7 Social Media Trends for 2017
The consistency of this blog post on a yearly basis is a trend in itself ????. At the end of each year we try and predict our top social media trends for the following year.
Feel free to check out our forecasts for 2016 and how they went here.
Staying true to the ‘this year is my year’ new years resolution cliché, this year is our year at iSocial, having increased our revenue by 120% from the previous year.
Nevertheless, we are sticking to our yearly trend and forecasting some of the most popular social media trends that will strike in 2017.
1) Instagram Stories
Expect the rise and rise of Instagram stories over Snapchat stories – especially for brands! Why? Instead of having to direct a completely new audience over to your Snapchat channels, brands on Instagram already have an existing presence to share their stories in front of. We still love you Snapchat ????.
2) Snapchat Filters
With brands focusing their story strategy more on Instagram, Snapchat will always have more value when it comes to peer to peer engagement and sharing. Take note, as this is where the value of Snapchat filters come in.
At a cost of just $5 per 20,000 square feet per day to implement your very own Snapchat filter (pending Snapchat approval) Snapchat filters are a great cost-effective strategy to create brand awareness and further encourage engagement amongst a younger audience specific to exactly where they are – an extremely valuable strategy for your social media communications!
3) Pay To Play
We say this every year, however with Instagram’s move to adopt a newsfeed algorithm similar to Facebook’s back in July 2016, it leaves THE two biggest social media channels with less organic impressions for brands, forcing them to pay to play if they want to be seen on Facebook or Instagram. However Facebook ads are still the MOST cost effective alternative to utilising other digital marketing options available to the marketer IMO.
4) Video Video Video
Fourth on the list is supported by no other than Facebook’s recent jump to join the live-streaming rush! If Facebook’s aggressive approach to ram Facebook Live down your throat isn’t enough to convince you to implement a consistent video strategy on social media than hopefully this paragraph is.
With YouTube and Facebook constantly at battle with each other to see who can achieve the most monthly views, make sure you take this into consideration when choosing which platform to share video content across. YouTube is for users searching for specific videos, whereas Facebook is for video content that will find specific users, make sense? If not, just upload on both!
5) Twitter Decline Results in Customer Service First platform
Despite the steady decline of Twitters daily active users and stalemate growth, there is still value for the micro blogging social media network – especially for the bigger brands. Due to its real-time content USP, users are jumping to their favourite (or least favourite) brands to complain. With 53% of users expecting a response from brands within the first hour on Twitter, Twitter have recognised this USP and have adapted their product with more features to help brands better tackle this.
What does this mean? Make sure your customer service team have your Twitter logins and link it to your customer service software – customer service is a marketing strategy in itself!
Disclaimer: It is worth noting that Twitter still has value amongst certain industries i.e sport and news.
6) Influencer marketing decline
Anyone with over 20,000 followers on Instagram is calling themselves an ‘influencer’ these days. With a sudden rise and demand for influencer marketing – across Twitter and Instagram specifically – users are getting all too used to seeing their favourite influencers/celebrities/glorified bloggers/whatever you want to call someone with a lot of followers these days, promoting their ‘favourite’ brands.
With Kylie Jenner charging $150,000 for ONE Instagram post that can make or break a brands business model, it will get to a point where the average Instagram user will become too hard skinned to the blatant influencer post IMO, resulting in the decline in influencer marketing and the rise of peer to peer marketing.
7) Branded Emojis ????
I’m going out on a limb here and forecasting the emoji craze to go to the next level. With even more brands creating their own emojis like what we’ve previously seen with Star Wars and the Kimoji App achieving 9,000 downloads per second on Apple’s app store when it first released ????.
Need help with any of the above? Feel free to drop me a line for more info or some help at chris@isocialuk.com.
By Chris Kyriacou
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