Social media saw a lot of changes and upgrades in the last year. These involved many new features along with customer preferences and brand awareness opportunities. This rise in the popularity of the medium of social media is expected to continue through the year of 2018.

Some of the trends that experts believe to crop up or continue in 2018 are:

Instagram Stories: Instagram Stories has been a strong rival for Snapchat. Within a short time of its launch, Instagram Stories was able to garner more than 250 million online users, which is quite a surprising number in front of the 170 million online users of Snapchat that took quite a bit of time to build. This trend tops our list because of the number of engagement numbers it creates on the regular. This is a great opportunity for brands and many of them are already utilising it to their advantage.

The Year of Augmented Reality: With a few good and successful AR apps, good sales of VR headsets, and better tech sophistication, augmented reality might finally take off in 2018. In the case that it does, the field of social media would be the first to make the best use of it by bringing people together from far-off places, making it popular by using a whole new UI experience.

Live Streaming Continues to Boom: Having set the expectation bar high up on this one, live streaming is not just about live streaming anymore. It is about communicating with your customers and followers in real time. Studies suggest, consumers would rather watch a live stream from some of their favourite brands than read an online blog on the same topic on the brand’s website.

Like we said, it is more than just interacting with your consumers; it’s increasingly becoming a standard and an expectation.

Customisable Chatbots are Here: If we look through the history of chatbots, last year saw a major hike in the popularity and growth of chatbots. Now companies are coming up with customizable chatbots that will not only respond to queries or take orders, but will also cater to specific requests since not all chatbots are created equally or with a templatised set of standards.

Content Repurposing: Content is king, and undeniably so. Now brands are going for a new social media marketing strategy called content repurposing. In simple words, it means working on your existing data to re-published in formats that are more likely to click with the new and changing audiences every year. It allows a brand to reach out to new audiences and increase their online presence while creating more opportunities for backlinks, which is a great SEO advantage.

2018 could be the year for many changes, which have found their roots in 2017 and 2016. You don’t need to go big to be able to start extracting advantages of these social media trends. Start small and steady and invest in the trends that are well-aligned with your current social media strategies. You can even choose envigo, which is an SEO agency in London for all your digital marketing related queries.