What Is the Future of Social Media Marketing? [Marketing Cast]

In order to leverage technologies for their business needs, marketers should stay up-to-date with latest trends. That's why many wonder what the future holds for social media marketing. In today's episode of the Weekly Marketing Cast , David Meerman Scott shares his thoughts on the topic.

Learn from Previous Innovations

The only way to prepare adequately for the future is by looking back at history. As David mentions, exploring the evolution of e-business, for example, can help today's marketers better understand the evolution of social media marketing. "Nobody talks about e-business anymore because it is just business," he says. We are now observing the same type of dynamic we witnessed ten years ago, and we should be able to recognize these familiar patterns.

Forget about the Notion of De-Marketization

In the future, David argues, the notion of demarketization will disappear, thus closing the gap between social media marketing and just marketing. "The sooner people realize that what we are talking about is marketing and communications; that what we are talking about is reaching people in the ways that they want to be reached, using these sorts of networks that they are already on, then the faster they can become successful at using those new tools," David explains.

The Tools Will Keep Changing (But Not the Methodology)

A couple of years ago, Twitter didn't exist and Facebook was limited to students only. A few years from now, new tools will populate the online landscape. But don't think of them as completley new—they simply reinforce some fundamentals of marketing. While they will provide new channels for doing marketing, they will also sustain the methodology of understanding your audience, creating something of value and providing it for free.

In what ways do you think social media marketing will change? Should we even call it social media marketing anymore?