In 2013, social media marketers placed more emphasis on mobile devices and gained a greater understanding of their global audience and its diversity. Those trends will continue in the new year along with these growing trends that should become the focus of social media marketing in 2014.
1. Image sites will continue to explode this year. In 2013, you couldn’t log into LinkedIn or Facebook without seeing a graphic or a video. Images and videos can express messages that plain text just can’t. Visual content will become an increasingly inescapable part of marketing strategies in 2014. Sites like Tumblr and Instagram will continue to grow their audiences. Resourceful marketers will determine how to best position their brand on these visually-oriented sites. Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, and Instagram will become more important to those seeking a younger audience.
2. More platform-specific content will be created this yearSocial media marketing used to consist of casting a wide net and hoping against hope to snag someone with it. However, as individual social media networks are now attracting more precisely-defined audiences, marketers will be compelled to create platform-specific content for each platform’s particular audience.
3. Paid social media advertising will explode this year. Anyone who’s been on Facebook or Twitter recently has seen a “promoted” post. Paid social media advertising provides a platform that is proving to be much more effective than older forms of online advertising in terms of both effectiveness and overall ROI. Promoted tweets have shown a 1-to-3 percent engagement rate, while Facebook ads have a click-through rate around 0.2 percent. The cost-per-click is much lower than the older forms of online advertising. Studies are also showing that social media advertising is more effective on mobile devices; that’s important to consider, since by the end of 2014, there will be over 1.4 billion smartphones in use around the globe.
