Top 5 Social Media Predictions for 2015

Wriiten by: Lauren Riley @BubbleJobs

As the year draws to a close, I thought now would be a good time to look at what the next twelve months hold for social media marketing.

With anything in the digital industry, social media is developing at a rapid rate, so it’s worth taking a look at what direction it will be taking in 2015.

If you’re also interested in the SEO/content side of things, Amy will be sharing her Top 7 SEO and Content Predictions For 2015 tomorrow!

1) Much More Video Content

While video has been a popular social media marketing option for a while, I think it’ll gain a lot more traction in 2015.

With the rise of young video bloggers (or vloggers) such as Zoella, Tanya Burr and Alfie Deyes (they have millions of YouTube subscribers each and have signed beauty and book deals worth thousands of pounds), it won’t be surprising to see brands jumping on the video bandwagon, with some of the larger companies vying for the chance to have one of the famous vloggers front their campaigns.

2) Goodbye Google+?

2015 might be the time that Google says au revoir to its own social network for good.

As Vic Gundotra – Google’s Senior Vice President of Social and the “father of Google+” – announced he was leaving the company back in April, and Google killed Authorship back in August, so it seems that they’re phasing out the platform.

A lot of people spent time building their Google+ profiles in hopes that their content would appear higher in search results, but now that Authorship’s been scrapped, it wouldn’t be surprising to see people migrating away from the network, and Google ultimately closing the project.

3) Even More Paid Social

Anyone who manages a company’s social media presence will know that Facebook has been dramatically decreasing organic page reach in a bid to promote their paid advertising offerings, and that unless you’re a huge brand with a significant following, the only way to reach all of your fans is to stump up the cash.

Couple this with Pinterest rolling out its Promoted Pins feature to more businesses in August, and Twitter expanding their advertising offerings to include more specific mobile targeting, businesses will more than likely boost their social media advertising efforts, as well as explore the possibility of hiring paid social media experts (we covered this in our digital job trends blog here).

4) Mobile

It seems an obvious prediction to make, but there are lots of reasons to suggest that 2015 will see an even more dramatic increase in focus on mobile-first in terms of social media marketing and advertising.

With Twitter developing its advertising platform and giving businesses the chance to target users by mobile network and users with new mobile devices, as well as buying mobile ad firm Tap Commerce back in July, it’s clear that social is leaning heavily towards mobile.

With this in mind, it won’t be surprising to see teams in larger companies purely focused on mobile social media advertising.

5) Bigger Use of Data/Analytics

Several social media platforms have really upped their game when it comes to analytics and data on offer in 2014, so I would expect to see even smaller companies making more use of the information on offer to them in 2015.

This comes after Pinterest released its revamped, incredibly detailed analytics dashboard in June, and Twitter announced that they’re experimenting with inbuilt analytics within tweets last month, so it’s clear that social media platforms are keen to share their data with their customers, and this will have a knock-on effect on businesses who will use this information for more intelligent social media marketing.

So there we go, some predictions on social media marketing in 2015. Do you think these will happen in the next 12 months, or do you have any predictions of your own?