17 Aug Our Predictions for the Next 10 Years in Social Media Marketing
Last month, we hosted a webinar talking about the past 10 years, the present, and the future of social media. Overall, we had three major predictions on what the future of social media looks like.
1) Data Drives Standards & Sales
Anyone who works with data/analytics is hoping for some kind of standard in how channels report data/analytics—and we predict that this is coming. Right now, here at Ignite, we create our own custom dashboards because there isn’t a tool that allows us to work with and analyze the data the way we want—the channels haven’t made this easy.
We also predict that we will get verified impressions. Most channels are working with 3rd party tools to start addressing the uncertainties that marketers/media buyers are facing when reporting impressions.
Finally, with improved analytics we foresee significant advances in being able to better attribute offline conversions back to social. Facebook, Snapchat and other channels have been testing a variety of tools to help accomplish this, but we think that they will tighten that up and get marketers even closer to that ever-elusive social ROI question.
2) Dark Social will Increase
Dark social is still an unknown territory for many social media marketers. According to Radiumone, 84% of outbound sharing takes place via Dark social—which is huge! Brands will need to start figuring out ways to insert themselves into this space, in a natural way, as well as report on it to effectively tell the full story to their efforts to their higher ups. The majority of brands don’t have an active presence on messaging apps, which is understandable, because they can be hard to navigate. But brands should consider dark social from a listening/customer service purpose—because conversations are happening out there.
3) Content Consumption will Change
With content consumption behavior changing, content types are going to continue to evolve. Facebook released new research on media consumption trends in their ‘Shifts for 2020’ series.
They reported that:
- People spend an average of 1.7 seconds looking at a given piece of content-which is really a blink of an eye
- People look 5x longer at video than static content on FB/IG
- Daily watch time for FB live broadcasts grew 4x over a year’s time
- 68% see VR becoming a part of everyday life
Social marketers will need to create these types of content in order to get and hold attention of their consumers.
To hear more about our predictions and what we think will happen to the main social channels, give our on-demand webinar a listen.
