No doubt, Marketers have been exploiting Social Media to reach millions of customers through various channels: Google Search, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Flicker, Vimeo, Bing, Pinterest, Vine, Google Plus, Tumblr, Flickr, Google Ads, Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Bit.ly, Ow.ly, Foursquare, Slideshare, Emails and many more. However, the question remains, “what more can be done to make the best use of these tools ?”
Twitter: Twitter is giving priority to visual content, especially evident with the launch of Twitter cards. Launched with the prime motto of promoting rich content while providing a mechanism to get people’s contact information within a tweet, Twitter cards will expand its portfolios over the next year. Who knows in future, Twitter might become social media marketer’s favorite, replacing facebook. The video illustrates a walkthrough Twitter Cards
Visual Based Content: Experts suggests, considering there are so many ads in a page, making your content visually rich is important to turn a viewer’s eyes. If you are not making your social media content visually rich, you need to! In fact, posts with photos contribute to 93 percent of the most engaging posts on Facebook. The mantra, “go Visual, go more social!”
Google Plus: A mathematician using an advanced algorithm has calculated that Google Plus will pass Facebook in total users by 2016. Although this is not seems to be happening but one thing is for sure, Google Plus is looking a lot more lucrative than it was in 2012-13. Apart from that, Google gives its own Google Plus based traffic. So if you weren’t taking Google Plus seriously, isn’t it the time?
Facebook: Facebook is one of the most widely used social media tool, nowadays. It connects marketers to the millions of customers at the same time. 90 % of the Facebook’s revenue comes from advertisements. To improve its existing bottomline, Facebook is in a bit of a testing mode these days (blame it on Twitter Cards). It’s playing with different kinds of ads, quickly replacing the one not working, consequently, messing with the interface almost daily. Looking at those tests, in future, Facebook might implement a dynamic advertisement model, advertising a different product whenever a user logins. This is sure gonna help social media marketers and Facebook alike. Moreover, Facebook graph search, introduced in 2013, which allows easy searching for rich content on Facebook, might turn out to be a great way for businesses to increase social engagement.
GMass: Emailing is still very relevant in today’s business world and it is a great tool to use to reach as many customers as you can all at the same time. GMass has some of the best features for companies to use for marketing including personalization of messages, sending mail merge campaigns, connection to Google Sheets (easily pulls all of your customers emails from one place), and even allows for automatic followups to be scheduled ahead of time.
Getting more Mobile
Smartphones are now coming of their shelves, replacing the computers and laptops, and taking over the command of reaching customers easily. Lately, social apps have been generating healthy revenue for its makers through in-app advertisements. On the other way, they are becoming a prospective advertisement platform for businesses to upsurge traffic to their websites.
Further, there are marketers who are widely using the apps in trend to market their products, especially social media apps.
There still lies a huge untapped potential in mobile social media as evident in the image below :
Empowering Employees & Fans
One of the major source of marketing is from “one customer” to “many customers,” the “Word of Mouth.” “Word of Mouth” is now a standard part of social media world, except rather than physical interactions the “one customer” talks to the “many customers” through social media. “Wow have you heard this song by an independent artist on YouTube?” on a prominent Facebook page is enough to gather more than 10, 000 likes in few hours. This is the power of social media, today. Just imagine how many of those 10, 000 will become your customers, let alone the visitors.
Well said, “Social listening enables the marketers to innovate and help in creative content marketing.”
Blending social media and other Medias
Blending various sources of media and creating a hype about the brand is nowadays into limelight. Marketers are introducing their products on television, then turning the same customers to social media through various contests, and promoting activities such as additional information or visuals or spoofs, where a customer needs to move to the social channels.
By retaining the TV excitement to their respective social media pages, businesses can do wonders in terms of social engagement that will ultimately drive traffic to their respective sites. This not only generates more traffic, but also repeats promotions through more than one social channel, making a lasting image of the brand in customers’ mind.
Interoperability
Smartphones, laptops, computers and tablets are now becoming interoperable where the user with same user details can login or grab information about the brand or product or the company itself. For instance naukri.com allows us to login through the same credentials and search for the jobs from Android phone, laptop, computer, iPad, and sends texts messages too. So this is what customers are looking forward for. ”Customers Expects, Demands, and Marketers Fulfill” is the guru’s mantra of marketing nowadays. If you can commit, then you can be the next marketing guru.
Content marketing “stacks” emerge
It’s already happening. The possible merger of Adobe’s marketing and Creative Clouds, and Oracle buying Compendium and Eloqua (Expect Salesforce to do something very, very similar quite soon; Exact Target isn’t quite in the content bucket). The social media trends of 2015 will open a new chapter in content marketing maturity: end-to-end, cloud-based technology solutions, in contrast to much more limited solutions, currently available. This isn’t just a technology play; this is something that will make content a better enterprise investment. Stay Tuned!
Digital Marketing Trends for 2014 Wrap-Up
So grab your seatbelts there are much more ways of social interactions yet to come. With more opportunities and fresh challenges, this is certainly an exciting time for social media marketers, especially for the many marketers directly involved with the revolutionary breakthroughs that are going to change the ground rules of user engagement.
In the middle of these developing social media trends, lie some great brains who are working tirelessly to create those breakthroughs, making life a hell lot easier and exciting for those involved. At the cusp of digital marketing, social media, and technology lies the nexus of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and content. They together will continue to drive the changes, creating new opportunities, and ultimately a demand for advanced digital media infrastructure.
Author Bio (Byline):-
Jignesh Parmar is the digital marketing analyst & strategist at Intesols. For the last three years, he is helping small businesses and start-ups to gather the right online marketing tactic. He is passionate about everything digital, and his life revolves around online marketing world. You can follow him on Twitter or reach out to him via Linkedin.
