Facebook Trends 2017

Facebook is forever evolving. When I first signed up as a student ten years ago, there was no Newsfeed, everything was publically visible on your friends’ walls, and there were only 12 million accounts.

Fast forward 10 years and things have changed. Facebook now has 1.79 billion monthly users. It is constantly updating, testing, and rolling out new features. The matter of fact is that this platform is now an equally business platform while being of social in nature. This is the reason that it is widely being merged with Indianapolis SEO strategies.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the latest updates, as well as longer term Facebook trends. Here are my predictions for 2017.

I’ve organized them into four themes which I see as overarching Facebook trends that help to mold the direction the company takes.

1. Monetized bots
Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that until a product reaches one billion users it isn’t a “meaningful businesses”, and that “we’re not going to try to monetize them” until then. Well, guess what? Facebook Messenger just reached that milestone.

Zuckerberg has said previously that Messenger will follow a similar monetization process to Facebook.

Rather than plastering the site with banner ads, Facebook persuaded brands to create pages with content that would drive organic interaction. Once that idea is embedded, Facebook reduced organic growth and charged brands to appear in a user’s Newsfeed.

2. Monetized live video
Digiday recently reported that monetization is coming to Facebook Live. According to the website, Facebook is considering placing ads in the live stream: either during the video as a video ad or display ad, or during breaks in live events.

Facebook has increasingly prioritized video; in the latest earnings call it revealed that that 500 million people watch 100 million hours of video between them every day. With the big push Facebook has given to live video more recently, seeking to make a profit in the future seems inevitable.

3. CTA buttons for local business Pages
Facebook has recently started testing updated Call To Action buttons for local business Pages. The idea is to make the customer experience better by allowing various actions – such as ordering food from a local takeaway – directly from the Facebook Page.

Facebook believes this will increase the completion rate as often local businesses deliver a sub-par experience on mobile as they don’t have the budget and resources to create their own apps.

4. Marketplace launch
Facebook launched Marketplace in October, where users can buy and sell among their local community. Marketplace is reached through the app, and users can make an offer or message the seller. Is this perhaps trying to head off Shpock before it gets too big? Or simply offer a local alternative to eBay?
5. Workplace launch
Also in October, Facebook rolled out Workplace, a version of the app available for any company or organization. It has many of the features of normal Facebook and some extra ones that are exclusive to Workplace.

Facebook has had this internally for years but has been working on launching it for all companies lately. Could that be related to the rise of Slack and Microsoft’s recent launch of Teams (and their earlier and still existing Yammer)?

6. Snapchat style updates
Facebook has introduced several features recently that will feel familiar to Snapchat users. In fact, it has developed quite a history of updating its apps with Snapchat style features, and even tried to buy Snow, an Asian Snapchat style company.

Perhaps that’s because it is worried about a trend we talked about last year: the growing number of teens who don’t use Facebook.

Posted by virginiapeake on 2017-02-02 09:19:14

Tagged: , social , media , facebook , digital , marketing , ecommerce