5 Biggest Ways Social Media Will Change in 2016

Here's how to stay one step ahead of the social curve.

Death and taxes used to be the only two things we could all rely on. Now we can add a third: that social media will roll out all sorts of weird changes. Entrepreneurs will then scratch their heads, wonder what this is all about, and finally jump on the bandwagon and try to catch up.

So before you scratch your heads, here's a heads-up. Five major changes are currently rumbling away in social media, and they're going to break out in 2016. You need to be ready for them.

1. Live Streaming Goes Mainstream

Live streaming is already out, but it's going to get bigger. Within months of its launch, Twitter's Periscope service already had 15 million registered users who could employ their smartphones to share instant content. Big companies have been quick to spot the opportunity. In July 2015, GE's Droneweek exercise took viewers into the company's factories and showed audiences, including the engineering graduates the company needs to attract, how jet engines, wind turbines, and locomotives are made and tested. The company got to tell its story through a week of live, authentic content.

Other kinds of content that companies can broadcast live include conferences, interviews, customer support, product demonstrations, and special offers. For small businesses, the select audiences who tune in are the most loyal customers. They're the people you want to hug closest, and live streaming brings them about as close as they can get. If you're not broadcasting live yet, expect to push up a Periscope in 2016.

2. On-Platform Content Opens Up

In 2015, Facebook snatched distribution from established content creators. Instead of publishers bringing Facebook users to their own websites, Facebook's Instant Articles program let publishers distribute their content on the social media platform. The content would load up to 10 times faster, more people would see it, and the publisher could earn advertising revenue. But the users would stay on Facebook, reducing the publisher's own brand value.

Despite the risks, 350 publications have now signed up, including The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post. More than 100 publications distribute their content through Instant Articles every day.

The program started on iPhones and expanded to Android devices at the end of 2015. It's still limited to select publishers, but expect registration to roll out more broadly--and force all of us to compare the benefits of showing our content on Facebook with the advantages of bringing users to our webpages.

3. Smarter Use of Snapchat

Of all the head-scratching moves in social media, few have created a greater risk of a bald spot than the rise of Snapchat. You spend time and money creating unique content for a targeted audience only to see that content disappear as soon as it's used. It's the exact opposite of the quick burst and slow burn that a good YouTube video or blog post can achieve.

And yet, companies as big as McDonald's, Acura, and Heineken have all waded in, keen to connect with the platform's young audience--and scared to be left behind.

The quality of the content has improved over the past couple of years, and it's going to get better. There are enough good case studies available now for anyone to be able churn out effective Snapchat content quickly and easily. Now that businesses no longer need to scratch their heads for good ideas, expect companies with youthful customers to start churning out disposable content.

4. Video Will Continue to Beat Static Content

At the start of 2015, the news was that Facebook users were posting 75 percent more videos than they were the previous year. In the U.S., it was closer to 100 percent, and Facebook was pushing 360 percent more video content into people's news feeds. Between April and November 2015, Facebook doubled average daily video views from four billion to eight billion. Even though the company counts a three-second glimpse as a "view," that's still a huge amount of video watching, and it shows how keen Mark Zuckerberg is to eat YouTube's lunch.

Those figures are only going to grow. Facebook has already made clear that it prefers video content to link posts and even images, so to build any kind of successful social media campaign, you will need to pull out a video camera and get shooting this year.

5. Virtual Reality Content Will Make Its First Appearance

When Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion in 2014, even the most savvy social media watchers were left bemused. But the idea is starting to become clear. Just as video is a more engaging form of content than still imagery, so virtual reality will be the next and most engaging step forward for content. The New York Times has already started creating virtual reality content that works with Google's Cardboard virtual reality viewer, and Paul McCartney invited a VR firm to film one of his concerts. It's still early days for virtual reality, but as we approach the end of the year, expect to see more moves toward a new kind of engaging content--and start scratching your head for a way to use it yourself.

Source :  http://bit.ly/1Q64UH5

What Can I Learn By Using Marketing Automation Software?

Ideally, marketing automation software allows companies to track, analyze, and nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into brand advocates. Marketing automation software introduces precision and process to both lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns through its ability to track, score, and assign leads efficiently.

To further illustrate these concepts, I’ve taken the liberty of breaking down the knowledge that can be gained from marketing automation software into three major areas of emphasis.

1. Lead Quality

Most prospects visiting your company’s website and consuming your content have not yet entered a purchase-ready mentality. As such, sending and assigning leads near the top of the sales funnel to the sales team annoys prospects and wastes sales representatives’ valuable time. Instead, marketers should offer educational content to advance the prospect down the sales funnel before assigning them to a sales rep. Marketing automation software makes this process easy by utilizing lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a practice of attributing point values to certain attributes or actions taken by leads to measure their fit for your products/services and readiness to make a purchase. Examples include:

• The company they work for
• The industry they work in
• Demographic information
• Volume of website visits
• Specific forms submitted (downloads and/or requests)
• Specific pages visited

When leads reach a certain score, they are automatically shared with a sales rep, and the rep can immediately see the contact’s history of interactions with your brand. In essence, the higher the score, the higher the priority for a sales touchpoint. This allows sales reps to use their time wisely, concentrating their efforts on highly qualified sales leads rather than wasting time on low-quality leads unlikely to convert. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning again this entire process is completely automated.

2. Buyer Journey

Another area of emphasis is the buyer journey. Marketing automation software also gives marketers the ability to understand a buyer’s journey from the very first encounter with the brand to the purchase (and beyond). This knowledge is critical to decreasing the sales cycle by presenting prospects with relevant content that will hasten the path to the purchase.

For example, ABC Company notices, through marketing automation, that 90% of their customers visit the company website at least three times, visit the pricing page, and request a consultation before making a purchase. Wouldn’t it be wise, then, for ABC Company to make it a goal to have every lead go through this journey? I know I would if I were them. Specifically, I would use lead nurturing emails to make sure they make it back to my website at least three times, obviously using the pricing page and consultation landing page as my featured email links. I may even redesign my website with this information in mind; if not my entire website, at least the homepage.

Tip: I would also encourage ABC Company to assign a significant point value to each of the proven high-conversion actions—i.e. three web visits, a visit to the pricing page, and a consultation request—when setting up their lead scoring.

The goal here is to use marketing automation software and tactics to discover trends that will shorten the sales cycle and convert more customers by using information relevant to the purchasing process identified through analytics. Say that five times fast…

3. ROI

Return. On. Investment. Every marketer and business executive seeks a clearer understanding of ROI, and it is not difficult to understand why. In its simplest form, the ROI metric is asking the question “Is it working?” With marketing automation software, that question is easy to answer. You can analyze a particular campaign as a whole and/or by each sub-element (ebook, blog post, social post, ad, etc.) to understand how many leads generated or nurtured by the campaign became customers. You can also determine whether the aggregate customer purchases stemming from the campaign outweighed the price of the campaign’s execution. Easy as pie.

There you have it! I hope this gives you a clearer understanding of the various things you can learn by using marketing automation software.

Source : http://bit.ly/1IcQdQA

14 WAYS TO SUCCESSFULLY MARKET YOUR STARTUP ON SOCIAL MEDIA

There was a time, not all that long ago, when social media didn’t exist – believe it or not. 

People actually read books, made phone calls, sent out hand-written invitations and kept photo albums. Oh how times have changed, for the younger generations anyway. Reports this year state that the number of social network users will rise to 1.73 billion, with the largest, Facebook, claiming to receive a whopping 1.49 billion monthly active users. Just take a minute to ruminate on that figure.

Whether we like it or not, social media has become a major part of our everyday lives, be it to communicate with friends, share pictures of our exotic forays, organise parties or, on a more serious note, grow a business. With the advent of social media, the ability to grow a startup by sharing, engaging and interacting has grown exponentially. Businesses now have a number of platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. – to launch and flourish, platforms that business of old were not privy to.

Here’s how to successfully market your start up on social media…

1. Have a social media strategy before you launch
2. Choose the right social networks that suit your audience
3. Designate budget wisely – the right ads in the right places can be of huge benefit
4. Have a 24/7 presence
5. Interact with your audience – let them know there is a person behind the screen, not a robot
6. Stay true to your brand’s theme – do not be tempted to stray for the sake of cheap hits
7. Follow like-minded people
8. Recruit specific social media roles – it is a full-time job, and its importance to the brand’s growth can not be underestimated
9. Regular reviews on performance
10. Collaborations with other companies, ideally with bigger audiences than your own – competitions, etc...
11. Create achievable goals
12. Don’t be afraid to think out the box
13. Use videos and images to create a strong aesthetic
14. Listen to your audience.

Source : http://bit.ly/1j16OeR

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