Lots of Joomal website owners wish they would have had a crystal ball to help them keep up with social marketing trends at the beginning of 2014.
Nobody can go back and repeat last year, but it will be helpful to prepare for this year. Consider these social marketing trends for 2015:
1. Graphics And Videos Grow In Popularity
Don't ignore powerful and popular social networking, graphical or video websites like YouTube, Instagram, and Vine. These sites are still thriving and growing in popularity.
Even with text-based social sites like FaceBook or Twitter, mixing in some videos, photos, or infographics can help improve click-through-ratios (CTRs).
2. People Check Social Networks On Handheld Devices
More and more people are using their smart phones and tablet computers to check Facebook, Twitter, etc. That means that your website needs to be designed to look and perform just as well on a small smart phone monitor as it does on a desktop or laptop computer.
If you haven't already taken this step, make sure that your website has a responsive design, so it is ready to take advantage of clicks from handheld computer users. "Responsive" simply means that the site can respond to different kinds of displays.
3. People Also Search On Their TV Sets
This is almost the opposite of the point above, but more and more people are either using those web sticks, game systems, or web-enabled TV sets to check the Internet. How does your Joomla website look on a flat screen TV? Again, websites must be able to respond to a variety of different kinds of displays. These could be very tiny or incredibly large.
4. Facebook Grows Even More More Competitive And Expensive
Most social marketers already know that they don't get as much traction out of their Facebook fan pages as they used to. Even if a site has thousands of fans, it is likely that only a fraction of these people will see posts unless they are very heavily shared or commented upon.
This forces more Facebook users to pay for more exposure, and the cost of this exposure is increasing. This increased cost could come in the form of paying for post exposure or putting more effort into making sure that those original posts generate a lot of user activity.
Something New Will Surprise Social Marketers
The one thing that most webmasters can count on is getting surprised by some new trend during the course of twelve months. For example, Ello is a new social marketing website that is still in the invite-only stage. However, it promises to become the anti-Facebook because it addresses privacy and invasive advertising concerns.
In any case, be sure to check back with jInbound during the course of the year to stay updated and add your own new discoveries about changes in social marketing.