How Social Media in Uganda will be like in 2015

I was called a prophetess on National TV (Urban TV) when I was hosted by the presenter @danmumbere on 31st Dec 2014 on the #tag show, because I wrote a blog in 2013 that predicted what Uganda’s social media will be like in 2014, and I got 75% of my predications right. Check them out here.

Now after a great deal of research and analysing what happened in the last two years, I am at it again and I hope I raise my bar to 80% or 85% true predictions. Here goes;

2015 has the opportunity to see Video marketing grow from just fun video of Katoto or the evil maid to brand marketing campaigns. There are way too many video embedded platforms that are not being utilised to pass on information like WhatsApp videos, Vine videos for Twitter, Facebook Video, and YouTube. These have easy to share features even though we still have internet data problems (still very expensive) we can still try to invest in short videos that won’t ‘eat’ in to our data bundles and our pockets at that.

Influencer amplification, more campaigns will engage online influencers because of their numbers and their niche way of communicating online. We have already seen this happen in 2014, many paid campaigns were seen on mainly twitter that some even made news, and this is going to grow bigger in 2015; people will want more information and brands will want to share their services and products more. Though I think we need to have more Facebook focused campaigns to drive that side of social.

As before you can’t separate social media from mobile, 60% if not 70% of people on social media us their mobile phones. So this means that all social related activities should be mobile enabled. And we all know what it means to be mobile….

There will not be any more corporate jargon and stiff messaging. No more dull and boring campaigns. This is because the audience will determine what kind of content they want to see and hear. The audience has now a clue about you and your company/organisation plus your products/services and it will take advantage of this. It will ask for specific information in regard to its needs. Therefore you will need to understand your audience as a content creator and social media manager to provide that information before the audience who are your customers start asking for it.

Every social media manager should invest in conversion tools because marketing campaigns are going to be more data driven and more hyper targeted.

Last year I said Google plus would be a good place for B2B marketing but it never took off. Actually it looked deader than ever and now there are predictions online that Google might kill it off and buy Twitter to maximise on its already existing presence.

In the world of Content Marketing which I am more passionate about, these are the few predications I see;

• Shift in discoverability oriented content development to context aware content like content triggered by circumstances like weather, location and news, events,
• Content marketing will depend on the story and finding the right people and medium for it,
• There will be a shift in the budgets where promotion of content will be the peak away from creation of it,
• Brands will no longer look at content marketing as campaigns but will create smart processes for their information to reach masses away from campaign marketing,
• and content distribution in all channels will be embedded.

Patricia Kahill

Patricia Kahill is a multipotentialite Christian entrepreneur, Content Marketing Coach and founder of the Content Marketing agency, Kahill Insights that helps business owners create engaging and interactive content items for digital platforms with a focus on returning a desired outcome. Patricia was the producer of SlamDunk Basketball Talk a show on House of Talent online TV, a former fellow at Harvest Institute for leadership and now an assessor there, and an alumnus of the YELP class of 2017. A member of the BNI Integrity chapter and African Women Entrepreneur Cooperative. She is driven by passion and curiosity, been taking every opportunity that has been given to her with an ambition of stamping her footprint on the world.