Up until now social networks have focused on building their userbase. In 2015 these networks will switch focus, turning their attention away from social awareness, and towards social promotion.
Promotions will no longer be small real estate on users’ news feeds. Instead they’ll be the main meal, commanding high prices by capturing more clicks than ever before.
Social promotion will finally start operating as a genuine method to increase conversions, downloads, and even sales – rather than traditional clicks and reach.
In this article we take a look at how social promotion will evolve in 2015.
1/ Focus on sales
The orthodox social ad would always deliver on impressions and even clicks but would often fall short of the metrics that really matter; conversions, downloads and sales.
According to the Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, Facebook led the social network market in sales with 1.85% of click throughs leading to a purchase (Twitter 0.77%, LinkedIn 0.47%).
With Twitter introducing their buy button in September, social networks have clearly began the shift into e-commerce.
Remarkably, users purchasing direct from social networks are spending an average of $ 50 dollars per order, proving that consumers are willing to part with a serious amount of cash through social.
2/ Revolution on mobile
Mobile lets brands add to the purchase journey through a number of ways including push notifications, in-app product recommendations and geo targeting.
With mobile touching 93% of the worldwide population and 65% of social network activity happening via smartphones, 2015 will inevitably see retailers put mobile social ads at the core of their marketing activities.
With Facebook, the leading social network with over 1.3 billion active users, generating 90% of its revenue growth from mobile whilst Snapchat and Instagram begin to implement ads – 2015 could see mobile ads overtake traditional desktop ads. 
3/ Social Video
2015 will see audio-visual storytelling taken up a notch. Brands will explore further their use of Vine, Snapchat and Instavid to create beautifully crafted messages and display their products in a new light.
Heineken’s 2014 Snapchat campaign at Coachella led the way in video advertising.
Their exclusive content, made timely by the Coachella event, perfectly matched the platform and surpassed user’s expectations.
Influencer marketing with vloggers and micro-vloggers has provided brands with alternative streams to advertise on social.
Oreo famously generated over 1.3 million YouTube views from their Oreo Lick Race challenge before it was banned by the ASA. Nevertheless, with clear value to be gained from vlogger marketing, expect to see this trend grow in 2015.
4/ Optimized targeting
Brands will use their experience in social promotion to optimize their targeting throughout 2015. Doing so will improve click through rates, multiply conversions and most importantly, deliver value for money.
To do so, brands will go beyond the limitations of the Twitter ads and Facebook advertising dashboards and start using third party products to enhance their targeting.
Social listening platforms will be integral to brands wishing to create focused lists of potential customers with far higher CTR percentages.
With advance search strings and boolean operators, social listening platforms like Brandwatch can find the social network users who have shown a clear and sustained interest in your brand’s industry and product, making them perfect candidates for social promotion.
Moreover, they collect and update their social network users in real time meaning brands no longer have to advertise to users who are simply uninterested, or who no longer use their social accounts.
If you’ve never used a social listening platform to guide and hone your social promotion, arrange a demo with one of our experts and we’ll show you how our tool can work for you.
These four factors will inevitably contribute to the increasing use of social promotion. If they take off in the way many predict, we could see 2015 marked as the year where social finally started selling.
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