The Future of Social Media: What Your Business Needs to Focus On

Here at Social Media Beast it’s important that we’re always on top of the latest in social media and technology for our clients. Make sure you’re ahead of the curve with these popular trends.

Video & Visuals

It’s no secret video is popular but it’ll start to dominate as the social media content format of choice. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram skyrocket in popularity. Even more recently, videos have become more popular on platforms such as Facebook – since they are the easiest way to share an experience. It has become increasingly popular to create videos that are more relaxed and natural without a “produced” feel to them. Social media audiences find the spur-of-the-moment videos created on a smart phone more relatable and engaging.

Niche

If you think about social media, you might realize you spend more time using it as a way to connect with smaller groups and communities, such as Facebook groups. With the increasing challenge of getting noticed in Facebook’s crowded news feed, more and more people are turning to more focused social media networks, such as Snapchat, that allow users to target a specific social media audience. According to Social Media Today, Snapchat is growing at a rate of 56% a year. Everyone craves an authentic community, which means more and more people are flocking to those Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, group boards on Pinterest and yes, even Google+ communities. That’s because the best communities are those that focus on sharing content and helping each other instead of being about promotion. If your brand can 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.

Influencers

Have you ever looked at the people you follow on Instagram? Do so and you may notice YouTube and Instagram users are achieving celebrity status, and brands are taking note. There is a boom in brands partnering with influential Instagram users and YouTube stars that create content around niche topics like fashion, luxury lifestyle or travel. With 74% of consumers relying on social media to inform their purchasing decisions (Simply Measured), brands are starting to pay influencers to publish a photograph of their product on Instagram and/or mention the brand in YouTube videos. Or they even pay them to take over their Instagram feed for a few posts or several days. According to an article by WERSM, using influencers sharing your content can lead to 3 to 10 times increase in conversion rate! We’ve all known for a while that celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing is effective, but as regular everyday people start to build audiences that rival pop stars and models, brands will start to realize how powerful these Instagram and YouTube influencers can be.

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Social Media Marketing in 2015: The Year of Quality Over Quantity

Social media is now solidly at the center of the communications industry. A diverse and vast landscape of social networks, each with its nuances and demographic makeups, means that there is something for every type of business, marketing campaign, and sales pipeline. Below we share some advice that will help businesses, both large and small, accelerate their 2015 growth through social media platforms.

Facebook still rules, and content still matters
Despite reports that Facebook is struggling to appeal to newer generations, it still is the biggest social network out there, with 1.35 billion monthly active users as of September 2014 (YouTube takes second with 1 billion). The increase in average age of Facebook users may actually be a blessing for marketers, with users' spending power increasing as they grow older.

Content on Facebook remains the focal component of the product. Changes in their Edge Rank algorithm, which governs which content is displayed on feeds, have consistently been geared to squash out cheap marketing content, pushing marketers to get more creative and produce rich, engaging content.

Fortunately there is a form of rich content that will help marketers succeed on Facebook this year: video. Facebook auto-play is going to define content strategies on this platform in 2015. 
To illustrate how powerful this feature is, let's take a look at the success of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge was launched shortly after FB rolled out auto-play, which starts playing videos on your newsfeed without any prompt. It therefore became impossible to ignore your half-naked friend dumping a bucket of water on him or herself. Although there are many other valid reasons behind the challenge's success, this feature is certainly one of them. Since the feature was rolled out a little over a year ago, the number of users watching videos on Facebook has more than doubled.

There will be a lot more Twitter ads
Twitter's growing revenue is certainly due to an increase in ad money spent on this platform, but we believe marketers still haven't realized the platform's true potential. Ads on Twitter can be incredibly powerful, and here's why: Twitter's public API makes it possible to easily create lists of users that are discussing a certain topic. Marketers can even identify users with specific intentions, by using search terms such as: "I want [enter any product type]". Lists of usernames can then be uploaded to Twitter Ads to create custom audiences to which marketers can communicate highly tailored messages. Conversely to Facebook, Twitter has not spoon-fed us targeting tools, but they have maintained an open culture that greatly empowers savvy markers. This blog post is a really good resource for getting better at targeting Twitter ads. In addition, Twitter cards now allow marketers to increase conversions and display more rich and engaging content than a mere 140 characters.

Keep an eye out for Snapchat
Snapchat's growth has been incredible to witness. As of May 2014, over 700 million photos and videos were being shared per day on this platform. Although they have not released how many monthly active users they have, such large traffic would suggest they could be larger than Instagram, which currently has 300 Monthly active users. With the introduction of Snapcash, Snapchat's Venmo-like money transfer service, Snapchat has at the very least shown that it will evolve considerably in the near future. One year from now, Snapchat is likely to have significantly more and diverse features than it has now. Marketers that are capable of capturing a significant audience on this platform will likely gain considerable returns.

Creative Data Collection will be key
There are a surprisingly large and growing number of tools that empower non-coders to collect data and insight about online behaviors, and most of them are free. In the past month alone, for example, we have used this Google Spreadsheets add-on to append number of followers to a list of Twitter users. We have used the Kimono Labs Chrome extension to scrape a list of accounts from a landing page. And we have used IFTTT recipes in more ways than we can remember. All of these are free tools that require no developer knowledge. Successful marketers will be those who can think creatively about ways to learn more about their target audiences by efficiently collecting data.

What does this all sum up to? The role of the marketer is shifting quickly to encompass far more than it traditionally has. In addition to effective communication, marketers will be called to understand new and changing platforms, collect and analyze data, and find new tools to work more efficiently.

High-quality, rich content will win over quantity, and informed, data-driven decisions will determine success.

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