The world of social media is regularly evolving, with fast-paced shifts and updates throughout Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, and other key social platforms. The platforms, features, user preferences, and other factors are constantly shifting on social media. Businesses today need to consider not only what’s happening now but what’s likely to happen in the near future. Here are some social media trends to watch out for before the new year starts.
More privacy and security
Privacy has always been the main concern on social media and the internet as a whole because all of our information is exposed to the platform. The recent Facebook data breach put the privacy and security on every social media platform into questions. How safeguarded is our information? Due to the design of social media platforms, they can’t function without our information. So, expect to see a continued push towards data privacy and security more than in previous years.
Social Platforms as Search Engines
Each social media platform has a unique type of information on which they focus. As these platforms continue to collect, they will dominate specific genres of information and clearly represent themselves as a search engine. While some like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook have already positioned themselves, other social platforms will soon follow suit.
Facebook-owned Instagram will follow the path of the holding company and will continue its inevitable decline of organic reach. The latest data shows a steep decline over time and will most likely accelerate in the next 12 months. As we see organic reach continue to decline, brands will be required to pay more to access the community in which they've invested. As a result, we will see more ads within Instagram Stories.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Groups will become Facebook’s new future. This came as more and more brands are pushing towards group-oriented marketing, as a way to enhance privacy. Facebook Groups will offer brands to leverage their social media marketing strategies by delivering more personalized messages. Facebook is changing the user experience to put Groups and community at the center of the platform, which offers an opportunity for brands that act quickly and start to nurture their own communities in this arena.
Twitter will continue to offer brands the most cost-effective opportunity to reach large numbers of people. The platform continues to hold its place in the social world despite changing since its inception. A smartly-written, properly-timed tweet is a simple way for a brand to reach millions of people without paying a lot. With well-known brands finding success with more playful content, we’re sure to see more and more brands investing headspace and creative efforts into Twitter.
Tik Tok
Tik Tok has over 500 million active users worldwide and the number continues to increase. The platform has become a tremendous hit among teens and young adults just two years from its inception. The average Tik Tok user now spends around 45 minutes per day on Tik Tok, according to Fast Company, which is more time than on Facebook. As such, more ad budgets will be spent on Tik Tok swinging the marketing momentum in this newer network’s favor.
Podcasts
With social media becoming more dominant in the way we communicate and interact online it was inevitable that podcasts would find their way into social media. Podcasts entertain consumers and offer an opportunity for marketers and business owners to monetize their services and products. Podcasting allows marketers to change up their media offerings by creating inexpensive, self-owned media outside of social algorithms.
It has been predicted that half of all brands will eventually launch or plan to launch their own podcasts. According to the statistics, 22% of Americans listen to podcasts each week. This is a noticeable increase from 17% last year and the trend is expected to grow even further.
Video Content
Video has become a major trend and type of content people prefer to consume and is predicted to become the primary type of Internet content. More than 600 million hours of video are watched on YouTube every day and an average of 8 billion videos are viewed daily on Snapchat.
Videos are an engaging content format that is effortless to digest. They provide a real-life picture of what is going on and are easy to share across multiple platforms. Videos are a perfect fit for social media platforms that are designed to help people connect, engage, and share content. Major platforms like Facebook and Instagram are almost demanding video content, changing their algorithms to give more preferences to videos when they are ranking for the content. In fact, a study by Cisco stated that by 2020, 75% of the mobile traffic will be video.
Primary source of news information
The Internet has slowly started replacing television and newspapers as more and more people consume information and especially news on the Internet. Forbes found that half of Internet users surveyed said they first hear about the latest news via social media. Facebook and Twitter have become the main source of news as the moment something important happen, you can instantly see that the hashtags related to the topic start to trend.
Many internet users will see the breaking stories on their social feed and go to the news sites to learn more. The Forbes survey found a 57 percent increase in traffic to news sites referred to as social media. This is because the information is spread out so fast on social media.
Engagement
In the past, likes and follows were the main factors of representing how popular or authoritative your content or profile is on social media. These two features, however, can be easily fabricated by purchasing fake likes and followers. As such, social media algorithms will now be heavily focused on engagement. Engagement will become more important because it is something that indicates when people are really interested in your content. The post on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn which gets a multitude of comments, shares, and replies is ranked higher than posts with a lot of likes but no comments or other engagement.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the social media trends that will almost certainly continue through 2020 and beyond. Whether you have an online or brick-and-mortar presence (or both), it’s important to keep up with the latest happenings in the world of social media. And as people depend on technologies and connections using the internet more and more, social media will continue to evolve.
If you aren’t sure how to keep up with the changes and growth in the social media arena, never fear. The social media experts at Strategy Driven Marketing get absolutely giddy about the possibilities and would love to discuss strategy, content and more to help your brand move into 2020 ready to go.
The team at Strategy Driven Marketing has worked with brands of all sizes and across all industries. We can help you make the most of your social media efforts through a tailored marketing plan, content creation, social media management, and more. Whatever your social media needs are, SDM is ready for the challenge. Contact us today to get started!