What social media trend will be most significant in 2014?
We are delighted to welcome some of the UK’s top online experts to the Brainstorm Digital blog, to share their insight into the rapidly changing landscape of social media. Today they tell us what trends you must prepare for in 2014 to keep up with the competition!
Click here to read what trends they believe dominated in 2013.
Danny Bermant: Social media will become a lead generation tool
Businesses will stop looking down on social media as a marketing tool and start treating it as a lead-generation tool. Directors, particularly those in a sales role, have tended to treat social media as a time-wasting exercise where you engage in endless chatter with customers but don’t actually generate any business. That is all changing for two reasons:
- LinkedIn now has a proven track record as a lead-generation tool. In one survey, it was shown to convert nearly 3% of visitors into leads. Sales staff who previously made cold calls can either connect directly to prospects or be referred through contacts in their social networks
- Social media analytics have vastly improved. It’s now far easier to track the conversion of social interactions into sales and thus prove the success of your social media campaign. The days of using analytics simply to see how many visitors came to your site and the top pages they visited are also long gone. It’s now possible to track how individual prospects are using your website, allowing you to tailor the ads and content they see specially for them, and move them more quickly towards a sale
The answer is that every so often, Google changes the way it calculates which pages are most relevant when people search for a particular term. If you want your website to show up high on Google, you need to understand as much as possible about how Google decides pages are important. That’s the algorithm.
When your marketing budget is tight, it’s tempting to consider having your SEO done by an offshore company. But if you have to go down this route, at least take the trouble to ensure your SEO consultant has a good command of English.