At the beginning of each year, everyone tries to forecast what will emerge onto the digital landscape over the next twelve months. We at Fission are throwing our names into the hat with these three predictions of social media and digital trends in 2015.

1. Mobile Everything.

In 2015, having a website without having an intuitive and fluid mobile version of it is organizational suicide. Mobile is the future of everything, as Forbes’ Joshua Steimle declared last February, and it affects anyone who has anything to offer. Steimle wrote:

If you own a restaurant, mobile is how people are deciding where to have lunch today and dinner tomorrow. If your business is self storage, people are now reserving storage units online, after they’ve loaded up the truck with junk and are already driving around looking for a facility. If you’re a bank, you better believe people want to do more with your mobile app than just check their balance.

If this was true last year, it is even more true now. Smartphones are only getting smarter, and they will serve as hubs for the growing number of what techies are calling “connected life platforms,” helping us to live more efficiently. Mashable has asserted that 2015 is the year when mobile will become a target, offering 15 mobile-specific trends for users to keep a close eye on. The rush is on for businesses and nonprofits to develop newfangled means to serve their products, campaigns, and causes to potential customers and supporters via mobile interfaces.

A study by Millward Brown entitled “Global Mobile Behavior” recently found that Americans now spend an average of 151 minutes on mobile devices every day — more than on TV or laptops — and mobile marketing opportunities are even stronger in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Citizens in these regions spend more time on their mobile devices and find mobile more favorable than their North American and European counterparts do. (See graph.)

 

The mobile device is now the remote control for our lives. Fission Strategy CEO Cheryl Contee says, “Mobile access obliterates the digital divide, whether ethnic, gender or generation. Organizations that are serious about audience engagement in the 21st Century need to be serious about mobile.”

2. The Internet of Things will become the thing.

If you didn’t see this coming, you’ve probably been in hibernation. This year, more and more objects and devices will feature the capacity to connect to the Internet (and to each other) in order to help you with the things you do every day.

Google reports indicate that in the past year alone, searches for “smart TVs” increased by 28%, searches for smart lightbulbs increased by 36%, searches for “wearable tech” tripled and more than 1.6 million hours of video on “connected car platforms” were watched on YouTube. Connectivity is the standard in 2015. Expect an emphasis on home automation gadgets such as smart thermostats and smart door locks that connect to other device, or beds that gather information about your sleeping patterns.

The team over at Huge recently noted, “It’s no longer enough to make your brand available across the web, mobile, gaming consoles, and connected TVs. Find ways to provide value to consumers online, in-store, on the streets and at home, and put your users’ own data to work making their interactions and lives better.”

With connectivity as the new precedent, businesses and nonprofits will need to think more strategically about how they engage customers and supporters.

3. Experience Matters.

This year, Consumers will be loyal to an experience (or cause), not a brand. Engagor’s Community Manager, Sofie De Beule, writes, “If brands want to grow in 2015, they need to engage meaningfully and purposefully, and ultimately, become a part of the daily lives of consumers to continue to deliver on that experience.”

It will become imperative for organizations to get down and dirty with their data, conduct predictive analytics, and mine for the information that helps them anticipate supporters’ needs, trends and behavior patterns. “Quantify user behavior on an individual level to create truly user-centric service,” says Toufique Harun, a Group Director at Huge.

Data-driven insights will be more essential than ever in 2015. This means more than just dusting off your Google Analytics—Entrepreneur Magazine says today’s small business leaders combine external and internal data from myriad resources to better understand their own organization and customers. Insights will allow businesses and nonprofits to stop relying on gut-feelings and begin parsing together seemingly-unrelated information to create pictures that convey the health of their relationship with consumers and subscribers.

Marketing automation tools such as Attentive.ly (created by our sister company) and others will become the standard for list engagement in 2015. Attentive.ly enables businesses and nonprofits to gain better insights through enriching the profiles of customers and supporters, tracking social network profiles, employment history, Klout scores, age, and more. This tool helps users discern which contacts among their lists are high-influencers or poor engagers. It allows organizations to “listen” to what their list is doing and reflexively respond.

How can your brand help uniquely serve and shape the particular interests of supporters and customers? Consult the data.

BONUS:

Another trend to look out for in 2015 is an increase in Pinterest social ads.

Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici pointed out in July that—while Facebook is about memories, past events, and retrospective data, and Twitter remains perpetually stuck in the now—Pinterest is about the future. It’s about what people aspire to do and what they want to do down the line. He writes, “The future is where marketers want to live. When a user pins an image of a wedding dress or a coffee table to one of her boards, she’s sending up a signal flare to the merchandiser who might want to sell her that wedding dress or coffee table.”

These are our predictions of the biggest trends to look forward to in 2015. Is there anything you would add to our list? What else should we be on the watch for?

Feel free to contact our team at Fission if you’d like to talk. And share this post if you enjoyed it! We’d appreciate your comments below.