4 Key Social Media Trends to Watch in 2016

The pace of innovation and creativity in digital disruption is accelerating as evidenced by the proliferation of technology across the landscape, and social media and business are no exception. The social media ecosystem is constantly reinventing itself. Digital citizens and brands are rapidly creating user-generated content (UGC) in many forms, be that blogs, wikis, posts, tweets, podcasts, discussion forums, chats, video, and other forms of content across online systems or services.

4 Key Social Business Trends

1. Specialized social networks are emerging and business is getting personal. Social business is leading to convergence of employees personal and professional lives and enabling listening and learning like never before. The emergence of specialty networks like beBee are servicing affinity groups – or ‘hives’ – within larger networks to bring more relate-ability and relevance to its members. This is true of less formal gatherings in places like groups on LinkedIn, lists on Twitter and even communities on G+.
2. Personal brand building is being embraced as social media becomes a mainstream communication skill. Individuals are adopting social behaviors not just to gather opinions and feedback from trusted networks, friends and family, but also to efficiently and effectively grow reputation, influence, authority and audience/network.
3. Consumer-generated content has grown up. The concepts of providing feedback, having a voice and providing written content have evolved to listening to your social network, sharing to influence opinions and engaging to shape outcomes using a multi-medium and channel approach. For example, sharing of insights, photos, videos, and opinions enables others to analyze and understand and engage in a more meaningful way, across interactions in various channels.
4. Visual content is changing the game, especially video. Real time channels including Periscope, Meerkat and Blab.im. are changing the game and are making it cost effective for both companies and individuals to create the needed assets.

The Social Moment:  The moment when an organization realizes that social business is mainstream and integral to its future success. The Employee Social Moment:  The moment when an employee realizes that social business is mainstream and integral to his or her future professional success.

Compelling 2016 Social Statistics

• There are 2.3 billion active social media users – the internet has 3.17 billion users
• 1 million new active mobile social users are added every day. That’s 12 each second – there are 1.65 billion active mobile social accounts globally
• 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles
• US adults spend an average of 1 hour, 16 minutes each day watching video on digital devices – 78% of people watch online videos every week, 55% watch every day
• Every day, 16 to 20% of that day’s Google queries have never been asked before
• The average CEO has 930 LinkedIn connections
• Over 3 million companies have created LinkedIn accounts, but only 17% of US small businesses use LinkedIn

Summary

The constant in the social media trends equation is that individuals and business continue to strive to learn new social skills and approaches to achieve the best results from the channel(s) in which they engage.

Similar to all the previous communication improvements and advancements, social media will witness changes, improvements and challenges, but it is here to stay.

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Socially Savvy helps organizations utilize social media to drive business results and is a premier partner in the activation, measurement and leadership of social business programs. 

Please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to join the social business conversation.

Contact us directly at info@sociallysavvy.com if you are interested in discussing our content creation workshop or employee social business activation program.

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