Interested in taking your brand to the next level in 2019? There’s a whole bunch of amazing social media trends that we are predicting will become big (or bigger!) in 2019. Here are our predictions on what will be huge in the digital space next year:
Live streaming/live video
The technology involved in live video has only improved more and more over the last year!
More brands adopting are adopting live video, and live video will secure it’s place as a huge player in the digital space this year.
VR and AR
Virtual reality and augmented reality is taking the main stage on social, with 360 videos and immersive 3D videos giving users a truly rich experience. This is particularly interesting for the wedding industry, with venues opting to include VR tours on their social, Easy Weddings storefronts and websites, and personalised geofilters available for Snapchat!
Bots
Facebook messenger bots are growing in popularity, with big brands like Boost Juice using them to their advantage, running competitions and encouraging their community to engage with their bots.
Shoppable media
There are more options to buy via FB and IG than ever before, with the ability to tag your items and directly link to your shop. If you sell shoes, accessories, invitation sets or anything else that is able to be shipped, then set yourself up with shoppable media. The immersive experience makes it much easier to shop directly from social media.
Ephemeral Content
Due to the introduction of ephemeral content on Facebook and Instagram, this style of content is expected to rise even more in popularity in 2019.
Separate platforms for video:
Facebook and Instagram have begun making a shift in video, offering separate products for longer form videos IGTV and Facebook Watch. Mark Zuckerberg announced last night this about IGTV and Facebook’s Watch:
“Our efforts have grown but we’ve had challenges reconciling all this passive video consumption with what people uniquely want from us, which is meaningful social interactions. Video has grown a lot on our services, but as I mentioned earlier, we hit a dynamic where when it grows in feeds in Facebook and Instagram, it displaces some social interactions and people tell us it makes the experience less valuable, even though they’re spending more time on it.
So the solution to this has been building separate video experiences outside of our feeds, with Watch on Facebook and IGTV on Instagram. What we’ve found is that when people seek out video experiences intentionally, they don’t displace social interactions as much, and the quality of the experience is generally higher. We’ve also been able to build experiences that help creators build communities around their content — which fits our mission and our focus to encourage meaningful interactions.
At this point, Watch has really hit its stride and it’s growing incredibly quickly — about 3x in the last few months in the US alone. IGTV is still earlier in its development, but I think we have a good sense of how to make it work as well. To be clear, these services are still well behind YouTube, which is our primary competitor in this space, but they’re growing very quickly.
That said, beyond the mission challenges of video displacing social interactions, there’s also a business challenge, which is that video monetizes significantly less well per minute than people interacting in feeds. So this means that even though we’ve made video more community-oriented and minimized displacement of social interactions, as video grows it will still displace some other services where we’d probably make more money.
From a mission and a business perspective, we still believe this is the right thing to do. Video is a critical part of the future, it’s what our community wants, and as long as we can make it social I think it will end up being a large part of our business as well.”
More smart speakers and voice search:
The use of voice-controlled assistants like the Amazon Alexa, Siri and Google Home will become even more common. Considering a Google home mini is approximately £49, this type of tech is accessible to almost everyone. We expect the boom in popularity of these devices will not only lead to better offerings but also potentially ads in this space or subscription-based monetization of the airspace.
More effective targeting capabilities:
We all know retargeting exists, and why that new TV you were looking at online is now stalking you around the internet, but in 2019 we predict that there will be even more specific targeting capabilities based on user behaviour, unlike anything we’ve seen before.
