Social Media Trends To Watch Out For In 2015

Social media market is changing fast, 11 years ago Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook with his college roomies, and only 7 years ago MySpace was still the largest social network in the world. If you work in marketing, following new trends in this sphere is necessary for your business. These are some of the most popular social media trends for 2015:

Real-Time Social Media

Almost every social media trend comes from Facebook. Changes with the biggest network in the world usually have consequences on the whole digital marketing industry. Recently the company decided to drastically change its news feed, and one of the main changes will be the better rating of real-time news stories. Awakening moment for Facebook team came during the Ferguson protests in summer of 2014 when they realized that news feeds are still displaying Ice Bucket Challenge stories, just because they had the most likes at a time, while Tweeter had more than 3,6 million tweets about the events in Ferguson that received respectable following. New algorithm change will try to make the right content visible at the right time and it will be based on trending topic engagement. This will require community managers to spend more time on social networks and monitor and promptly respond to their target audience needs.

Mobile Social Media

Following the large increase in mobile use of internet, community managers will also need to adapt to the needs of mobile users. Now we have plenty of social network mobile applications and some of the networks like Instagram or Tweeter are used more by mobile than by desktop users. These changes require further social media strategy customization. There are long lists of different updates that can make your social media page more mobile friendly. When it comes to Facebook, this means introducing shorter posts, less page links and more questions and direct calls to action. With Twitter it’s getting as much retweets as possible and bombarding your followers with a lot of very short tweets. You should also follow the current trends and big events that are happening, or to cut the story short, with Twitter you need to have the sense for the moment. You should also open accounts on several other aspiring social networks like Instagram or FourSquare.

Increase in Paid Social Media Advertising

With new algorithm updates that Facebook introduced last month, we can expect a huge rise in paid advertising on this and some other social networks. Facebook pages will from now on get much less free interaction since the updated algorithm will place “click-bait” posts on the bottom of follower’s news feed. This means that page publishers will need to turn to the paid advertising and soon that’s going to be the only effective way to promote your business. Twitter is already introducing its business advertising model and probably a lot of small and medium size companies are going to use it for gaining new customers. Since small business owners would rather pay for results than for their brand visibility, Twitter’s advertising platform that will introduce tweet engagements, conversions, app installs and new followers and leads is going to be very appealing to them.

The Rise of New Ad-Free Social Networks

With Facebook news feed being flooded with commercials people (especially the more anti-establishment kind) turns to other social networks. Reddit was the first in ad-free social media wave, which offers much less room for promoting brands, companies or products. Its users call it “The Front Page of Internet”. Here you first need to earn some respect from other Redditors and than start shamelessly promoting your business. Ello is another ad-free social network. It was created in 2014 and it is the fastest growing ad-free network that is promising no ads, no user data sales and no real-name policy. This network will also offer some nice promotion opportunities, and if you are a community manager, maybe this is your chance to become an Ello marketing guru.

About the Author:

Oscar Waterworth is a writer from Sydney, Australia. A father of two and a working man, he somehow manages to find the time to write up an occasional blog post. In his free time he likes to read about technological advances, play futsal and build stuff with his kids.

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