Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2013
Last year at this time, I wishfully predicted that social media would settle down and evolve into “just another type of digital media” in 2012. That didn’t happen. If anything, social media is more prominent as a category than ever. More new media options, more growth, some maturity and plateauing, but more enthusiasm than ever among marketers.
I hope my predictions for 2013 will be more accurate! Here is what I am seeing for next year.
Behavioral analytics
Last year I predicted the arrival of more and better analytics and measurement for social media marketing. In large part, this has come true in 2012. But the trend will continue in 2013, in the behavioral marketing direction. Companies are collecting customer and prospect behavioral data across a variety of platforms—social media channels, display advertising, e-commerce, email, mobile—modeling their expected future behavior in response to various marketing actions, and seeking to refine their messaging and targeting for better results over time. At last, real database marketing is being applied to social media.
Social selling
So far, marketers have mostly applied social media to such uses as building awareness and engagement, solving customer service problems—and hoping to tie social media activities to revenue results. But now social media are finally showing their ability in big-time selling situations.
I ran across a fascinating example of this at the DMA12 conference in Las Vegas in October, where Cheryl Mikovch of IBM shared the story of how the marketing team that supports inside sales has enabled reps over the past couple of years to use social media to identify opportunity and deepen their account relationships. Tactically, the process features a “rep page,” where every inside sales rep has a dedicated URL, filled with social media tools, to build his or her web presence and engage in direct communications. The marketing department provides professionally written content, some fed automatically to the rep page, and some available for the reps to pick up according to their needs.
The result? For one of IBM’s public cloud offerings, 15% of the business closed via inside sales could be attributed to the social selling effort. Examples like this suggest that social selling will go mainstream, gaining wider adoption among sales departments in 2013.
Caption: IBM inside sales rep Kelly Meade’s web page contains her Twitter feed, a self-introductory video, plus plenty of articles and links, helping her identify new business opportunity and close sales faster.
Social media as the new brand presence
Brands have traditionally established their presence in the marketplace with paid advertising, plus, in the last 10 years, a robust website. But social media are increasingly playing a major role in that job, adding ways to more proactively gather contacts and develop relationships as part of the brand presence online.
As an example of how social media are taking the lead in establishing brand presence, consider the new Hollywood media agency, theAudience, which specializes in using social media to promote new movies. TheAudience has a track record of achieving sell-out attendance by developing a network of followers for new movie launches, without any paid advertising.
But websites and paid ads will not be fully replaced by Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. More likely, social media will continue to work in tandem with traditional media, each playing to its own strengths.
More and better content to stem defection
Un-follows and un-likes will continue to grow on social media. Data from ExactTarget’s study “The Social Break-up” shows that the top reasons for ending a relationship in social media are that the posts were too frequent (44%) and the content became boring over time (38%). So marketers will be challenged to find ways to keep their content fresh, exciting and relevant, to build and sustain relationships over the long haul. This means sounder content marketing strategies, a maniacal attention to defection rates, and continuous fine-tuning.
But the third reason (26%) for breaking off the relationship is that the follower only signed up to take advantage of a one-time promotion. So marketers must also be sensitive to the nature of this type of subscriber, and develop special strategies to convert them to a higher level of engagement.
Personal branding as a way of life
Consumers and business people alike are realizing that their online personas have a growing impact on both their everyday lives and their professional careers. Rather than letting their personal brands evolve organically, individuals will make more proactive efforts to build and manage their images online, benefiting from the guidance of an emerging community of personal brand experts like William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson. This means establishing a unique brand positioning, and developing a set of active and consistent messaging across Internet media, especially social networks, to explain who they are and what are their capabilities. Personal branding is no longer just for celebrities; with the rise of social media, it is for everyone.
Social media expands way beyond marketing
While social media was quickly adopted for marketing purposes, its value is beginning to spread more broadly. For example, managers are beginning to recognize social media as a potential employee productivity tool. A 2012 McKinsey study suggests that companies can improve white collar “knowledge worker” productivity as much as 25% through platforms that allow easy information sharing. The enterprise supply-chain software company E2open is exploring ways that social media can be used to predict consumer demand, collaborate with trading partners, and resolve issues in logistics and manufacturing processes.
It looks like the opportunity for social media’s contribution to business and society is still wide open.