The change or the rise in social media is unmatched by any other Internet phenomenon. To put things in perspective, within a span of seven years – between 2005 and 2012 – social networking sites have gone from their being in their nascent stages to being the most popularly visited sites on the Internet. Most importantly, social networks have now moved onto the mobile platform in a big way.
In 2005 – there was no Twitter, YouTube or iPhones and Facebook was available only to students on exclusive college campuses. Total online advertisement revenue was a mere $12.5 billion. Fast forward to 2012 and more than half of all mobile phone users have smartphones, Twitter sees more than 400 million tweets every day, Facebook has over a billion registered users and YouTube gets over three billion views every day. So will this exponential growth continue and what can we expect next? Watch Chief Strategic Officer of Mashable – Adam Ostrow, talk about the future of content marketing in this video.
Challenges faced by online publishers – rise of mobile and social networking
Social media and content marketing experts are seeing a drastic change in the way people are consuming content. Consumers are increasingly going mobile. This is a major challenge for publishers and news sites. Recent studies have shown that social networks are driving more traffic to the news sites than ever before. As Adam points out, these studies have also shown that more and more users are utilizing their smartphones to access online content and getting their news from social networks.
This poses a lot of challenges for online publishers. Firstly, they now have to create content that can be viewed without hitches on mobile platforms and screens. Secondly, news publishers must now fight with friends and family members on social networks to deliver breaking news content to the users. Thirdly, online publishers must change their advertising strategies as online ads are not fully tapping the power of social media and mobile technology. Lastly, publishers and content creators must be technologically advanced and have the latest technologies to deliver content effectively.
How can publishers adapt?
Adam Ostrow has some answers to this question. Most importantly, companies and publishers must start building responsive websites. A responsive website is one that acts differently depending on the device it is being viewed from. It optimizes itself depending on the screen-size and device platform to give users the best viewing experience. He says that even ads should adopt this technology and infinite scroll technology so that there are no on-viewable ads on websites. He also adds that content should be more visual, as in, more images and videos should be published as this drives people to share the content more.
Although the need to keep up with technology is essential for content marketing success, content and social media marketers must remember that creating compelling content is of the utmost importance. Taking examples of brands like Oreo and their gay support campaign, Adam demonstrates how brands have been very successful with small pieces of compelling content. To know what else he thinks about the future of content marketing, watch the video.