Predicting the future of social media is always fun.

Emerging platforms, secured patents, new tactics and demographic shifts are just a few things to consider when making a prediction.

So, what is next with social media as we look ahead to 2020? Here are four big predictions on the future of social media in 2020.

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1. Plan a content strategy and create an editorial calendar for your social channels.
Marketers are sometimes at a loss at what to post on social media.

Successful social media marketing doesn't happen on accident -- there's a strategy in place, just as there is with a blog.

Look at the big picture and come up with social content that will resonate with your audience.

Map out seasonal content, as well as content related to events or launches your company is planning.

Work closely with your editorial and marketing teams to know what's coming down the pipeline and strategize the best ways to promote it.

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Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. If you’re a smart marketer, you have been using the these top social media giants to share your content, promote your products and services and grow your business. But rival platforms are being created all the time, and while many of them don’t reach the same heights of success, a handful could give mega-popular platforms a run for their money. Moreover, if you’re an early adopter of up-and-coming alternatives, your company could reap the biggest benefits.

If you want to be ahead of the curve, keep your eye on the following five social media platforms to watch.

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How have the rise of social media and spread of misinformation changed the news media landscape?

As a major election year nears and the public questions the role of Facebook in combating misinformation, Andrew Pergam, director of governance and strategic initiatives at Facebook, gave a glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes at the social media company during a symposium at the University of Utah on Friday.

Misinformation is one of the companys most pressing and scrutinized issues, he said. We are under an immense amount of pressure to do more to tackle viral information more quickly.

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What kinds of content are most likely to make an impact on social media platforms in 2020? This handy guide offers tips for making a splash online.

With changing algorithms and shortening attention spans, it is crucial to invest wisely on social media content.

You have very little time to set yourself apart on social media platforms, so savvy communicators will take advantage of every opportunity. If video is performing well, double down on those snackable videos. If your audience loves to share graphics, make sure you create exciting visuals that pack a punch.

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A sound, effective strategy involves these four steps.

A whopping 3.2 billion people, or 42% of the world's population, uses social media. On average, people spend over two hours of their day messaging and surfing social media networks.

After having a positive experience with a brand on social media, 71% of people will often recommend the brand to their friends and family. On top of that, 49% of people are taking their cues on what to buy from social media influencers.

Based on these statistics, it's crucial for businesses to have a solid social media marketing strategy in place. Unfortunately, many business owners have no idea how to handle social media marketing.

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When was the last time you watched a video on Facebook? What about Instagram or Twitter?

My guess is that it was probably within the last day.

The reason for this guess is because video continues to be one of the most powerful forms of content on social media. You can not take a digital step without coming face-to-face with a video – and there is a reason for this.

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When you really think about it, marketing has come a long way in just a few decades. Marketing tactics are more sophisticated (and more effective) than ever before, and social media marketing has ensured that every business on the planet has a voice.

There is just one problem. In a world where every business on the planet has a megaphone, how can you make sure that your voice is heard?

Having a strong brand seems to be the only way to consistently get ahead of the competition, but it is not easy.

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Gig workers who are totally localized (caterers, electricians, painters, plumbers, wedding planners, etc.) often discount the value of using social media for their marketing. Why? Because these platforms are at least national, if not international and what would be a use for a local business?

Indeed, localized SEO and local advertising can drive you a steady stream of traffic and revenue. But you should not discount social media as a good tool for your marketing. Here are five actionable social media marketing tips for local contractors and other gig workers.

1. Geo tagging and targeting is your allies

Social media platforms may have global reach, but they also allow you to go very granular with your marketing.

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According to the National Center for Health Research, people who visited social media platforms 58 times or more per week were three times more likely to feel socially isolated. The center also found that heavy social media users are 2.2 times more likely to have eating and body image issues than moderate users.

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Ever since the idea of writing was conceived, humans have recorded historical events, the occurrences in our daily lives and even our deepest thoughts and feelings in diaries or journals. They reveal what our ancestors cared and thought about and handed down wisdom from one generation to the next. Social media has quickly moved into the space once occupied by personal diaries, although how we use it isn’t quite the same anymore. Two-way conversation A diary entry is usually a thoughtful process.

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When I look back at all of the mistakes I’ve made in business and marketing and add my observations from working with over 57,000 business owners and entrepreneurs in nearly every country in the world, it dawned on me.

Social media marketing success boils down to three simple steps.


The Three-Step Social Media Marketing Machine

For the past decade, brands have been capitalizing on the pervasiveness of social media in consumers’ daily lives and shopping habits. And this past year was no different.

Social media analytics company Unmetric found that brands that promoted messaging with edge, savvy, conviction—and occasionally dogs—won the marketing game.

Of that messaging, video—particularly those with memorable storylines, guest appearances or creative approaches to addressing social issues—reined as the overall best-performing format for branded and original content, a consistent trend in their numbers since at least 2015.

The Most Captivating Brand Campaigns We Saw on Social Media in 2019

Social media marketing is a strategy employed by many companies. One of the biggest complaints I hear from businesses is that they're not having much success on social media. The thing is that certain social media marketing mistakes can cause brands to fail. I'll be addressing several issues that may be impacting your social media efforts in this article.

Are you making any of the following mistakes?

Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Must Avoid

With another US Presidential election on the way in 2020, we can expect the debate around fake news to once again ramp up, and become a key focus of discussion as we look at how political influence spreads online.

What if Fake News Is Not the Real Problem on Social Media?

Believe it or not, 80 percent of internet users globally have at least one social media account. In total, social media users exceeded 3.4 billion people in 2019. Business owners and marketers know that these platforms are vital for the success of their business. Due to their desire to improve, brand managers are continually looking for ways to connect with their audience and keep them invested in the company.

4 Social Media Marketing Tricks You Need to Know in 2020

Updating your brand bio can be a great, simple way to boost engagement, especially heading into the new year. Your profile bio can play a key role in perception, and in driving subsequent action, so it is worth reviewing your details and ensuring that everything is as you want it.

Writing a Great Social Media Bio for Your Brand [Infographic]

Is influencer marketing becoming a strategy of the past? Are influencers worth what brands pay them to endorse their products?


How This Social Media Agency Is Revolutionizing The Influencer Marketing Landscape

Do you feel bad after using social media? If you do, chances are you don’t have healthy habits when it comes to using it. So when you use social media, you’re harming your wellbeing in the process.

Luckily there are a few things you can do to develop the right mindset and healthy habits to make you a happier, healthier social media user. Here are a few tips.

1. Moderate your use.
Social media is an excellent tool to not only connect the world, but give creators freedom to express themselves and build communities around their work. However, it also has a dark side.

4 Ways to Develop Health Social Media Habits

With influencer marketing becoming more... um, influential, it is worth noting which online identities are generating the most attention, and considering what that means for your outreach strategies.

And while you might not necessarily be able to get PewDiePie to endorse your products, it is interesting to consider how these popular identities are building their platforms, which could provide some guidance as to where people are looking, or even just give you an indicator of which creators to look to for inspiration with your own content.

The Most Popular Social Media Influencers

Michael Bloombergs presidential campaign is hiring hundreds of workers in California to post regularly on their personal social-media accounts in support of the candidate and send text messages to their friends about him.

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None of us are getting out of this alive. With the advent of consumer tech and the internet, you can now make your wishes known in a myriad of ways. For starters, if you are wondering where’s the best place to make sure your loved ones follow your will directives and have access to your passwords, you can do this online.

Specialty sites can store all your important documents from wills, trusts and passwords to your funeral preferences. While most sites are subscription-based, there is a free option that is HIPPA-compliant with secured bank-level encryption.

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Social platforms are still reporting robust growth — yes, even Facebook — despite a growing chorus of opposition. Social conversation continues to shape everything from culture to the media cycle to our most intimate relationships. And we now spend more time than ever on our phones, with endless scrolling through our social feeds being a chief reason why.

But dig a little deeper, and a more nuanced picture emerges about social media users today that has important implications for the ways in which brands reach customers. Specifically, when you look at who is — and more importantly, who is not — driving the growth and popularity of social platforms, a key demographic appears to be somewhat in retreat: young people.

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Social media trends are like friends; they come and go.

However, the best friends and trends end up sticking around and evolving into permanent parts of our lives with qualities such as integrity, dependability, trust, quality and even ROI.

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Are you looking for ways to generate more engagement on social media? Want to ensure you’re posting at the best times for your audience?

While the exact right times to post will vary based on each unique audience group, the team from CoSchedule have put together a guide, based on a range of studies and reports, which highlights when brands in a range of sectors tend to see the most engagement on each of the major social platforms.

Again, there are unique variables for each business, but this overview could serve as a good starting point for planning out your social posting strategy, and maximizing engagement.

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Fort Smith Mayor George McGill announced a statewide 2020 Census Social Media Challenge to increase awareness about the Census.

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A few months ago, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launched a new platform called WikiTribune Social – or WT:Social for short. Unlike Facebook, the Wikipedia social network isn’t designed to generate profit by leveraging user data. Thus far, it has a modest membership, but Wales doesn’t seem interested in jousting with Facebook. Instead, it sounds like he is hoping to offer a refuge from it.

Some critics have highlighted the ways certain social media sites are purposefully designed to be addictive. That can help make them successful, but it can take a toll on users.

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I also enjoy watching TED Talks to get a better understanding of the latest trends, including in digital adoption and platform usage. Social media is a constantly evolving field - it is a rare arena of marketing where the platforms may change over time (bye Vine, hello TikTok), but the overall advice seldom feels too dated. Most businesses do want their content to go viral.

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These days, your boss can be watching your Instagram stories or liking your posts. Social media blurs the line between work and personal life. While this can bring you closer to your team, it also adds pressure as any faux pas may affect your role or office dynamics. To explore the effects of ones social profiles on their career, WhoIsHostingThis, wanting to quantify what constitutes digital hoarding, the extent to which people do so, and the potential privacy risks of this behavior, asked over 900 employees, and the findings were interesting:

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Social media trends are like friends; they come and go.

However, the best friends and trends end up sticking around and evolving into permanent parts of our lives with qualities such as integrity, dependability, trust, quality and even ROI.

The bad friends and trendamies need to get weeded out before too much time, and resources get depleted.

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What are your social media goals for 2020? Tangible goals are the cornerstone of any successful social media marketing strategy, but how do you know you picked the right ones for the year ahead?

You take a look at your resources and performance throughout the previous year, as well as industry trends and social data insights. Sometimes, the goals you set lead to excellent results, other times — you learn from your mistakes and re-think the goals for the next year.

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This year is likely the last one ever in which you can say that more than half the planet is not on social media.

Hootsuite just released a massive digital state of the union report. Some of the high-level findings:

5.2 billion of us now have phones globally
4.5 billion are connected to the internet
3.8 billion are active social media users

That 3.8 billion is 49% of the planets population, and it grew 9% over the past year. That means it is extremely likely that sometime this calendar year, more than half of all of us will be active social media users.

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As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the world, more and more governments are imposing lockdowns on their citizens. As a result, reliance on digital tools has increased significantly to maintain social and professional relationships. Notably, usage of video conferencing app Zoom has spiked, and not just for professional purposes.

But what about the social media tools we were already using to connect with people on a daily basis? How has their popularity changed so far in these trying times?

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If you are not seeing results from your social media efforts, have you asked yourself why you are doing all of that—other than because everyone else is doing it?

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For many beginners (and, heck, some mid-level and even advanced SEOs), the line between search engine optimization and social media can sometimes blur.

~ Does your social media support or even help your search engine rankings?
~ How does optimizing for search on social media affect your profiles chance of showing up to new users?
~ And what does it mean that my tweets show up in search results?

In the past, the difference between SEO and social was fairly stark.

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Due to the coronavirus pandemic think tanks around the world are working under quarantine and have cancelled all events in the coming months. They will have to rely more on social media to get their messages across. How successful are free-market think tanks today in trying to attract traffic to their websites, as well as views and followers on other platforms?

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Self-quarantining during COVID-19 has caused some, especially those in the travel industry, to take a bigger hit than others. Those who usually work from home have had to make less of an adjustment, though booking paid partnerships is a struggle industry-wide.

As a result, many influencers are getting creative with their social strategies. Those who are multiplatform and have more than one revenue stream are coming out on top.

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Social media has been one of only a handful of sectors that is benefiting from the stay-at-home environment. Social distancing has forced social interactions online for the time being, but investors looking to capitalize on the surge in social media usage be surprised at the big winner.

On Friday, DataTrek Research co-founder Nicholas Colas said the biggest social media winner from the COVID-19 era is not Facebook, Inc.
FB , its subsidiary Instagram, Snap Inc  SNAP 0.06% or Twitter Inc TWTR 0.02%
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Instead, teen-oriented video platform TikTok has seen the biggest surge in Google search volume over the last 90 days. TikTok is owned by the private Chinese company ByteDance.

Social Media Search Numbers
Colas said Facebook and Twitter saw only a small bounce in worldwide Google search volume since global lockdowns went into effect. In the chart below, searches for Snapchat have demonstrated a similar trend, while searches for TikTok have steadily risen over the last 90 days.

Our stress levels are at an all-time high right now, which means our attentiveness to our own self-care should be, too—especially those of us with wanderlust. Traveling from the living room to the kitchen and back is no one’s ideal of a vacation, yet here we are. On top of that, our social media platforms seem determined to remind us of better days: Hey, look where you were a year ago today! blares Facebook, serving up a photo of a gorgeous beach or other getaway spot much more alluring than the permanent butt-groove you have formed in your couch.

For many of us, looking back on our travels past is not doing us much good at the moment. Luckily, there are a few methods to keep them from showing up in your social media feeds.

When most people talk about social media, they are usually referring to platforms like Facebook or Instagram, but rarely think of LinkedIn as part of the vast array of social media platforms available.

We tend to assume that LinkedIn is not such a valuable place to be and often, even businesses make this mistake, assuming that it would be far more beneficial to focus on their presence on Twitter, for example. There is a logic behind this – LinkedIn is a place for businesses, but I’m looking to advertise to real people, and they are going to be on other, more laid-back platforms, so I might as well go there, too.

This logic is flawed. Why? We are just about to show you.

On LinkedIn, you can build your brand.
This is true both for individuals looking to expand their job potential, and for businesses wanting to grow their brand. As an individual, where can a possible employer find you? On Facebook or Instagram. But do you really want them to see that snapshot of you in your undies at the beach, or the dirty joke you posted last night?

Probably not. These are personal details about you that chip away at your professional brand.

With most Americans under orders to stay at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, many people are turning to social media for a fun distraction. Taking a Facebook quiz about how well you know a friend or what character from your favorite TV show best matches your personality may seem like a harmless way to pass the time while quarantined, but it could also give scammers your personal information for nefarious purposes.

Not all social media quizzes are data collection scams, but some quizzes collect personal information by asking questions like: What is your mothers maiden name? or What is the name of the street you grew up on? These are common security questions for banking and credit card accounts. Sharing this information can lead to your accounts being hacked and your personal and financial information being stolen. It also can enable a scammer to impersonate you to your friends and family.

Tips to avoid social media scams:

• Be skeptical. Before you take a quiz, figure out who created it. Is it a brand you trust? Just because something appears to be fun and innocent, doesn’t mean there isn’t an inherent risk.

• Adjust privacy settings. Review your social media accounts privacy settings and be strict about what information you share — and with whom you are sharing it.

In Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin elaborate on why Instagram is more than just a social media platform: instead, it has become an icon that has altered understandings of visual social media cultures. By doing so, they focus on different aspects of Instagram, such as its aesthetics, cultures, ecologies and economics, supported with real-life examples and cases.

Instagram has tried to keep itself distinct from Facebook and other social platforms.

While usage of most mobile apps has remained neutral during the coronavirus pandemic, social media app usage has exploded during the lockdown, according to new data from Nielsen.

Why it matters: Prior to the pandemic, consumers and tech companies were both becoming more aware of the overuse of social media and actively trying to limit it. In a time when people can not connect with friends and family in person, companies have put these efforts on pause.

By the numbers: Prior to the pandemic, social media usage for most of January, February and early March remained relatively flat at around 20% of total mobile app usage, according to Nielsens data.

But beginning in mid-March, when statewide stay-at-home orders went into effect, social media app usage began to increase significantly, and now consumes around 25% of all mobile app usage for U.S. adults.

Other media app usage, like video, lifestyle, and finance apps have mostly remained the same, in part because consumers are now leveraging other devices, like desktops and television screens, for more activities while home.

An Italian-based artificial intelligence company is regularly analyzing social media posts about the coronavirus for their emotional content.

Why it matters: Classifying tens of thousands of posts by their emotional tone provides a snapshot of how people feel about the pandemic. Spoiler alert: not great!

How it works: Expert System specializes in semantics and natural language reading, a branch of AI involving computer systems that attempt to make sense of written language.

In doing so, a computer can rapidly analyze vast amounts of the written word — like, for example, a day's worth of social media posts about the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the past few weeks, Expert System has been collecting English language social media posts each day that feature frequently used hashtags like #coronalockdown and #covid19. Its AI can extract the emotional content of those posts, which is then analyzed and interpreted by Sociometrica.

Social media has become one of the most important instruments of hybrid warfare which is named the new generation warfare method, said a Turkish digital media researcher.

According to the general definition, hybrid warfare is one of the war strategies that combine political warfare, conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyber warfare methods, including fake news, diplomacy, lawfare, and foreign electoral intervention.

In an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency, Ali Murat Kirik, an academician and expert digital media researcher at Marmara University in Istanbul, increasing activities of perception management and social engineering in social media proves that it is used as a warfare tool.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has issued a warning about sharing too much information on social media while being at home.

The FBI specifically is warning about trends such as posting your senior picture and graduation year.Officials also say beware of social media games that require you to tag a parent or post a picture of your first car.

They say these are often the answers to security questions and hackers can use the information to reset your passwords and get into your accounts.

In a recent survey of 1000 consumers and 500 businesses, Animoto found that 75% of Millennials purchase decisions were influenced by a brands social media presence. But that's Millennials, a generation that's largely grown up online, and those response figures vary significantly across the different age brackets - so which platforms should you be focusing on to reach your target market?

To provide more insight, the team at Animoto broke their research down by generation.

Some of their key findings include:

Gen Z chose Instagram as the platform to follow brands
Baby boomers spend most of their time on YouTube and the Facebook Feed
Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X selected YouTube as the platform they rely on when making purchase decisions