We live in the information age, and the nanotechnology era is quickly approaching. Social networks have an enormous role in these times, so one of the leading global agencies for public relations, Ketchum, whose exclusive representative in Croatia is the agency DIALOG Communications, conducted an internal investigation which defines the main trends on social networks in 2016. We have singled out the three most important:
1. The key to success in social networks is a combination of paid and earned content
The average person spends about ten hours a day consuming media, during which time they are exposed to more than 5,000 marketing messages (source: eMarketer and Media Dynamics). About a quarter of these messages are noticed by the users, and only about 3% of them have any effect. Web space is cluttered with content, and users firmly control the content that they get in touch with, when and where. The winning combination is that of paid and earned content – paid content works best when the story is thematically and contextually relevant.
2. Video content rises exponentially
Video on social networks is a place where the organic and paid reach intensively overlap. According to the latest report of the company Shareablee, brand video content has increased by 98%, and user engagement with videos increased by 163% over the previous year.
Investment in the creation of video does not have to be expensive. Applications such as Photoshop and Instagram help create dynamic content.
3. Facebook spearheads the development
Facebook currently has more than a billion active users per day. They realized that visual is the key to communication in social networks, so they bought Instagram for $1 billion. Through Instagram’s Boomerang option we had a chance to see how photos become GIFs, so Facebook introduced GIFs as an option for the profile picture.
Live streaming is also in full swing, and its reach is growing continuously. The areas in which this option is expected to grow the fastest are food, the creative industries and health. In December 2015 Facebook gave users the live stream option.
Studies have shown that we look at our cellphone on average 50 times daily. So last year Facebook mainly introduced new features specifically designed for mobile platforms.
