As we wind down the year and look back on 2016, we find that social media is on everyone?s lips–but perhaps for different reasons than we social media marketers would imagine or prefer. The discussion happening around social media at the end of the year is about responsibility and control.
The outcomes of the EU Referendum in Great Britain and the American presidential election were no doubt influenced to a greater or lesser degree by social media, from President-elect Donald Trump?s insistence on using Twitter as an unfiltered direct communication channel with his followers and critics, to the soul-searching happening in some quarters about the role social media played in serving up news stories to the American electorate.
Social media is also being mentioned frequently as the major news and polling organizations come to grips with the fact that their predictions did not see a Trump victory as a serious possibility, while those monitoring the two campaigns on social media, like our own Socialbakers analysts, saw how much support the Trump campaign was able to muster and how much Trump?s controversies galvanized his supporters rather than hindered his path to the presidency. In the world of social media marketing technology, there?s been plenty of talk and soul-searching about social media, too, although in quite a different way.
There?s no question that the platforms are maturing both in terms of business models and technology. They are behaving much more like tra...