2016 Social Media Trends

© The Brand Agency. All Rights Reserved. Proprietary and Confidential.© The Brand Agency. All Rights Reserved. Proprietary and Confidential.
The Future of Social.
Trends Report
October 2015

Background
Since its inception over a decade ago, social media has grown from a ‘fad’ to one of
the most defining movements of our generation.
Our social media landscape is as dynamic as ever, with new platforms establishing
themselves each year and existing companies scrambling to remain relevant.
So what 8 trends can we expect to see in 2016?

1. In The Now
There will be greater growth in immediate and in-the-moment platforms than in
retrospective platforms.
Periscope, a relatively new mover, allows users to broadcast a live video, viewable by
anyone around the globe. This follows trends by Snapchat and Instagram who
support in-the-moment and on-the-go updates, opposed to more retrospective
platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
For social media specialists, this could signal the end of scheduled postings as users
demand more timely updates.
Forbes:TheTop7SocialMediaMarketingTrendsthatwillDominatein2016

2. Shoppable
This year we saw the introduction of “buy” features on both Facebook and Pinterest,
for both advertisers and users.
Mobile users on Facebook and Pinterest can now complete a transaction without
leaving their apps. Instagram is developing a similar approach, and we expect other
platforms to be close behind.
Brands such as Burberry and Ralph Lauren have made their runway videos
shoppable, decreasing the number of steps involved in the purchase of an item and
therefore increasing the ease of transaction.
TheGuardian:Tensocialmediatrendsthatwillshapemarketingoverthenextdecade,PeterKim

3. Snackable
The past two years have seen data scientists struggle to digest the huge quantities of
data currently collected as we click, scroll and spend online and instore.
This gave rise to the data insight revolution which saw data condensed into bite-size
clusters allowing for easy implementation of findings.
This trend has continued to all facets of our lives, the huge amounts of information
to which we have access is overwhelming, so smart marketers have made this
information ‘snackable’ and easily digestible. The more snackable content is, the
more social it will be – translating to better results.
Entrepreneur:5TrendsReshapingSocialMedia,JohnRampton

4. Functionality
Facebook continues to lead in the development of functionality, in the past year we
have witnessed the introduction of Call-To-Action buttons, Instant Articles (a new
form of publishing), an in-post search engine, and instant-play videos.
Twitter and Instagram are both expanding their functionality in an attempt to
prevent users from leaving the app.

5. Privacy
With another year of high-profile security breaches (think Ashley Madison), user
concerns over privacy will sky-rocket.
Facebook is introducing more privacy awareness tools for its users. Increasingly we
will see users leave platforms unless they offer higher privacy and security
protection options.

6. Organic
As the ROI of social media marketing becomes more measurable, there will be a
greater level of competition for organic visibility.
Facebook is stifling organic visibility, forcing users to buy advertising. We can expect
that the cost of advertising will rise during the next year, the messages from brands
who rely on organic advertising will be entirely lost in the clutter.

7. Small Fish
The recent years have seen a number of new social media platforms compete for
space in the highly competitive and mass-critical online landscape.
Due to the nature of the social media industry, these start-ups have either failed to
launch, or have settled as a minority platform will only barely continue to operate.
In the next few years this trend will most likely fizzle out as brands begin to realise
the difficulty in accruing a large enough user base to remain competitive against
giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Entrepreneur:5TrendsReshapingSocialMedia,JohnRampton

8. Integration
As the number of wearables, and smart devices continues to increase, we can
expect that their connectedness with our social networks will improve.
We can expect our lives to become more integrated as technology increasingly
utilises social media to improve the device’s social intelligence.

The End.

2016 Social Media Trends

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2016 Social Media Trends