Social media continues to be the flag bearer in turning millions of heads from around the world. There is plenty to trend about, whether it is about politics, movies, football, baseball, video games or anything else that intrigues the global population as a whole.
Even controversial figures like Donald Trump can be trending. Whether you like it or you hate it, trending can bend either way. To this day, there are over 2.5 billion active social media users and the numbers don’t show any signs of slowing down.
Facebook is the clear winner by bagging over 1.79 billion monthly active users in the third quarter of 2016. YouTube closes in behind it with over 1.3 billion active users. Let’s probe into what we can hope to expect out of 2017.
- Live Video
Even though Periscope Pro, Twitch, YouTube Live and Facebook Live have already introduced the concept of live videos, we are still in the developing stages. In a recent study by Zanthus and Focus Vision, 41% of TV subscribers either cut back or cancel their subscriptions very soon in the coming days.
- An Increase In Power Of Social Media Giants
At this point, it has become increasingly apparent that the big names of social media are not going to rest, not while the iron is still hot. The growing numbers derived from the activities on all social networks is proof of that. The marketers just have to figure out how this will affect their strategy in 2017.
In the future, the flow of information will be filtered and measured by the term of “reducing clutter” and reveal only that which is important. In other words, Facebook will decide what you see. Google too, will only show that kind of content, which complies with its rules and stored on its servers.
- Crackdown On Fake News
Fake news was a real pain in the year of 2016 and was brought to notice at the US presidential election. Despite the fact that Facebook claims to have banned fake news sites from using Ads, there is still much work to be done. Google is a prime example of struggling to deal with the fake news.
Even though Google has changed its algorithm, it has made its search engine even more vulnerable to fake news. It is because pages are rewarded by how many times they are clicked on. Thus, fake news can increase their traffic and can move up the rankings on the search engine results page.
- Messaging Apps
One-on-one customer communication has become a huge deal today. The main hurdle is how they will be able to develop content to so many that is relevant. At the moment, developing bots that provide relevant content and learn from customer behavior is expensive.
However, the cost savings around customer service will validate them quickly. It is worth considering that four of the most popular messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger, QQ Chat, and WeChat have a bigger community than the top four main social networks.
- Virtual Reality
2016 gave prominence to virtual and augmented reality, which is the sole reason why many tech companies are now opting for VR. GoPro, for example, has posted a series of VR videos on YouTube. Now there is a big calling to have VR implemented on social media.
Facebook has already gotten its hands on the Oculus and then there is vTime, which is the world’s first ever VR sociable network that allows you to interact with your friends or family in virtual locations. Imagine the kinds of interactions you will have with your friends and loved ones once VR becomes a global hit.
Author Bio: Callie Brendon is a Social Media Marketer and a Technology Blogger at Coursework Online Writing Service UK. She enjoys writing about branding, digital media, and entrepreneurship.