As the new year is approaching fast, we thought it would be a good idea to take our crystal ball out and do a bit of magic with it. To be precise, we want to try and predict some of the trends we think could happen in social media in 2016. We’ve covered social media here on our blog on multiple occasions, whether debating if it is a good investment for a small business or simply discussing its global reach and marketing potential.
Disclaimer: Our crystal ball gazing skills are nowhere near as good as our search engine optimisation skills. In other words none of what you read here is guaranteed to happen, these are purely our speculations.
We think that social media platforms will continue with the monetisation push and we will see more and more “Buy” buttons on familiar platforms. This means there will be more options for eCommerce businesses to use social media as a direct marketing channel. Rather than driving traffic to eCommerce sites, social media platforms will try to catch the user's attention right there on their social media feed, and get them to click on that “Buy” button. This may include the incorporation of some form of a payment gateway.
We’re quite sceptical about the mobile as this all conquering platform, as in our opinion it is a bit overhyped. Yes, there are more and more people using smartphones and browsing the internet, but in our opinion the quality of this traffic is nowhere as good as the traffic coming desktops. When people sit down to do something important online, social media based or otherwise, they do so at a computer.
Having said that, we will most likely see new, app based social platforms springing up in 2016. What will be 2016’s answer to Snapchat, Tinder or Vine remains to be seen, but that is the beauty of this ever evolving app landscape.
Now, this may not be news as people have been talking and reporting it for almost a year now. However, it is important to know that both platforms count views in a different way. We do believe that in 2016 Facebook will come out as a winner when it comes to online video.
Facebook Instant Articles will expand and we will see even more options for individuals and companies to publish full featured content on Facebook. This will of course increase the amount of time people spend on FB and will have a big impact on search, as content published on FB will be driving additional traffic to the platform from search.
Image Credit:
https://pixabay.com/en/glass-ball-ball-stones-mystic-928785/
