Social Technology Trends for 2016

Social media is maturing.

The tools are getting better, the expectations from companies using social media is increasing.

As we look ahead to 2016 we see some key trends.  At a recent MarTech conference I gave the following presentation which highlights some of the main trends I expect to see in 2016.

Here's a quick summary of the expected trends:

1. More integrated products - Expect more acquisitions in the tools space as companies are tired of implementing too many tools.  We want to minimize the tools and are prepared to invest to ensure this.  

The bigger tool providers will raise lots more money to allow them to acquire tools and integrate them as part of their offering.

For example, don't expect too many monitoring tools to stick out on their own, they are prime acquisition targets.  Mention, Brand24 and other tool providers can acquire (similar to what Brandwatch are doing) or be acquired.

2. Influencer Platforms get smarter - Influencer marketing will see massive growth in 2016 but tools need to be able to do influencer marketing at scale.  This means they need to implement marketing automation functionality as part of their core offering.

Expect the bigger marketing automation players to buy Influencer platforms or Influencer platforms to add on marketing automation for influencer identification and outreach.

3. Messaging apps to grow rapidly -  Slack is a big winner in this area as it broadens what it does because of the massive demand for messaging.  Slack is going to start taking over from other private communities.  Did you know that Whatsapp already has over 900 million users.

4. Content curation gets smarter - We don't just want a filtered list of posts we want smart learning technology that monitors what we share and presents better suggested content based on this.

5. More predictive analytics - We want to know about problems before they trend and the technology is now available for this.

6. Image Recognition software grows rapidly - The social web is an image and video based web.   We need to be able find images based on the content of the image not the text with the image.  Pinterest recently made an announcement about their support for image based search, expect all others to follow.

7. Image creation moves more in-house -  As the social web is image based there is increasing demand for creating images for most things we share.  But this is challenging due to the costs.  Tools like Canva are changing this and recently they introduced functionality to allow you to manage a production process for image creation within your organization.  Image creation for social is moving in-house!

8. Live streaming will grow - That's probably an obvious one.  I don't think too many people will argue with that.  When the hype settles down with live streaming we'll see more useful applications of it appearing and then we'll see good long term growth.   The new live streaming platforms will need to implement very strong anti-spam techniques as they will be flooded with this.

9. Content optimization and content predictive analytics to grow - We are producing so much content we need help to make sure that it will get ongoing organic traffic after we publish it.  But we're not all SEO experts so we'll see tools such as Inboundwriter helping with this.

10.  Massive increase in social selling - You'll see the buy button appearing on social channels across the web.   There is a strong demand to show results from social and this will help.

What will also help is frameworks like our PRISM funnel framework that can be used to take people from a tweet all the way through to sale on your website.  

Summary

2016 is going to be a very interesting year for social media technology.  There is rapid change in this sector and this is going to increase.

What do you expect the trends to be?  Do you agree with me?