If you think things move quickly in the digital space, imagine trying to run a digital marketing agency and digital skills training organisation like we do, forever working hard at keeping at the cutting edge in the latest and greatest on everything online!

Don’t get us wrong, we love what we do and we wouldn’t have it any other way, but keeping ahead of the pack does require a strong commitment to lifelong learning. And there is so much to learn out there that I think it’s important to define what you would most like to learn and then commit to learning it. So in case it is useful, here… are the the social media and other online marketing tools I’m planning on tackling to increase my knowledge on in 2015 and why:

Tumblr is one of those social networks which is often overlooked, but which has tremendous potential for SEO and social media marketing. Tumblr is as a cross between WordPress and Facebook– Tumblr has all the blogging functionality of a blog platform such as WordPress, but also includes all the features of a social site such as hashtags, following, sharing, and liking. Read more about it on this great blog post. I’ve had a Tumblr site for a while at www.tumblr.com/yradams and I intend to finish it off and get more active on it in 2015. With so many different businesses and projects on the go, I’m thinking I might talk about ‘all of my stuff’ in the one place there for people who just want to keep up with ‘all of the stuff’ I do.

Back in April 2014 I attended a Google Partners event in Brisbane and Google Tag Manager was one of my big takeaways. Not only were the guest presenters talking about Google Tag Manager, and attributes in a big way, industry colleagues I caught up with there were raving about it’s power. I fed this back to the relevant technical people on our team who got to know it well and are using it extensively, however personally I’m only scratching the surface on my knowledge levels in this area. I’ll be studying up hard on Google Tag Manager and observing how this affects the accuracy of the stats coming through for my sites on Google Analytics, as well as our clients.

We now have many clients using Instagram where the target market is a good fit and they have a highly visual product to showcase (which many do) and it’s now time we started using tools to schedule messages on Instagram in advance to ensure we are posting at opportune times, rather than when we get a moment. Like all social networks, timing is everything! I plan to test out both schedugr.am/, Instapult, TakeOff and latergram.me. Read more about these here.

I’ve used Hootsuite since 2009 and know it well, but want to delve even deeper into the analytics and auto-scheduling offered by the system in 2015. Hootsuite may have decreased the number of free accounts you can have from 5 to 3, and increased their monthly fees to $16.95 a month, but I think its worth every dollar. I’m even thinking of killing buffer.com which we have used since 2011 and which I really love, if I can get Hootsuite to do everything I want it to do.

My friend Gideon Shalwick, launched VeeRoll.com in 2014 which helps you target your exact audience in YouTube, create video ads campaign in just a few clicks and import and run your campaigns in your Adwords account.

Despite best intentions I haven’t yet found the time to fully put this baby to work, but in 2015, I intend to!

What are you planning to learn more about in 2015? Why do you intend to focus on this? Why do you think it will be the best thing to invest your time into? Tell us in the comments below!

Do you need help with increasing your digital skills? Talk to our sister company, The Training Collective who have a wide range of online and in person training courses available throughout Australia & New Zealand.