Social Media Trends 2016

You may be wondering where Social Media is going this year. What are the trends to look out for? Are there any new techniques? What platforms will win out? To this end, I thought I’d create a compendium of articles from some of the top Digital/Social Media sites to try and help you figure out what 2016 might hold for Social Media and your business.

Inc. have identified 3 Biggest Social Media Trends to Know for 2016 and they include:

1. Video becoming the native advertising platform of choice
2. Virtual reality becoming a buzz worthy platform
3. The rise of mobile messaging for customer interaction

Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Social Media Marketing Predictions From the Experts includes 10 hot trends selected by 14 experts

1. Social Media goes private – think groups like LinkedIn and messaging
2. Get ready to pay more for traffic – this could include Twitter developing an algorithm like Facebook to display tweets
3. Visual customised by platform become critical. Peg Fitzpatrick says that, “Creating anchor content for your website and breaking it into contextual pieces to natively post to each platform will be essential”. Wow!
4. Live video goes mainstream. We’re going to see more Persicope and the opening up of Facebook live to more accounts

Econsultancy has come up with its 11 pivotal social media trends for 2016

1. Live streaming – yet again this seems to rear its head.
2. New social publishing formats – they reckon the growth of Snapchat Discover, Twotter Moments and Facebook Instant Articles points to a trend of keeping viewers ‘in app’ which will, in turn lead to more ad engagement.
3. Video Innovation – we will see brands getting more creative with video content. Think virtual reality style ads!
4. The even bigger rise of the buy button – we will see more brands using the ‘Buy’ buttons on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube.

Forbes magazine came up with The Top 7 Social Media Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2016

1. In-the-moment updates will dominate – with the growth of Persicope over the past year we may see the demise of scheduled posts and the rise of ‘in-the-moment’ updates.
2. Buy buttons will take over – it will be interesting to see how this does develop or whether we’ll get ‘buy-button-blindness’.
3. User privacy concerns will hit an all-time high – the author Jason DeMeyers believes that only platforms ‘which offer a degree of privacy and security will continue to thrive’.

Related Courses
Social Media Marketing Courses