Those who usually work with social media and SEO services have already known that social media is going to be big. As people come up with more innovative types of content and methods of sharing them, some keep wondering what trends will dominate social media in the next year. Hence, there are 5 trends predicted will transform social media in 2017. Here are the big 5.

Social Networking Use Has Shot Up in Past Decade
In the past decade, social networking has experienced a meteoric rise. In fact, it will grow even further in the upcoming years. This makes sense since humans are social creatures. In fact, social media has been a great media to channel a desire to stay connected to others. With social media, today distances are no longer a problem. The number of social media users will grow at 8% in 2017 to a heady 2.39 billion people.

Employees Turn into Beacons for Their Brand
You can use social media to help you get more connected to your employees. In fact, brands have now started turning to employees as brand ambassadors to further their brand image. In other words, using employee social advocacy programs has grown about 191% since 2013.

It integrates elements that already have a connected audience rather than increase social reach through scaling. When you pull this off correctly, it can be much more effective at enticing engagement. So, you can consider utilizing tools like Social Toaster to turn your team into a passionate group of social advocates.

‘Real’ Real-Time Engagement
Since users expect that a brand needs to have a social team on their feed to answer questions and resolve issues. The existence of social media becomes terribly helpful. Social media can be a “real” real-time engagement. In a domino-effect, this has caused brands to start investing heavily into cross-functional social media teams that can keep abreast with the increasing number of client pings every day. Eventually, most brands will have shifted client service entirely to their own social media accounts.

Driving Decisions through Analytics

Now, social media is no longer used as a media for people to get connected. As through marketing aspects, social media is a great source for statistics analysis. In fact, social media analytics has gotten more powerful, comprehensive and easier to be used these days. You can find many popular social analytics tools which are free and can accommodate the needs of most SMBs, such as Buffer, Followerwonk, Iconsquare and many more.

Social Video Wins Again
Many online marketing experts have predicted that image and video will slowly replace text. Even tough, text will still be useful but image and videos will dominate. This is because Brands have evidence that video content is effective and over 76% of B2Bs use them to good effect.