Social Media Trends to Watch in 2015

These are a few of the more exciting social media trends to watch for in 2015.

Each year, industries are shifted dramatically as multiple use cases are made for social media and new technologies emerge to disrupt business as usual. This was true in 2014, and there are several social media trends to watch for in 2015 as well.

More Hosted Video

Facebook has made it abundantly clear that if you want your video to be seen, you’ll have to load it directly to the network. Twitter has also made similar efforts and it won’t be long before other networks make the same move.

With so much competition for users’ business, networks need to offer both users and businesses reason to not only visit the network, but stay active. Encouraging business to post videos directly to a network feed (as opposed to sharing a link to an external video sharing platform like YouTube or Vimeo) and running autoplay (for better or worse) as users scroll through their recent updates is one way we will see networks’ landscapes change in the coming year.

Malleable Data

Both Facebook and Twitter have made drastic changes to their analytics platforms for business, and Pinterest has been working to offer some of the best analytics businesses can get when it comes to how their websites and social profiles work together. Moving forward, we can surely expect to see the use of social data become a little more robust.

It is no secret that social data can offer huge amounts of value to a business, and it is a primary reason why businesses are willing to accept the pay-to-play model that is being pushed. Moving into 2015, we can expect the major networks to begin working on ways to monetize their own data by offering more comprehensive uses for it to businesses. Right now, brands tend to look elsewhere to mine and leverage these data. Expect these networks to try and change that this year.

And speaking of pay-to-play…

Get Ready to Invest

It might have started off as small (or rather significant, in some cases) declines in organic reach on Facebook, but we are now seeing that if we want our content to make waves, we’ll need to give it a little push.

The great news for brands and marketers is that we are living in a golden age for social advertising. We recently ran an internal test in order to measure the effectiveness of new ad media compared to traditional PPC ads on networks like Google and Google Display, and we found that for some of the most competitive search terms, your dollar can be up to ten times more effective on social media. If ever there was a time to invest heavily in social advertising, it’s now.

Remember, these networks are still companies (several of them public) trying to prove their oft-ballooned valuations. They need to make it appealing for marketers to invest.

You’ll Hear Less of the Term ‘Social Media’

For the longest time, we’ve been hearing things like, “…do social media.” In 2015, one thing we will start to see a little less of is the use of the term “social media”, at least as we see it now.

We have started to pigeonhole ourselves into thinking of social media as a concept, and not as the term it is. The reality of the situation is that virtually any medium in which two or more parties are put in contact with one another is inherently social. So, “social media” can be anything from big networks like Facebook to the comment section on a food blog. Once people start to see that (and they have already) we will see a move away from this overuse of a term that doesn’t quite make sense as its currently used.

A More Targeted Message

One thing that brands have struggled with considerably is the messaging and rhetoric used on social networks and the clear lack of audience content differentiation necessary to effectively leverage what each network can offer. For example, your Twitter audience doesn’t necessarily care about the same issues and isn’t necessarily made up of the same people as your audience on LinkedIn. What’s more, your overall social audience (or, social client persona) might be interested in only one type of messaging in particular, and this message might apply to all networks.

In 2015, there will be a clear move away from the attempt by brands to please everyone and a move towards an attempt to zero in on a particular audience – your social client persona.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the social media trends we can see taking shape in the coming year. That is not to say that there won’t be more, and it certainly doesn’t mean that these will be the only ones. Every second of every day, something new comes up and all of these trends might fall in order of their importance to something new. We will just have to wait and see.

What social media trends can you see taking shape in 2015? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!