2017 is predicted to be another year when social media dominates as the main marketing platform of choice for many businesses. Over the past year, social media has grown exponentially and is predicted by many tech and marketing experts to continue to expand. Experts and trend experts have forecasted the top incoming trends of the year to be video, personalization and AR/VR.
You need a Facebook marketing strategy in order to succeed for 2017. This coming year, Facebook is once again poised to be a top marketing solution for many businesses looking to better engage with their customers. Facebook had a record-breaking year in 2016 and with its purchase of Instagram, Oculus and other miscellaneous projects; Facebook’s future looks very bright indeed. Demographics indicate that in the past decade, over 75% of adults under age 50 use social media networking. Facebook boasts 1.79 Billion active users per month and forecasted to grow even bigger. Put another way, Facebook is one of the biggest markets of people in the world with billions and billions of dollars of capital at stake. If you’re not trying to get a piece of the Facebook advertising pie you’re crazy!
Facebook video in particular is predicted to become the top channel for marketers. Live video began in social media when Twitter bought Periscope, an app that allows people to broadcast and share live video feeds. In response, Facebook launched Facebook Live, an instant broadcasting system for sharing videos on their already huge and user-friendly platform. The main reason professional marketers use videos is because it is an engaging and intimate experience for personal use and for consumer targeting. Users can subscribe and get notifications when a particular person or fan page begins a live feed for any new video. Facebook Live is so new and revolutionary that marketers haven’t even yet figured out how best to use it for business. The surface has barely been scratched.
We have also seen a rise in “message bots” or “Chatbots”, which are another personalization method that helps users get speedier and more accurate results to questions and searches on websites.
Facebook currently deploys these through its messenger platform and as of the past year, allows third parties to use the platform as well. Chatbots are becoming popular in many venues but marketers have barely pushed the limits of what these bots are truly capable of achieving. Experts predict that one can expect a lot of improvements to chat message bots over the coming year.
In addition, augmented reality, or AR has become commonplace with consumers and social media users. It’s a way to add computer images and elements to a live video or photo and was used most commonly in sports broadcasts and weather visualizations. Pokémon Go, a popular mobile phone game app, brought augmented reality to popular culture and it has since moved into mainstream use on social media platforms. The next rise is VR, or virtual reality, which is the next step up.
Its popularity has brought AR to Snapchat with lenses and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook stated that the company is going to look at AR as well as VR as a tool to help their focus on video content. Facebook began as a way for pictures and words in combination to tell stories. Video, particularly live feed is starting to supplant that as users want a more instant experience and video is a better immersion tool. Augmented reality is going to help move the experience along. Marketing can use AR to better engage audiences through such methods as creating geo tags for Snapchat filters and more.
By all accounts, social media has become not just a wave of the future but a permanent way that users connect to one another. It has erased boundaries of space and time and created vast numbers in the pool of potential customers. With the latest evolution of personalization, immersive experience through video and AR, 2017 may very well be the year of “Live social media”.
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