Future Trends in Social Media Marketing

The Rise of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality has been creeping into our lives over the last few years; through apps like Snapchat and Instagram. It is no secret that Apple is one of the main industry leaders when it comes to anything to do with mobile technology. Following the recent reveal of the iPhone X, augmented reality has gained a massive boost. The new iPhone X features a new chip which allows the phones to provide users with an augmented reality experience that previous to this millennium would have been inconceivable. This video demonstrates it:

While this new feature will likely be initially used for gaming and utilities, such as measuring tapes. It is inevitable that it will find its way onto social media platforms. In my opinion, Snapchat and Instagram stories will have the biggest use for this feature, as they will soon support filters and geotags that take advantage of this new technology. Similarly, brands could soon project their products into the homes of social media users through special filters.

 

The Change of Twitter

Twitter has failed to significantly grow its followers in 2017. To give an idea of their failure in 2017, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram all now have more followers then Twitter. In 2017, Twitter also lost access to the rights to stream NFL games to Amazon; this is a huge blow to Twitter in America. In 2018, it is very likely that we will see twitter make an attempt to rethink how the platform operates. Possible outcomes of this could be some time of a subscription element, or possible redoing their advertising options, which have fallen behind the competitors.

 

Facebook Spaces

Facebook owns Oculus, which is currently the leading company in Virtual Reality. Facebook has also been working on a project called Spaces.

Spaces is a platform which is designed to allow friends to connect through VR. Facebook is predicted to invest more into Spaces in 2018, and when they do, it is likely to be the first successful VR social media platform.

Ref: Oculus.com

Embracing Stronger Governance Policies

Following a series on controversial decisions in 2016 presidential election in America, social media platforms have been forced to carry out a more hands on approach when governing their platforms. For example, Facebook recently demolished thousands of ads that had seemed to be connected to Russian meddling, and have also invested in new forms of artificial intelligence that can monitor meddling. 

Taking into account the heat that Facebook and Twitter received during the 2017 election, these platforms are likely to introduce new codes of conduct and governance policies that will protect entities from future criticism.

 

The Growth of Instagram Stories

Approximately 200 million people use Instagram stories each month, which is over 50 million more then on Snapchat. Keep in mind Snapchat was the birthplace of Stories and Instagram stories is only 1 year old. If the growth continues at this rate then nearly half of all Instagram users will be using stories by the end of 2018. This is means brands must focus more on Instagram stories then ever before.