My take on the year ahead in social marketing. 16 social marketing trends for 2014:
1. Chat app marketing will fuel the social web
2. Social TV behaviours will grow in value
3. Customer activism will get more sophisticated
4. Moment commerce will emerge in force
5. Content experiences will get even more immersive
6. The sharing economy will accelerate
7. Paid social advertising will eat more budget
8. Niche social networks will gain in popularity
9. Multi platform will become the new normal
10. Social performance marketing will bite
11. Native advertising will get more integrated
12. Curation tactics will need to get smarter
13. Social mobile will continue to converge at pace
14. Social data will drive more personalisation
15. Social marketing automation will improve
16. 'Always on' will transition to 'Always care'
Trends can be useful
But come with a health warning
Most self obessed year of the internet ever
Social steeped in the cultural consciousness
A growing fatigue and worry over it uses
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/06/selfies-status-updates-digital-bragging-web
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/tired-of-being-social-maybe-its-time-to-join-an-anti-social-network/
What did 2013 bring in social?
We can expect to see these trends to continue into 2014
By 2016 digital will be 26% of all ad spend, of which social will be 26%
Social as a % of total marketing spend about 3-5% - rising to 20% in the next 5 years
1 billion tweets every 36 hours
More spend = more content = more noise
Implication – find quality signals
The options are dizzying for a marketer
Its about managing complexity at speed; 2014 will be faster than 2013
Its about connecting social to your marketing ecosystem
Leading brands are looking at how content, social and mobile converge within this ecosystem
FB reported $2bn in revenue for Q3, but also a reduction in daily active users amongst teenagers
June 2013 18.9% of iPhone users in the USA were using SnapChat regularly
400m snaps per day, equivalent to FB photo uploads
Part of a trend of teenage consumers being more selective about their online activities; desire to be temporary and transient
Rise of messenger apps like What’s App, Line, We Chat, Kik
Al part of the Erasable You
Nielsen launched official Twitter TV Ratings as a measure of currency
Brands investigating how they can legitimately enter these conversations
Twitter has claimed that running TV ads alongside promoted tweets is 36 per cent more effective than TV advertising alone
Customer power and confidence is growing within social
There is nowhere to hide for brands
BA incident another reminder of the available means to protest
Thunderclap is a new service that allows organisations to co-ordinate a Twitter campaign using users streams in real time
Don’t forget your advocates; try and switch detractors
Social gifting has been around for a while, but Twitter are up-ing their commitments to commerce opportunities within the platform e.g. Twitter cards etc.
Amex and Starbucks pioneers in integrating CRM into social channels to drive prospecting and loyalty
Post IPO expect to see more commerce enabled features
Snackable social video the hottest investment area right now
Unruly predict there will be a 1bn view branded content video in the next 3 years
Short snackable social video is booming in all forms
Branded content formats are increasingly dovetailed into social strategies
Mobile video expected to triple in consumption in the next 2 years
Consumers want to see rich immersive experiences
McKinsey reckons the collaborative economy is worth $1.3m in the next 3-5 years
The community is the capacity – its getting mainstream and profitable
How brands can let consumers participate in this new world where ownership and access is shared
Air BNB poster child for the collaborative economy; taking it to a neighbours
Couchsurfing – travel the world on a sofa
Share Cars with Lyft
Find neighbours to do your tasks
By 2017 social media ad spend is expected to exceed $10billion – Business Insider
The effectiveness of social ads are compelling
Promoted tweets 15x more effective than banner ads
Promotted pin
Facebook finally admit that you need to buy ads to reach your audience
A combination of predictive ad buying solutions means social advertising is getting more effective AND efficient for marketers
15.2m Facebook users were exposed to the posts, with an average frequency of 7.6 impressions.
18-24 year-old users were reached nine times on average.
4.63m interactions were driven by paid media at a cost of 8p cost per engagement.
As a result, sales of Crème Eggs increased by 7%.
Tracking the overall ROI by looking at the breakdown of purchase intent, 18% was driven by Facebook and 20% from TV advertising, even though the budget for social was around one-third the size of that spent on TV.
However the final results showed that the most effective strategy is a combination of both TV and Facebook ads, as likelihood to buy increased by 66% among consumers exposed to both channels compared to those who only saw one or the
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/63570-it-s-official-cadbury-s-facebook-ads-are-better-than-its-tv-ads-sort-of?dm_i=LQI,1WMJG,9O2YS5,6U62O,1&utm_campaign=3201820_927-daily-pulse-us-2013-10-14&utm_content=buffercb9ad&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=Econsultancy
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/13/facebook-vs-tv-and-youtube/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
http://searchengineland.com/google-debuts-post-ads-lets-brands-turn-google-content-into-ads-on-gdn-179401
There is a growing social media fatigue amongst users
Their needs and tasters are getting more particular
Social graphs are blending with interest graphs around niche networks
More and more we are seeing leadership social brands operate on a multi platform basis – agile, smart and creative
Part of this is recognising that the connected consumer roams across multiple platforms and channels
Included in this trend is after 2 years G+ is emerging as a credible platform to sync with your digital marketing ecosystem
Team of 4 dedicated social/digital strategists
Partner team of 30-40 people
Content marketing specialists
Google+ will be a 2014 hit
Mixed signals in this area
Market softening for social tech & CMO’s easing up on chasing hard social metrics
We will see social performance marketing talked about in more clear terms
Recognising where social can play and what value it can bring to business goals
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-myth-of-social-roi-2013-10
Native advertising is hot! Part of the growth in branded content and content marketing
Native ads – allow brands to promote and weave their custom content into the endemic experience of a website or app
The blurring of ads into editorial and native environments will increasingly
Instagram ads
Tumblr ads
Expect to see personalisation and smarter integration into feeds/streams
http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-native-ad-strategy-takes-shape/245242/
http://contently.com/strategist/2013/12/04/facebooks-algorithm-change-all-part-of-its-native-ad-master-plan/
As noise increases, finding and curating quality signals will become more important; along with then distributing that content through networks
Using vendors to help power curation and real time content experiences
Levi’s using Flipboard to curate fashion magazine using different contributors
Sports sector leaders in curation tactics around peak games and utilising sponsorship assets
Bringing social currency to owned properties
IOS will surpass 1billion users in q1 in 2015
Hummingbird update is about things not srings – location, social signals, context
Pull to refresh
Emoticons as language
What is Apple doing buying Topsy? One of only three companies with access to the Twitter firehose – expect to see subtle iTunes targgeting and better ads
Social data is the closest proxy to real life and its valuable signal if used right
Econsultancy surveyed CMO’s who believed social data is massively under utilised as a data source to serve personlised web experiences
Social doesn’t scale
So sooner or later tech/software will crack natural language processing and machine learning to deliver intelligent automated marketing strategies
Expect to see more smart social bots self learning and interacting with you
About removing guesswork, using behavioural data to calculate probabilities in real time
Brands will be able to read the data points correctly to serve up quality ‘automated’ service encounters which will drive brand and service KPI’s
http://blog.eloqua.com/social-marketing-automation/
We are seeing a shift from always on to always care
I think we will see more social media marketing centre around what people care about and what they find useful
Brands are divining purpose and cause to drive salience and commitment
Nestle just bought petfinder to complement their cat care proposition
Honda care about making sure drive thru cinemas stay open
http://www.nestle.com/media/newsandfeatures/purina-petcare-and-petfinder
2014 will be about getting the mix right at the enterprise
As social matures into enterprises its about getting the investment and infrastructure right to service social business needs at scale
Marketers will talk more specifically about social performance marketing as an outcome that has value – insight, data or action