Keeping tabs on your Social Media in the New Year

As we head into a new year, it seems that social media will continue to play a vital role in most businesses’ online marketing strategies.

Nowadays, social media is ubiquitous, not just in terms of personal use but also for the growth, exposure and public relations of a business.

CEOs are spending much of their online efforts focused on management of their company’s social media accounts and researching new opportunities they could put to work. Some of them try to be active on as many networks as possible, while others focus their efforts on one or two platforms, updating them diligently in hopes of building a tight-knit, engaged audience.

So what is the best solution for combating your customers’ ever decreasing attention span and developing a foolproof social media and online strategy? The short answer is, “There is none.”

An online strategy is different for every business because, to be effective, it needs to focus on the customer – where they spend their time online, how they interact with businesses they frequent and how they consume their news.

While it’s difficult to make predictions about anything on the web, I can speculate that a few social media trends will most likely continue to develop this year. Knowing what’s on the horizon can help you decide how to distribute your social efforts and advertising dollars, thus shaping your overall online marketing strategy.

Niche social networks

When people sit down to watch a TV show, they aren’t just watching the program. You probably can bet they are checking into their program with GetGlue, a social media platform that lets users check-in to TV shows and movies they are watching. There are hundreds of niche social networks. My personal favorite is Untappd, a social network for craft beer connoisseurs. Businesses that take advantage of niche social networks within their marketplace will be the ones that are remembered.

Advertising on mobile platforms

Mobile advertising will become a viable solution for businesses looking to advertise online. Facebook is already doing this through promoted posts, an advertising option where advertisers pay to promote their page or page posts in the news feed.

Traffic from mobile

With an increase in smartphone purchases in the past couple of years, there will come an inevitable increase in mobile internet usage. Businesses should consider where their traffic is coming from, whether it be to their website or social media outlets. How well or poorly your content is displayed on a mobile device could make or break a sale. It also could mean the difference between keeping customers’ attention or having them boot you off their social sphere with a dreaded “unlike.”

Internal communications

Not all social media usage is about turning a profit. This year, more companies will turn to social media for internal communications. Why interrupt your co-worker with a question when you can ask them less intrusively with a Skype message? Successful businesses will adopt social media as a tool for internal communication and company promotion rather than banning employees from using it.

Connected accounts

Big players like Twitter will introduce their own content scheduling and management tools. Facebook has done this already with its Pages app. Also expect more connectivity between your personal and business social accounts.

Managing big data

It all comes down to numbers and questions like, “How much revenue did this social media campaign bring in?” Business owners and advertisers often are left wondering if their social media efforts are making a difference. This year, data management within social networks and by third-party tools will be better aggregated into tangible results.

5 Predictions for Social Media in 2013

2012 saw many significant developments for social media, with the industry continuing to establish itself as a serious contender for marketing budget and tools embedding themselves as part of everyday life, from the Wii U's in-game social networking capabilities to the use of mass-market social networks during regime changes in the Middle East.

What can we expect to see over the next year? Here are my five predictions for social media in 2013...

1. Internal investment expands

The creation of community manager and social media manager roles has exploded over the past two years, with an increasing number of companies realising social marketing and community building is not something that can either be done as a side-line or by a couple of interns. In fact, the big news yesterday was that Nike have taken the whole of their social media marketing inhouse in order to 'get closer to their customers'. We've seen plenty of self-created crises this year which could have been avoided by a judicious hiring strategy focused on quality. In addition, social media marketing is becoming fragmented, requiring specialists for specific elements such as content strategy and customer service. This will lead to either greater internal training for existing specialist teams, or recruitment for specialists into the social team.

2. Social budgets decentralise

Traditionally, the social budget has either come out of the Marketing or Technology pots. As social media activities become more embedded into other departments and as companies move towards a hub and spoke model as outlined by Jeremiah Owyang, we will see a move from most of the social budget coming out of the traditional departments and instead spread out across multiple teams, as they each run their own activities.

3. Content creation grows in importance and becomes more targetted

Econsultancy recently found that only 38% of companies surveyed had a content strategy in place, but 90% believed it would become more important over the next 12 months. As the importance of an effective plan for content creation for social spaces is recognised, we will see several changes over the next year. There will be an influx of editorial specialists focused on social media content creation. Brands will use more varied forms of media, with a focus on images and video as tablets with better screen estate enter the home en masse. Finally there will be less one-size-fits-all content and more targeted custom messages based on behavioural data.

4. Social TV and the second-screen spread

As more web-integrated TVs and other media devices enter the living room, Social TV will finally gain mass-market traction. We've already seen people's interest in using social networks to discuss TV live (and worked around a number of TV-streamed events such as the Royal Wedding and the FA Cup Finalamongst many others) and this year media companies and technology brands will aim to provide a fully integrated social experience.

Neilsen have recently introduced the Neilsen Twitter TV Rating, which they’re hoping to turn into the standard metric for measuring the conversation that a TV show spurs on Twitter.  This new rating, aimed at advertisers, claims to provide the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming, and complements the existing TV ratings. In other words, an extra arm of monetisation is being added to social telly.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in tablet sales which looks set to continue in 2013. Along with innovation in second-screen usage by companies such as Nintendo with its Wii U heralding an attempt at more fulfilling live interactions between gamers, a world with an augmented TV experience is not far away.

5. Social Business gains a foothold

Over the past 4 years, brands have gradually invested into social media marketing as they have seen the benefits in opening themselves up and reaching out to customers. Social Media teams have grown, generally around Marketing Department efforts, and established themselves either as centralised resource or as a source of knowledge and training for other departments to tap into. However, 2013 will be the year when a select group of forward-focused companies take the lead and start integrating social, not just as a customer engagement function, but as a fundamental element of all business functions. No more silos; rather a holistic embedding of engagement principles acting as the glue between the enterprise of employees and the community of customers, supporting the overall business strategy.

Facebook Privacy Changes

Facebook is announcing a handful of privacy-related changes today; a couple that make it simpler for users to access and change their personal settings and another that may make a small percentage of the user base upset (what’s new, right?).

First up, Facebook is adding a privacy shortcut tab that follows users around as they explore the site. The new privacy shortcut will appear on the right of the top header, next to your name, profile picture, “home” button and settings button. The shortcuts menu will feature things like “who can see my stuff,” and “who can contact me.” The shortcut will make is easier for users to quickly choose who gets to see their content.

Facebook is also improving the Activity Log to make it easier for users to interact with all the information that is being shared and what is showing up on their Timelines and friends’ news feeds.

“The updated Activity Log has new navigation, so you can easily review your own activity on Facebook, such as your likes and comments, photos of you, and posts you’ve been tagged in. It also has new ways to sort information, for example: Now you can quickly see public photos you’re tagged in and have hidden from your timeline, but which still appear in other places on Facebook,” says Facebook.

Users also have the ability to manage photo removal requests for large sets of photos they are taged in. The new tool within the Activity Log also lets users untag multiple photos at the same time.

Another big change involves third-party apps. Facebook is turning the single permission into two separate permissions. Now apps must ask users for the ability to grab their personal info separately from asking them to be allowed to post on their behalf. This will go into effect for most apps – but some like games apps on Facebook.com will not require the two-stage app permission.

There’s also been a little bit of a language shift within the permissions. Instead of asking to access a user’s “basic info,” it now asks to access their “public profile and friend list.”

All of these changes will go into effect by year’s end, according to Facebook. Since all of them improve the visibility of privacy controls, most users will probably be ok with them. One change that users may not initially warm to is this: Facebook is getting rid of the ability for users to disallow their name from appearing when users searched it in the serach bar. Here’s what they have to say:

Facebook started as a directory service for college students, and today we offer a whole variety of services, such as news feed, photo uploads and mobile messaging. As our services have evolved, our settings have, too.
Everyone used to have a setting called “Who can look up my timeline by name,” which controlled if someone could be found when other people typed their name into the Facebook search bar. The setting was very limited in scope, and didn’t prevent people from finding others in many other ways across the site.

Because of the limited nature of the setting, we removed it for people who weren’t using it, and have built new, contextual tools, along with education about how to use them. In the coming weeks, we’ll be retiring this setting for the small percentage of people who still have it.

Although Facebook says that they’re nixing this feature because nobody really used it, you can’t help but think about the possibility of Facebook search whenever the company does something to improve their own search results.

This is a pretty significant stir to Facebook’s privacy stew. This big announcement comes on the heels of Facebook’s latest (and last) Site Governance vote, in which the company adopted new proposed policy changes involving the sharing of info with affiliates, as well as the ability for users to vote on future site changes.