Trends Identified
Cracking the commerce code
In Asia, social commerce adoption has been swift,41 with 70 percent of China’s Gen Zers now opting to buy direct from social.42 In North America, however, social commerce hasn’t kept pace. Despite the longhyped promise of buy buttons, people aren’t yet buying on social in huge numbers.4
2019
Social media trends 2019
Hootsuit
Messaging eats the world
Top messaging apps—WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, and Skype—now collectively count nearly five billion monthly active users, according to We Are Social and Hootsuite’s 2018 Q3 Global Digital Statshot.
2019
Social media trends 2019
Hootsuit
The evolution of social ROI
For years, we’ve been predicting the death of short-sighted vanity metrics. In 2018, we’re seeing this long-promised shift finally take place. What’s dfferent? While organizations have traditionally used social media to increase top-of-funnel engagement, many are exploring and discovering the value of social in other phases of the customer journey. In addition to brand awareness, social media is also helping organizations achieve business objectives such as lowering customer service costs, tracking changes in brand perception, mitigating risk, attracting top talent, and even feeding social insights into supply chain analyses. But this evolution requires new metrics—and alignment of social media strategies with your organization’s most urgent business challenges.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
Mobile fuels the growth of social TV
Mobile usage, shorter attention spans, and the thrill of novelty have accelerated the consumption of video content. The old buzz phrase used to be that “brands need to be publishers.” But in 2018, social networks will encourage brands to become broadcasters as mobile video and social-TV style programming take the spotlight. Creating broadcast-style content won’t work for every brand or product category. And the metrics that bump the stock price of social networks—such as engagement rates or video views—might not help your organization achieve your specific business outcomes. However, for many industries, this will open up innovative social advertising formats and bold new ways to engage social audiences.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
Trust declines, while peer influence rises
2017 was a tumultuous ride—we saw the explosion of fake news in public discourse, U.S. President Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph over traditional media, and an erosion of public trust in mainstream institutions. Politics aside, these cultural and technological shifts impacted both businesses and consumers. As Edelman found in their global study of consumer confidence, for the first time in history consumers trust peers just as much as technical experts and more than CEOs, governments, and academics. Marketing leaders are also more skeptical of inflated influencer metrics and wary of paying to reach social media bots instead of humans. We’re moving away from trusting institutions, vanity metrics, and mega-influencer celebrities—and moving towards smaller and actual spheres of influence where customers advocates, genuine customer communities, and engaged employees matter more than ever.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
Humans, meet AI
The machines have risen. And marketers have discovered they can be delightfully useful. The danger, of course, is following this trend, rather than understanding the far-reaching changes AI will bring to social marketing. Over 100 thousand Messenger bots are now active on Facebook (a 233 percent YOY growth over last year’s 33 thousand). But it’s still unclear whether customers will value these human-less engagements. While AI is still a future-facing trend, marketers can expect to start reaping the practical benefits in 2018. Facebook, for example, has released new predictive analytics to help marketers find insights faster. And visual search engines are using machine learning to help consumers search by images rather than keywords, a shift that will redefine the future of online product browsing.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
The promise (and reality) of social data
Organizations have long heard about the benefits of deep listening and uncovering customer insights with social data. But they’ve also realized that integrating social data with other analytics systems—or finding usable insights from mountains of social mentions—requires a lot of work and more resources than they originally thought. In 2018, the promise of social data remains—but organizations will need to recalculate the effort and resources they’ll need to invest to turn social data into a true source of customer insights that can be used across the enterprise.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
Get to know gen Z
Gen Z are now attracting the type of attention that has long been bestowed on Millennials, but with little separating Gen Zers (16-20) from the youngest Millennials in terms of age, how different should we expect these two audiences to be? Do Gen Zers really have de ning characteristics distinct from those of their Millennial counterparts?
2018
Trends 18
GlobalWebIndex
Social commerce: take 2
It has often been assumed that social commerce will transform the way we shop online. As we enter 2018, however, it’s a trend that has gained traction in parts of Asia but is yet to take hold in the West, where online shopping is still rmly rooted in traditional online retailers.
2018
Trends 18
GlobalWebIndex
Sports' online revolution
In a splintering media landscape, live sports have managed to retain their appointment viewing status. But with the likes of ESPN, BT and Sky now reporting some declines for their sports broadcast audiences, it’s clear that even sports are no longer immune to the ‘cord-cutting’ phenomenon. How serious could this digital disruption be and how should the industry respond?
2018
Trends 18
GlobalWebIndex