Top Social Media Marketing Predictions 2016

How would be the social media marketing strategies in 2016? Let’s discuss in this post!

2015 was an exciting year for the digital marketers. Not only the big firms, but the social media has been adopted by most of the businesses in the world to get exposure and reach the target audience. 

Yes, social networks have turned into a great content and brand engagement medium.

Besides, Social media is important for the job searchers and thus, the social profiles where the online marketers have shown their skills would never be underestimated. Also, the online job opportunities related to the social media field are getting enlarged when compared to previous years.

So, how social media will influence the marketers in 2016?

The passing year has laid the foundations to many new social media trends, which would affect the social media marketing scene in 2016 as well.

Before checking the top social media predictions 2016, let’s have a quick review of some of the game-changing social media news in 2015.

1) The biggest revolution that we experienced is video marketing. Leading social platform Facebook boasted a large 4 million video views every day of 2015.

2) Live streaming apps like Facebook live, and Periscope will affect the way we market our brand on social media in 2016. Periscope users are already viewing 40 years of Live video every day now.

3) The biggest shock came from Twitter that announced to kill its share counts and soon experienced a decline of 11% in overall sharing on the platform (naturally!).

4) YouTube, in its attempt to fight Facebook videos, launches a series of features like paid YouTube Red service, 360° storytelling features, etc.

5) Google plus rose from the ashes with a revamped strategy to fight the current visual social platform Pinterest.

6) Visual marketing saw a never before popularity with visual platforms like Instagram overtaking Twitter regarding users and Pinterest marketing still being the Queen of referral traffic.

This massive rise in the use of social media nudges us to have a successful social media plans for 2016. Am I right?

If you’re a brand marketer like me, I would suggest you take note of the following social media predictions to create a winning social media marketing strategies and build an impressive brand name for your business.

Peak 7 Social Media Evaluations of 2016

I’ve estimated that the following social media marketing plans would trend in the year 2016!

1. More Personalized Marketing

I believe that the personalization would be a perfect social media approach this year and so on, since the customers/social followers like the personalized offers from brands.

With the successful launch of broadcasting services like Periscope, Facebook live, Blab, you name it, marketers and influencers now have an opportunity to reach out to the fans and connect with them, when and as is.

So, you may find the creative, unique ways to approach and engage your fans with interesting content. Big Brands will hire influencers to advocate their products, live on social media.

For bloggers, the personalized marketing would be a tremendous opportunity to form a community around their blog, reaching and sharing values over live videos.

If you utilize the apps that support live streaming and real-time updates, then you will be able to leverage the insights of your customers/site visitors to create the tailored content for them.

2. Noticeable Visual Content

Understandable visual content will continue to take the front seat and help you get more engagement on social media.

Moreover, the marketing rules have changed, and thus, your spectators now got the opportunity to discover the helpful content through visual social media platforms.

Out of all, considering the short attention span of online readers, visual marketing in 2016 will be the key source to garner eyeballs on your content.

Having the customized visual content in the form of imagery, infographic, memes and gifs will change the way you refer visitors to your blog/business website.

To connect at a deeper level with your audiences, you will have to look at the storytelling aspect of images than any other factor.

So, conveying your brand message through the stand-out visual content would entertain your target audience in a better way, and they will start to follow your business that would lead to higher conversion rate.

To create the correct size pictures to use on social networks, just check the social media image dimension chart provided by Marketing Tech blog.

3. Brace Social Video Era

With all the social media platforms, prioritizing video content, I am pretty sure that the videos will continue to boost the user engagement and social media shares in 2016.

Facebook is leading in adopting videos as a viable social media strategy. It has started to surpass the YouTube with its record video views.

Twitter has also followed suit with the announcement of supporting native videos. It is soon going to launch video ads for marketers too.

According to research by Cisco, video content will account up to 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic (from 64% in 2014). It is proof of how we have to revamp our marketing strategies if we want to reach more readers and a wider audience.

Here is what the content marketing genius Jae Baer predicts about video marketing in 2016.
Meeting your Facebook followers with a featured video, building a YouTube channel with curated videos and reaching your Instagram/Vine followers with short videos would help your brand get a good exposure.

If you’re a blogger, you may consider creating the videos using the screen recorder tools and embed useful videos in the social posts to improve the follower engagement on social media.

4. Scommerce – Social Media Online Shopping

Scommerce is  the act of selling through social networks

I think that the Scommerce will likely to increase this year, 2016!

What is your deduction?

Marketers and brands will hail this feature no less than other trends in 2016. Customers can now buy a service or product directly from social media without having to leave the platform.

Platforms like Facebook and Pinterest have adopted the buy now features for a while now, and I’m expecting to see the social commerce apps from Snapchat, Vine, etc. Moreover, players like Instagram and Pinterest are already on the track of social media retailing.

It further gives proof to my prediction about visual marketing. Since you have to entice customers directly from social media, you have to invest with better graphics and images that tell your brand story.

It again boils down to “having eye-catching visuals and imagery that resonates with your brand voice”.

Through the network-drive auctions, digital marketers can sell directly from social media without an online store.

Even the bloggers will have the nice opportunity to sell their affiliate or own products through social media.

5. Long Social Content

Since the things are getting changed, the social media has endured not only the short messages but also the extended social content.

Did you see the groundbreaking success of external publishing platforms like Medium and LinkedIn publishing in 2015? Then you’ll be thrilled to see how content publishing will go social in 2016.

I could estimate that the content publishing option on social media sites will change the game and yes, many brands show interest in integrating the Snapchat stories to reach out their base.

Facebook has launched news features and Instant articles is one among them for the publishers to publish a post directly on its platform rather than sharing a link to their blog post. If this was not enough, Facebook Notes come up revamped like an entirely functional publishing platform.

Facebook “notes” have a new Medium-like appearance. (See comments on this note) https://t.co/e8QQwWEXeN

— Dave Winer (@davewiner) August 17, 2015

While these outlet content channels will be on the rise, I still raise the same question, are you prepared to rely your content on a platform you don’t own?

I’m not a fan of rented land, but having a good social presence with great content will keep your audience to stay where they want instead of turning them out to your native soil.

Do you agree with me?

6. Social Media Searches

Social media searches would be more powerful than before, and hence, I can predict that the social media optimization will be considered equally as the search engine optimization. 

Facebook obviously has a great mine of data and with the release of its much-awaited search feature, it will become a full-fledged search engine driving traffic to your sites just like Google, Bing and others do.

Pinterest is also on its verge to becoming the next visual search engine and with the release of guided search it has done it rightfully so.

Just have a look at the below image to understand the guided search feature in Pinterest that may help you get visitors from Pinterest search engine. 

Twitter is reportedly working on a ranking algorithm similar to EdgeRank of Facebook (called TweetRank) that would decide the priority of Tweets. 

So, I would suggest you craft the quality social content with relevant keywords to drive traffic from social media search engine.

My Other Social Media Marketing Presumptions

• Advertising – Social networks would enable flexible advertising functions for the online publishers.

• Apps/Messengers – Brands would like to spend quality time on social media apps and messengers to connect with fans & customers.

• Emojis – Emojis are the powerful communication tool to express the outlooks. Thus, they may be often used to enhance the click-through or conversion rates in social media.

• Influencers connection – Marketers would keenly interested in connecting with social media influencers to drastically improve their brand visibility.

• SEO Benefit – Social media websites are often crawled by search engines so that you could get better SEO for your business with your social media activities.

• Social Media Mention – Businesses would like to receive great social media mentions and use some tracking tools to find out their brand mentions. 

Privacy Concerns In Social Media

Where there is freedom, there comes a concern too. With so many ways to connect with your audience, you will also be giving your competitors an edge to keep a tab on you.

Not only can competitors spy you, increased social media connections can attract the wrong kind of audience as well and hence the privacy concerns have also become primary.

Avoiding creepy targeted ads with intrusive advertising would be good to stay authoritative in the eyes of your social media followers.

I imagine that the social networks will have better security features to prevent the phishing attacks and identity thefts.

Facebook has introduced some privacy features and hoping the same kind of awareness tools from other well-known social media websites as well.

Final Words

Last year, 2015 was a great year for social media and this year, 2016 is predicted to be even better with excellent marketing strategies that I’ve discussed above.

Just using the social media would not let you stand out from the crowd and thus, I would advise you to find and implement the personalized social media marketing techniques.

Don’t get overwhelmed with these social media predictions for this new year, 2016. Just you should be aware of these estimations to create even more, effective social media strategies that get you better results.

My personal pick would be to create more personalized content that gets shared on social media. You can consider getting a community of raving fans through live broadcasting.

Don’t forget to create social media content that aligns your SEO efforts and plan to use paid social media (if you have a budget) for deeper reach.

Lastly, I would like to tell not to follow too many strategies but try to have a successful social media presence. Just be yourself and focus on the platforms that your customers hang out on and build a famous brand name for your business through social media.

What do you predict about the social media behavior in twenty sixteen? Do you have anything to add to the social forecast list 2016? Is there anything I’ve missed in social media marketing plan 2016? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.