CII BLOG

Emerging social media platforms in 2019

09 May 2019

For all the ardent social media users, there is good news around the corner! Year 2019 is setting new frontiers in the trends that will dictate multiple new platforms that will be available to them.  

Similar to human behaviour, technologies and capabilities of social media platforms keep evolving accordingly. Marketers, brands and on-line businesses track these behavioural changes by offering new and promising platforms to satisfy user requirements.

So, what are these changes that will dictate new and emerging social media platforms?

The top of the chart will be responsiveness. Customer loyalty will grow with responsiveness to their complaints, issues and queries as potential platforms concentrate on 1:1 interaction using the right monitoring and tracking tools.
Intimate real-life stories and experiences will replace static updates and information broadcasts. Platforms will need to share moments that matter to people, not brands.
Influencer marketing will be a dominant trend as platforms will nurture strategic partnerships through relationship building.
Cisco predicts that videos will dominate 82% of internet traffic by 2022. Live videos and Vertical videos, IGTV and Interactive video formats will usher in more smartphone quality videos.
Facebook Messenger & Chatbots will be crucial to reach and build audience engagements. Generation Z will be the focus segment.
Socialisation and community will have to take the front seat with lesser emphasis on using it as a promotion channel to drive branding.
With fake news talk and privacy disasters on the rise, trust of followers will need to be rebuilt and kept.
LinkedIn will resurface with added functionalities and possibilities.
Organisations will be supporting more employee created content.
Mobile users will be crucial to social media.

Already there are quite a few active social media sites which are expected to become more popular and emulate the existing Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat after leveraging the above trends.

The focus will be on Gen Z who will comprise 32% of the population.  While they crave for extremely personalized experiences together with privacy, they favour ephemeral platforms over the usual platforms used by their parents. Houseparty is a live group video chat platform through which one can connect with the existing phone contact list, eight at a time. Its popularity stems from the fact that unlike Google Hangouts, one does not need to request to join a chat.

Messaging will continue to become more popular beyond its 4.1 billion user bases. The cross-platform instant messaging application Kik while maintaining privacy, allows anonymity by registering with a username or email. The platform allows attractive options for commercial exploitations including its own cryptocurrency Kin.

The USD 1.5 billion influencer marketing industry will be further leveraged. Presently the ad-free Vero is more about social life than social media and allows users to share what they want and control who view their posts. Since it has no algorithms to differentiate what content gets seen, its organic nature is making it quite attractive to influencers who are often barred on other platforms.

Video content will continue to rule the Internet traffic. The short-form video platform Tik Tok allows users to create and share videos with special effects filters, stickers, and more and is occupying the number one slot in its category and is becoming popular with the youngsters by the day.

The ever-industrious platform providers continue in their mission to bring more and interesting options for the social media users. Besides the above, there are many other options available that one could explore. These include Amazon Spark, Anchor, Facebook for Creators, Lasso, Foursquare Swarm, Caffeine, Mastodon.social, Facecast and Google My Business.

The existing trio of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn sure have competition from the new kids in the block!