I want to be as honest as possible with you. Today’s post will most probably be some sort of rant from me, as well as several trends in social media that I have been noticing it quite recently.
Basically, the social media landscape is forever changing. Of course, it makes sense since technology is constantly advancing and the demand for social media marketing is forever increasing (by the day). The social media landscape today is not the same as what you have years ago.
Things are getting more complicated and more importantly, things are changing at rapid speeds. There will always be trends which will ‘die by itself’ and those that will blossom to be something much bigger.
In this post, I hope to cover as much as possible and remember to leave a reply on what your thoughts are later in this post.

 

Social Media Landscape 2017

1. The ever growing demand of social media tools

Let’s face it. I can’t live without my social media tools. Buffer and Hootsuite to name a few, they serve as a great platform for me to automate and manage my social media accounts.
They are easy to use, versatile and most importantly: get the job done… fast! As the trend (demand) for these social media tools are increasing by the day, don’t forget that there will be more competitors along that will emerge.
For example, MeetEdgar was created to offer something more than any other social media tools could do (at that time) and old timer tools such as Socialoomph will forever be behind the limelight but not forgotten.
The growth of social media tools are always recommended (and appreciated) but increased demand will most probably increase the entire cost of the tools as well. It makes all the sense since as more users are using them, the requirement to perform maintenance and much-needed upgrades would cost a lot more money than usual.
Therefore, prices of social media tools (some of them) will continue to rise as we dive deeper in 2017.
 

2. The end of Twitter?

Twitter is forever getting my love and hate relationship. For one, I love Twitter as it drives insanely amount of traffic but at the same time, it is dying by itself. Trolls and spammers are constantly on Twitter and in most cases, more than any other social media platforms.
Twitter is constantly being under the spotlight because they are losing more users on a daily basis compared to years ago. Personally, I feel that while Twitter is a good tool to use, it certainly lacks real communication.
For example, I would probably only see one genuine person in every 20 accounts or so. Not to say that they are not real, they are not communicating and this affects the overall gameplay on Twitter.
 

3. Rise of paid advertisements

Want to get your content in front of thousands? Well, you can do it pretty much under a day thanks to paid advertisements on social media.
Facebook for one is a powerful advertising platform that will grow your businesses in many ways, at the expense of money. The trend for paid advertising will constantly increase (duh!) but here’s the kicker, people will be smarter especially with paid advertising.
But wait! What does this mean?
It simply means that if social media marketers and business owners who manage multiple paid advertising will head over to third party tools to manage their advertising. For example, AdExpresso is an awesome tool to manage all your Facebook advertising effectively due to its automation.
Plus, there are tools that help you to do multiple variations (A/B testings) to determine the best, highly converted ads to ensure that you are not wasting your money.
Again, this makes sense because most of us are spending at least a few hundred dollars a month on Facebook just to advertise a post, perform boosted posts and much more. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to let your money being wasted on the wrong target audience, right?
 

4. Segmentation matters even more

Your target audience will matter the most in 2017 and beyond. And it doesn’t matter if you are planning to paid advertising or organic reach.
If you are not producing content that resonates with the right target audience, you are going to lose out a chunk and here’s why. There is just too much content for you to digest on a daily basis.
Do you know that there are thousands of content being injected into the Internet every second?
That’s how much information there is on social media and the Internet. As human, we are unable to consume all of them at the same time … which leads us to only one thing; reading the content that resonates (or matters most) to us.
Therefore, producing content that matters to your targeted audience will be more than just important in 2017 (and beyond).
 

5. Hashtag marketing

Personally, I feel like bidding farewell to hashtag marketing. Don’t get me wrong. It is still very effective especially when you are trying to monitor your reach etc. However, it is often felt less useful and it is very time consuming to perform hashtag marketing.
For starters, not everyone uses a hashtag and therefore, it is hard to determine if you will actually reach the targeted audience and the number of reaches might not be accurate.
If you are wondering that if you should be using hashtag marketing for 2017, the answer is probably “yes, but with the limitation”. Do not put all your eggs in one basket and therefore, consider using hashtag sparingly. Of course, there can be exceptions for Instagram but overall, I still feel that hashtag doesn’t carry a huge weight in social media marketing in 2017 and beyond.
Personally, I believe that hashtag marketing will slowly become less popular as time passes by. Again, this is just what I feel!
 

What do you think?

As I have said, this post is pretty much about my rant and what I see coming in the social media landscape 2017. What do you think? Leave a comment below and share what you have in mind!
 
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