In 2015, social networks will continue to find ways to push businesses into their advertising programs.
We already know that Facebook plans to stifle organic promotional posts in the news feed starting in January 2015, and that Twitter hasn’t ruled out implementing a Facebook-like algorithm for their news feed. Instagram is still busy expanding their advertising platform, and since they’re owned by Facebook, an algorithm that limits organic posts from businesses and brands could easily be added into the mix.
Hence, brands who might have avoided social advertising in 2014 will be forced to embrace it in 2015.
- Instagram will become essential for image-based social media marketing
Instagram isn’t showing any signs of slowing down; not by a long shot. With 200 million monthly users, Instagram has become the network when it comes to image-based social media marketing. Research confirms this, although perhaps not to the same extent: According to the Social Media Marketing Industry report, 42% of marketers are planning to increase their use of the platform this year, compared to 38% in 2013.
- LinkedIn will widen the gap as “the” B2B social network
LinkedIn has been the top network of choice for the B2B crowd for years already, and we believe we’ll see the gap between LinkedIn and other networks continue to widen in 2015. While B2C marketers report LinkedIn as being significantly less important than Facebook or Twitter for their marketing efforts, the numbers are quite different for the B2B crowd: according to the 2014 Social Media Examiner survey, 88% of B2B marketers are using LinkedIn, compared to 89% for Facebook and 86% for Twitter.
- Social media marketing will finally be embraced as a core pillar of content marketing
In 2015, business owners should finally realize that there are two core pillars of a content marketing strategy: publication and distribution. They should learn that social media is the most effective method of expanding the reach and visibility of their content, and because of this, will come to view social media as more of an “amplifier” for their published content rather than as the content itself.
In 2014, we saw marketers succeed at realizing the importance of creating and publishing content with the rise of “content strategy” as a buzzword and core focus of online marketers, but many failed when it came to designing and executing a successful content distribution strategy.
So, while the content marketing buzz continues to pick up steam, business owners need to remember that a distribution strategy for that content is just as important, if not more important, than the content itself.
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