We’ve seen plenty of articles throughout January with social media trends to look out for in 2016. The experts we’ve read and written about are not the only ones, of course, who have noted these trends; those in charge at your favorite social media platforms have their fingers on the same pulse.
As a result, lots of features have popped up recently that support the evidence of these trends, and will continue to do so as the year goes on. The folks at CJG Digital Marketing have put together a comprehensive infographic to help you keep track of these features and trends so you can plan to take advantage of them to reach your 2016 marketing goals.
Here are several key features we found especially interesting. Take a look, and start thinking about how your marketing plan can incorporate the themes below!
Ecommerce: Instagram Shop Now Button
Instagram and its 300 million users represent an incredible (and largely untapped) resource for businesses looking to grow through social media. Now that the network’s advertising platform has gone global, it’s no surprise that they’ve rolled out a Shop Now button akin to Twitter’s Buy button equivalent.
Publishing: Facebook Instant Articles, Twitter Moments (Project Lightning)
It’s no secret that content marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways for a business to get exposure, grow awareness, and convert customers. Because of this, social platforms have all scrambled to create their own versions of blogging platforms to draw content away from publishers’ own blogs and onto social networks. Two such examples are Facebook’s new Instant Articles and Twitter’s Moments.
Search: Facebook “M” and Pinterest Visual Search
Few people would be so bold as to say that Google is in imminent danger of having its place at the top of the online search game challenged, but that doesn’t mean that social media isn’t going to try! The importance of search cannot be understated, and social networks are wise to make their search functions are intuitive and attractive as possible. This will help them corral as many of the searches people perform onto their own properties as they can, keeping people in their own ecosystems instead of having them switch over to Google to find what they need.
Facebook is doing this by developing M, a digital-human hybrid personal assistant. Pinterest’s answer was to create visual search, which brilliantly capitalizes on both the growing importance of search and of visual media at the same time.
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