Social media has a great potential. The way social media has evolved is quite interesting.  Here are the top digital media trends for 2020 and beyond:
Video content on the rise
Video is one of the most popular formats of the content consumed by social media users. Videos are considered as an adaptable and engaging content format. Social media are well thought-out for people to connect, share contents and engage and videos serve the purpose. Social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are pushing hard to insert videos and at regular intervals. Instagram’s recent algorithm prefers videos format over other formats of content.

Web: the primary source of news and information
As the internet supplements television and newspapers, more and more people prefer to seek information and consume news on the web. Portability combined with a wide variety of choices to source news and information puts www at a definite advantage. Many internet users will see the breaking stories on their social media feed and go to the news sites to learn more about the development. Facebook and Twitter have emerged as the main source of digital news.

Trending Hash tags
The moment something important happen, you can instantly see that the subject’s hash tags rank high in the tally of trending words. Hash tags make the topic search engine optimized and therefore a hit.

Data segmentation and the use of artificial intelligence
With this advantage, social media platforms have ingrained artificial intelligence into their algorithms and this is responsible for ranking of social media posts, deciding which contents to display to what type of users.

Content specific search engines
Each social media platform has its own unique type of information. As these platforms collect more and more data, they can truly dominate certain types of information and represent themselves in the “search engine”. For example LinkedIn’s core strength lies in finding jobs and connecting like-minded people in businesses. As this feature evolves, people will start deploying different platforms to the niche utility the platform delivers. Always heading for Google and keying in the keywords may or may not be the place future belongs to.

New cast: Podcasts
2019 has seen a drastic growth in podcast trend worldwide. Apple podcasts, Google play music, Spotify are the platforms for podcasts.

Live content will dominate
Facebook live, Instagram lives, YouTube lives- Live streaming and live videos are everywhere. It’s personalized and engaging. Moreover, it you get a chance to communicate directly with the one following you on the social media platform.

Short, crisp information

Short information such as stories, IGTV and reels of short duration, entertaining social media trivia are all preferred content in 2020. According to a study, almost all accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Watsapp use stories and highlights to push traffic. Stories and similar highlights engrave authentic values and dynamic insights into the world of the audience.

Personalization is the key

Personalization has always been the key to a successful marketing strategy. Personalization is everywhere in the online world starting from the emails to your FB and Twitter handles. From personalized Facebook feed, Amazon products suggestions to Google’s personalized search, it’s indeed everywhere! But with the emergence of concerns over privacy and transparency, social media platforms may find the balancing act between privacy and personalization challenging.

Primary source for E-commerce outlets

This is probably good news for many of the e-commerce outlet owners out there who rely on social media to make sales. For so many years, Google and Amazon have dominated the commercial business, primarily with their e-commerce interfaces. With social media becoming more and more popular and the integration of e-commerce features such as a Facebook marketplace or an Instagram store, there’s no doubt as to why social media may emerge dominant in the e-commerce vertical in the near future.

Social media TV                                                                                                          

Now a day’s people consuming online content are more than ever before, the OTT platform is slowly replacing the television. Trends in streaming channels like Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, etc. are dominating the field. In fact, the television itself is changing to keep pace with the trend.

So what do you think of these trends? Do you have any other ideas or reasons to believe that social media will evolve in this near future? To learn more about Social media as a subject, join the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Jagannath Institute of Management Sciences Vasant Kunj-II.