Social Ogilvy were the company that correctly predicted Facebook Zero back in 2014 (catch up on their article, ‘Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach‘). So when they shared their observations and predictions for 2015, we listened with bated breath! Culture Republic Executive Deborah Hair recently attended a social media session hosted by Social Ogilvy: here’s her pick of the top insights from the session:

1. This will be the year of Twitter Zero: whilst organic reach remains a useful tool to test best practice and approaches, it’s no longer enough to make your message heard. Twitter will soon be making a huge push towards paid advertising;
2. Just like Facebook before it, in 2015 ‘Twitter is bound to embrace algorithmic content sharing and move away from its traditional reverse chronological order format’, say Social Ogilvy;
3. ‘The number of people on Twitter has hit a plateau yet the volume of content published to twitter continues to accelerate’, Social Ogilvy suggest;
4. Twitter is seeking fresh ways to attract new users and to provide new experiences for these users;
5. Twitter has a suite of paid products with around 400 targeting options, including post code targeting. ‘Delivering editorial content via sophisticated targeting can deliver massive performance benefits’, say Social Ogilvy
6. Twitter have produced a series of ‘Twitter cards’ – these can drive engagement from your tweets & measure the impact, and are broken down into three categories:
   1. Products: sell products for retail
   2. Leads: generate more leads for email marketing and boost your CRM
   3. App downloads.
7. The highest engagement seen so far on a Twitter ad in the USA was the Super Bowl. In the UK, the John Lewis Christmas advert took the top spot.
8. Twitter e-commerce is being beta-tested in the US: we’ll soon be seeing BUY buttons in our newsfeeds.
9. Video ads rule – and Facebook is where it’s happening! Facebook is seeing a steady growth in video uploads, whilst YouTube video posts are diminishing.  Facebook finally outdid YouTube on the video front, in December 2014 – good news for audience interaction, as nearly 80% of all video interaction is now happening on Facebook.
10. Watch out: times they are a-changing, and a‘Youth Internet’ is coming  …
11. According to the Global Web Index, Snapchat was the fastest growing social network of 2014.
12. Most popular videos (measured in terms of highest engagement) are between 30 seconds and 2 minutes long. The rule of thumb is to keep it short, but remember: content is king! (So long as the content is good …)

Here at Culture Republic, we’ve seen that more and more cultural organisations are trialling online advertising. Here’s a great example from our friends down at The Audience Agency, who are using a Twitter Advert with a link to ‘sign up’ to their newsletter by clicking the button. Click, and Twitter will kindly fill the necessary fields automatically for you:

Don't forget to sign-up for our monthly newsletter which has news, jobs & details of all the top sector events https://t.co/Ykh9AS4JtH

— The Audience Agency (@audienceagents) August 26, 2014

If you’re feeling inspired to rise to the challenge and take your social media to the next level in 2015, get in touch: we’d be delighted to work with you!