New Year, New Networking: The Changing Landscape of Social Media

socialmedia1

In 2014, Social media will continue to grow while becoming more optimized to meet users and businesses’ needs. Currently social media represents 5.5% of marketing budgets nationally. This number is expected to increase to 15.8% by 2018. That is a 3x increase in the next 4 years. With more ad dollars being put on the table, social networks are stepping up their game to stand out from the competition. Major changes have been made recently which could affect your social media strategy.


Facebook Ad Structure Is Changing

Facebook is changing its newsfeed ad structure in 2014. Facebook announced a new structure has been created to help advertisers create more optimized campaigns. It is also supposed to improve ad performance measurability. However, many are saying this new algorithm will dilute visibility of friends who have have “liked” a business page. This will push businesses to pay more for advertising instead of gaining traffic organically. Another new source of revenue for Facebook is “Play- Now Videos”, which are streaming ads played on mute when a viewer scrolls past. It is predicted that viewers will start to become overwhelmed by the increasing amount of advertising. This has brought up questions of whether Facebook will start to lose credibility by putting too much focus on revenue streams.

Google + Is On The Rise

Since Facebook is continually needing to produce revenue to appease shareholders, there is room for other networks to gain market share. It is predicted that Google + will be gaining attention and adding to its half billion members. Since Google+ does not need to produce revenue, it is less like to get saturated by ads like Facebook. The SEO benefits of using Google + is enough to make this a major part of any businesses content strategy. The “+1” feature on google plus is the equivalent to a Facebook like. However, it is a much more powerful tool from increasing SEO. The “+1” feature is the number one search ranking factor for driving traffic, beating out backlinking, and sharing on all other networks.

Pinterest is Placing Pins

Pinterest launched Place Pins this year, competing with FourSquare and Facebook Places. Users can now check in at their favorite locations and link back to these businesses websites. Currently people are pinning 1.5 million places a day, and there are 750 million pin destinations on Pinterest. The value of pinterest is the blogger type quality of content it provides. Users are able to write reviews and generate word of mouth through pinning. Pinterest has slowly started to move toward paid placements and advertisement, but the sharing of original content will still remain the real value of this network.

Twitter is Going Visual

Many loyal Twitter users were upset with the addition of adding photos to tweets. However, with twitter’s growth slowly declining, changes needed to be made to increase user acquisition. Visual content will continue to be integrated, and twitter will start to look more like a Facebook feed. The goal is to make Twitter more user-friendly and take out the confusion how the service works. This is advantageous for businesses looking to advertise on this platform, as previously blocks of texts were the only way to market on Twitter.

With the landscape of social media consistently changing, it is important that your marketing strategy is optimized for these changed. At EmoryDay we stay informed of the latest social media trends and use this to provide results. Contact us today for a free consultation to see how we can help address all of your marketing needs.

 

Get Started with EmoryDay

  • 1.
    Create a Free Account
  • 2.
    FREE Custom Marketing Plan (no obligation)
  • 3.
    Select only the services you want.
  • 1.
    Create a Free Account
  • 2.
    FREE Custom Marketing Plan
    (no obligation)
  • 3.
    Select only the services you want.