Come new year and every professional is busy making their predictions of the domain that they work in! it is a natural human trend to do so, especially because we are living in a fast-changing world. What distinguishes a prediction for a traditional industry as opposed to the digital marketing world is that in the latter, you will often find two grads in a garage changing the whole scenario within the span of a few months! Keeping such sweeping changes aside, here are my top digital marketing predictions of 2015:
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Twitter on SERPs: Hashtags, tweets and retweets, the world of Twitter will show a stronger presence on the SERPs. Twitter is looking to conquer the SEO zone and their focus will be to stamp their presence of the SERPs. Search results will increasingly contain URLs links from Twitter. Indexing on Google will have a face change when Twitter begins to mark a dominant role on the SERPs.
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Facebook Search: Of late, Facebook is showing a growing fondness for search crawlers, primarily because they want to fine-tune their ad offers. It remains to be seen whether Facebook launches its own search engine algorithm or simply ties up with a search engine, like they did and severed with Bing. You can, however, definitely expect Facebook to come up with something that puts them squarely on the search engine scene.
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Google’s Instant Answers: Google is playing the game with their single-point agenda: make the internet and Google more user-friendly. Keeping in tune with that motto, expect Google’s instant answers to provide more information and options than never before. While previously you could simply come across the answers, Google is now looking at tie-ins with several online vendors. Who knows you might be able to book cabs or movie tickets through the instant answers functionality!
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Content Advertising: Content advertising or recommendation is the way forward for most major brands online. That much has already happened in 2014. In this year, I expect platforms like Outbrain or Taboola will be picked up by the big boys of the digital marketing arena like Yahoo! or even Google. There are smaller fries as well, like Zemanta or Zegnet. Acquisitions are definitely on the cards in this segment and that is entirely because of the need for content promotion and recommendations.
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Pinterest Rises: The use of promoted pins on the ‘in’ social networking site Pinterest will be the next tool for digital marketers. The brands that already have a strong presence on Facebook will look to diversify and capture more eyeballs. The ad model of Pinterest that is already launched after the customary beta phase. With the use of this ad machinery, brands will look to spread their presence over Pinterest, especially B2C digital marketers. Two reasons for the rise and rise of Pinterest in the estimate of digital marketers: better engagement and untapped consumer base.
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No Threat to Google: Question is: which brand challenges Google anyway? It is Amazon, according to critics who say that for commercial searches, it has become the go-to destination for online shoppers instead of Google. True, Google will love to get that consumer numbers on this own site but its position is not really threatened. Here’s why: those consumers are already gone and Google won’t waste resources trying to woo them back! What they are doing instead is blending the mobile devices with desktop or laptop computers through the Android and Chrome platforms. That keeps them very much ahead of the curve in terms of eyeballs and consumer base.
