Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2014

Many marketers still find social media a hard nut to crack. Despite having years of experience, they find difficulty in using social media to attract more visitors to their website and drive real ROI.

2013 is almost at its end and 2014 is around the corner. Experts have predicted 2014 to be a year for content and social media marketing. If you are still not confident in using social media to drive your marketing efforts, this is probably the last chance to polish your social media skills and make a big difference in all your marketing efforts.

social media marketing
Want success? Focus on content and social media marketing in 2014

Below are some of the probable social media marketing trends that a marketer should know about to be successful in 2014:

Create a social media governance policy

Though this is not directly related to marketing, it can definitely have a very strong influence on your marketing and on your business as a whole. Not only businesses, but individuals are also quite active on social media these days. A business needs to connect with its employees on social media for better branding. A business should have a well-written social media governance policy for its employees. The policy must be able to clearly state the Do’s and Don’ts of interacting with the company on social networking sites.

Concentrate on content distribution

In a recent post by Forrester, analyst Ryan Skinner shows proper distribution of content is as important as creating a quality content. Skinner’s post quotes Jonathan Perelman of BuzzFeed saying, “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”

A marketer should concentrate not only on creating high quality content but also on distributing the content. You can continue to focus on using paid, owned or earned media to increase the distribution of your branded content, but social media can still be used as a support tool to distribute content to relevant audiences on social networking sites.  

Google+ will become a major player

While Facebook continues to lead the list of social networking sites with 1.15 billion active users, Google+ is fast catching up. It has the second highest number of active monthly users – 343 million. Marketers cannot afford to think of Google+ as just another social networking site. It’s increasingly becoming an essential part of SEO and is also important to provide users a personalized search experience.  Google+ has an integral role in the Google Authorship program, which experts believe, will be the chief element in Google’s search algorithm by 2014.

Image-centric networking

2013 has witnessed the rise of image centric and video centric networking. Visual content is gradually occupying an important part in content marketing.  Popularity of networking sites like “Pinterest” clearly shows this new trend. Some other image-based social networking sites are Slideshare, Path and Tumblr.

LinkedIn will play a major role in B2B business growth

Though many digital marketers feel LinkedIn is dead, in reality it’s not. With 238 million users LinkedIn still plays a very important role in social media marketing. With the launch of LinkedIn Influencers program , it’s positioning itself as one of the premiere sources for creating and collecting content for professionals.  LinkedIn is expected to play an important role in digital marketing in 2014.

About the Author: Kevin John is a Content Marketing Specialist at iTeleCenter, a virtual phone system for small businesses. He has written about business, real estate and lifestyle for more than a decade. Follow Kevin John @kevinjohnaa