4 Social Media Trends for Entrepreneurs to Start 2015 Right
“Social media” plays an incredibly powerful role in marketing for small businesses and entrepreneurs and was one of the biggest buzzwords of 2014.
However, you can’t ride the first wave and hope to keep up with the crowd. As social media continues to be a great medium that you can use to engage your customers, you’ll need to be smarter and more savvy in 2015 to run with the big boys.
Social Media Trends for Entrepreneurs
Here are four major social media trends to hop on board with right now:
1. Create Bigger and “Outside of the Box” Social Media Marketing Messages
Thought leader Wade Foster from Zapier told Mashable that, due to the popularity and maturation of social media marketing, it will be harder for businesses to stand out in 2015. Therefore, you need to have a honed plan of attack.
Let’s face it…the Internet is a crowded place. Every day, it is continuously being filled with more and more content. And while there’s no limit to how much information is published, there is a limit to how long someone will spend consuming it.
If you want your social media marketing messages to stand out, here are a few things that you can do:
- Focus on mastering the art of creating compelling and clickable headlines
- Create and publish “epic content” that never gets old
- Add photos to all of your social media posts (statistic show that they outperform posts without photos)
Developing entrepreneurial strategies require creativity as well as practicality. Using equipment like a transportable card reader available from eCommerce vendors like Shopify can be integrated with your social media platforms.
In 2015, take a big step back and evaluate the quality of your content with a critical eye before jumping headfirst into a new year.
2. New Safeguards for Protecting Information
According to the Financial Post, due to hacks with popular social media apps that occurred in 2014, there’s been an increased demand for enhanced privacy controls. This means that you need to be careful about how you’re using your customers’ information, ensuring that it’s as secure as possible, and allowing people to browse anonymously if they wish.
The best way to communicate these precautions and reaffirm your business’s respect for user privacy is to spell it out in a Privacy Policy. Inform visitors exactly how their information will be tracked or how shared content will connect to their social media accounts.
3. More Functional and Formulaic Strategies
Ingrid Hansen from Launch Media advised Business News Daily that this year will bring the need for a more formulaic, focused approach to social media. Taking this step is important for the following reasons:
- Businesses can no longer rely on random posts to draw attention, and should instead review hard numbers and raw data to maximize customer engagement
- To gather important information that will help you effectively refine your social media marketing plan
- To understand how, why, and when users are sharing your content to better plan out your strategies for this year
4. Shareable Is the New Viral
Obviously, everyone wants their content to go viral. Whether you’re a blogger who’s posting art criticism or an entrepreneur trying to draw attention to a new product, the goal is to have your content explode across the Internet.
However, you also need to remember that having shareable, quality content for a specific audience can actually be more important than focusing all of your time and energy into making a post go viral.
Just because your content doesn’t get thousands of reblogs, retweets, or shares, doesn’t mean that it didn’t serve a purpose. What’s important is that it’s reaching the right audience where it will generate attention.
This is especially important if you’re in a narrower, specialized industry where your audience is naturally going to be smaller. They key is to evaluate your content based not only on general popularity, but popularity within your desired audience.
The overarching theme for social media marketing in 2015 that’s repeatedly emphasized by both thought leaders and industry professionals is the need for increased creativity and clever, new approaches to social media that aren’t based solely on posting and hoping for hits. Make it fun, make it engaging, and most importantly, make it valuable.
