Campaigns are devised for brands to meet their objectives. To give them the desired shape, most of the times agencies put in their blood and sweat. So, in our ongoing series where we are finding thoughts on social media for 2013 from different facets such as global experts, editors, we thought that this series would be incomplete if we don’t get view points straight from social media marketers who breath this space 24*7. So, here is a list of 14 social media trends from a bunch of social media marketers, that we spoke to recently.
1. More elaborate. More thought through: Creative driven. Insight driven social ideas. As more people shift from traditional to digital advertising and bring a certain thought process. As more clients spend more money on digital. As more time is spent on social ideas, ideas by and large, on the brands serious about social media will continue to get better.
2. Higher pay at more established firms: More difficulty for social media startups. We’re now in our 5th or 6th year of this industry in India (depending on how you look at it). If you’re looking to be a social media service start up, I imagine its going to be difficult. Most brands worth their salt have established partners. There’s a growing importance of social – it’s not an ‘experiment’ anymore. Brands want partners with established credentials. This also means agencies will have to invest in better talent or look to retain their best talent equal to higher pay if you’re good.
Harshil Karia, Co-Founder & Online Strategist at FoxyMoron – @harshilkaria
3. Blogging to glory: Focus will shift back to blogs from Social Media. Companies will start integrating blogging as a critical part of their digital campaigns. Professional Bloggers will be in demand like never before. Companies will pay more attention to their own blogs too.
4. Video Content becomes the king: Content will be queen, while Video Content will become the king. Like 2012 did for photos & images to change fortunes of companies like Instagram, 2013 will be the same for Videos, Video Content & Video creating and editing companies. Do we foresee some video editing software companies to rise?
Chintan Vora, Co-Founder at Digital Latte – @theunsocialguy
5. Mobile Consumption growth in T2 & T3 cities: Mobile video consumption will explode and not just via 3G networks. The underserved areas (Tier 2 & Tier 3) + rural will drive this demand via preloaded memory cards sold through innovative distribution channels.
6. More branded websites: We will also see brands invest a lot more in their own websites + content platforms rather than sink money on social networks alone. This will fundamentally change the way digital outfits work since a brand website is much more demanding to build and sustain.
Prashanth Challapalli, Business Head at Jack In The Box Worldwide – @jackinchief
7. Products will go social: To many the NIKE fuel band is just another innovative product. To me it’s an out and out “Social Product.” This year we will se this trend picking up across industries with products (and services) going social. I would not be surprised to see someone release a social watch or a social car this year. Stay tuned.
8. Retail Will Go Social: Social Media has traditionally been defined as what happens Online. This year we will see a lot of what happens online go on ground. Be prepared to see functional Like and Tweet buttons getting integrated across various retail touch points in an interactive and efficient manner.
Vineet Gupta, Managing Partner at 22feet – @vinnig
9. “Brand Boredom” on Social Media: 2013 would witness the emergence of ‘Brand Boredom’ on Social Media. Brand boredom will impact those brands which over-use monotonous content strategy and rely heavily on FB posts and Tweets in the name of doing Social Media. Engagement will cease to exist on such pages leading to huge drop out rates of fans/followers which in-turn would see death of such brands on social media.
Daksh Sharma, Director at Iffort – @indianterrain
10. Integrated marketing: As a marketer, the biggest change we witness is the focus on value generation via mixed marketing mechanisms. So, brands have started to mix things up and integrate a Facebook campaign with a QR code work play or a Twitter activity with an offline hand to it. This would increase as brands are becoming mature about how to use social media and understanding its co-existence with other marketing channels.
Dinesh Juneja, Co-Founder at Creativa India – @ohteri
11. Social Media in 2013 will be dead. Dead, as we know it: There are too many Indian brands jumping on the bandwagon now, and the space is cluttered. Mere contests will not be enough to drive engagement. In 2013, firms on social media will need to stay ahead of the competition by identifying key business goals, like loyalty. Then engaging the Indian consumer in a specific manner, like via mobile phones, rather than only social media. The bridge between social and real-world relationships will also need to be built.
Shashank Nigam, Founder at SimpliFlying – @simpliflying
12. Direct ROI in terms of sales and revenue: We’re seeing increasingly with many of our clients, is how social campaigns can give direct ROI in terms of sales and revenue. Branding and marketing managers have had enough of hearing about buzz creation and engagement, and want results in terms of how social is helping drive people to stores or helping someone buy the product or service that they offer. We’ve successfully executed fan-monetization campaigns with tremendous results and this will be expected of other social agencies as well.
Adhvith Dhuddu, Founder at Alivenow – @adhvith
13. Networks and Social Media Marketing as regular syllabus: More and more brands to opt for Facebook Marketing, the growth of FB users in India to surpass 80 Million by end of 2013. Pinterest to be in demand amongst marketers, due to excessive hype without knowing the true purpose. Google+ will lose it all as a social networking site, just involving celebrities and politicians will not help in the long run.
More and more Indian students to opt for Social Media Marketing in their regular syllabus or demand for it pressurizing management schools for crash courses or a chapter or a specialization by itself.
Sorav Jain, CEO at echoVme – @SoravJain
14. Emergence of new social networking concept in 2013: Facebook will continue to grow in India and will reach 75 million users by end of 2013. Facebook engagement will come down on an average, until unless Facebook launches new services like full service email or search engine. The users logging into Facebook from mobile will be over 50%. Facebook and Twitter are likely to introduce aggressive advertising models which may include big banners and videos. Social networking and micro-blogging from mobile will increase in a big manner. New social networking apps like fancy, pose and other apps will see traction in India. We will hopefully see a new social networking concept in 2013, as its high time something comes up in this space.
Sandeep Amar, Digital Veteran – @sancalls
15. The online-offline connect: Marketeers will steadily start moving from a disruption-campaign engagement model on social platforms to getting social media to integrate more strongly with a consumer life cycle. Right from real world marketing activities to brand or product experiences social media will steadily play a larger and better role and participate when a consumer wants it to.
Saurabh Parmar, Founder at Brandlogist Communications – @saurabhparmar
A mammoth list of trends and some of them I see taking shape already. What trends do you think from the list would start evolving and grow in the Indian social media industry?