14 Dec Social Media Trends for 2016

What’s hot for 2016 in the world of social media? Is Twitter on the way out? Will Facebook business pages keep changing their viewability algorithms? Is LinkedIn still for professionals only?

Don’t worry about any of these – they actually don’t matter going into the new year!

Here’s what’s most important for social media trends:

Social media strategy number 1: Keep it social. While it’s true that more and more brands are taking to social networking, far too many are using these platforms as a simple “advertising” extension. They post nothing but sales messages and refuse to divulge any humor or personal information. Remember that people want to see, watch and hear from real life people. That’s the whole point of social media to begin with, and it doesn’t exclude brands!

Social media strategy number 2: You’d better be using video marketing! Videos are still critical to your social strategy. Consider that videos average 62% more engagement than photos. Facebook also recently announced that video sees an average of eight billion views a day from 500 million people.

Social media strategy number 3: Take video even further – try live broadcasts. Live social broadcasts are becoming more and more popular for brands. People are more likely to trust a brand that can show exactly what’s happening as it’s actually happening. With apps like Periscope and Facebook’s new Facebook Live Broadcasts, this is a strategy to explore for 2016.

image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net