Lauren Peek | @_LaurenPeek A new year means new predictions. While others are busy hammering out the details of their New Year's resolutions and making predictions about absolutely everything, we would like to offer a few of our own 2015 social media predictions.

Increased demand and usage of ads by businesses on social platforms

Starting in 2015, organic reach on most social platforms is becoming close to nonexistent. The number and type of posts that easily reach your followers have become limited, and it is absolutely necessary to keep up a high level of engagement for these posts to be viewed at all. The easiest solution is paid ads. As the year goes on, more businesses will probably invest in ads on social media platforms, leading to a demand in features and accessibility to the ad creation process.

Continued explosive growth of very visual social media platforms

Posts just do better when an image is included. It is therefore no surprise that image-based social media sites — Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest — all experienced very rapid growth this year. The fact that all three surpassed Twitter in different metrics made social media headlines in 2014. As more and more young people flock away from Twitter and Facebook, we should continue to see rapid growth on these three platforms.

More websites and social sites featuring hosted videos

In 2014, many brands began uploading their videos straight to their Facebook page instead of first hosting them on their YouTube channels. Twitter and LinkedIn also began hosting videos directly on their sites as a form of content sharing. In a year with rapidly declining organic reach and increasing ad spend, social media sites could begin to show preferential treatment to videos hosted on their own platforms versus videos hosted on other sites in 2015.

Rise of new social media sites like Ello

While companies are jumping on the social media advertisement bandwagon, some consumers are looking for a way off. Not everyone wants to see ads in their news feed, so they're beginning to flock to ad-free social media sites. When I searched for "ad-free social media sites," Ello was the first result. Ello wants to succeed where others have failed by offering an ad-free site where user data is not sold to advertisers. As brands must rely on ads to reach their audiences on the more established social sites, those not wanting to pay may start looking to alternatives to reach audiences in the future.

Will these social media predictions come true? We shall see. Join us as we follow the social media trends of 2015 at www.socialmediadelivered.com.s209167.gridserver.com/blog.