Social Media Marketing Trends 2015

In the current landscape of social, four things matter most: calculating social ROI, providing social customer care, creating winning content and the rise of native video on Facebook. Stay on the winning end of the spectrum by staying on top of these social marketing trends.

Social ROI: Not A Wild Goose Chase

The world of big data means that clients think everything is reportable. Social ROI is the topic of the moment - how can you know whether your social media efforts connect to the bottom line? Although that number is elusive, it’s not unattainable. The best way to track ROI is to look towards conversions (however a specific brand chooses to define those).

Our data shows a clear connection between social Interactions and Site visits. That’s a very powerful data point that you can take to a client that is asking to see how social media performance and spend translate into business. Provide this information and you will solidify yourself as the authority on anything social.

Social Customer Care: Unmet Demand

We’ve been talking about social customer care for years. The value that lies in creating an efficient process for taking care of the growing demand for customer care on Facebook and Twitter is immense - that’s why we recommend brands to be Socially Devoted. That means answering at least 65% of customer questions over a quarter. Unfortunately, the vast majority of brands are still far from optimizing their social customer care.

Let your clients know that they can’t truly reap the benefits of social media without investing in an online community that prospects can count on for answers to their questions. To truly revolutionize your social customer care, track Question Response Rate and Time and try to improve there first (we’ve got the perfect tool for that!).

It really pays: Socially Devoted brands get 3.5 times more Interactions on Facebook. That means a higher Reach and more Impressions without added ad spend.

Content Quality Control

There’s certainly no shortage of content on social. Individual brands post thousands of pieces daily - on their own. Audience attention is not elastic and so starts the battle of the brands for even the slightest bit of attention.

To stay relevant to your audience and keep fueling a relationship with a customer or nurtured prospect, you need to be able to create great content - and forego the hard sell. Your audience will quickly disengage from your social media presence or content if they feel like they are being sold to without getting any value, be it entertaining, educating or informative, and that will have an effect on purchasing behavior. What does this mean for an agency doing social for their client? It means constantly monitoring which content audiences like best, which content gets the most interactions in a region, vertical, and smaller segments - and you need to be able to report it.

The Rise of Native Video

The move to native social video publishing is proving to be a worthwhile one for Facebook. Not only has the amount of videos published on Facebook overcome the amount published via YouTube, video is also now the content type that is most likely to succeed in the News Feed. That’s right: videos on average get a better organic reach than photos, the long-thought to be king of content-types on Facebook and Twitter.

And Facebook isn’t the only platform that’s jumping on the video train: Twitter allows users to share Vines and will soon roll out native publishing, Instagram has native video publishing and Hyperlapse, you can even pin videos to Pinterest and share them on LinkedIn. Content creators need to stay ahead of this trend, or their competition will stay ahead of them. Establishing a sustainable and scalable video creation strategy will be to the benefit of both brands creating content in-house, and, of course, the agencies that do it for them.

There’s a reason brands are moving to native Facebook video - it’s where the most active audience is. The keys are to produce videos fit to purpose for different platforms and track the right platform-specific metrics against the competition. We’re committed to staying on top of the most important developments in the market and provide you with the tools to navigate them.

As video becomes the dominant medium, the quest for virality will become increasingly futile..

As you see more and more videos uploaded to social, the end-goal of going viral with them disappears. Video becomes just like any content-type - create more for reaching different segments of the audience and expect the same amount of Interactions as with any other highly saturated content-type.

Social at the Heart of Every Campaign

Although social media has become such a significant part of our lives, there are still only a few companies - 5% by our measure - that take full advantage of all that social can do. These brands are situationally aware, integrating social internally and building external strategies around a social media core. With the right tools and measurement strategies, you can build entire campaigns around social data.

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Putting social at the heart of every campaign means knowing how social ties into larger marketing and business goals. Integrating social seamlessly to support awareness, promotion, and relationship nurturing goals will make it possible to finally calculate that ever-elusive social ROI and prove more concrete value to the client. Knowing how to create winning content, get a relevant audience to engage with it, and then bring those leads to conversion is what will set you apart from your competition in the eyes of your prospects.

The secret to creating truly advanced social presence for your client is measuring social success. In this lies a great value: social is an environment where you can easily track what works and doesn’t and then turn the dials to where they need to be.

Social Media Measurement is Evolving

The benefits of focusing on social:

• Posting engaging content for the right target audience means more conversions
• Doing social customer care right means saving money on Impressions and operational costs.
• Driving brand loyalty through nurtured relationships on social.

The Importance of Interactions

If the most important thing online is conversions, then the most important thing on social is Interactions. The more people engage with your content, the bigger audience you will get - giving you more opportunities for conversions. Agencies saw 65% more interactions for their clients within 3 months of starting to use Socialbakers Analytics. Deep social analytics can really work for your brand. For an example of how, take a look at the 41? 29! case study below.

How Agencies Can Stay on the Cutting Edge of Social

Having an in-depth understanding of social, current trends, and measuring performance does not create value in and of itself. Agencies looking to create a reputation as social media experts and stay ahead of their competition should always stay ahead of trends, but also know how to use their knowledge to keep their own business healthy

Using Analytics When Pitching

• Do Your Homework. Come to the pitch having analyzed your prospect’s current social efforts (and their competition’s) and telling them how you plan to improve the situation
• Be Prepared. Even if you didn’t prepare: if a prospect asks a tough question, just pull up their stats in seconds and build from that using a social data tool like Socialbakers Analytics
• Poach Clients. With Socialbakers Analytics you can see which prospects are not doing well on social and can approach them with the data and pitch a better game plan than their current representation’s.
• Analyze Their Competition. With concrete data on the most important metrics of social media performance. You can place a client on the map with their competition and pitch them a strategy to better the situation.
• Stand Out From The Competition. Use a tool like Socialbakers Promoted Post Detection, which shows you how a client and their competition are using ad spend and whether this is cost efficient, or should be changed, and show them that there are services only you can provide.

Providing Expertise to Existing Clients

• Be More Creative. Build a strategy from a deep understanding of the market and how to move the needle on the most important metrics.
• Be Reliable. Create a relationship with your client that will foster the feeling of reliability - deliver exact data, on time, and draw from a massive data-set for the most accurate data points.
• Drive Their Success. To truly create great communications on behalf of your clients, be their data interpreter and the reliable and respected advisor they need.
• Keep an Eye on Your Clients’ Competitive Landscape. it’s a basic building block of comprehensive representation and will make them feel taken care of.

If you take anything away from this study, let it be these points

• There is a clear connection between social Interactions and Site visits. That’s a very powerful data point you can use to build a solid ROI metric for your clients.
• The rise of native video on social media channels is picking up speed. Make good use of it!
• Come to the pitch prepared with data that goes beyond the freely available. Look at the competition, at the industry and find the perfect spot to aim for with your prospective client.