From the many hours I have spent working across social media platforms in 2016, I can certainly see that is has both grown and advanced for the positive, especially towards those using it for business purposes.
Everyday users have seen that they are far more likely to grab the attention of brands by using social media channels, especially when it comes to chasing up orders, making complaints, sharing feedback – Many are now not only posting a message, they are using images and even videos to reinforce their message. Of the many groups that I run, I can see the growth of more thought through messages being shared such as this one from a customer with a complaint against a national delivery company’s poor service who used a video.More social media platforms, more users and more content being shared – So what exactly will 2017 have in store for us?
- Advances in Social Media tech: We are now seeing more softwares being created that are uniquely designed to work with social media, helping us to use the platforms better, understand what they can do for us, teach us more about the audiences that follow us, view stats and more. Not only we will see many more fantastic items of tech entering this industry sector, but we will also continue to see costs of them declining and becoming more accessible for smaller businesses with smaller budgets.
- Networks of networks: We all understand the importance of our followers / likes / members on social media, but I feel we will see a lot more attention placed on the networks that theses followers hold themselves. If you have 1,000 followers who each hold 1,000 followers themselves, then we should be thinking more towards the potential that the 1,000 x 1,000 second audience can bring us – Our followers need to also be sharing not only content from us that interests them, but will also interest their audiences.
- Advertising: As social media becomes ever more crowded, then for many businesses they will want to guarantee that what content they share will be seen. I can certainly see more detailed targeting for advertising on social media. I also can see that paid for advertising will be a lot more engaging enabling advertisers to grab a lot more that someone’s attention. Analytics will be able to soon drive consumer predictions for larger businesses, studying the history of consumers activities based on key words predicting in advance what a potential new customers needs are.
- Lifelong Social Media experts hitting the job scene: If we say that social media really kicked in around 2005, then as we reach 2017 I am pretty sure that many children who were four or five at the time when Facebook/Youtube/Twitter and more were expanding and drawing in huge audiences, we will have now 16/17/18 year olds who would have lived most of the lives on social media now looking to find full time employment. Most children now know how to use the likes of visual social media platforms such as Pinterest and Youtube (I have seen it many times) so most will be absorbing so much information from social media compared to what many of us would have been doing at the local library or during the hours at school where we had any small percentage of our attention focused on what the teacher was telling us. Look out for these life long social media users to take on board if you are looking to improve your company’s social media reach – Many will not event put on to their CV the fact that they are affluent on social media so always ask the questions during interviewing (I did this recently once and found out the student who we interviewed had over 100,000 followers on Youtube)!
- Video, live streaming and 360: Video was a huge hit in 2016, just look at the craze we had on flying drones. There really is some fantastic video footage out there now thanks to both advancement in video recording devices and softwares, but also thanks to the social media channels themselves. Video will be king once again in 2017 I feel and especially if it is content that is yours and unique and backed up by a strong target audiences that you can share out to. Pinterest recently released the news that you will soon be able to live stream 360 video on their platform soon (of course this will also mean broadcasting live to Twitter also).