With our New Year’s Day hangover now complete, social media and digital marketers are ready to begin the year. While business for most begins again Monday, social media marketers have been feverishly at work, recapping the past year and predicting what’s to come. Let’s take a look at what marketers – who shall remain unnamed, have said:

• Visual content will become king
• Social media will finally be recognized as a skill
• Video content becomes the choice for marketers
• Paid media becomes the way to rise above the noise
• Slideshare is the new YouTube for business
• Mobile becomes even more important than before
• Silos break down as social friction lessens
• Employee advocacy becomes an important piece

Let me begin by saying that all of these are bound to happen some time in the coming year in some capacity, but if you read social media blogs from the end of 2013, professionals were clamoring for the same trends to occur in 2014 as well. Visual content performed well in 2014 with the rise of tools like Canva, paid media became the go-to method for engagement due to the rising noise in social media, and silos broke down as marketers moved from platform to platform to get the most out of their promotions. If anything in history has told us, humanity always becomes more visual, moves towards monetization, and looks towards increased movement. Just look at where civilization began and where it is now, and the cost to move — social media is a mere microcosm of the greater picture.

The story of where social media is heading in 2015 is also generally positive, as it has also been over the past 5-7 years. What’s unprecedented is the growth in the vertical, but also obvious is the seduction that many of my fellow professionals have for the industry as well, from sharing each others articles to having each other on their podcasts. At the end of the day, marketers love marketers, and many times at the expense of the customer which is the real audience many of us ought to be writing for and writing to.

Convergence and Consolidation

There is one prediction that I have yet to see written however, and that’s the beginning of the convergence and consolidation of the social media technology sector. I’d like you the reader, to consider the following:

• There are multiple service providers that offer marketers the ability to schedule their social media content — many of whom are paid
• While social networks are flourishing on a user base, some are also struggling to maintain revenue growth, and frustrating investors
• The explosion of complementary tools has led to split focus from marketers, and focus can only be split down to a degree
• The mere fact that there is only so much time, so much money,and so much energy for marketers to do all the things that could be done
• The redundancy of information across all social media markets — the simple notion that you could find the above predictions on more than 10 different blogs is telling that there is market saturation

Every industry and economy goes through growth and decline. When looking back at history, one must observe the rise and fall of industries and note that growth does not go on forever. Whether we’re looking at the first dot com boom or the rise and fall of commodities over the years, the same thing can be said about what will happen to the social media technology sector. I predict that at some point in late-2015, we will begin to see the convergence of many of these tools that we have come to know over the years as well as the consolidation as the splitting of focus for marketers forces them to focus more than ever.

As social media marketers, this prediction should not be read as the fall of social media. We should all agree that social and digital marketing are forever here to stay and are a critical part of all marketing strategies. The most important point is that each industry is susceptible to growth and decline, and social media is no different. Unfortunately, this is the year that it at least starts to happen.

 

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http://hookedoninnovation.com/2014/01/06/bold-predictions-sure-to-go-wrong-in-2014/

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