider in 2015: you can no longer rely solely on organic reach to make a significant impact, and paid media leads to more conversions than organic media.

Paid social leads to 25% more conversion than organic social. Source: Convertro.

Your focus should be on learning more about the individuals in your audience, as well as understanding how to segment your prospects, whether there is already a connection with your business or not. Plus, establish who needs to see what and when, and determine how you’re going to deliver each specific message.

Francisco Rosales, founder of SocialMouths.

#12: Republishing Grows Reach

Laura Roeder

Facebook spent 2014 tightening the noose on social marketers, and with an algorithm change taking effect in January, shows no signs of stopping in the new year. On top of that, other networks like Twitter continue to grow more crowded, which means getting noticed in a feed or a timeline gets harder and harder all the time. Therefore, reach for individual posts is dropping.
Anyone with a Facebook page can tell you that reach has plummeted, and the reach on any given post is a fraction of what it would have been a year or two ago. That’s why in 2015, marketers will focus on getting cumulative reach by republishing their updates multiple times. Instead of posting an update once and hoping for the best, they’ll post an update again and again. Instead of trying to take out one large slice of pie, they’ll take multiple smaller pieces that add up.
Republishing updates like this may improve reach in more ways than one, because it can afford marketers more time for one-on-one engagement. By spending less time writing unique updates that may or may not hit their targets, marketers will be able to dedicate more time to interacting live with their fans and followers, encouraging the type of engagement that Facebook values and rewards with more consistent organic reach.
Laura Roeder, founder of Edgar and the site, LKR Social Media.

#13: Campaigns Become Platform-Agnostic

Jim Belosic

We’re going to see marketers shift their focus back to “platform-agnostic marketing.” Savvy marketers are realizing that the social space is becoming increasingly fragmented, and creating unique campaigns for each channel is difficult and expensive. For the last few years, you could create a campaign just for Facebook and get good results. But now your audience is everywhere—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others—each with different reach and engagement.
Along with increased fragmentation, marketers are seeing increased costs to just to have their messages seen. There isn’t a free ride anymore. To get the most from your marketing dollars, you’ll have to be in more places at the same time.
The best bet is to have one clear goal (increased engagement, sales, data collection, etc.), and then be “everywhere.” In 2015, marketers will create centralized platform-agnostic campaigns that achieve these goals, regardless of where the audience comes from.
Jim Belosic, CEO of ShortStack.

#14: Fans Demand Personal Interaction

Ravi Shukle

Next year will see increased demand for personal interaction with fans and followers. This means that fans today want to get to know the people behind the logo or brand and want to see who it is they’re engaging with.
Companies that have already grasped this concept are not only seeing a lot more interaction on their content, but also building up a higher level of trust. This approach lets their fans know there’s a real person behind the company who cares about what they have to say and is there to respond.
A great example of this is demonstrated by Gary Vaynerchuk, who started up a new online video series called the Ask Gary Vee Show.

The Ask Gary Vee Show responds to questions posed with the hashtag #AskGaryVee.

The aim of the show is to highlight current topics in the world of social media and answer questions submitted by fans through the hashtag #AskGaryVee. Where the show separates itself from others out there is that Gary presents the whole show face to face, with the camera giving his followers that personal interaction as he reads out loud and answers user-submitted questions.
This is a great way for Gary to consistently engage his fans, since they can submit questions through using the hashtag and then tune in to see if their question got answered. The key to building these stronger relationships in 2015 is going to come from personal-style content. More importantly, companies will need to respond to their communities in a timely manner.
Ravi Shukle, Facebook marketing specialist and the host of the new podcast, Crown Your Community.

#15: Social Media Goes Niche

Courtney Seiter

In 2015, I foresee the rise of a smaller, more personal social media trend that focuses on niche groups and specific, shared qualities or interests.
We’ve always shared with specific people or to small groups through “dark” channels like email or text messaging right alongside our broader social media sharing. In the coming year, I predict that this type of sharing will begin to get more notice from marketers and app developers.
The emergence of new, more focused social media networks like Ello and This—even Facebook’s experimental Rooms—as well as the explosive growth of apps like Snapchat that allow users to target a specific social media audience, indicate that this groundswell may have already begun.
Combine this with the increasing challenge of getting noticed in Facebook’s crowded news feed and the announcement that a Twitter algorithm is likely on the way soon, and the stage is set for some big changes in the way we communicate socially.
For brands, this change could mean exploring new and diverse social media spaces on an authentic human scale, as you find your community wherever they might gather.
Courtney Seiter, content crafter at Buffer.

#16: All Social Networks Offer Paid Visibility

Neil Patel

The majority of the social networks will copy Facebook’s model for displaying information to their users. That means other social networks will begin filtering what posts your friends or followers see.
Why? Because there is a lot of noise on these social sites, which causes users to decrease their engagement. Sure, as a user, you can unfollow or unfriend certain people. However, if the majority of their posts are great, you still want to see what they have to say. You just don’t want to see the junk.
In addition to improving user experience, this model can help these social sites generate extra income. For example, any additional revenue that publicly traded companies can squeeze from their users means higher stock prices.
Although most people or companies won’t pay to guarantee all of their posts are seen by others, larger companies will. Paying for the visibility of their content will ensure they are getting traffic and the brand exposure they’re looking for.
If you want all of your content to be seen without having to spend any money, share high-quality content or updates on a regular basis. Also make sure the majority of your followers are interacting with your content. For example, if you don’t know half of your friends on Facebook, you can’t expect them to be as engaged as your real friends would be. For this reason, you may be better off unfriending those users. Having interested followers will produce higher engagement rates, which will prompt the social network to show your content to more people.
Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.

#17: Marketing Requires a Combination Approach

Mike Gingerich

No longer will there be social media marketers who focus on only one network. They will be extinct!
Integrated social media marketing will become a “must” for implementation. For too long marketers have been doing “Facebook marketing” and “Twitter marketing” plus other marketing in isolated silos. As we’ve seen in 2014 with Facebook reach, if a business focuses on only one social platform, changes to that platform can be disastrous. Therefore, the importance of integrated marketing will headline 2015.
Smart marketers will need to use a combination approach. They’ll need to focus on multiple social networks and the ways to use them in power combinations. For example, sharing on Twitter a video or image your brand posted to Facebook can add value to the Facebook post. Marketers will have to find ways to weave together and drive social traffic from one network to another.
Brands need to think cohesively about their “online social marketing plan” that uses their website as the foundation for great content and then integrates cross–social platform sharing to enhance reach and boost engagement from one platform to another.
Below is a great example from Peg Fitzpatrick. She starts with a great blog post on her website, which is then socially shared.

Here’s an example of social media cross-promotion.

In this example, Peg shares to Google+ and refers back to the post on her website. It also incorporates a “Pin it for later” convenience option that when clicked allows the user to pin the image to his or her own board on Pinterest. So it includes multiple social networks for sharing, all of which drive back to her website where she has email opt-in forms to grow her email list.
This is the integrated, synergistic online marketing approach that marketers will need to implement in 2015.
Mike Gingerich, co-founder of TabSite.

#18: Visual Content Ups Its Game

Cynthia Sanchez

Visuals, visuals, visuals! This will be the year we see marketers take images and videos to the next level. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram skyrocket in popularity. Plus, more recently, videos have become more popular on Facebook.
We’ve also seen tools come on the scene that make creating awesome visuals super-easy and fun to do. Canva has made image creation a breeze and mobile apps such as PicStitch and Wordswag put the power of creating interesting images and videos for Instagram right in our pockets.
No longer are great images limited to businesses with huge budgets for professional photographers and graphic designers. Now, businesses with the smallest budgets can create images for their content. This is a good thing because consumers will expect higher-quality images. In the early days of Pinterest and on Instagram almost anything could get attention with repins or likes. Now there’s so much competition on these platforms, not just any image will do.
Great visuals also go a long way in helping people establish trust with your online presence. Have you ever been to a doctor’s office with outdated furniture and old magazines in the racks? Unless you’ve been seeing that doctor for a long time, you might question his or her professionalism. Not using images in your content or using bad outdated ones can reflect negatively on your business. People could think of your business as less professional or less reputable.
On the flipside, when it comes to videos, I predict that we’ll see them become less produced and more relaxed and natural. There’ll no longer be a need to set up a studio with a production crew for every video you create. Social media audiences will find the spur-of-the-moment videos created on a smartphone more relatable and engaging.
Cynthia Sanchez, writer and podcast host at Oh So Pinteresting.

#19: Marketers Take Control of Content

Donna Moritz

We are tribal by nature. As such, I believe there’ll be a continual move toward common-interest communities that fuel our innate need to tell stories and communicate as a group. This includes Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, group boards on Pinterest and Google+ communities. Hashtags will also continue to shine on Instagram and Twitter as a way to stake our claim to a topic or niche and build community by curating content around that topic.
When you establish a group on any of these platforms, both the founders/admins and the people who join the group actually want to find each other. They are looking for conversations about mutual interests. They want to see your content in a place where they’re not distracted by main news feeds.
It’s not surprising that many businesses are reporting the benefits of establishing a Facebook group separate from their Facebook page. As pay-to-play becomes more of a necessity for having your content seen on Facebook, the popularity of groups brings a degree of control over what content we share and how we communicate with each other.
In my experience, the best communities are those that focus on sharing content and helping each other instead of being about promotion. If you build trust as someone who brings people together and guides them to share and support each other, you’ll build relationships with the people who matter most to your business, without giving “reach” a second thought.
Donna Moritz, founder of Socially Sorted.

#20: Hashtags Build Collaborative Communities

Sue B. Zimmerman

This will be the year of the collaborative community. On- and offline there is an opportunity to build relationships and expand our sphere of influence from communities outside our own. We should become more relaxed about sharing what we do and who we know. I call it “lead with giving.” In this evolution of how to do business, everyone wins.
The hashtag is the anchor of the social media revolution. A single hashtag connects a conversation across Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. From these conversations, a community can quickly be formed; people with common interests are united. These conversations are also the place where businesses conduct their most powerful market research.
Today, even when you can’t physically be at an event, you can still join the conversation, thanks to the hashtag. Be a part of the conversation before, during and after the event to get the total experience!

Use hashtag to connect conversations across social media platforms.

Build your community through your expertise and your experiences. This mindset will help transform how we receive information and how we communicate our knowledge. Make 2015 #InstaAmazing.
Sue B. Zimmerman, founder of Insta-Results™ and author of Instagram Basics for Your Business.

#21: Paid Media Becomes the Norm

Aaron Lee

Paid media isn’t going away. In fact, budgeting for paid media will be more important than ever, as it will be more integrated with earned and owned media.
This year, we saw social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram introduce ads to a number of businesses as they strove towards monetization. Next year, we can definitely expect them to make a worldwide rollout.
The use of social media will only continue to rise as the number of people who join these social media channels climbs. We can expect organic reach to continue to decline as the volume of content on these networks increases.
To make up for the decrease in organic reach and to get content across, businesses will need to pay to play or watch their content wash away. Soon the idea of free attention will vanish and paid media will be the norm.
I believe this is a natural progression, since there are only a number of things we can see at any single time.
The increasing competition to get content across will in turn evolve paid media into another level, as businesses try to satisfy consumers’ thirst for good content. Native advertising and sponsored posts garnered a lot attention from businesses this year. We can expect better integration and coherence with its platforms moving forward.
While most people might find this disturbing, I think if paid media continues to evolve, we might just get good actual content.
Aaron Lee, social media manager, entrepreneur and the grandmaster of customer delight at Post Planner.

#22: Visual Marketing Explodes on SlideShare

Peg Fitzpatrick

The recent upgrades to SlideShare put it in place to be the hottest social platform in 2015. LinkedIn owns SlideShare.
LinkedIn started delivering solid traffic to blogs in 2014, as well as on-platform publishing. SlideShare will seal the deal as a viable social platform, proving that LinkedIn is no longer just for finding a job.
SlideShare offers an easy way to create an enhanced version of a blog post or repurpose a presentation. Building your visual brand across the web has proven to be a powerful piece of the branding puzzle. A great SlideShare can help showcase your expertise and build thought leadership.

SlideShare is an easy way to create an enhanced version of a blog post or repurpose a presentation.

Solid features of the upgraded SlideShare:

Upload infographics to SlideShare
Download leads from views of your SlideShares
Keynote author status for select accounts, offering special features and wider exposure
Customizable profile page
Clickable links at the end of the presentation, which direct traffic to your website
Integration with Haiku Deck, so you can create a presentation directly in SlideShare
Analytics

A fun way to showcase a SlideShare is to make a GIF of your presentation using GIF Deck. Embedding a SlideShare into your blog post or post published on LinkedIn is a snap with the provided embed codes. You can also add them into your next email blast. And they look great on mobile!
With its versatility, link-building opportunities and lead gathering, it’s hard to deny SlideShare’s value to your content marketing bottom line. Add SlideShare to your content marketing plan and see how it can boost your visual marketing in 2015!
Peg Fitzpatrick, co-author of the upcoming book, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users and a social media strategist.

#23: Social Marketers Become Selective

Emeric Ernoult

Social media is becoming increasingly competitive and complex. If it was possible to be a social media expert three years ago, it’s definitely impossible today. And it becomes even worse as we enter 2015.
Specialization is unavoidable. No one can be a Facebook expert, Twitter expert, Instagram expert and Pinterest expert all at once. On top of that, the advertising options offered by each of these platforms are becoming so complex that mastering them requires an enormous amount of testing, experimenting and learning.
You can’t do it all (let alone do it all well), so you’ll have to make choices.
As a consequence, business owners and marketers will have to change the way they approach social media and be much more focused on the things that work for them, while getting rid of the ones that don’t. Will 2015 be the year you’ll delete your Facebook page, remove your Instagram account or stop your Facebook advertising? Maybe.
In order to do that, measure your results on social media to make sure you invest your time well.
Take a step back. List the social media efforts that paid off back in 2014 and the ones that didn’t. Then make some hard decisions, based on what you can measure.
The only way to handle the growing complexity of the social media marketing world is to be selective. And you need the right data to make the right choices.
Emeric Ernoult, founder of AgoraPulse.

#24: Direct Buying Becomes Mainstream

Ian Cleary

In 2015, both Twitter and Facebook will introduce the Buy button and we’ll see significant sales happening through these platforms. I don’t imagine that you’ll be buying products for a few hundred dollars, but you will hand over micro-payments. For example, it makes perfect sense for authors launching a book to offer it for sale directly on Twitter and Facebook.
We know that Twitter and Facebook are already testing this out. I think that they both will partner with Stripe to do all the payment processing.
LinkedIn will follow with a similar payment system, but I don’t see this happening until 2016.
As people get used to handing over smaller amounts of money, Facebook will develop a marketplace for products and services in years to come. Why not go shopping with your friends online?
Ian Cleary, founder of RazorSocial.

#25: Social Media Marketers Rebrand

Andy Crestodina

The popularity of the search term “content marketing” is gradually catching up with “social media marketing,” and service providers will react by broadening their services and repositioning their brands.
This trend started with SEO companies a few years ago when content marketing emerged as the most sustainable (and safest) way to improve search rankings. But as demand for content marketing services grows, social media marketers will be next to jump on the bandwagon.

The demand for social media as a specific service will continue to exceed the demand for content marketing services.

Companies looking for content marketing services will need to look deeper into the history of each service provider to learn the legacy and favorite strategies of each. In other words, the branding of marketing companies will converge, but the “flavors” of the providers won’t.
Content marketers with different backgrounds will continue to focus on different channels.
Social media marketing backgrounds drive results through content, connections and micro-targeting through social ads.

PR and communications backgrounds drive results through strategic messaging and high-level outreach.
Search engine marketing backgrounds drive results through technical on-site fixes and tactical outreach.

But in the end, the demand for social media as a specific service will continue to exceed the demand for content marketing services in 2015.
Andy Crestodina, principal and strategic director at Orbit Media and the author of Content Chemistry: An Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing.

#26: Businesses Embrace Owned Digital Assets

Stephanie Sammons

In 2015, I believe there’ll be a renewed focus on building and growing owned digital assets such as websites, blogs and communities. Social media has offered tremendous content distribution and engagement opportunities over the past few years, but it’s become much more noisy, expensive and difficult to reach your audience. Additionally we don’t own our space or our connections on social networks, and the rules are changing constantly.
To reduce these risks, businesses will seek out alternative avenues for content distribution, such as creative partnering, influencer marketing and niche content-sharing platforms to achieve more targeted visibility and engagement. Also, content curation as an “owned” content strategy becomes more prominent and acceptable.
This will be the year of social media awakening as more businesses realize that owned digital assets build greater long-term value with less risk.
Stephanie Sammons, founder and chief strategist at Wired Advisor.

#27: Video Creates Engaging Experiences

Bryan Kramer

As humans, we each define a positive experience differently. When we have experiences that go above and beyond expectation, we want to share them and engage our friends and followers. To benefit from this innate behavior, companies need to think through and create world-class shareable experiences for their audience.
Since videos are likely the easiest ways to share a moment, video marketing will take off in 2015 in ways we’ve never seen before.
Video gives us the most context around people, companies and things over any other online medium. Start thinking about video as experiential. This is where 3D glasses and video start to give us the ability to play with video and experience stories, shopping and interactions in new ways. (Remember that Facebook bought a 3D company in 2014.)
It seems like loyalty and its definition have changed overnight. Customers who want different things will expect and deserve a personal experience in 2015. So give them unique, engaging experiences. And use video and creativity to do it.
Bryan Kramer, CEO of PureMatter, host of the From the Author’s Point of View podcast and author of There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: #H2H.

#28: More Apps Support Anonymity

Gini Dietrich

The web has gone back and forth on anonymity. In the early days, everything you did online was anonymous. But that eventually moved to you having to use your real name because of hate messages, bullying and even crimes. If you weren’t going to say what you had to say using your real name, the web decided you probably shouldn’t be saying it at all.
In 2014, anonymous social media apps such as Whisper, Secret, YikYak and Facebook Rooms emerged and gained popularity fairly quickly. Once again, we can air our grievances with little risk of real-life consequences.