Future of Social Media: 15 Social Media Trends 2020
Social media is a child born several decades ago. It is early days exciting with its diversification from early social media networks like Friend Free to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and others. While some people saw its dynamism, others thought of social media as more of the Wild West.
Indeed, social media has constantly changed, and no signs of slowing down. In fact, when Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, said, “The only constant changes,” he probably could have been referring to social media trends bound to happen in 2020 and beyond. Future of social media: check out some social media changes expected to occur in 2020 from now on.
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More privacy and security
In the current climate of social media, brands aim at implementing methods that fast build customer’s trust. This involves how they connect and relate to their audience. Lately, concerns have emerged concerning privacy issues and how consumers’ data is being used. You know you can’t successfully avoid providing your information as long as you want to stay connected to the world.
Owing to these issues, we see social media brands strongly pushing towards data privacy and security than before.
We saw Facebook rolling out major data management updates. Reports also indicate that social media will incorporate what’s known as “Dark Social fully.” This basically means that social media users can interact privately. Dark social media Apps such as Skype, messenger, and others are expected to increase in a few years.
Future of social media: more video content
Admittedly, video consumption through social media is increasing. No wonder YouTube comes as the second largest search engine globally after Google.
In fact, people look at videos five times longer than written content, which includes images and text messages, among others. The engagement level of video content-they is versatile and engaging, something that delivers a real-life picture of the subject matter.
Today, we see platforms like Facebook and Instagram pushing hard for videos. We all love the Facebook Live feature. Reportedly, Instagram has recently developed an algorithm that gives more preference to videos when ranking the content.
This impacts so much on marketing efforts through the creation of relevant video stories that talk about brands. It’s reported that people make buy decisions based on emotions, and it’s almost impossible to trigger emotions by facts and stats.
Because of the value video content comes with, it’s almost guaranteed that we are bound to see the social media industry awash with videos ranging from entertainment, marketing, and tutorials.
High focus on Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
The world of technology doesn’t seem to give us rest from technological terms. We all have heard about AI, right? Well, AI has been there and almost incorporated in every facet of our lives. But what are AR and VR?
Although folks often confuse the two, they are miles apart. With AR, you make use of the real world to enhance your daily experiences. For example, Snapchat has well implemented this technology through those elegant camera filters and 3D Bitmoji. Similarly, Facebook has copied this feature and have been building it over time.
With AR in social media, we can get AR live events, AR videos, extra brand awareness, and many more. Then there is virtual reality (VR), which implies creating a whole new world literary from nothing. In other words, VR uses a principle of simulation to give us real and imagine the world.
Social media has tasted the usefulness offered by these technologies. They will be used to create fancy filters and simulations, but the potential of these technologies is endless, stretching through 2020 and beyond.
Becoming a huge source of trusted information and news
Today, social time has, by far, overtaken TV. More and more time is being spent on social media, with an average user spending at least 15 minutes longer each day, according to GlobalWebIndex data.
The research also reveals how a higher proportion of the population uses Facebook daily (50%) than is watching TV (39%). Wider gaps are reported with the millennials. Basically, this reflects how TV and traditional media no longer appeals to people as their means of reach.
This behavioral change forces social media to make their platform sources of trusted information. Internet users see news on their feed and then follow the full information from the news sites. The moment news is released, they go fast on social media, and before long, the whole world is informed.
You also recognize the power of hashtags, which makes news spread like wildfire! The only challenge that remains is differentiating fake from honesty news. We are hopeful that social media finds a way to host trusted news only.
Data segmentation and the use of AI
AI seems to be here to stay. AI can reduce the complexity of tasks and mimic human intelligence; that’s why it continues to unfold every day. With AI, social media platforms have been able to rank posts, group data, and a lot more. Now, one of the biggest challenges is fake news and sensitive data. By 2020 and the late future, AI is expected to segment data better and ensure that social media platforms provide the best possible content.
Can do stuff online more than ever before
People are becoming increasingly lazy as machines and various automation take over manual operations. Technologies are now counted on to make life much bearable and comfortable. For instance, today, people don’t have to visit stores physically. With a click of a button, they can make an order and pay online; then, the stuff gets delivered to their doorstep!
It’s expected that in the future, social media will amaze us. We will use Cryptos to pay, something that Facebook has already launched with Libra. We will have social media platforms with all the services that we do online. These features will be so powerful for future generations if well implemented.
Engagement will become more important
Engagement is becoming more important today than in the past. Why? Well, in the past, people measured the usefulness of a post through likes. Then those stats would be used to rank the content on the web.
Unfortunately, we discovered that likes and fake followers are bursting the internet. Social media logarithms are now more focused on engagement, mainly comments, life features, and shares.
This trend has been effectively implemented by Instagram, Facebook, and even LinkedIn. The logic is simple– the post that gets many comments, replies, or live video feed ranks high than the one with many likes and few comments. In the future, we will focus on video content, Instagram followers app, as mentioned earlier, and content that is deemed engaging.
Certain platforms will pose as specialized search engines
Social media platforms have continued to position themselves and getting popular for a certain kind of content. YouTube is an example, which is praised as a platform for YouTube content. Today, YouTube is the second largest search engine.
The tricky is simple: As these platforms amass lots of data, they begin to dominate certain information types, eventually becoming search engines. For example, LinkedIn has been known as an engine for jobs and like-minded professionals. With many professionals using this platform, they will truly transform it into a huge job search engine. Possible!
And with people doing a lot of different stuff online, they will start leaning on certain platforms rather than always heading to Google.
Chatbots will become more advanced
Chatbots and artificial intelligence are the modern customer assistants offering instant massaging. Customers love them because of their likeability and efficiency. Businesses save time, money, and resources. They learn more about you as you engage more with them and then develop a response based on that. That’s why the banking and pharmaceutical industries rely on them to tackle repetitive tasks and answer their clients’ questions.
The market of chatbots and automation has been there ad still evolving. We see more and more human-like features being implemented and developed. We will immediately see chatbots literally closing deals or marketing and selling your products while you take a nap! Why not!
The more social community will arise
As many people stay connected via social media, a greater social community is bound to emerge. This will be facilitated mainly by the social media features supporting group engagement, making it easier to form social network communities based on specific topics.
As such communities form, special information will be easily filtered. With the rise of specific niche communities, I think they will demand an opportunity to represent their own niche based platforms.
Rise of more influencers
Influencer marketing has taken the world by storm in recent decades, and no signs of slowing down. Every day, brands at all levels are fighting for the top spots. With marketers always coming up with innovative ways to improve their online presence, then comes the concept of influencer marketing.
In 2019 alone, 80% of social media marketers found influencer marketing quite effective. Predictively though, 2020 and beyond will see more and more social media influencers play an important role in creating brand awareness.
They will not play it the decades-old way of influencer marketing, but two things are meant to be evident:
- The rise of micro-influencers
Micro-influencers will be of use by mid-level brands that don’t have huge budgets for marketing. They will hire influencers with little yet more engaged following to promote their brands.
- More transparency and honesty
It is expected that influencers will not lie to their followers but will deliver an unbiased view of their endorsing product.
Short, crispy information will become a go-to choice
Today, the concentration span of people is rapidly decreasing. They want easy to read scannable content. That’s why short information such as stories and IGTV content types will be more prevalent by 2020.
Firstly, this type of content is Innovative. It is still somewhat new, and people like new stuff. Secondly, such information is believed to be giving real authentic values and perceptions to the audience. Short, crispy information is trusted to be easy and super engaging. And how long doesn’t it take to go over short news content? Definitely, such content takes less than 5 minutes to consume, yet in an easy-to-view way than long post contents.
Social media ads will play an important role
Social media platforms are pushing brands that make use of their advertising packages. On Facebook and Instagram, you will definitely struggle to get your content seen if you don’t pay for it.
You can advertise on Facebook for as little as $1 a day, a minimal amount of money yet with great rewards. One marketer is reported to have used Facebook ads and generated a whopping $36,499 worth of revenue out of a mere $4,159 spend.
No doubt as to why this media trend will continue immensely in 2020 and beyond. And this means you will have to be prepared to spend money for meaningful brand outreach and engagement.
Future of social media: personalization is the key
Marketers have always employed personalization as a key to successful marketing. Personalization language is not a new thing; in fact, that’s why currently we have personalized Facebook feeds, Google’s personalized search, etc.
So the more your social media account gets personalized, the more your chances of succeeding. This a truth in its entirety! The only challenge I guess experts will tackle is that of implementing privacy in the wake of personalization. This is because personalization uses personal details to create suggestions. But we will see how this drama unfolds come 2020!
Major Marketplace for E-commerce stores
Already many eCommerce stores heavily rely on social media to make sales. Search engines like Google and Amazon have dominated the commercial business, majorly eCommerce.
With social media seeking ways to make it better for commercial activities, the Facebook marketplace and Instagram store are already with us. These trends can only make us believe that social media will soon be dominated by the eCommerce industry. Not only that, but social media will roll out powerful features to facilitate this field. This will make social media a major space for people to buy or sell their brands.
Final thoughts on the future of social media
These are some of the trends that will certainly hit social media through 2020 and beyond. Many of them have already begun taking off, and the trend is seriously rising. For others, however, it may be realized only with appropriate investments and continues usage and popularity. I mean, the possibilities are endless.
But the bottom line is that as people increasingly become dependent on internet connections, social media is meant to evolve and go wild! Stay tuned for what is cooking!
