If you live in the digital space and participate in digital marketing of any kind, you know that the trends and best practices can change on a regular basis.
Social media teams and internet marketing professionals already know that they have to keep on top of the changing landscape of marketing on the internet.
Here are 5 social media marketing best practices for 2015 to ensure you’re winning at social in the new year.
Video is not just for YouTube anymore
Social media marketers are going to need to embrace video in new and improved ways. Simply creating a video and uploading it to YouTube will not suffice.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest all support video and all need to have some attention to video. In fact, Facebook is poised to overtake YouTube in direct uploads.
Creativity in the development of your video is also more important than ever. With all the competition for eyes on your video, it has to catch their attention and be engaging.
Embrace online reviews
If you have not yet realized how important consumer reviews are for your business, it’s time to start paying attention.
Positive reviews can have a direct positive impact on your bottom line sales. Other consumers trust online reviews, even if they don’t know the reviewer. Embracing the idea of online reviews means encouraging all of your customers to leave online reviews about their experience with your company, your products, and/or services.
If you are nervous about negative reviews, don’t be. As long as you participate in best practices, you won’t have anything to worry about.
Social content
2015 is the year that content will take over social.
Content has always been important to the success of a social media campaign, but now content is even more important. Content is what makes your social campaigns engaging, sticky, viral, and helps convert social visits into conversions.
Creating original and engaging content is growing in importance as social media marketing is growing in popularity.
Pay to play
Especially with Facebook and Twitter, you had better reserve some of your marketing budget for paid social media campaigns.
It is becoming more necessary to run paid social campaigns as the organic posts are reaching less and less fans and followers.
Choose your preferred social network
With the growing complexity and amount of social networks, it is hard to keep up.
Rather than try to concentrate campaigns on each social channel, the trend and best practice for 2015 will be for companies to choose the main channel they want to focus on.
It doesn’t mean to ignore all the other channels, but posting on those less often and messaging to follow on the network(s) you are concentrating on.
Getting started
Staying on top of changing trends and best practices takes a lot of time and effort.
Some of the best practices for social media marketing in 2015 include developing creative video on other social channels other than YouTube, embracing online reviews, writing engaging social content, adding paid social media campaigns into the mix, and choosing the social networks your company prefers to focus on rather than spreading yourself too thin trying to post to all of them.
The one trend and best practice that must be applied to all of the 5 points above is media monitoring.
Monitoring your company’s social mentions is vital to the success of all your campaigns and helps you to efficiently and quickly answer and respond to your fans and followers.