Social Marketing Predictions for 2018

[happygeek]

It's that time of the year again when the whole 'prediction' business machinery gets fired up. So I thought I would grab some of the ones from my inbox that are perhaps most applicable to the digital marketing sector. The following were inspired by some crystal ball gazing by the folk at the Talkwalker social analytics people, and caught my attention today. So, what does the gathered DaniWeb consciousness make of them? Accurate, likely or total nonsense?

Here goes:

1. Facebook will become a major competitor to YouTube during 2018 in terms of 'social video' consumption. This on the back of the introduction of new features to help creators with video discovery, especially a preferential boost in the newsfeed for original native video. A dedicated video app is also in the pipeline.

2. Conversational UI will march onwards and upwards, an AI-powered army of chatbots that will nurture leads and drive sales. Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are all investing heavily in this area.

3. Be it video or Augmented Reality, 'rich media' for an immersive experience will close the gap between engagement and purchase. If your ecommerce environment is dated, you'll be losing out.

4. R.I.P organic social reach. Paying for visibility on social media will no longer be optional, as organic reach not only nose-dives further in 2018 but commits seppuku in the process.

5. The marketeer is dead, long live the influencer. Maybe the most controversial of the predictions, but influencer marketing has already proved itself in consumer-facing environments and is predicted to storm B2B marketing strategy in 2018. OK, so it may not actually kill traditional online marketing, but it will sure as heck have to be taken seriously and implemented alongside it.

[jessicaaustin]

Great post thanks for sharing with us

[happygeek]

Thanks. So do you agree or disagree with the predictions then? :-)

[AssertNull]

How about

Number 6: Sponsored "news", "matchings", and "research" will grow in 2018 to the point where there's more of it than the real thing and it reaches critical mass. This will include all measurements of popularity, likes, polling, etc. EVERYTHING will be ads of one type or another and you'll have to be even more savvy than ever to wade through it.

Number 7: The Overton Window will shift to make this acceptable, in part due to pollsters and "like"-counting selling out to the highest bidder.

Number 8: A second Overton Window opens that makes all this unacceptable to a small, but growing segment of the population. There will be money to be made off of this second Overton Window.

Number 9: The two Overton Windows will separate to the point where they no longer overlap, resulting in at least two completely different populations. People become even more divided.

I don't consider this a hijack. I think it dovetails nicely with your 1, 2, and 4.

[happygeek]

Agreed with number 6. Numbers 7, 8 and 9 could be considered a single item concerning the Overton Window dividing - do you get paid by the word? ;-)

[Abdullah_14]

Your points are 90% to be agreed and you said about RIP about organic traffic no it will never die for sure.

[AssertNull]

do you get paid by the word?

More succinctly...

You can fool some of the people all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time, but a huge chunk of advertisers no longer care about the rest of the quote because they feel they gain more by fooling people than the backlash they get from people not being fooled and resenting the attempt.

[oouzo_1]

Social Media, is good platform!!! Thanks for the article.

[imtylerbanks]

without any organic social reach you can get nothing, no one wants to buy a thing in popup ads anymore!!

[agustina]

Thanks for sharing great information about social marketing predictions