Social Media Marketing Trends to Watch For..... Fact or Fiction?
Social Media trend forecasting season is upon us so here are some general developments that are on a few radars. It's always good to keep these trends in mind when planning your budget for the coming year and your strategy for new projects and events.
Social Media trend forecasting season is upon us so here are some general developments that are on a few radars. It’s always good to keep these trends in mind when planning your budget for the coming year and your strategy for new projects and events.
You can always play it safe and assume for the most part things will stay the same, but being agile enough to lean into big, new waves like Periscope will assure your company sustained success, as it changes with the audience instead of after it.
In the wake of Ashley Madison, which was really just the most recent in a slew of privacy scandals in 2015, users have never known their data to be more vulnerable than now, and any new platform must promise and live up to the promise to keep user data private. When a casual hack can be at least temporarily life-ruining, expect users to be more careful before going all in on a new app.
Think Periscope, think Blab, think Snapchat. In 2016, the obsession with live-streaming and live social will continue, especially as Snapchat adds new features, Periscope spawns competitors, and VR technology becomes more mainstream. More and more, social apps will aim to put the user at an event—virtually--as much as possible. Facebook is still great, but it can’t provide the kind of in-the-moment content that live-streaming apps can.
Speaking of Facebook, their Instant Articles will be a feature to watch in 2016, as they set out to make a major mark in online publishing. Social apps will scurry to keep up, as every platform is angling to not only acquire customers, but keep them. Nothing keeps a user on your site longer than having a continuously updated stream of published content. Watch out for Twitter’s Lightning project as well as Snapchat’s move to more “story” content.
Hopefully we have finally learned our lesson in regards to the meteoric rise and equally fast fall of smaller social networks that prove the ADD-like attention spans of social media enthusiasts is more limited than a gnat, and also the way an ill-advised launch can be something your network never bounces back from.
Hopefully we’ve learned that the race to the top is more slow and steady than fast and furious, and it’s just not good business for an app to declare itself the anti-Facebook hero.
With Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook introducing Buy buttons, expect to see other apps (Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, etc) and new apps focus on making mobile and social commerce seamless. In-app innovation geared towards online shopping will likely be top of mind for anyone in tech, and will be exciting to watch, at least for social marketers.
So what is in store in a few years time...
In the not too distant future............in our very own galaxy, Social Media will...
In 2017, the Asia-Pacific region accounts for approximately half of social media users worldwide.*
In 2017, marketers spend more than $11 billion on advertising on social media in the United States.**
By 2020, over 5 billion people use social networks, about two-thirds of the world’s population.***
In 2020, social networks penetrate all realms of life as individuals and governments explore new ways to tap into the power of the crowd.
Location data used in conjunction with social networks create hyper-local social platforms. Niche or specific-interest based social networks allow people to customize and filter content, while privacy concerns drive the growth of temporary social media platforms. Social media provides a vital stream of data used by governments and corporations for advanced analytics and sentiment analysis.
Social media in 2020:
- Social goes hyper local with the interplay between social and geo location technologies, allowing consumers, businesses and governments to connect and share on local issues.
- Temporary social media becomes mainstream where interactions are deleted after a specified time, thus enhancing user privacy.
- Social network enable public safety by offering platforms that track individuals ‘marked’ as possible convicts by national security agencies.
- Niche social networks emerge connecting users with specific interests, leading to market fragmentation.
- Social TV allow content creators and providers to deliver customized content based on social media activity of the users.
Source: ©2015 socialmediatoday.com
http://government-2020.dupress.com/driver/social-media/