A recent article released by Forbes predicts the 2018 social media marketing trends that businesses can expect to see on Facebook and other major social media companies. The predictions made by Forbes suggest that social media marketing is in for several major changes in the coming months.
According to the article, one of the biggest trends of the year is that businesses can no longer rely on Facebook content reaching consumers organically. The ability to reach consumers on their news feed with content organically has been slowly decreasing in past years, but this year Forbes asserts that 2018 will be the year Facebook becomes a paid-advertising-only platform for businesses. Facebook has even been testing a new system where paid and organic content will be separated out into two different feeds. If this change occurs, it would mean drastic changes for companies advertising on the platform. Paying for ads and content boosts may soon be the only way to go.
A general theme in a few of the trends is that technologies are aiming for faster and easier. Faster and easier set up on advertising campaigns. Faster and easier information access. The entire process will most likely be speeding up in 2018. One way the article predicts this will occur is through an increase in AI technology that advertisers can set up to help generate and test different ad creatives, images, etc. in the same campaign at the same time. Interestingly, the article also makes an argument that codes like QR Codes® (DENSO WAVE’s trademarked codes which were widely popular a handful of years ago) that store links to other pieces of information are going to be increasing in popularity this year because of technology interfaces like Facebook Messenger and the new Apple iPhone. These codes will be available for consumers to scan with their mobile devices, making it easier to immediately connect them to the information or support they need. Because of this, it is possible we will begin to see various kinds of codes like QR Codes® surfacing in future advertisements.
Finally, on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc., video advertisements are predicted to take over the majority of traffic. Now that live video, recorded video, short burst videos, temporary videos, and more video services are available on many social media platforms, it has been predicted that the majority of internet traffic will be video related. With so much internet traffic focusing on videos already, companies are expected to push video content with a focus on generating conversions instead of just accumulating viewers.
All of Forbes’ predictions are interesting because, although AI technology might be able to help create and test multiple creatives, the majority of these advertising changes are going to make it much more time consuming to advertise on platforms like Facebook. Creating content that will stand out from the crowd in a video saturated market with an entirely ad-filled news feed directed toward consumers who are becoming more and more accustomed to getting support and information in seconds, is going to become a much more difficult process. While the large companies with full marketing teams might not find themselves impacted by these changes, small and medium sized companies could have a harder time keeping up and remaining visible in this new market. It might be time for those kinds of companies to consider paying an agency to take care of their marketing needs for them.
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