2013 was a year of acquisitions, IPOs, new platforms, video content and Google Plus. We witnessed big brands being taken over by bigger brands, like Tumblr got acquired by Yahoo! Twitter introduced Vine in Jan and released its first IPO as well towards the end of the year that did surprisingly well. We saw the rise of YouTube, Vine and Instagram videos in social media marketing. 2013 was an exciting year for us and what’s more, 2014 is going to be a game-changer in social media marketing.
It’s better to have an idea of where we’re headed to be able to devise better marketing strategies in 2014. It’s always best to have an idea of what to look out for and what to look into. So here are a few social media predictions for 2014 so that you know where to put your time and energy for most effective results.
1. Embrace Google Plus
Search is an important part of marketing, and to be found you need extensive SEO to rank higher on Google. You’re in luck if you’re already working on your Google Plus Page and engaging your audience there, as it adds value to your Google ranking. And, if you haven’t yet started your Google Plus page, it’s time you start one this year.
2. Contextual Video Content
It’s true that the Future of Social is Video. But what’s more important is contextual content. Simply uploading a funny video won’t work. We need to upload a relevant video, that is in context of our brand’s identity, value, key proposition or campaign in general. The video has to be of a good quality. With Vine and Instagram Videos it has become easier to create and share video content on social networks. As always, YouTube is always around to search for absolutely anything. I would like to stress again that YouTube is a like public library where you can find absolutely anything.
3. Year of Advocacy
You’ve run ads, done contests, fan-gated your Facebook apps and you’ve been rewarded with a good number of fans. What next? 2014 is not going to be about increasing fan numbers (potential customers or not), it’s going to be about turning these fans into brand advocates. Instead of just us marketing for the brand, we will have to market together with these Fans. Word of mouth has always been one of the most powerful means of advertising, and what’s better than people who love brands publicising it themselves?
4. Increase in Social Ad Spend
To gain visibility almost all social media networks will turn towards paid advertising. Pinterest, Instagram have introduced promoted pins and branded posts. Twitter has its promoted tweets. If you’ve got a Facebook page, to get the right visibility and reach to the customer you will have to spend. Interestingly, although at the moment Google Plus custom urls are free – they plan to charge for these urls in future (could be in 2014?) as we know – we can’t afford to ignore Google Plus Company pages, this may be one of the many changes we might see in social ads spend.
5. LinkedIn Company Pages
Whether you want to be successful as an individual professional or as a huge brand, you must have your presence on LinkedIn Company Page. These pages are a great way to interact with potential clients, customers or even employees for that matter. Beautify your company page, write SEO relevant descriptions and add all your services. LinkedIn has become big in 2013 but something tells me there is going to be more from LinkedIn’s in the coming year. It’s definitely a platform to be give due importance.
6. Location Based Marketing
With gadgets like Google Glass and exponential rise of mobile use, location based marketing is going to see new heights. Social Media teams will have to be on their toes to ensure that a customer benefits from interacting with the brand in store. Starbuck’s campaign of #tweetacoffee is a great example of location based marketing.
While these are our suggestions, here are some more of what the experts in the industry are saying about the coming year:
Russell Davies, Director at Lobster Digital Marketing – @RussellDavies71
“Brands will combine their social media marketing with their print and broadcast advertising and budgets for both will increase.”
Talya Shoup, Marketing Manager at glispa – @onlyonetalya “I predict that social media will be driven very strongly by mobile in 2014 – brands will continue to shift from web-based promotions and marketing to mobile.”
Glenn Gow, CEO of Crimson Marketing – @CrimsonCEO “Getting results will dominate social marketing. This will mean turning “engagement” into lead generation and an investment in social selling.”
Simon Tam, Director of Marketing for The Slants – @SimonTheTam
“In 2014, you’re going to see auto-playing video ads on multiple social media sites: probably Facebook mobile, maybe Vine. It’s going to give businesses more options to create short, high-impact, ads while giving social sites more revenue. Businesses will need to think more creatively, in shorter bursts.”
Jeff Davis, President and CEO of Orabrush – @davisjdd
“Brands will include YouTube in their social strategy alongside mainstays such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”
John Lincoln, CEO of Ignite Visibility – @ignitev
“With advances in analytical tools, and simply a better understanding of the medium and it’s cross channel integration, all business will be involved and the more savvy the marketer, the better they will be able to use data and integration to their advantage.”
Katie Knoll, Xelleration Social – @xelleration “I predict that there will be a huge drop off of businesses using Facebook as a marketing & sales medium in 2014 due to the huge drop in organic reach & Facebook¹s huge push towards advertising.”
Shaina Epstein, Social Media Associate at Eastwick – @shainaepstein
“1. The rise of visual social and Pinterest as a Google for images
2. Targeting via SOLOMO (Social, local, mobile)
3. Downstream analytics and monetary tracking for better targeting
4. Integrating online and offline experience”
Click here to read more of 2014 predictions by industry experts.
75% of engagement on a Facebook post occurs within the first five hours – Wisemetrics
Shocking? As community managers we put in a lot of effort in creating our strategic content plan to schedule Facebook posts, tweets and share information on other social media platforms. We invest time and energy in getting images designed to be shared on these platforms as well, since they are received well with a lot of enthusiasm on social media.
However, it can be noticed that there are a lot of video platforms that are attracting attention and traffic. YouTube being the king of all video platforms, has 100 hours of videos being uploaded every minute. Along with YouTube, there are platforms like Vimeo and Dailymotion where a lot of video content is shared.
Interestingly, Vimeo has developed a reputation for the creatives and artists, so ad films, short films, animated films by freelancers and brands are shared and receive high level of quality engagement. Vimeo is used for show-reels and portfolios as well.
What’s more interesting is the coming up of new entrants like Vine and Instagram Video. Infact, 40 per cent of the top 1,000 most popular Instagram videos are from brands, with MTV leading the way followed by NBA and Peanuts. These two platforms have revolutionised the use of videos and taken engagement to the next level.
Why Video Content Is Future?
In simple words video content meets the criteria of 3 Es – Emotional, Engaging and Entertaining.
Each of these platforms can be used by digital marketeers meet different objectives. Let\’s focus on how social media video content can be optimised and used for social media marketing campaigns.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine, ofcourse after Google. It has over 3 billion searches every month, and 6 billion hours of video content is viewed monthly. What we as marketeers must realise is that video content on YouTube is like books in a public library, where they’ll stay forever. They’ll always be available to the user by doing a simple search. Tweets and Facebook updates unfortunately, tend to disappear under the new updates and have a short life. Whereas, on YouTube, people will always search for relevant stories – and you never know – your video might be the one that answers their query.
You can see more interesting stats on YouTube in this interesting infographic.
Objective: To increase shelf life and SEO Target Audience: For everyone, when you want to give detailed information
1. Add SEO keywords, meta tags, meta description of your video
2. Share the video on all social media platforms
3. Dedicate a section to videos on your website
4. Embed video in your blogs
5. Add YouTube Channel to your Facebook Page (there are Facebook Apps available) to integrate Facebook Campaigns with YouTube and increase the views of the videos.
6. Link YouTube channel with your Google Plus page
Limitation: Overload of content, difficult to get high ranking
Most watched YouTube video of 2013 was Ylvis – The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?), followed by Harlem Shake and How Animals Eat Their Food.
Vine
Vine is a fairly new way to share video content. It’s not even celebrated its first birthday yet! But – you wouldn’t feel like that as a lot of brands have already taken up to Vine to share their brand with a larger audience. According to studies conducted by The 7th Chamber, every 5 tweets a second contain a Vine video. Also, it has been found out that a Vine video is 4 times more likely to be seen than a branded video.
As you know that the Vine app allows you to take only 6 seconds videos, it’s important to keep the script extremely crisp (don’t overload it with information) and visuals interesting. Add special effects (stop-motion effect is a prefered and a popular choice), also do share it – a lot! Vine is specially for social media sharing as it’s short and entertaining.
Objective: Viral snippets on twitter, when you want to tell your story and create a buzz Target Audience: Witty, with short attention span
1. Create 6 seconds loop videos of your new product/service promotions
2. Record wishes and opinions from your brand ambassadors
3. Share feedback about your product/service in real-time
4. Give a preview of new music release or adfilm release and how-to videos
5. Embed Vine videos in your blogs
6. Vine videos can be saved as mp4
7. Vines must be hashtagged to categorise and increase searchability
Limitation: Like tweets – Vine videos are also short-lived as compared to YouTube videos.
Here is an interesting vine video that brings PacMan to life.
Instagram Videos
65 percent of top brands use Instagram and 40 percent of the videos on Instagram are marketing efforts. A brand can get its 15 seconds of fame on Instagram videos by keeping a few things parameters in mind – relevant content, artistic detail, and timing of sharing the video. Burberry has been using Instagram videos frequently and beautifully. Their latest December – Countdown to Christmas videos are not only beautiful, but representative of the season.
The filter used for the Instagram videos is important, as it defines and sets the mood of your brand. For example, Burberry frequently uses X Pro II as a filter for their videos. Instagram videos are artistic, creative, beautiful and, an excellent choice for marketing for fashion and lifestyle brands.
Objective: Artistic video collection Target Audience: Artistic, with an opinion
1. Instagram videos are longer – of upto 15 seconds
2. These videos can be about artistic capture of your product – adfilms, behind-the-scenes of shoot or fashion show, promotional campaigns, video series
3. Videos can be hashtagged to categorise
4. Shareable on other social media platforms
5. Videos can be saved as mp4
6. Embed videos on your blog or website
Limitation: Limited target audience on Instagram. Platform is not search friendly for individual videos.
Here is an example of Burberrys Instagram Video – an excellent example for branded videos for advertising on Instagram
Here is an interesting mini infographic that talks about the Vine and Instagram Platforms.
Suggested Video Content Strategy
Upload YouTube videos of your brand campaign or on-going promotion and do extensive SEO of these videos. Give your team sufficient time to plan and develop the videos. These videos are more professional and so target for atleast one video in two to three weeks. Once videos are uploaded spend sufficient time doing its SEO and sharing on all social media platforms.
Share Vine videos once a week about your products. You can create themes like How-to videos, behind-the-scene videos or funny videos. Since these are just 6 seconds videos you can share them more frequently.
Depending your brand’s industry, Instagram Videos can be share once in a week as well. Fashion, Art, Culture, Music, Food, Outings are more suited for Instagram videos. Create beautiful content to appeal to the audience.
Shabby videos will not yield same results as good quality, creative videos. So spend time in scripting, storyboarding and shooting with your creative team. The result will surely strengthen your brand’s image and content’s shelf life.
Social media is all about having a conversation. As social media executives or community managers we try various combinations to get the perfect post for maximum engagement. The brands we manage have presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus (among others like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and more). Each of these platforms cater to a slightly different audience, and so the composition of these posts also varies accordingly.
The length of the post is one of the primary factors that determines whether your Fan or Follower, who has been overloaded with updates from various Facebook Pages and Friends, will be willing to engage with your brand. An update, complete with appealing content (including hashtags, images and links) will finally lead the Fan or Follower to interact with your post. Since every networking site is used for different purpose, the behaviour of the Fans and Followers also varies on every platform. Interestingly, research shows that people are willing to read more detailed posts on Google Plus than on Facebook. So, what’s the length of a perfect post across social media networks?
Facebook
When it comes to Facebook, we can see that most posts have a length of about 103 characters (as mentioned in Quintly Research). It has been observed that posts that have around 850 characters have received the highest post interaction i.e. a sum of Likes, Comments and Shares. I would suggest 850 characters is too much information for the Fan, and so an ideal length should vary between 2 – 4 lines approximately which is about 200 characters. A well worded post (with an attractive image preferably) and simple language has the potential to do wonders on Facebook.
Post embedded below is by Mashable – who talk about all things social.
Twitter
While most conversations on Twitter happen in 140 characters, shortened links in a tweet are a common element. In fact, one must add links to blogs, images, videos or redirect followers to the website from the social media platform. Links take up about 22 characters in a tweet and so an ideal length of a tweet should vary between 110 – 120 characters including about 2 hashtags (which are ideal for a tweet), and/or RT @twitterhandle. The idea is to use all 140 characters, as Quintly Research also suggests that 140 characters is the “optimal posting length in order to get the most engagement” however, it was found out that the highest peak of engagement was for 22 characters.
Tweet embedded below is by another social media veteran Eric T. Tung. This tweet consists of 120 characters, complete with a Link and a @mention.
Meetup Tweaks Consumerism With New Manhattan Billboard: In the midst of the holiday shopping season… http://t.co/D1b1rgRmSp via @adage
Google Plus Longer posts seem to work better on Google Plus. Post length of 156 characters appears to be the average length of posts on Google Plus according to Qunitly Research. Most of the social media marketing experts also maintain this post length while conversing with their Followers. The research also states that “there is not a real peak for Google+” which would suggest that a fixed length of post would work better than others. But, a peak in interaction can be observed at 5 characters and second highest peak is at 442 characters. I would suggest to maintain an average length of 200 characters for your regular posts, as compared to 442 characters, unless you have to give out extremely detailed update on your brand. The post embedded below belongs to Mari Smith – a renowned social media consultant – is of 157 characters only.
Now that we have discussed the perfect post length, here are some more suggestions on a the elements of a post for various platforms. Key aspect to keep in mind is to maintain a union between the communication done on every platform. The length of the post may vary, but the conversation being carried out across platforms should be one. Here are some Do’s of a perfect post.
Facebook Do’s
Maintain the medium length of post ( 2 – 4 lines)
Remove the long url from the post – instead add a shortened url
Support your post with an attractive, perfectly cropped image (403 x 403 px for box image, and 803 x 403 px for Highlight image)
Use relevant hashtags (preferably upto 2) to increase your post’s searchability
Twitter Do’s
Maintain the 110-120 character limit (excluding @mention and link)
Add RT in the start of the tweet and mention @twitter_handle to give due credit
Add link (if any) in the first half of the tweet
Use upto 2 hashtags (more than 2 can be an overkill, so be judicious in your hashtag selection)
Google Plus Do’s
Maintain the post character limit of upto 200 characters approx
Add shortened links in the post
Use attractive multimedia – videos and images to support your post
Use relevant hashtags to identify the category of your post. Or you can include SEO keywords in your post and #hashtag them. (Google Plus contributes heavily to SEO – so hashtags are extremely important.)
Follow these tips to make your perfect posts for all social media networking sites. Length of a post will demand the attention and, ultimately engage your Fan and Followers in a conversation with your brand.
