Written by ContentPowered.com
By now, you’ve surely heard some of the more major trends for marketing in the coming year. Mobile, of course, is the biggest. You’ve been hearing about the importance of mobile for the past five years, and it finally reached the tipping point where more mobile users are browsing than desktop users on average. It’s not a mobile-optional world or a mobile-acceptable world; it’s a mobile-first world.
Another trend you’ve likely heard of is the increasing nature of pay to play advertising. Facebook is continually cutting back on brand reach and promotional posting without an infusion of cash. Whether you believe this is a moneymaking scheme on Facebook’s part or a legitimate leaning to improve user feeds doesn’t matter; the facts are the facts. Facebook is moving ever-forward towards a pay-only marketing platform.
1. The Content Singularity
The last four years have been something of a promised land for long-oppressed content writers. They spent decades seeing their valuable content lose out to over-optimized pages, until Panda came along. Finally! Good content was the way to go, at long last.
Since then, millions of words worth of content are published every hour online. Every possible subject has been done to death. The only ways to write valuable content are to either dig as deep as possible into something, plumbing depths no writer has visited before, or do cover something so fresh and new that no one else has heard of it.
The bar has been raised to such a height that it’s hard to maintain the level of content quality necessary to stand out. Are you writing seven blog posts per week about a wide range of subjects, complete with actionable advice? Good, that’s par for the course.
The coming year may not be the breaking point, but it’s a trend that is going to continue. The bar rises ever higher. Valuable content must be ever more valuable to receive any notice at all.
It’s going to be a year of focusing less on the production of content, less on the volume, and more on the quality. It will be all about Ideas. Powerful ideas, motivational ideas, expansive ideas – ideas to drive thought and engagement. Information is good; ideas are compulsive.
Further, video in all shapes and forms will continue to grow, to some extent replacing traditional blog content. The written word will never go away, but video may become a bit closer to required for many marketers. This includes both short Vine-style clips and longer-form Facebook and YouTube videos.
2. Measurement
2014 was a year where video exploded, between Vine, Instagram, and Facebook’s video everything. Yet so little of video is truly utilized to its fullest.
2015 should see two major aspects of video hit the limelight. The first will be video SEO. Google is undoubtedly aware of the profusion of video, and the push for more video content in the future. In order to more fully index the Internet, they are very likely pushing for some kind of way to monitor and analyze video.
This might mean that Google pushes for everyone to post a video transcript. It might mean they work on their automatic parsing technology. It might mean a lot of things. It’s all also somewhat tertiary to the other trend in the coming year.
This other trend will be the expansion of the breadth and depth of video analytics and monitoring. Between video content and mobile devices, there’s a dearth of good analytics. You can piece together a lot of information, but it’s patchwork and it’s not as detailed as what you get from a good old desktop Google Analytics install.
Expect in 2015, not just more video, but more ways to analyze video. Not just more mobile, but more ways to analyze mobile.
3. Diversification
How many social networks do you think a brand should have a presence on, moving forward? Some will say just one: Facebook. Others will list off the big few: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube. Others add in Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Reddit. Some remind you that LinkedIn and even MySpace have their roles. That’s not even counting foreign social networks big in other countries, or forums dedicated to specific subjects rather than general everything like Reddit.
According to Global Web Index, 92% of adult Internet users aged 16-64 have an account on at least one social network. On average, believe it or not, the typical online adult has a profile on 5 different social networks. That means when you bring yourself to marketing on a social network, even one as large as Facebook, you’re only occupying one fifth of the user’s social attention.
Moving forward, one thing brands will be doing is diversifying their social profiles. Those that only have a presence on Facebook will expand to others, like Twitter, Google+ and Instagram. Those who already have accounts on those sites will likely expand to yet others, like Reddit, Pinterest and Tumblr.
This is what I envision. Brands will spend the next six to twelve months expanding to various social media platforms. They will then work to establish a presence on those sites and determine which of them are worth the time investment. They will then dial back and focus on the 3-5 networks that bring them the most engagement and the most conversions overall.
Some brands will, in the coming year, very likely abandon Facebook. There’s already been a lot of discussion about the death of Facebook as early as two years from now, and the way Facebook has been making itself increasingly hostile to marketers will help support that theory. I doubt that Facebook will be truly as dead as these predictions within two years, but it’s certainly already losing appeal.
All it will take to cause a mass exodus from Facebook is a new social killer app, a site that will take its place, just like Facebook took over from MySpace. Many have tried, of course. Those that succeed in sticking around end up the Twitter, the Instagram, the Tumblr. Those that don’t end up like Ello – a brief fad that fades out.
