From Fast Company — Social media will keep getting bigger
Will algorithms grow a soul? You’d have to live under a rock not to have noticed the swelling backlash over what ends up in our news feeds and how it gets there. Facebook and Twitter are both wrestling with the repercussions of sharing fake and biased news during the election, and scrambling to find ways to integrate human filters. Then there’s the glut of violent, discouraging, and downright depressing propaganda and news that seems to flood our feeds – enough to leave even the biggest social booster feeling a little deflated. Beneath these problems is a deeper issue. Right now, most social media algorithms are optimized with one primary metric in mind: engagement. Watch for networks to respond to user pressures and find more nuanced – and more ethical – ways to weight and filter the content we receive.
Shopping is coming to social media: It’s the no-brainer, slam-dunk idea that just refuses to catch on: shopping on social media. Sure, “buy buttons” have been around for years on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram — heoretically letting users make purchases right from inside the networks. But the reality is they generate minimal sales volume and are generally clunky to use–available for just a few products, with limited information about inventory. Never mind that social commerce is ubiquitous in Southeast Asia on networks like WeChat, accounting for 30 percent of all digital sales – somehow, Americans can’t be bothered. Until now. This fall, online commerce giant Shopify officially launched an Instagram integration, letting its merchants sell directly from the network. Considering that Instagram is fast closing in on 1 billion monthly active users and Shopify powers more than 500,000 businesses, we can expect to see an unprecedented range of products bought and sold on social media in 2018.
LinkedIn finally gets some respect: Quietly, in its own buttoned-down way, LinkedIn eclipsed the 500 million user mark in 2017. And they’re doing a lot more than updating their resumes. LinkedIn launched a host of new social features this year, from live video functionality to instant messaging. Not to mention, 100,000 blog posts are published on the network every week. LinkedIn generates a level of engagement and genuinely thoughtful interaction that other social platforms are hard pressed to match. It was spared much of the fake news and political furor that consumed Facebook and Twitter in 2017, and has emerged as the preeminent network for sober, thoughtful discussion of all things business. In 2018, expect to find more companies tapping into LinkedIn’s highly targeted ad functionality and to see sustained user growth on the network.