A study conducted by WoodWing Software from mid-December to mid-January examined relevant publishing technology trends for 2014. A total of 125 participants – mainly from the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region – answered four multiple-choice questions about their publishing strategies and the use of social media. The submissions came mainly from newspaper, magazine and corporate publishers as well as advertising agencies and marketing departments. Of these, 59% plan to implement a comprehensive multi-channel strategy this year. A full 22% still focus on print above Web and Mobile. In social media, Facebook (77%), Twitter (61%) and YouTube (53%) clearly dominate, while the high interest in LinkedIn (32%) is also noteworthy. With social media, 71% want to increase brand awareness, while 42% want to address new markets. A summary of the results is available for download.

WoodWing´s survey "Trends 2014" showed that brand awareness and customer acquisition are key objectives of the use of social media as a publication channel.

A study conducted by WoodWing shows that publishers, agencies and marketers have recognized that modern communication must address the variety of publishing channels to reach its audience. The majority, 59.2%, favor a combination of print, Web, mobile, tablet and social media. The "first" approaches are of less interest – only 5.6% vote for Web first and 4.8% for Mobile first, while 21.6% vote for print as the key channel.

Brand awareness and new business are main social media goals
The main reasons to communicate via the various social media channels is to increase brand awareness (71.2%) and to interact with customers (64.8%). Social media also plays an important role in customer acquisition – 52.8% aim to reach new customers in existing markets, and 41.6% use it to make inroads in new markets. 

Social media still dominated by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
With regard to the relevance of the various social media channels, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube still have the lead. In the evaluation of other channels such as Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and Vimeo, the participants were less enthusiastic – only 17.7 % were planning to use Pinterest (Google+: 23.58%, Instagram: 19.51%), while 31.7% rated Pinterest as not relevant (Google+: 18.7%, Instagram: 21.5%). 

Some of the comments on expected trends reflect the participants’ thoughts and strategic approaches in more detail. Some examples:
– Among the new models for tablet publishing, Flipboard and Zinio will succeed (corporate publisher)
– Sharing and recycling information (corporate publisher)
– Design once, publish to multiple formats (advertising agency)
– Channel-neutral authoring workflows; streamlining/improving efficiency of workflows that feed Web, blog, mobile and social channels (magazine publisher)
– Shifting away from print replicated on tablets (magazine publisher)
– A combination of all possibilities – text, video, music and photo. The newsletter in magazine form (magazine publisher)

No royal road in modern publishing
“On one hand, the results of our trend study show that publishers of all kind have recognized the importance of providing their content via various channels,” said Roel-Jan Mouw, CEO of WoodWing Software. “On the other hand, the broad variety of strategic approaches has also revealed that there is no royal road to reach the relevant audiences. In the light of these findings, we are pleased to see confirmation that publishing and DAM solutions should be open and flexible enough to support each and every publishing strategy and workflow. That’s exactly the philosophy behind our multi-channel publishing system Enterprise and our digital asset management solution Elvis DAM.”

And the winner is… 
The winner of the Apple TV raffled off among all participants is Chrestian Willhans, Image Manager and Graphic Designer at Ejendals Group in Sweden (WoodWing announces the winner in a video on YouTube). The company produces and markets workwear shoes and gloves in Europe. Ejendals creates a comprehensive catalog in several language editions and operates a multilingual Web site at www.ejendals.com.

In the survey, Willhans mentioned that his company would publish its catalogs in additional languages and digitally for tablets this year. He expects more instructional videos and presentations on YouTube. By phone, Willhans added, “The big challenge is to keep the file stock in order and to have a central location to manage all files in the various formats. This may sound ridiculous, but it´s all about this.”