Social Media Marketing Trends to Follow in 2014

By Sachin Verma Our Bestseller: WordPress Themes

A new year is always good for a new start, if you missed out social media optimization and marketing in 2013, I have compiled a list of things to look for in 2014. How marketers will utilize Vine for marketing? How Facebook auto-playing video ads will affect marketers?

This post contains answers and hints to all these questions and trends that will be in for 2014. 2013 was a big year for social media marketing, so will be the 2014.

Forming a Dedicated Social Media Team

Forming a dedicated social media team for business is a good idea for 2014. Dedicated social media dream team can save a lot of time, they can help establish a social media influence and also a better user support for your business. This is going to be an effective method to build a good social presence.

30% of big brands have a customer support service on Twitter. Use LinkedIn for establishing your brand online, it is a great place to turn visitors into customers. Facebook has the most number of active users and highest conversion rate as compared to other social networking sites. Using Social Media Paid Advertisements

Social media sites have always been perfect places to find the right audience for your niche. With social media advertisements you can target those specific people who can be easily converted into customers. With Facebook offering dirt cheap targeted advertisements, it becomes very convenient for small businesses to use advertisements.

With the increase in the use of rich media in advertisements, the conversion rates of advertisements have also increased. Marketers utilize advertisements containing rich media as they are highly interactive and results in more conversion rate. Targeting mobile phone and tablet users through advertisements has been in trend recently and it is going to have an impact on social media marketing too. About 200 million users access Facebook from mobile phone devices, it’s enough to give us an insight of scope in mobile phone marketing.

Creating Content with More Visuals

Posting quality content on your social media profile is as important as your website. In 2014, with social sites like Vine, video content is going to increase tremendously. As well as images, GIFs, infographics and other visual content are going to be more important to establish yourself on social media sites. YouTube marketing is already in for so many years in past, so will be the Vine with short video advertisements.

Using New Features of Social Media Sites

With Facebook announcing the automatically playing videos ads, internet marketers see it as an opportunity to utilize the advertisements in a better and latest way. According to a study by eMarketer in 2012, in-stream advertisements have six times more click through rate than the standard advertisements. Video marketing is definitely in for 2014, online businesses can’t skip this one for sure.

Google Plus and Linkedin

Google plus and LinkedIn are probably going to grow more in terms of active users and are also going to be a good place to promote small businesses and build your social presence. Google has made Google plus an essential element of blogs and websites. Google plus account is required for so many things, including authorship, Google analytic, webmaster tools and YouTube.

Using Social Media Meta Tags

The use of social media meta tags will definitely increase in 2014, which will increase the social media traffic on websites. If you are not using social media meta tags, start using them now, they do make a difference. With Facebook, Google plus and Twitter and other major social networks already offering meta tags to correctly show title, images and description. The use of social meta tags is going to increase, to optimize conversion rate for social media exposure.

Major social sites that support social meta tags are:

Facebook: Open graphfor photos, videos and articles. Google plus: Snippetfor articles, products, reviews and events. Pinterest: Rich pinsfor products, movies, articles, recipes and places. Twitter: Twitter cardsfor photos, applications, products and article summary. Social Media Insights

Facebook has already provided page insights for page owners on Facebook. Well, for me, it’s pretty much decent, it displays almost everything related to that page, from daily likes/unlikes to source of visits on your page. It can be called an analytic tool for business on Facebook. I have been utilizing the data from page insights for a while now and below is the result for my blog page.

Creating Viral Content on Social Media

Going viral is one of the things that can give you immense success with least efforts. Vine by Twitter is one of  the growing social networks, which allows users to upload videos up to six seconds. In 2013, some vines got really viral, one of the few I have seen got 7,000+ tweets and 4,000+ Facebook shares. Yes, you read those numbers right, it is time to create interesting videos related to your business.

Some more basic things which are already trending in social media marketing since 2012 and 2013 which will be in this year too:

Contests on social networking sites. Asking users to vote on your site. Image and video rich content. A post with question or discussion topic. Conclusion

This is 2014, where social media is as important as search engines were in previous years. So, just setting up a profile page for your business on social media is not enough. You need to squeeze the most out of social networks to rank higher above your competitors.

Facebook, Google plus and Twitter are not the only social networks you have to target. 14 social networks with more than 100 million registered, the number increases to 22 when we talk about 50 million+ registered users. Not many of us are utilizing social networks to their full capacity. Right use with social media optimization can lead to unexpectedly high social signals. Though Matt Cutts recently stated that social signals are not used for ranking websites, he might be hiding something there. A recent animated infographic by Neil Patelshows how social signals help you rank higher.

Well, there may be many more things to be looked in at 2014, I have tried to cover the most important ones in this post. Feel free to share any points in the comments below.

About Sachin Verma
author

Sachin Verma is a student and blogger from India who blogs at Bitdoz. He fancies himself a photographer, web developer, blogger, Genesis and WordPress enthusiast. He is also active in CPA and digital marketing.

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