Showing posts with label Future Social Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Future Social Media. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

2025 And Beyond Social Media Marketing?


10 Ways to ace social media marketing in 2025 and beyond..

The world of marketing will witness significant changes and social media marketing will be at the core of most marketing strategies.

In this article, we look at a 10-step guide to emerging trends in social media marketing and how you can win at social in 2025 and beyond.


Social media marketing is essential to any marketing strategy in an era where everyone is online. In fact, the sheer number of social media users in the world in 2018 – 3.196 billion – is staggering. Social media won’t remain the same as it is now. What counts as a trend today will be obvious tomorrow.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to making sure your social media marketing strategy always stays current:

1. Social videos broaden horizon: The audience loves videos, and so do marketers. Videos are well retained by the human brain, are usually self-explanatory, and engaging. It is predicted that 80% of global internet traffic will be attributed to videos by 2021.

2. Moreover, live streaming of events, ‘How-To' videos, product launches, behind the scenes, etc. is catching up with consumers and marketers alike. By 2020, videos will not only be used to create brand awareness and conversions but also become highly personal. Marketers will use videos for:

--One to one communication – for e.g. Personalized videos to walk you through the features of a device.
--Networking – As users consume more videos for entertainment and education, marketers will leverage this opportunity to build a community of loyal followers.
--Visual content for online shopping – With short-form videos gaining traction, and shoppers preferring video ads and how to videos over other ad forms, marketers will sync social videos with their e-commerce strategy.



3. The rise of AR and VR: Experiential marketing has tremendous opportunity to engage customers and create memorable experiences for them. Virtual Reality (VR) can be used to bring to life a faraway event or a simulated environment, while Augmented Reality (AR) can add unimaginable layers of depth to real-life experiences. With social platforms pushing features like FB’s Oculus Rift Glasses, Snapchat’s Geofilters and Lens or Amazon helping users try on clothes virtually, marketers will embrace these features to entertain and engage their audience and boost their advertising revenue.

4. Product search goes social: Today’s customers are tech-savvy and informed. 84% of people surveyed said they trust online reviews as a recommendation. Hence social proof like reviews, shares, likes, mentions, etc. are important. While you are busy advertising, your prospect is most likely looking for social recommendations or the popularity of your product. He is most likely to turn to social media to discover this information. According to a Globalwebindex report, 28 percent of users turned to social networks during their online product research. As users continue to flock to social media platforms, it is possible that social would go on to trump search for product research.



5. Social commerce – hit the buy button: The next logical step, when a user discovers you on social media is to provide him with a call-to-action. Social has commerce channels and can provide an easy, breezy shopping experience for users.

Marketers can supplement their ads with a buy button to optimize conversions. The addition of a buy button can eliminate the step needed for a website visit or app download. Though this trend hasn’t caught up yet, it can certainly add value and improve conversion rates.

6. Step up your sell game: People are hooked to online as well as offline games. Can you deny the popularity of Pokemon Go, Clash of Clans, Candy Crush and so many more? With 66% of men and 70% of women playing mobile games, and 54% of gamers being in the age group 25-44, games are popular across most demographics.

Brands can take this as a cue to investing in gaming apps for ads, creating exciting games for brand awareness, educating their customers, and making some sales in the process.



7. Insights get more profound: There is no shortage of data from social media marketing efforts. As more people converge on social channels, pulling data from different platforms and monitoring usage and preferences, can help you gather rich insights into consumer behavior and understand the customer journey better.

8. Unique content: There is too much noise out there, with everyone churning out content at a fast pace. Now, the need is to create customized content for every individual. It may sound ambitious, but an extraordinary amount of data you now have access to, along with emerging technologies, it seems possible. Most social media platforms are already customizing a user’s newsfeed based on his likes, clicks, and preferences. This trend will continue to grow, and marketers will serve content and ads handpicked for an individual.

9. Niche platforms for targeting: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. cater to mass audiences, but platforms like LinkedIn make it easier to connect with a specific niche. Niche social platforms will gain popularity and make it easier for marketers to focus on a particular user base.

Related Article: YOUR Video Content Is King?


10. Power of AI: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in vogue. Combined with machine learning (ML), AI can help you automate mundane, repetitive tasks, perform predictive analytics, offer personalized recommendations, and engage your customers. Marketers will leverage AI along with social media data to:

--Offer product recommendations
--Make chatbots to provide customer support
--Use ML algorithms to craft personalized and relevant messages
--Identify business issues

Now that you know what’s to come in social media marketing, how are you preparing for the future? Let us know in the comments below.

Guest Authored By Vandita Grover. Vandita is a Computer Lecturer by profession at the University of Delhi. She has previously worked as a Software Engineer with Aricent Technologies. Vandita writes for MarTech Advisor as a freelance contributor. Follow Vandita on Twitter.





Social media marketing is essential to any marketing strategy in an era where everyone is online.

In fact, the sheer number of social media users in the world in 2025 – 3.196 billion – is staggering.

Social media won’t remain the same as it is now. What counts as a trend today will be obvious tomorrow..


    • Post Crafted By:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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    Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

    Wednesday, May 2, 2018

    YOUR Social Media And Brand Future?


    Brands and social media will work differently in the future..

    It used to be true that to sell a consumer product like a dress or a man’s jacket you had to answer three questions:

    --Does it fit?
    --Does it look great?
    --Is it priced right?



    Those questions are still very important but now they’re only part of what you need to address.

    What younger consumers want now is values. Things like authenticity, environmental friendliness, fair wages for all workers, artisanal products, local production, ethical behavior and transparency are all important now. These values are not as easily transmitted to consumers as the first three in the bullets above.

    The way companies communicate their values is by creating content and that content is conveyed via social media. Almost all consumers who use social media follow at least one brand. Content has become a critical component of a brand’s presentation and value. Brands that create great, relevant, convincing, authentic content get their followers to buy their products and it’s a great way to stay in front of consumers and build repeat customers.



    If you create an image, you usually own the rights to that image. If the image generates income, it’s usually the creator who benefits from that income.

    That is mostly not true on social media. While there are some people who make money from their social media, influencers for example, most of the money is made by the social media company itself. If you post an image on Facebook, you probably won’t make money from it but Facebook can. The more people you get to look at that image, the more money Facebook can make and the same is true for other big social media like Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, You Tube, Pinterest and virtually all others. We’ve all gotten used to that arrangement so it doesn’t seem strange.

    But imagine this: What if you had a telephone interview and got a job offer from it? Or what if you made a big sale by email? Would the phone company or your email provider be entitled to share in the income from that job or sale? You would think that’s crazy. Yet, when you provide images or text that generates traffic on social media, you don’t make anything from it but the big social media providers often do.



    Social media is like a big pot that you put your content in and you can permission other people to look at the stuff you put in the pot.

    Because the social media company controls the pot, they get to make money from advertisers who put their ads next to your content on their site. Their fee for managing your content is the advertising revenue they collect. Last year over $40 billion was paid to Facebook, primarily through advertising revenue. The value of Facebook in the market today is over $450 billion.

    It doesn’t have to work this way. Changes in technology happening now will allow content creators to benefit financially from the content they create and post on social media. It is based on a technology you’ve probably heard about (and probably makes your eyes glaze over when you hear it) called blockchain. Conceptually, blockchain technology eliminates the need for intermediaries. That’s the role the big social media companies are playing and blockchain is a threat to them. Blockchain eliminates the need for the pot that holds your images, videos and texts and that takes away their control. In fact, it displaces their presence entirely. Most of the $40 billion that Facebook collects annually will wind up going to the creators of the content. That will wipe out the value of the company to its shareholders. In fact, it could just wipe out the company.



    When that happens and the revenue that social media companies now get goes to the creators of content, a lot of talent will be drawn to creating social media posts.

    Brands that now have to spend a lot to create their social media feeds will find a new stream of revenue. They will be incentivized to make their social media more compelling and entertaining. It will be a new stream of revenue for many brands and in a world where margins are under pressure, it will make a big difference. You can already sample what great content looks like on a consumer site. If you check out Glossier and their affiliated site Into The Gloss, or NetAPorter and their editorial, or Food52 and their related shop, you can start to see how great content and products work together and help each other. This is just the beginning. When there’s an economic incentive, there’ll be video and entertainment that will support brands and move even more entertainment time away from TV and on to your phone and computer.



    How Will It Work?

    The user experience of blockchain-based social media will not be vastly different from what you experience today. If you’re familiar with extensions on your browser software, there’ll likely be an extension for each of the social media platforms you engage with.

    It would be as if Facebook, Instagram and others were buttons on your browser that open up the software you use to engage on social media. What’s different is how it is handled in the ways you don’t see. When you use blockchain, everything remains on your computer and not on Facebook’s. More important, it stays under your control. You’ll permission the friends and contacts you choose to see your information or you can choose to let anyone see it in much the same way you do now. The more people you can get to look at your information, the greater the allocation of cryptocurrency you’ll receive and that’s convertible into money.



    Who’s Going To Do This?

    There’s a broad range of companies developing the structure that will replace the big social media companies. What makes me confident that it will happen is that the technology exists, no new fundamental technologies have to be developed for this system to work. What’s not developed is who will be the winners in the new structure. Think about the early days of any industry involving technological change. A lot of entrepreneurs jump in with good ideas and eventually the winners emerge. Here are some candidates that already exist today:

    Steemit – Steemit is a site that works like Reddit. It’s a giant bulletin board capable of handling millions of ongoing text-based conversations simultaneously. It exists today, you can join it right now and if you generate real content and real views on Steemit, you will get a cryptocurrency called STEEM that has value you can turn into money and spend.



    DataWallet – I wrote above that using blockchain, you could permission people to see your content. Along with that, you can also permission advertisers to post ads on your content and to monitor the ads that are presented to you. DataWallet allows you to be the one who collects most of the advertising revenue that comes from the content you create. You set the switches that give the permissions that drive the revenue. When you use their tool your content is measurable and it turns into revenue for you.

    Blockstack – They are building infrastructure that are systems that other companies (like the two above) can use if they want to create their software. If you think about Microsoft Windows, it’s not a program you use, it’s a system that other people build programs for. In this new structure, Blockstack works as the foundation of the network that facilitates the creation of other programs.



    What The Future Holds

    Economics encourages rewards going to the people who create value. Over time, the market will incentivize the people who drive internet traffic with the appropriate reward. When that happens, brands will see quickly that the better their content, the more revenue it will create and ultimately the more products it will sell. Content creation will likely explode. You could see how the interests of brands and production studios could align. The possibilities created by these changes are very broad.

    One caveat – you can’t predict with certainty what will happen with technology. There are some naysayers about blockchain but every day we are hearing about more and more uses for it. The way that brands and retailers interact with social media is important now and that is only going to grow as time goes on.

    Guest Authored By Richard Kestenbaum. Richards firm, Triangle Capital LLC, does mergers, acquisitions and capital-raising for companies in fashion, retail, and consumer products. Follow Richard on Twitter.





    "If you’d like to hear more on the subject, here’s a podcast in which I am interviewed about this topic at the retail trade show Shoptalk.

    It’s just under 12 minutes.." -Richard Kestenbaum


      • Post Crafted By:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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      Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

      Sunday, February 4, 2018

      The Social Media Fembots Are Among Us?


      MTV’s “TRL” recently welcomed Poppy, a rising star with hologram-perfect skin, an avant-garde Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe and a voice like Betty Boop’s on benzos..



      For much of the show, she perched silently on the couch and methodically stacked candies on a glass table. A longhaired handler called Titanic Sinclair accompanied her, explaining, “I’m just making sure she doesn’t malfunction.” Poppy proved a tough interview. Asked what she thought of the Grammys, which had aired the night before, she chirped: “Um, I don’t really remember them.” Then she changed into a costume that made her look like a beautiful egg yolk and performed “Bleach Blonde Baby,” a song about how she was born with full makeup and a mani-pedi.

      Poppy is — to sum up her project most simply — an android-themed pop star. She first appeared on YouTube in 2014, in a video where she eats cotton candy while an overdubbed soundtrack plays oddly pleasant eating sounds. When she speaks, Poppy exhibits the limited range of a chat bot, the oddly formal vocabulary of a digital assistant (she says “New York New York” and “YouTube dot com”) and the late-capitalist tics of an online influencer. In “Hey YouTube,” she repeats vlogger greetings — “What’s up, guys?” and “Hey YouTube!” — until they lose their meaning. In “I am empowered,” she purrs, “I feel empowered when I create high-quality content on the internet” over and over again.



      The fembot has long been a pop culture fixation, but now feminized tech is all around us. Digital helpmeets like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are fitted with nonthreatening feminine voices and programmed to respond to sexist comments with cutesy repartee. (If you tell Siri to make you a sandwich, she replies: “I can’t. I have no condiments.”) Creepy techno-Pygmalion stories — like the one about the guy who 3-D-printed his own Scarlett Johansson bot on his patio — captivate the online news landscape. With the help of machine learning, a community of Redditors are creating highly realistic fake porn that melds famous actresses’ faces onto porn performers’ bodies. Twitter lit up with crazed sex-robot memes last month after images of a new sex doll styled as an Instagram model (swollen lips, thick thighs and an athleisure-lingerie uniform) went viral.

      And, of course, we can conjure the illusion of intimacy with famous women as we scroll through their Instagram profiles and consume their Snapchat feeds, dispensing or withholding likes. Projects like Poppy poke at the cyborg nature of online fame itself, where female bodies are mapped onto the social platforms they inhabit — constantly resized, customized and upgraded to please their followers.



      Poppy’s YouTube videos have been viewed more than 257 million times, and now her persona is permeating the culture: She’s logged a “Today” show appearance, a Times Square billboard, a Comedy Central Snapchat series and a Sanrio sponsorship. She’s now in the midst of an American concert tour and starring in a web series pilot, “I’m Poppy,” on YouTube’s paid subscription tier, YouTube Red.




      The commentary of Poppy is not exactly subtle, but the performance of the woman behind her — the 23-year-old Moriah Pereira — is eerily fascinating. (Titanic Sinclair, her creator-handler-director figure, is played by the 30-year-old Corey Mixter.) Poppy’s voice has the soothing affect of an A.S.M.R. video, those recordings of rustles and whispers capable of evoking tingling sensations on the back of your neck. The way she pauses and freezes between statements — as if she’s downloading a new dialogue program and recalibrating her expression to fit it — is uncanny.

      If Poppy is a person who acts like a robot, Lil Miquela is a C.G.I. creation posing as a human being. She’s a computer-animated Instagram model edited into real backgrounds, posed with real people and dressed in real streetwear that you can buy, too. Her look — enormous matte lips, thick eyebrows, a dusting of freckles on her Barbie-smooth skin — is an exaggerated version of the beauty standard that’s swept the platform, making its most-followed women look oddly similar and a little bit unreal. Now she has her own side hustle, too, a series of clubby singles featuring her heavily Auto-Tuned voice. Miquela draws out tensions about the authenticity of social media performance; sometimes she filters her face through stylized anime beauty apps, layering artifice on artifice. She doesn’t say much, but in a rare phone interview posted on YouTube, a woman calling herself Miquela parried a question about her fakeness with a provocation: “Can you name one person on Instagram who does not digitally edit their photos?”



      Fembots are being designed to look more like internet stars, but perhaps internet stars are being designed to look like fembots, too. Take Kylie Jenner, who now ranks among Instagram’s most popular users — she recently topped 100 million followers — and who holds great sway over the platform’s aesthetic, which she molds through example but also via sales of her wildly popular Kylie Cosmetics line. Clicking through an image gallery of Ms. Jenner’s changing looks over time — watching her lips balloon with fillers, her skin tone deepen, her eyes pop open and her facial features chisel — gives the sensation of a model’s upgrading. A fan of wigs, Ms. Jenner changes her hair color so frequently (often into shades of neon or sorbet) that it recalls the ease of a Photoshop click and the appeal of an endlessly customizable object. It’s so typical for Ms. Jenner to appear on Instagram with her phone in the shot that she begins to evoke the image of a cyborg, device permanently attached to her hand.

      Then there’s Ms. Jenner’s affect: blank. She posts video clips of repetitive motions that loop over and over again — freshly manicured fingers stroking a piece of fur, a glittery eyelid half-opening — giving her an animatronic vibe. In a 2015 feature for Interview magazine, Chris Wallace, then the senior editor, described Ms. Jenner as “almost sex-doll sanguine.” On the cover, she appeared clad in latex fetish gear, posed in a wooden shipping container or tucked under a man’s arm, staring into the middle distance.



      Though the field of artificial intelligence is bent on creating robots that seem realistic — ones that can pass the Turing test by persuasively mimicking human beings in conversation — the subfield of fembot creation seems more fixated on creating something physically perfect but mentally deficient. In the online magazine Real Life, Janna Avner smartly noted that the fembot creator “turns the limitations of bot technology into a kind of strength.” The failure of artificial intelligence to actually match human intelligence is a feature, not a bug. The sex robot memes on Twitter play off the moment when the doll becomes sentient, when she begins criticizing her owner or asking about their relationship status, at which point he lunges for the reset button or unplugs her.

      The idealized digital women of film and television — “Her,” “Ex Machina,” and “Westworld” — become nightmares when they acquire minds of their own. But our cyborg internet stars are suspended on the web without a redemption narrative. Followers of Poppy, Lil Miquela and Kylie Jenner can be consumed by the mysteries of their origin stories. Who is the architect of Poppy’s satirical project? Is Lil Miquela based on a mysterious real woman’s photographs, or was she materialized out of nothing? Which plastic surgery procedures has Ms. Jenner had? What filters does she use?



      In the pilot for “I’m Poppy,” a Hollywood figure asks: “Where did she come from? Who is she with?” The answers elude him, but when he hears she has 50 million followers, he decides: “She’s perfect.” The follower count justifies the star’s existence, and their interactions animate and regenerate the star’s persona.

      On her reality series, E!’s “Life of Kylie,” Ms. Jenner has said that her followers drive her pressure to post more and better selfies to Instagram and that she’ll delete images that don’t instantly please, turning her own image into a site of crowd curation. It’s as if her fans themselves are molding her to their specifications.

      Guest Authored By Amanda Hess. Amanda is a David Carr Fellow at The New York Times. She writes about internet culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly for the New York Times Magazine. Before she joined The Times in 2016, she wrote for such publications as Slate, the Washington City Paper, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, and Pacific Standard, where her feature on the online harassment of women won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest. She was raised in Wisconsin, Nevada, Washington and Arizona. Follow Amanda on Twitter.





      "#SMSSummit will feature 6 ultra-focused tracks designed to deliver in-depth insights into strategy development, content creation, ROI growth, paid social and much more!

      This is a must-attend for any marketing professional looking for practical takeaways to help address a spectrum of social media marketing challenges.."

        • Authored by:
          Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO  where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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        Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA
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