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The social life of your content and ecosystem isn’t getting any less social and technologies keep evolving to demonstrate the increasing value of social platforms in your publishing strategy. There is a lot to watch for in the coming year, but here are 5 trends to consider as you look to the year ahead:

  1. Dynamic sharing will continue to grow. Publishers at the cutting edge will continue to find ways to encourage social sharing—by presenting what readers’ peers are talking about along with articles and products that meet the same criteria as their search. Data usage will become more streamlined to enable readers to keep up with what is trending and have more opportunities to enter a community dialogue.
  2. Paid Amplification will become more of a standard. Paid amplification, at the heart, is about more successfully targeting your social content for a greater ROI. It’s essentially an extension of your website’s individualization tactics and it requires highly targeted content to begin with. BtoB and BtoC businesses that successfully leverage paid amplification are better able to measure and target their social efforts. The end result? Higher traffic and engagement with their content
  3. Wearable technology will strengthen its foodhold. It’s no secret that wearable tech is becoming more social—you need only look to My Fitness Pal for an example of how easily wearable tech can interface and gain value through social platforms. But, what does that mean for niche BtoB publishers?  Right now, it’s simply a head’s up, because technologies like Google Glass are rapidly evolving and they focus on content consumption; even content creation. Like other wearable technology, people will be inclined to share what they are doing with their nifty gadgetry. Watch what is happening so that you can learn the best way to adapt content for wearable tech users.
  4. Mobile will only become more mobile. In addition to the hypermobility of wearable tech, we will continue to see a rise in mobile usage and apps. What was true last year, this time, is even truer now: BtoB publishers must continuously adapt with responsive design, not just by transferring content to mobile format, but by thinking mobile. Mobile behavior is its own animal and it increasingly manifests on social platforms. Confirm what social platforms capture the most attention from your audience and make sure their interaction there is easily mobile.
  5. Paid, Native Advertising AND eCommerce will expand. Facebook’s advertising changes alone are forcing BtoB and BtoC companies to become more directed and intentional in their approach to social advertising. They’ll be more effort and data to track ROI of social ads, as well as more options for advertising that include native ads. And, eCommerce will find its way into these ads and onto sites with Buy Now buttons already surfacing on Facebook and Twitter. This means you have more options for social advertising and hopefully, more opportunities to gather data for individualization and ROI, but it also means you’ll want to look at how that will continue to drive traffic and transactions on your own site.

Welcome to 2015! Welcome to the (social) jungle.