While social media is con­stant­ly evolv­ing, one thing remains unchanged as 2015 approach­es: at its core, social media is all about hav­ing a two-way con­ver­sa­tion with your audi­ence. Visu­al con­tent, paid ampli­fi­ca­tion, and mobile are a few trends that will dic­tate strat­e­gy and invest­ment adjust­ments for many brands, but social should con­tin­ue to sup­port your brand’s goals and help build rela­tion­ships with your audi­ence, as well as build­ing author­i­ty and trust. As SAP CMO Jonathan Bech­er said ear­li­er this year, “Social is an enabler, not a goal in itself.” Here are insights and pre­dic­tions from 19 of the top social media experts on what we should expect to see in 2015.

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Jason Burby, President, Americas at POSSIBLE

Two trends to watch:

• Using brand­ed con­tent to ampli­fy engage­ment through social. The key to this is com­ing up with authen­tic and rel­e­vant ideas and chan­nels that hit the brand’s audi­ence. Depend­ing on your audi­ence you can be more heavy-hand­ed with the tie to the brand; in oth­er cas­es, if you are too heavy-hand­ed, the audi­ence will reject it com­plete­ly. Where a lot of brands are strug­gling is around the rel­e­van­cy stand­point and how to cre­ate that con­tent in a time­ly scaleable man­ner at a rea­son­able cost. Brands are also strug­gling with defin­ing suc­cess when doing these things, a lot of peo­ple talk about engage­ment but don’t look at what that real­ly means for their busi­ness near-term and long-term. Start and end with a sim­ple ques­tion: “Does it Work?” By focus­ing on that up front we force the con­ver­sa­tion to define what suc­cess looks like upfront and then use that to mea­sure the suc­cess over time.
• Real-time mar­ket­ing. RTM is anoth­er top­ic a lot of brands are look­ing at and con­sid­er­ing how to sys­tem­atize on an ongo­ing basis again in a way that can suc­cess­ful­ly scale. RTM requires the abil­i­ty to lis­ten and take advan­tage of appro­pri­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties and then lever­age media to dri­ve when it takes off. This requires allow­ing free­dom for quick respons­es, but also a strong under­stand­ing of brand voice to make sure con­sis­ten­cy is there.

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Lisa Buyer, Author of “Social PR Secrets”

LinkedIn blue will be the new social media black for 2015 when it comes to pro­fes­sion­al net­work­ing and oppor­tu­ni­ties. The LinkedIn defin­i­tive pub­lish­ing plat­form intro­duced ear­ly this year is prime play to build a pro­fes­sion­al brand and for a com­pa­ny to claim stake in thought lead­er­ship posi­tion­ing. Since any­one can now post long-form con­tent, com­pa­nies now can lever­age an army of employ­ee brand advo­cates to estab­lish a deep­er rela­tion­ship with an audi­ence. But it will take a plan that calls for edi­to­r­i­al coor­di­na­tion, orga­ni­za­tion, cal­en­dars, and a team of ded­i­cat­ed exec­u­tives who can deliv­er con­tent. Match up the per­son­al con­tent pub­lish­ing with the a brand’s LinkedIn Page’s Com­pa­ny updates and Groups and then add some spon­sored updates in the form of social adver­tis­ing on Face­book and you’re reach­ing new audi­ence heights. The 5‑Step LinkedIn to-Do List for 2015

1. Select a con­tent coor­di­na­tor.
2. Iden­ti­fy 5+ authors with­in your com­pa­ny to be part of the LinkedIn edi­to­r­i­al team of writ­ers.
3. Pub­lish arti­cles and then cross pro­mote to your Com­pa­ny Page, Spon­sored Updates (remem­ber to always use a strong visu­al).
4. Imple­ment an employ­ee shar­ing plan.
5. Mon­i­tor the feed­back, com­ments, and inter­ac­tions on the author’s per­son­al pro­files and also track ana­lyt­ics for the LinkedIn Com­pa­ny Page as well as refer­ring traf­fic to your web­site or blog via Google Ana­lyt­ics.

Tip: Pay atten­tion to audi­ence tar­get­ing to lever­age expo­sure to get the right con­tent in front of the right audi­ence.

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Mel Carson, Founder of Delightful Communications

Busi­ness­es will final­ly wake up to the fact that social media and mobile mar­ket­ing are no longer new phe­nom­e­na and should be inte­grat­ed right from the start of any mar­ket­ing cam­paign or inbound ini­tia­tive. The future of dig­i­tal lies in com­pa­nies being social and mobile by design!

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Victoria Edwards, Digital Content Strategist at Florida Blue

One of the biggest trends for social media in 2015 will be using more bud­get to help ampli­fy your con­tent’s mes­sage. I also feel that more depart­ments across enter­pris­es will become more aware of how social media can aid in their efforts, which will in turn start to break down walls.

Brands will cre­ate con­tent that will be more cus­tomized for the spe­cif­ic audi­ence, and will also have a tighter con­nec­tion with PR.

Mar­keters and deci­sion-mak­ers will real­ize that social media isn’t free any longer, but if invest­ed in, can be very reward­ing.

• On Face­book, we will still have to pay more and more mon­ey to show our mes­sage to the audi­ences we are try­ing to tar­get.
• Twit­ter will con­tin­ue be still be a neces­si­ty for brands to remain rel­e­vant, but we will have to be super cre­ative (and also spend mon­ey) for our mes­sage to be ampli­fied.
• Insta­gram will also only become more impor­tant for mar­keters. Cre­ativ­i­ty in mes­sag­ing is key so Insta­gram­mers of the world will see, lis­ten, and engage.

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Barry Feldman, Marketing Consultant at FeldmanCreative

For mar­keters… We’ll see the fas­ci­na­tion with all things social wear off a bit with the mass­es that expect­ed mir­a­cles sim­ply because they showed up. On the flip side, those who appre­ci­ate the remark­able oppor­tu­ni­ties new media presents, will rock our world by treat­ing us to amaz­ing­ly orig­i­nal and engag­ing con­tent.

For the media… The net­works you love are like­ly to become hard­er to stay in love with as they begin to, or con­tin­ue to, real­ize their ad-dri­ven, rev­enue-earn­ing, board-pleas­ing aspi­ra­tions.

Brands should deter­mine what they’re try­ing to accom­plish and forge a plan to do it. Most sim­ply pro­mote links to their con­tent.

I think Google+ will remain the high-pow­ered, but high­ly ignored net­work it is now. I real­ly love Google+, but it’s sim­ply not unique enough to light up the net or take the lead on any front. Those that dig into it seem to get a lot out of it. Long-term, I sus­pect its impact will be min­i­mal, but I want to be wrong.

Every year brings cool new tools. But lis­ten­ing, isn’t a tool. It’s a skill, a rare one. A very small per­cent­age of online mar­keters under­stand how social media presents the most amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty ever for gain­ing insights into how con­sumers think and feel. Those mar­keters are like­ly to do great things.

Social media’s just get­ting warmed up. I’m not say­ing brands will invest wise­ly, but yeah, wal­lets shall con­tin­ue to open.

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Natalie Henley, Vice President, Marketing at Volume Nine

The lines of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing (social vs. con­tent vs. SEO vs. PR, etc.) are going to get blur­ri­er in 2015. Brands active­ly focused on max­i­miz­ing returns are going to real­ize the best social media pro­grams hap­pen in tan­dem with these oth­er dis­ci­plines.

Addi­tion­al­ly, brands that haven’t fig­ured out visu­al con­tent are going to be real­ly behind the times. Trends like the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of Insta­gram, or the val­ue of pay­ing to boost visu­al con­tent in Face­book (which by the way, you real­ly should be doing), just show us the grow­ing demand of con­sumers who want cus­tom imagery. This, in turn, real­ly is lead­ing to a shift of qual­i­ty vs. quan­ti­ty.

Tying this all togeth­er:

In the past a “good” social share may have been to tweet the title of a quick blog post that you paid a third par­ty writer $50 to throw togeth­er for you. Now, that same process is pay­ing that writer con­sid­er­ably more, tak­ing the time to devel­op a com­pelling top­ic and rich con­tent, adding a cus­tom image (as well as incor­po­rat­ing tags like Open Graph and Twit­ter Card, with sizes and mes­sages appro­pri­ate for those plat­forms), cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple social posts to share that sin­gle piece of con­tent and final­ly pay­ing to boost those posts.

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Simon Heseltine, Senior Director at AOL

Over recent years, in Spain, Ger­many, and Bel­gium we’ve seen news pub­lish­ers fight with Google as to whether they have the right to use snip­pets of their work to dri­ve traf­fic to them. Face­book seems to be spoil­ing for the same fight in 2015. They’ve decid­ed that rather than send pre­cious users away from them when they click on an arti­cle, they’re actu­al­ly going to host that arti­cle them­selves and share the ad rev­enue with the pub­lish­er.

For those that don’t opt in, they run the risk of los­ing that traf­fic source, and ced­ing it to their com­peti­tors. For those that do opt in, they’re basi­cal­ly pay­ing Face­book for the traf­fic they’re get­ting, through the ad rev­enue split. If this works, look for Face­book to iden­ti­fy oth­er ways of keep­ing users with­in their walled gar­den, mak­ing them almost like the por­tals of yore.

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Kelsey Jones, Managing Editor of Search Engine Journal

I think more and more brands will be focus­ing on per­son­al­ized ser­vice. We’ve all seen those great exam­ples of brands going above and beyond to fix some­thing for a cus­tomer fast (e.g., I wrote about how Delta was my sav­ior way back in 2011 on my per­son­al blog) but I think there will be even more of a shift to cer­tain employ­ees becom­ing brand cham­pi­ons or “fig­ure­heads” of com­pa­nies on social media.

I think cus­tomers appre­ci­ate when they real­ize they are talk­ing to a spe­cif­ic per­son. It real­ly makes a dif­fer­ence when a brand’s Twit­ter account ends the tweet with the per­son who wrote the tweet­’s ini­tials, because then it shows that it’s real peo­ple behind the pub­lic face of the com­pa­ny. It cre­ates con­nec­tions; it makes your employ­ees some­one cus­tomers feel they can reach out to, instead of throw­ing their request into the vir­tu­al cir­cus of cus­tomer ser­vice and hop­ing some­one will respond.

Whether it’s Google+, Face­book groups/pages, or Twit­ter, mak­ing the peo­ple who han­dle your social media more vis­i­ble is going to increase engage­ment and the trust fac­tor of your com­pa­ny (espe­cial­ly if they come through and ensure cus­tomers have a great expe­ri­ence with your prod­ucts and ser­vices).

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Douglas Karr, CMO at Circupress

Accord­ing to a recent report, 5 out of 6 social media inquiries to busi­ness go unan­swered. Con­sumers are view­ing the medi­um as means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with busi­ness­es, but busi­ness­es are still view­ing social media as sole­ly a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. This gap con­tin­ues to widen each year and it’s hurt­ing busi­ness. Brands should be pri­or­i­tiz­ing their com­mu­ni­ca­tion on social media by:

1. Respond­ing to direct requests and ensur­ing issues are brought to a con­clu­sion.
2. Pro­vid­ing val­ue to their com­mu­ni­ty beyond the brand’s prod­ucts and capa­bil­i­ties – build­ing author­i­ty and trust with them.
3. Pro­mot­ing them­selves active­ly with social adver­tis­ing.
4. Mea­sur­ing response and share of voice against their com­pe­ti­tion.

Social lis­ten­ing plat­forms will con­tin­ue to evolve with auto­mat­ed rout­ing and intel­li­gent respons­es. Com­pa­nies who invest and respond via social lis­ten­ing will see improved reten­tion, and increased cus­tomer val­ue.

Google+ will con­tin­ue to be a niche audi­ence, but hang­outs and YouTube inte­gra­tion will con­tin­ue to pro­pel it for­ward as com­pa­nies see the oppor­tu­ni­ties in shar­ing real-time video.

Image-cen­tric net­works will need to improve mon­e­ti­za­tion for their own liveli­hood – incor­po­rat­ing both paid pro­mo­tion and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inte­grate cam­paign track­ing and calls-to-action (e.g., click the image and go to a pur­chase).

Brand invest­ment must be revised in 2015 but the con­tin­ued “direct attri­bu­tion” mod­el needs amend­ed. Indi­rect attri­bu­tion and improved cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion must be inte­grat­ed into invest­ment analy­sis so com­pa­nies can see the total return on social media analy­sis.

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Sean Murricane, Senior Social Media Specialist at TwentySix

For brands, social net­works, led of course by Face­book, have made it clear: the free lunch is over. Paid-for has to be a part of your strat­e­gy.

Social media can’t sit in iso­la­tion any more. Few­er and few­er com­pa­nies are employ­ing ded­i­cat­ed social media peo­ple, espe­cial­ly at a senior lev­el, because they’re real­iz­ing that it’s now as essen­tial a part of an inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing and cus­tomer rela­tions approach.

The temp­ta­tion is still there to attempt to find ways of forc­ing tra­di­tion­al cus­tomer acqui­si­tion activ­i­ties or income chan­nel on social. I hope that 2015 is the year that more and more orga­ni­za­tions “get” social at the senior lev­el. The rea­sons for hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with your cus­tomers should be obvi­ous. Don’t just sell to them.

Social lis­ten­ing has seen great leaps in the last year, and the chal­lenge now is what to do with all the data and knowl­edge they’ve been build­ing up. We know more than ever about the audi­ence each brand has, and where the tar­get audi­ences are – so cre­at­ing con­tent that both retains the loy­al fol­low­ing while appeal­ing to the tar­get audi­ence will be the big chal­lenge.

A mul­ti-chan­nel approach is essen­tial to reach­ing your dif­fer­ent audi­ences in dif­fer­ent ways.

I’ve nev­er been a huge pro­po­nent of Google+, and feel like it’s always been this nice lit­tle plat­form that’s had a loy­al fol­low­ing, and it’s not going to be a Face­book beat­er. But nei­ther it should be. The func­tion­al­i­ty on there is strong, and it’s a bit of a relief that Google have cut loose a lot of the require­ments to sign up. I doubt 2015 will be “The Year of Google+”.

We’ve start­ed to see the first gen­uine celebri­ties emerge from these chan­nels in the last year – more and more oth­er chan­nels will start to pick up on these peo­ple. Although that end­ed fair­ly dis­as­trous­ly for ITV2 this year, you can expect to see more radio and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties emerge through the Vine, YouTube, and Insta­gram route when in the past they would have to work their way up through Hos­pi­tal or Stu­dent Radio or TV.

Invest­ment in social media is going to be cru­cial­ly impor­tant, but bring it in right at the start of the plan­ning process – don’t just let the tra­di­tion­al PR and mar­ket­ing teams go and sort out their cam­paigns, then take them to social and say “Can you do us a hash­tag?”

“How will this play out on social?” should be asked right at the start along with “How will this play out in the Press?”

To sum up: Social’s no longer an emerg­ing trend – it’s a part of how peo­ple expect to inter­act with your brand.

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Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing

For social media, there are three big trends worth watch­ing and act­ing on for 2015:

1. Social media is no longer organ­ic: Grow­ing mon­e­ti­za­tion by social net­works will dimin­ish organ­ic ampli­fi­ca­tion to near insignif­i­cant lev­els. At the same time, social plat­forms will pro­vide even more effec­tive adver­tis­ing options to reach spe­cif­ic audi­ence tar­gets. Accord­ing to BIA Kelsey, U.S. Social Media Adver­tis­ing Rev­enues are expect­ed to reach $15B by 2018.
2. Social media is most­ly mobile: Social net­work­ing and adver­tis­ing on mobile devices will con­tin­ue to explode in pop­u­lar­i­ty among con­sumers. Nielsen reports that more time is spent on the Inter­net through smart­phones than PCs and half of smart­phone own­ers vis­it social net­works on their devices dai­ly.
3. Social media is inte­grat­ed: Savvy brands will be invest­ing even more in social tech­nolo­gies across the orga­ni­za­tion from social busi­ness plat­forms to fos­ter inter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tion and effi­cien­cy to exter­nal par­tic­i­pa­tion mar­ket­ing efforts to crowd­source con­tent with brand social net­works. IDC expects the world­wide enter­prise social net­works mar­ket rev­enue to grow from $1.24 bil­lion in 2013 to $3.5 bil­lion by 2018.

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Erik Qualman, Author of “Socialnomics”, “What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube”

Social and mobile aren’t emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, they are merg­ing tech­nolo­gies. You will see a mas­sive shift in focus and heavy invest­ments into brands start­ing to pro­duce “in-house” video.

Keep­ing in mind that now over 50 per­cent of site traf­fic is com­ing from mobile and that by 2017 it’s pre­dict­ed that two-thirds of all con­sump­tion on the mobile device will be video. We will begin to see in 2015 deep invest­ments into mobile video that can be eas­i­ly shared via social.

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Adam Schoenfeld, CEO of Simply Measured

In the future, we expect to see com­pa­nies rely­ing on social data to influ­ence busi­ness deci­sions beyond the mar­ket­ing depart­ment. There is an increas­ing inter­est in how social media affects all areas of the busi­ness, includ­ing sales, recruit­ing, cus­tomer sup­port and mar­ket research. Mar­keters were the first to har­ness social data, but the strate­gic insights you can gain from social ana­lyt­ics play an impor­tant role for all areas of the com­pa­ny.

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Michelle Stinson-Ross Social Media Strategist at Offers.com

As social media mar­ket­ing has matured, I think 2015 will be the year that some brands start pulling away from the pack with high invest­ment con­tent. What do I mean by high invest­ment con­tent? Few­er pieces of con­tent and more invest­ment of time, bud­get, and cre­ativ­i­ty in tru­ly out­stand­ing con­tent pieces.

The ten­den­cy to crank out con­tent on a dai­ly basis has con­tributed to a lot of noise across all the social chan­nels. Face­book in par­tic­u­lar has spent the last year mak­ing it plain to brands that they will be buried in the user news feeds unless they cre­ate some­thing tru­ly amaz­ing or impact­ful.

I think that ful­ly pro­duced sto­ry­telling videos will be a large part of that trend to high invest­ment con­tent. Face­book wants more native video. Google+ is open­ing doors to video con­tent cre­ation via the Google+ hang­outs.

Con­tent is king, but bril­liant con­tent will be emper­or in 2015.

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Bas van den Beld, Founder of State of Digital

I’d say a big trend at the moment is the use of video and Linkedin. Social media mar­keters are mak­ing full use of ser­vices like Vine and Insta­gram to give peo­ple a visu­al expe­ri­ence. Peo­ple also like to share visu­als so the use of ser­vices like these, and espe­cial­ly video, is under­stand­able.

Linkedin opened up its pub­lish­er plat­form recent­ly, which means it’s now much more than just a plat­form to exchange job infor­ma­tion.

Brands should be aware to not over­share on these plat­forms, but seri­ous­ly tar­get. Use video and Linkedin in a way that their audi­ence will appre­ci­ate it, not just because it’s a trend. It means the con­tent shared should be in line with the expec­ta­tions of the audi­ence.

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Iris Vermeren, Community Manager at Brandwatch

Real-time: Oreo’s exquis­ite­ly timed “Dunk in the Dark” tweet dur­ing the Super­Bowl 2013 taught us one thing: real-time social media mar­ket­ing is the future. By hav­ing a packed social media com­mand cen­ter in place for the event, the cook­ie brand was able to cap­ture the real-time vibe and go viral.

Watch for a rise in cross-net­work, real-time cam­paigns and events next year. Some mar­keters still chase their dai­ly mean­der­ings in “favorites”, “likes”, “shares” and oth­er imme­di­ate (point­less) met­rics. The most suc­cess­ful ones will have ever more cus­tomer data, mon­i­tor­ing trends every minute of the day, capa­ble of faster adap­tion, short­er lead times, and always-on, real-time mar­ket­ing. Instead of the next quar­ter or the next month, the focal point for the best becomes the next hour or minute.

Pre­pare to pay: Over the last year, Face­book and oth­er social net­works have all but killed the organ­ic reach of your page posts, leav­ing you with no choice but to pay for expo­sure or hope for shares from your dimin­ish­ing reach. As oth­er plat­forms get their ad prod­ucts launched – Insta­gram and Pin­ter­est recent­ly intro­duced ads and pro­mot­ed pins – spend­ing there will rise. Social media is no longer a “free ride”. So be pre­pared to spend more of your bud­get in social adver­tis­ing. With the recent devel­op­ments, this trend is like­ly to grow.

Mobile-friend­ly Con­tent: By 2017, 87 per­cent of con­nect­ed devices sales will be tablets and smart­phones, accord­ing to Forbes. Due to the rapid­ly grow­ing, wide­spread use of smart­phones, tablets and oth­er devices, opti­miz­ing con­tent that’s acces­si­ble to mobile users will become the norm!

Wear­able tech will surge (Apple Watch, Athos, etc.) which will put an even greater empha­sis on mobile for many com­pa­nies. There will be more inte­gra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy with our dai­ly lives and habits, mean­ing more chances of hit­ting your audi­ence with rel­e­vant mes­sages when they mat­ter, and less effec­tive­ness of broad­cast­ing mes­sages.

Social Lis­ten­ing: If I had to pick three futur­is­tic devel­op­ments in social lis­ten­ing, they would be the appli­ca­tion of social data in more places across orga­ni­za­tions, the actu­al social media pur­chas­ing itself (e.g., the recent­ly announced Twit­ter buy but­ton) and the increas­ing use of pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics.

The huge amount of human inter­ac­tions and data flow­ing through social media today has increased vis­i­bil­i­ty for brands and sim­pli­fied online research. Online reviews and rat­ings have gained sig­nif­i­cant promi­nence. Social media has become a podi­um for brands and helps them bet­ter under­stand how to res­onate with their audi­ence.

Every day, we’re hear­ing from our clients how impor­tant deep lis­ten­ing and ana­lyt­ics are. The indus­try is def­i­nite­ly mov­ing toward deep lis­ten­ing that informs and pro­vides holis­tic social intel­li­gence that is action­able and impacts busi­ness and cam­paign deci­sions.

Ana­lyz­ing what your cus­tomers, com­peti­tors and oth­er stake­hold­ers have to say about your brand is para­mount, but his­tor­i­cal data and real-time lis­ten­ing will only get you so far.

More impor­tant is the way busi­ness­es will act upon this infor­ma­tion and how they will grasp oppor­tu­ni­ties. Brands need to be able to spot issues before they devel­op into a cri­sis. Using social lis­ten­ing tools will help them detect which con­ver­sa­tions could lead to a great head­line sto­ry, a new busi­ness idea or even a con­vert­ed cus­tomer.

The only way to stay ahead of the curve is to not only under­stand what your stake­hold­ers are say­ing, but also what they might say. When brands rec­og­nize how pow­er­ful data can be, they can’t help but be com­pelled to act on it – hence this shift that we’re expe­ri­enc­ing towards putting social data on big walls, in oper­a­tion cen­ters, in front of the C‑suite, in people’s hands.

Even­tu­al­ly, the brands that will come out on top are the ones will pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next. They will make the most of the bil­lions of con­ver­sa­tions online to tru­ly inno­vate and look beyond past hap­pen­ings.

Google+: Let’s face it. Many of us are still fig­ur­ing out Google+. It’s main­ly a hub for dig­i­tal and tech-mind­ed peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in the B2B space. Google+ lacks the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, mak­ing it chal­leng­ing to gen­er­ate as much engage­ment. But despite Google’s des­per­ate attempts to fur­ther pop­u­lar­ize its social net­work, orga­ni­za­tions don’t have choice but to join if they want to improve their SEO rank­ings. It’s part of the Google empire and can help remain rel­e­vant in search, find­ing and build­ing rela­tion­ships with influ­encers and it can strength­en your indus­try author­i­ty.

Image shar­ing net­works: Insta­gram, Pin­ter­est, Vine, Snapchat all of these net­works fore­saw the impor­tance of visu­al con­tent and grasped the oppor­tu­ni­ty accord­ing­ly. Twit­ter revamped its entire time­line design to bet­ter incor­po­rate pic­tures and ani­mat­ed GIFs. Five tweets in every sec­ond con­tain a Vine link.

We can expect to see a surge in visu­al con­tent (pic­tures, graphs, short clips, etc.) of which the most rel­e­vant and tar­get­ed ones will dom­i­nate the scene.

What’s excit­ing is that new data tech­nol­o­gy will be even more ground­break­ing in the next year. Com­put­ing pow­er is get­ting faster, lighter and thin­ner. Visu­al social intel­li­gence is ris­ing. Expect to see pow­er­ful new ways to visu­al­ly com­pre­hend data, bench­mark and ana­lyze cam­paigns para­mount to sur­viv­ing in com­pet­i­tive indus­tries.

Brand invest­ment: For as long as social media mar­ket­ing has been around, brands have strug­gled with how to deter­mine return on invest­ment. What’s the right amount, and how much should we focus on paid or tra­di­tion­al sales tech­niques, vs. new social media approach­es?

Paid social media place­ments are afford­able as opposed to tra­di­tion­al media, but your best bet is to try it out and see how it works with your audi­ence. Your clients expect to have two-way con­ver­sa­tions with your brand on social media. They expect their com­plaints or com­ments will be attend­ed to quick­ly. It’s para­mount to have a social pres­ence, to have a ded­i­cat­ed team of com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and have a pro­to­col in place of lis­ten­ing and engag­ing with stake­hold­ers.

The most pop­u­lar social chan­nels, espe­cial­ly Face­book, are push­ing more toward mon­e­tiz­ing. Put sim­ply, if you want to reach your audi­ence on those plat­forms. It will make sense to allo­cate more spend­ing there in the future.

The met­rics avail­able in social lis­ten­ing plat­forms are great, and they’re real­ly use­ful for opti­miz­ing your cam­paigns and jus­ti­fy the impact of your invest­ments. How­ev­er, brands have to be more sophis­ti­cat­ed in the way that they under­stand their own busi­ness objec­tives, apply them to the social space and devel­op stats and sto­ries that tell some­thing use­ful.

The solu­tion to the strug­gle of mea­sur­ing your ROI is to focus on inter­nal met­rics and mea­sures of suc­cess, rather than exter­nal ones. If you’re a car deal­er, what is a test dri­ve worth? Or what is it worth when some­one finds the phone num­ber to a deal­er­ship after see­ing it on your web­site? Brands should ask for more input from mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers. It requires a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tion with your research depart­ments, mar­ket­ing and sales teams to deter­mine what cer­tain behav­iors are worth. Even­tu­al­ly, we’ll start see­ing these attri­bu­tion mod­els mature.

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Tessa Wegert, Communications Director at Enlighten

We’ll see more inno­va­tion with regard to inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. This year we watched Mer­cedes-Benz build a native car con­fig­u­ra­tor tool on Insta­gram. An inter­ac­tive “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style Tum­blr is being used to pro­mote the film “Exists.” 2015 is sure to bring more cam­paigns that tie inter­ac­tiv­i­ty to social media plat­forms in order to boost engage­ment.

One of the best things a brand can do to opti­mize social media is to view social as a nec­es­sary com­po­nent of all pro­mo­tion­al activ­i­ties, from con­tent strat­e­gy to SEO and PR.

Many brands are still try­ing to wrap their heads around social media mar­ket­ing inte­gra­tion. With regard to social lis­ten­ing, I think we’ll see a boost­ed effort to mon­i­tor com­peti­tors and indus­try chat­ter, rather than brand con­ver­sa­tions alone.

Both brands and con­sumers are rec­og­niz­ing that there are added ben­e­fits to using Google+ that go beyond the net­work itself. For busi­ness­es, it’s greater expo­sure on Google and high lev­els of brand engage­ment. For con­sumers it’s fea­tures like map inte­gra­tion and more rel­e­vant ads. Next year may not be the tip­ping point, but Google Plus is grow­ing stronger every day.

Apart from more inter­ac­tive cam­paigns, I think we’ll see plat­forms like Pin­ter­est and Vine get more buy-in from For­tune 100 com­pa­nies. Last year Williams-Sono­ma pub­licly laud­ed Pin­ter­est for dri­ving sales, and GE is going all-in with its use of Tum­blr and Vine. Visu­al mar­ket­ing will be viewed not as one aspect of social media, but as a chan­nel all its own.

The social media invest­ment esti­mates I’ve seen for 2015 seem con­ser­v­a­tive. Spend­ing is bound to go up, but with so many indus­try reports and case stud­ies com­ing out in favor of social media mar­ket­ing I would­n’t be at all sur­prised if spends are revised.

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Kelly Wrather, Senior Manager of Content Marketing at Kenshoo

As smart­phones, tablets, and wear­able tech­nolo­gies become fur­ther embed­ded in our day-to-day lives, apps and cross-device inter­ac­tion will become more impor­tant to mar­ket­ing efforts.

One of the biggest social media trends is the grow­ing impor­tance of mobile, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in social adver­tis­ing. Per eMar­keter, mobile adver­tis­ing is on track to com­prise 68 per­cent and 84 per­cent of rev­enue for Face­book and Twit­ter, respec­tive­ly, by the end of this year.

Social chan­nels are step­ping up mobile offer­ings to help brands bet­ter con­nect with key audi­ences across devices. Look no fur­ther than Facebook’s relaunch of Atlas, roll­out of its Audi­ence Net­work, and intro­duc­tion of local aware­ness ads for exam­ples of the grow­ing mobile stake.

This scale in mobile, cou­pled with improved tar­get­ing and the rich social sig­nals avail­able, make mobile-social a key oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands.

With­in the app space, it will become more impor­tant for social mar­keters to dri­ve not just installs, but also track more down-stream activ­i­ty, tar­get re-engage­ment, and under­stand con­sumer life­time val­ue.

Brands will be poised to win if they start to look at social more holis­ti­cal­ly, across devices as well as chan­nels, and begin to apply cross-chan­nel and cross-device insights to bet­ter opti­mize efforts.

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Ashley Zeckman, Director of Marketing at Benovate

There are two major shifts already tak­ing hold of social media that will only be ampli­fied in 2015.

• Con­sumers have already began block­ing out brands and con­tent that feel auto­mat­ed. In order for a brand to show real val­ue in 2015, they’re going to have to look and feel like real peo­ple. Con­sumers buy based on trust and emo­tion, so hav­ing a pow­er­ful voice behind your brand is a must.
• Mar­keters must begin incor­po­rat­ing paid adver­tis­ing into their social media tac­tics. Plat­forms like Face­book have made it appar­ent that if you don’t invest, your audi­ence (organ­ic or oth­er­wise) will not even see your con­tent, let alone inter­act with it. In 2015 I pre­dict that mar­keters will begin to become much more savvy about when it makes sense to invest in social boost­ing or adver­tis­ing and when organ­ic reach will suf­fice.