Social Media Trends to Watch Out For In 2015 – Reade Milner

 

Social media is constantly shifting and evolving. The reason is that people’s attention shifts to other things. This means that certain mediums will become more or less relevant as time goes on. There is even a cyclical nature to this shift, as some social media platoforms will come back into relevance, just when they seem to have completely lost their luster. That being said, here are the social media trends that I think will be big in 2015.

• More expensive Facebook ads. It is no secret that Facebook has taken advantage of the fact that several businesses have maximized the social media platform’s popularity. As users’ news feeds becomes more filtered, however, these businesses were forced to opt for paid ads to maximize their reach. The transition from 2013 to 2014 has seen a 10% increase in Facebook ad pricing, so it is a logical deduction that the same thing will happen in 2015.
• Bigger market share for Twitter in terms of advertising. Twitter is taking advantage of the declining interest for Facebook ads. Twitter has continuously been improving their business advertising model, and a heightened interest has risen over their new paid packages. These include performance-based results instead of just the usual retweets and clicks that businesses currently bank on. This could cause businesses to consider sending a bigger focus on Twitter next year.
• Google+ losing its significance. Google+ has faced blow after blow as Google Authorship failed to make that big of an impression to social media marketers. Google+ brain Vic Gundotra also resigned early this year. The quick decline of the platform has been very noticeable, as users have either stuck to the more stable choices or opted for newer ones. Not at all surprising, considering the hype that Google+ tried to raise when it was launched and did not really reach the heights that its creators were hoping for.
• Instagram outpacing video competitors and maintaining dominance in image-based marketing. Instagram has always had a strong presence in image-based social media, and this is expected to improve even further into 2015. The end of 2013 predicted that 38% of businesses will likely utilize the platform for their marketing strategies, and this end of year prediction sees that the number will rise to 42%. As far as its competition with Vine in terms of videos are concerned, there is also a big chance that in-feed video advertising will allow Instagram to outpace them in 2015.
• Social media marketing to be given top priority in content marketing. The past year has allowed content managers to improve on quality and make the majority of their posts about the customers; not about the product or brand. This type of content strategy has been proven to be much more effective, and the internet has finally seen a considerable decline in websites that are too promotional as they all gear towards engagement over direct selling. However, distribution of this content has been a problem. Therefore, this is seen to be the main target for next year, and social media marketing will finally get the focus that it deserves when it comes to content strategies.

With so much happening it will indeed be another exciting year for social media.