The last few years have seen the rise of social media as a viable area for serious business communications. Everything from marketing to investor relations can now be handled through these new media, and maintaining a company's social media presence has become a specialty in itself. How social media will change through 2014, and what it will mean to you, is now coming to light.
When the average person thinks about social media, what comes to mind is often status updates and quick tweets, but 2014 looks set to be the year that online communications specialists discover the power of images in social media. More platforms are supporting image formats, and some will even accept video posts. Look for opportunities to post creative, engaging visual content on Facebook, YouTube, and other sites that can handle the bandwidth demands.
Another trend that social media will have to obey in 2014 is the demand for mobility. It isn't enough to post updates with the idea that your audience is going to be reading them from the comfort of home. In 2014, more social media users than ever before are going to be browsing content from their phones and tablets. Learning to optimize content—especially images and video clips—for mobile users will give you an edge in attracting attention. Indeed, given that 84 percent of shoppers with smartphones will use their devices while shopping, it would be wasteful not to try to reach them at the point of sale.
Another major trend that's developing in the new media is aggregation. While the concept of news and communications aggregation goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, the practice languished through much of the last decade as social media stole the show. Sites such as Digg are back, however, largely as a result of embracing social media and reworking their platforms to more easily share items through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit.
Social media will also be taken more seriously as analytic tools in 2014. Applying Big Data-style analysis to the trillions of social media interactions available, businesses will spend 2014 getting better at predicting customer behavior, market trends, and likely outcomes to policy initiatives based on users' online interactions. A big part of a communications specialist's job will likely become interpreting data for such analyses, rather than generating it.
The year 2014 is full of promise. With ever-expanding social media options, improved functionality on most platforms, more mobile-friendly content, and successful efforts to integrate content across sites to better present a consistent message, 2014 is already showing the potential to be the year that future communications professionals look back on with respect.
(Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)
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