My Social Media Predictions for 2016

Social media is the best-positioned media channel available to marketers and publishers today. While adoption of ad blocking across the browser-based web (on both mobile and desktop) is growing, we can expect a rush toward more first-party ad serving platforms (apps and media streaming services) over the coming years as publishers seek to preserve their ability to sell visible impressions. During this transition, I project social ads will be heavily leveraged to spur adoption of these platforms. Social ads from players like Facebook and Twitter already have fairly accurate targeting, expansive reach, and solid action-based metrics to use to measure the efficacy of user acquisition campaigns.

More now than ever, consumers view “social media” as a continuous part of their digital experience rather than a special “other” space where their friends and family live. In fact, social and streaming media have become the primary modes of digital experience for consumers, often simultaneously and across many devices. Digital and mobile are now social first, where social used to be “plugged in” as a forum layer or a separate chat app in a user’s digital experience.

These changes pose two problems for marketers, the same problems we have been running into for a few years now:

1. The platforms keep evolving in ways that make it harder for brands to connect with users in an authentic way.
2. The proliferation of social channels makes it harder to keep up with all the places users might go. Facebook continues to throttle organic reach for brands. Instant Articles prevents publishers from monetizing their content if they want it to load quickly from the News Feed. Younger generations are spreading out across messaging, image-based social, video-based social, and other forms of niche social apps that seem to pop up and burn out every week. The only way to keep up is to be so engaged with customers that you can come with them from channel to channel.

What do I expect for social in 2016? My social media predictions include:

• Twitter will continue to fight for their place at the table amongst advertisers and users alike.
• Facebook will continue to expand as a ubiquitous layer across the entire social, mobile, and local network of customer contact points.
• Marketers will continue to need to contribute real, verifiable revenue to their organizations while maintaining a solid return on ad spend.
• Cross-channel attribution and optimization in a single platform is going to become industry standard for paid social media, as it’s been something various players have been promising for years without delivering.

What do you think’s next for social media marketing?

Originally published at blog.accomplice.io on November 17, 2015.