Is the use of social media marketing coming to an end? What lies ahead for businesses:

You wake up, bleary eyed, it’s a 7am Monday start. You stayed up all night finding new data to weave into your glittering blog posts, so now you’re too tired to think straight. You pick up your smart phone and check Facebook. Two of your friends have birthdays today, so you wish them well and post a virtual birthday cake to their wall, adding a cute Pusheen for good measure. One of your friends has tagged you in a post, ‘Jeremy Clarkson Sacked for Punching Producer’ – you’re fuming, so you repost immediately, adding an ‘angry’ emoticon to demonstrate your newfound rage. Then you check your newsfeed, there’s a link to a new restaurant opening in town, so you add yourself to the invite list and tag a few friends to come along with you. You then open up a group message to find out who’s up for paintballing at the weekend, using a 30% discount you received in an email from Groupon yesterday.

With Facebook done, you check your LinkedIn account, three new professional contacts, and four profile views. Not bad, but you really want that PR job advertised by Burberry on Vine,  and you know employers will check your profile, so you quickly edit your ‘Experience’ information to reflect the two-week training scheme you secured for a month’s time.

Then you check Twitter. And there’s Jeremy Clarkson again. This time you re-Tweet to your followers, with a link to an article by the Guardian, and ‘#outraged’ – this link is already trending, and you want your point across! Maybe you’ll even Tweet this to the BBC… or maybe not. Moments later a friend has favorited your tweet, and two more followers have re-Tweeted your link themselves.

You’re barely out of bed, and you’ve already promoted your name across the vast expanses if the internet, both professionally and personally, and interacted with various followers and friends.

Craig Newmark, ‘Craigslist’ founder, illustrates the diversity of social media, stating it is for ‘connecting online, for commerce, politics, and personally… it is a big part of our lives’, and Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, highlights the true effects social media has had on global relations, stating that ‘fifty years ago, emigrants left their families behind. Now… they simply enlarge their social networks, building truly global communities’ (). And this has proven a phenomenal tool for businesses, allowing publicity of the brand to spread throughout these ‘global communities’ and around the world, such as has been demonstrated by Coca-Cola, Sony, Primark, and Volkswagen – all powerful examples of Trustov’s Word of Mouth Theory (Trustov, 2009). Essentially, the global social media phenomenon has provided the perfect interface for businesses to utilise their most powerful tool for success – their followers.

Publicity and engagement via social media has always been heralded as an essential method of success for businesses, for example, even way back in 1967, Milgram ran a study to test connectivity across social media platforms, and concluded that the ‘convergence of communication chains through common individuals’ is key for business success. Now, social media has become the forefront of business interactions, whether it’s for sole traders, high-street firms, or big business names, and across every market and industry (Cudjoe, 2014).

Having only really taken hold in the last fifteen years, social media is accelerating at an alarming pace, now becoming a daily engagement for 1 in every 4 people worldwide (eMarketer, 2013), and experts are already warning businesses against the detrimental effect of not engaging with social media platforms (Rainie, 2010). But what lies in store for the future of social media marketing, and what does this mean for your business?

According to Princeton researchers, the social media platform, Facebook, will lose ‘80% of users by 2017’ (Garside, 2014). But is this just a result of past-paced social media cycle? In truth, very few social media platforms last more than a few years, with sites including Bebo and MySpace truly dead in the water, just a few years after their global take over (Arthur, 2009).

Facebook has done tremendously well to have survived as long as it has, having acquired a staggering 1.39 billion monthly active users (Noyes, 2015), and having secured its own film in the process (The Social Network, 2010). Nevertheless, are we perhaps seeing the start of a ‘privacy craze’ which has been looming over social media sites since their creation? It would appear that the need for increased privacy and data protection is becoming a desire for many users, people are ‘moving away from public sharing’ (Ross, 2015). With sites such as Facebook and Twitter making it a formal requirement of their ‘sign up policy’ that you grant them access to information on your personal account, mobile phone, computer, and emails, it would seem that want of privacy is a far cry for social media users at present but this doesn’t mean that the industry will not be reshaped to comply with user demands (Woollaston, 2014).

So what does this mean for your business?

With the popularity, and success, of social media marketing already clearly cut, it is very unlikely that use of these social platforms will ever cease for businesses. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that the shape of social media marketing won’t be undergoing radical transformations. New sites will, evidentially, be created, and blossom in popularity just as Facebook has, alike its now extinct predecessors. So how can your business keep ahead of the social media market? Here are my top three tips:

1.  It is more vital than ever that you, whether you’re a sole trader, high-street retailer, or multi-story business success, keep ahead of the social media market (Sprung, 2014). Keep engaging with new platforms as, and when, they rise to fame, because that is where your customers – and your revenues – will be heading. And one of the best way to do this is by keeping a check on social media Bloggers, Vloggers, Tweeter’s, and Posters! Put simply, follow people who make it their job to keep the world updated on all of the latest technological advancements that can assist your business. Here are a few suggestions of social media guru’s you can follow in Twitter (suggested by Harrison, 2013):

• Mashable (@mashable/social-media)
• David Pogue (@Pogue)
• Jeff Bullas (@jeffbullas)
• TechCrunch (@TechCrunch)
• Jordan Gillette (@JordanGillette)

For more tips to keep up to date with new social media developments and trends, check out this article by Anderson-Gray, 2014: http://bit.ly/1FocWpg. And remember, if you don’t interact with your customers on social media, your competitors will.

2. Just as importantly, you should link each of your social media platforms to one another, to maximise your engagement with customers (Conely, 2014). You can achieve this, for example, by tweeting about you exclusive Facebook offers, or posting on Facebook about your YouTube channel. More importantly, most social media sites will allow you to embed a call to action button (CTA) from one site to then next. ie, you can link you Facebook page to your Twitter page using a CTA.

This is a brilliant method of ensuring engagement on each platform, as well as promoting the publicity of the various branches of your social media campaign. For a fast and easy guide on how to do this, take a look at this article: http://bit.ly/1Kk8cko.

3. Finally, be brave. The world of social media had never been static, there are always new tools and app’s being developed to assist business’s using social media. For example, just a few months ago, Facebook launched a new tool to help businesses promote their events (see http://on.fb.me/1QwycNT) as well as a whole new package of tools to assist with brand publicity (See http://bit.ly/1ABKY4Y), which in February 2015, helped artist Zena Holloway achieve global fame:

For more information on Zena’s Facebook success story, take a look here: http://on.fb.me/1E8JKjU, However, be aware that not all of these new developments will work for you, or even be relevant to your business industry, but that doesn’t mean you should shut off all new methods of engagement entirely. They are simple little tools to revitalise you digital marketing campaign, and will help to keep customers engaged, rather than loosing interest in the same old site (Lele, 2015).

What are your thoughts on the future of social media? Share your comments below!

Article by Kayleigh McChambell

Sources:

Arthur, Charles, (2009), MySpace and Bebo are Running out of Friends,  The Guardian, available at: http://bit.ly/1GLq9d0;

Conely, Megan, (2014), A Beginners Guide to Social Media for Small Businesses, Social Media Examiner, available at: http://bit.ly/1ft7oJU;

Cudjoe, Dan, (2014), Customer-To-Customer Electronic Commerce: The Recent Picture, International Journal of Networks and Communications, Volume 4, Issue 2, pages 29 – 32;

eMarketer, (2013), Social Networking Reaches Nearly One in Four Around the World, Social Media eMarketer, available at: http://bit.ly/1dT40fp;

Garside, Juliette, (2014), Facebook Will Lose 80% of Users by 2017’, The Guardian, available at: http://bit.ly/1c4j6w5;

Harrison, Heather, (2013), Five Ways to Keep Up With Social Media, Outbound Engine, available at: http://bit.ly/1aGCEI4;

Lele, Shruti, (2015), Re-Engaging Dormant Users: Bringing Your App Back to Life, Business to Business Marketing Interventions, available at: http://bit.ly/1A1QWKL;

Milgram, Stanley, (1969), An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem, American Sociological Association, Volume 32, Issue 4, pages 425 – 443;

Noyes, Dan, (2015), The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics, Zephoria Internet Marketing Solutions, available at: http://bit.ly/1lbTJPy;

Rainie, Lee, (2010), Tech Experts Reflect on Social Media, Pew Research Centre, available at: http://pewrsr.ch/1cwvl8a;

Ross, Eleanor, (2015), Bye-bye Facebook: The Future of Social Media for Small Businesses, The Guardian, available at: http://bit.ly/1nBS5rs;

Sprung, Rachel, (2014), How to Consistently Keep Up With Social Media Trends, HubSpot, available at: http://bit.ly/Xqo7uJ;

Trusov, Michael, (2009), Word of Mouth Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Volume 73,  pages 90 – 102;

Woollaston, Victoria, (2014), Is Facebook Reading Your Texts?, Daily Mail Online, available at: http://dailym.ai/1d60MyG;