Top 5 Social Media Marketing Trends in 2014

Since its inception as mere sharing the info on social platforms, Social Media Marketing (SMM) has come a long way and become one of the most effective and powerful means of advertising products, services or brand. Now SMM is an integral element of internet marketing.

Let’s see the top most social media marketing trends which have already set in with the beginning of 2014:-

Social Listening

Social listening allows you to interact directly with customers. It’s not just about setting up a HootSuite account or watching your tweets, it’s about listening and responding strategically.

Here are some core aspects about this trend-

• Understanding is the key. Is this about a growing trend? Is the hype due to great advertising or a patented product? You need to grasp the full picture before you respond.
• Bear an intention of delivering mutual value. When you are willing to dole out better service and remarkable value, you will be surprised to see your customers drop some level of privacy.
• Rather than simply trespassing upon the customer’s privacy, display how listening builds up the relationships.

Social Advertising

Social advertising is indeed luring, but only a fraction of digital marketers find their social advertising plans effective and giving out great results. Social ad options can be really confusing many times, so you need to have a plan in mind before starting with ads.

• Establish achievable marketing goals
• Set a considerable budget
• Know about the needs of your audience
• Select your channels
• Check out the level of competition
• Optimize your website - especially the landing pages
• Create 2 or 3 versions of ad copy and experiment

Email marketing

Social media has made email more powerful and effective tactic of advertising a brand. E-mail marketing can help you stay in the attention radar of your customers. By encouraging your e-mail subscribers to connect with you on Facebook, twitter or LinkedIn, you can increase your social visibility.

• Incorporate your popular email content into Facebook & Twitter status updates and vice versa
• Put teasers of upcoming emails as Facebook status updates
• Use email subject lines to optimize Facebook ad headlines

Maintaining a social media team

Keeping a dedicated team for your social media marketing is the key to SM success. Generally, companies keep only one person team for this purpose, but having more than 1 person would be a great idea. Read below the tips of keeping your team dedicated to the

social marketing success-

• Be aware of what you want to achieve from SMM. For this choose your target social networks wisely.
• Chart a smooth workflow process and schedule daily time for routine social media activities, for example, listening and monitoring, posting updates, networking and the like.
• Generate genuine and good quality content including blog posts, images, videos, graphics etc., which will be posted on regular basis.

Keeping tab on social media ROI

It is important to measure social media ROI. If not, you will not be able to understand how and to what extent social media marketing can benefit your business.

Define clear and measurable social media goals to start with. This could be brand awareness (Facebook likes), lead generation (email opt-ins and content downloads) and customer retention (comparing costs of retaining a SM customer with that of a non-media customer).

These are few latest Social Media Marketing trends which have gathering speed in business this year. If any of the above you haven’t yet taken under your wings, discover about that and start experimenting.