3 Social Media trends to watch in 2014

The astute business owner knows that to remain on top of social media marketing, they will have to keep innovating. You cannot formulate one social media marketing strategy and expect it to keep bringing in the riches forever. Every now and then, a new social media platform comes into being and catches the fancy of one or more sections of your target audience.

Meanwhile the existing social networking channels continue to evolve at furious paces and introduce improved features frequently. You have to be able to adapt quickly to the trends in social media to exploit this potent marketing medium to the hilt. Given below are three social media trends to watch out for in 2014 and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly.

Trend: Brands will create differentiated and channel-specific content to exploit the peculiar features of every social media network.

There are no shortcuts to success and businesses who have been successful on social media know this all too well. The users of various social media channels prefer to consume their content in different ways. What is more, a piece of content should ideally be designed to exploit the specific features of a particular social media network.

More and more brands now understand that dishing out the same content on Facebook and LinkedIn, the two most popular social media networks, will not bring in the same degree of success. So 2014 will see businesses opting to create channel-specific content that will exploit the specific feature of every social media network they frequent.

Trend: Google+ will feature in a big way in social media marketing strategies.

More than 70 percent of all brands on social media are also on Google+, even if they are not sure about how to engage with their audience on this medium. But with Google+ and Google Authorship increasingly influencing organic search engine rankings, businesses can no longer be passive on this channel. So in 2014, businesses will concentrate on creating marketing strategies to harness the potential of Google+.

Trend: Brands will engage more in demand-generated direct marketing tactics.

As competition increases, businesses are forced to look for innovative ways and means to grab audience eyeballs and make themselves seem indispensable to them. With more and more people sharing personal informationtheir likes, dislikes, wants, and peeveson the Internet and especially on social media, businesses now have increased insights into what their target audience needs.

They can thus work towards fulfilling these wants and earn brownie points with their target audience. So 2014 will see businesses exploiting this Big Data to find out what their present and prospective clients are spending on or what they want to spend on and come up with suggestions to ease their shopping experience.

The year 2014 will also see the rise of a host of new social media channels like Medium, impossible, Mobli, and Nextdoor.

The next year promises a flurry of activity for business owners and digital marketers as they try to get ahead of competition by adopting the above-mentioned social media marketing trends and getting up on the new platforms to hobnob with a greater number of their target audience.