Social Trends 2017: 360 Live Video and ChatBots

Looking forward to 2017, social media is continuing to evolve with a projected growth of social media users by 7% in 2017, an estimated 2.39 billion users. It is now more important than ever for businesses to embrace emerging trends and technologies to remain competitive.

ChatBots

Chatbots are computer programs that imitate conversations with individuals using artificial intelligence. They are revolutionizing the customer service experience, allowing consumers to ask questions or purchase products and services directly from the application in real time. This innovation is a huge time saver and cost cutter for businesses as well as ensuring an effective process for customer services.

Live 360 Video

A huge social trend in 2016 was live video. This year Facebook announced the introduction of live video to increase brand personalisation and our team predict this trend to evolve from strength to strength in 2017. The opportunities with Live 360 video are endless from building a community, increasing consumer personalization and building awareness through social. If you want to increase overall consumer engagement and following in 2017, make live 360 video part of your social media strategy.

2017 is set to be an exciting year for social media with some great innovations on the cards. At EdgeDNA, we pride ourselves on our use of new trends to keep above the social media curve and we are really excited to see what the rest of 2017 has in store.

IoT

While the majority of people in the United States have still not experienced Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality, almost everyone has come into contact with an interconnected device whether they are conscious of it or not. Today, almost anything can be interconnected as demonstrated at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. In fact, there are no longer just smart phones but smart homes, smart washers and dryers, smart sinks, and even smart hair brushes and jeans as announced at the CES.

Nevertheless, the clear standout remained Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, which utilizes Artificial Intelligence. Rather than entering the highly saturated mobile and web industries, Amazon has taken a different route by dominating the IoT industry by creating a new product in itself. More importantly, the product caters to Amazon’s core business which is selling products either for the home or used at home.

If Amazon is able to emerge as a leader within the IoT industry, it will not only reap massive profits but it will gain access to invaluable data and become a much larger threat to “tech giants” specifically, Apple and Google. According to Juniper Research, “the number of connected IoT devices and sensors are expected to reach over 46 billion in 2021, up 200 percent from last year”. At this rate, this emerging technology is really not emerging at all; it is here and it is here to stay.

While this technology is still in a young phase, it will surely continue to rapidly develop. When speaking with developers Nikolai Bourdain and Charles Gaffney, they expressed that these systems will become much more advanced in the coming years as they become equipped with more data information and develop greater technological capacities. With these advancements, advertisements will become much more diverse and complex, and in turn, highly personalized. Furthermore, this will make advertisements more effective and efficient as they will drive the customer experience and eliminate the need for many live customer service roles. Finally, this type of advertisement eliminates the need for banner ads that target a specific type of consumer as this system can provide every individual user with  tailor-made advertisements.