As we celebrate the New Year, it’s a good time to look back on the biggest developments in social media and online marketing from 2015.
These developments have shaped our online culture and are likely to be influential as we continue into 2016.
The Rise of Video
Online video has always been popular, but it hit a new high in 2015.
Videos became the number one sharable content across social media platforms, and video ads became increasingly popular. Two live streaming apps, Meerkat and Periscope, rose to prominence this year, and other platforms fought to keep up. Facebook developed native, embeddable videos, Facebook Messenger gained a video option, Instagram launched its own video app, and YouTube and Vine remained popular. Our conclusion: Video seems certain to remain popular throughout 2016.
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Search Everywhere
Google still reigned supreme in 2015, but more social media platforms are enhancing their own search capabilities.
Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter all added new features to their search tools to make it easier to discover more content.
Facebook took it one step further by beefing up its search to turn up up-to-date information about current events, pop culture, and more. They hope that users will use Facebook to find recent information from both their friends and reliable news sources.
Our conclusion: Google will almost definitely remain the go-to place for internet searches in 2016, but it will be interesting to see if other social media search tools can make a dent in the market.
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Ad Blocking
This year, ad blocking went mainstream.
Extensions such as the popular AdBlock Plus enable users to block pop-ups, banner ads, and even video ads on their web browser. Then, in September of this year, Apple enabled ad blocking technology of iOS, spurring the launch of a fleet of ad-blocking apps. All of this ad blocking means that some popular forms of online advertising are not reaching as many people.
Our conclusion: This means that organic advertising is likely to be even more important in 2016.
Overall: 2016 is sure to bring us a round of exciting new developments in social media. After all, if it stayed the same, it wouldn’t be the internet.
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Written by content manager Meghan Woolley
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