While it’s impossible to predict the future, we can make some educated guesses on what the social media landscape will look like in a year. The following predictions are based on the trends that have been taking place over the past year. Social media management are based on the trends that what’s going on around the business world.
Tagging and Searching Everything
In the next year, we’ll see an even greater focus on tagging and searching for people, brands and products. This is driven by Facebook’s introduction of hashtags and Twitter’s purchase of Trendrr last summer. In addition to hashtags, Facebook has also announced that they will begin “deep-linking” public posts to individual third-party sites. This is an effort by Facebook to make their users more engaged with each other and with the larger web.
Facebook Timeline
This spring, Facebook introduced Timeline (see my post on How To Use Facebook Timeline for Business) which allows businesses to post both photos and videos from all stages of their history (not just the past year). Rather than filling up your friends’ news feeds with all your status updates, you can now organize them into a visual timeline that they can scroll through when they want to see all your best photos or videos.
Social media has changed the way we communicate and interact with others. It has also changed the way we do business. Many marketers believe social media is an important part of their marketing strategy, but it can seem overwhelming. Where do you start? What’s the best way to approach social media? How do you know if you’re getting results from your efforts?
Social media is a constantly changing platform that allows users to communicate, create and share. More than half of the U.S. population uses social media, and they are highly active on this form of communication.
By now you’ve probably heard something about Snapchat, the social media platform that only allows you to view content for a short period of time.
Tinder, the dating app that matches users based on their social media profiles. Or Periscope, a live video streaming app that Twitter recently acquired for $100 million.
And there are many more apps and social media platforms that have gained popularity in recent years.
Social media is a powerful tool for reaching out to your customers, but what are the trends that are going on this year? Which ones will stay and which will fizzle out? Here’s what we think you can expect.
Tagging People in Photos: I’ve seen this before, but it’s still not common. I predict it will become more and more common as time goes on. The first time I saw this was when I tagged one of my friends in a picture on Facebook. They saw the picture and commented on it, even though they were never tagged in it. This works especially well if you’re holding up your phone and taking a picture of an event because then everyone who is tagged can see it on their smart phones and comment or “like” it or whatever. This also makes things easier for search engines because they can pick up pictures of people easily by scanning your photos for faces. Google just announced that they are working on facial recognition capabilities in Google+ so I wouldn’t expect it to be too long before you could search for an individual person by his face (or at least his name) in Google+.
Sharing Private Information: This is another one that is already prevalent on Facebook and Twitter, but will probably become much more widespread (especially with instagram.) Find out the latest hashtags in twitter.
12 months from now, your social media strategy will be vastly improved. You’ll see a 20% rise in your Facebook likes, a 30% increase in Twitter followers, and a 50% bump to leads from your Instagram. You’ll experience even greater success with Google+ and LinkedIn as well, but these two platforms will not be the lead generators.