2014 was yet another year of growth and innovation in social media. These 5 major trends are predicted to stick around in 2015.
1. Businesses going social.
Social media is becoming increasingly important for businesses, so don’t expect it to go away anytime soon. Throughout 2014, we have seen a growing social presence of various sectors of business, especially healthcare. If your business has customers that are on social media, then you need to be there as well. Each platform provides a different audience and requires different content, so figure out where your customers are and get to work!
2. Paid social advertising.
In 2014, we saw a tremendous growth in organizations paying to advertise on social media. On Facebook, more businesses began utilizing the “boost this post” feature. This is a great method of expanding the reach of individual posts to people who “like” your page. Facebook also offers “Facebook Ads”, where you can quickly create an advertisement on Facebook, decide how much you want to pay, and target your audience. On Twitter, users can choose to “promote” specific tweets, “promote account” to gain followers who might be interested in your business, and “promote trends” if you are looking to kick off a major campaign or conversation to trend on Twitter. Lastly, Instagram is slowly allowing advertisements to appear in user’s feeds, but it is not yet open to everyone for advertisements.
3. The move from ‘pushing’ out content to ‘pulling’ in conversations.
Finally, organizations are beginning to understand the nature of social media. The idea of pushing out content to followers like you would on a website is ineffective. Social media requires brands to pull users in by not only providing compelling content, but by starting conversations. Starting conversations with your followers and responding to their comments will increase their connectedness to your brand.
4. Brand integration of videos specialized for social media.
The use of videos on social media isn’t anything new, but now businesses have begun using social media to share short videos to promote their brand. The importance here is that the videos are short and fun, perhaps showing a ‘behind the scenes’ or a montage of crowd-sourced fan content. Videos are a great opportunity to show off your creativity and start a conversation. Youtube, Instagram, and Vine are the most popular social media sharing sites at the moment, and short videos are expected to continue growing in popularity.
5. Sending money via social media.
The latest trend as 2014 is wrapping up is the ability for social media users to send money via their social media account. Snapchat recently teamed up with Square, so that with the click of a button users can transfer money to one another’s bank accounts. Facebook is now rumored to unveil a similar feature on the messenger app to allow friends to easily message each other money. It can be assumed that Twitter will be following this trend as well. This may become an outlet for companies to do business directly via social media in the coming years.
Do you have any other trends that you think should be included on the list? Comment or tweet them to me @todays_business.