Social Media – Possible Game Changers in 2014

Posted on 18. December 2013

Before we all go into our well deserved Holiday Mode we would like to encourage you to take a moment to read this post with our opinion on the topic Social Media in 2014. If you follow the changes some platforms made or announced in 2013 you can maybe already guess what will become important for your business in 2014. But for those who are not following every single announcement or like to hear what we think, please read on to see our prediction for 2014.

Let us start with online videos. We think this will play a much more important role in 2014. Some social media experts pointed already last year out that 2013 is the year where you need to start a YouTube Channel and we think everyone who did will have an advantage in 2014. Not necessarily because of subscribers but because they already know what works for their business and what not. How much they need to invest in 2014 and how often they need to produce videos to keep their audience entertained and informed.

When talking about videos we need to talk about video advertisement too. Video ads will also become more important in 2014. But we think you should be careful because video ads can also become an annoying factor in 2014. You may have seen the announcement from Facebook regarding video ads in their newsfeed. We are sceptical and would like you to imagine the following to understand why we are not sure that this is a good idea. Imagine you login to your Facebook account and suddenly hundreds of video ads play their message at the same time. Well, even one or two at the same time will be annoying don’t you think? Now imagine your target group will get your video message on Facebook and the reaction might be that they are annoyed by it and do not buy your product or ask for your service just because of an automatically played video ad on Facebook.

Since we are on the topic. Did you noticed that the Rating System on your company Facebook Page is now much more visible? The rating system was implemented a while ago and is around for some time now, but was never really a big part of a company Facebook Page until recently. Now the problem is, and we know that as a fact, if you have only a few followers and even fewer rate your site just one bad rating and you end up with a low overall score. Bigger companies with many ratings may not need to concern themselves with this, but small business owner should. Because one bad rating and you suddenly have to deal with a two star overall rating and this can become a problem to encourage new customers to try your product and services.

We are sure you have noticed that videos are the main thing that will become more important in 2014, but we also would like to mention copyright issues on YouTube. If you create a video, upload this to YouTube and include any kind of footage, sound effect or music that is not 100% yours, it can happen that suddenly an ad, even if you are not monetizing your videos, is playing in front of your video. This is because of the Copyright ID system from YouTube which became an important debate in the YouTube Gamer Community. We posted about this in one of our previous posts which you can find here: “Google / YouTube Copyright controversy“

We hope that our post gave you a few ideas what to do in 2014 with your Social Media and Online Marketing Strategy and Budget. What do you think will become important and to watch out for in 2014? Leave a comment below and we wish everyone a Great Holliday Season.

Your teccrab Team