Every effective website starts with a strong design and quality content. However, if you really want to maximize the effectiveness of your site, you’ll want to use social media to drive engagement. If you’re only providing opportunities for passive consumption, you aren’t tapping into your visitors’ desire to participate in your content. The good news is that you can use social media to drive engagement. After all, that’s what social networks are for – enabling people to interact with content and spread it to their friends and contacts. By leveraging these existing tools, you can create more participation on your website and see better results from your marketing. Here are 4 ways on how to keep the ball rolling:

1. Your Blog Posts. Blogging is a top strategy to positioning your brand as a leader and expert in your industry. Ranked as the 5th most trusted source for accurate information, blogs are awesome tools to showcasing your knowledge and sharing advice. Your audience will appreciate the value given that offers solutions to their problems. Your social media networks are excellent platforms to promote your blog content. When sharing, include an image that complements your text for increased exposure. Also, be sure to tailor your message to the appropriate audience. For example, Facebook is more family and friends oriented whereas LinkedIn is geared towards professionals. Modifying your post accordingly so it speaks to that audience makes your social content effective.

2. Infographics. Infographics are incredibly engaging.

Since humans process visual information faster than words, it only makes sense. The human brain tells us “reading is hard” and “looking is easy.” An infographic uses the power of visually appealing content to trick the brain into reading. Besides, we understand the content better when it’s paired with pictures. It’s no surprise that kids like picture books. But it’s not just kids; adults are the same way! The brain itself likes pictures. The takeaway is simple: Share infographics socially, and the social world will share it right back.

3. Quizzes.

Quizzes can be used as a fun way for brands to engage customers. Marketers can use quizzes for brand awareness and a “fun” factor, or as a means to gauge customer interest in products. Results can be useful for recommending relevant subsequent content that drives back to the brand. With quizzes receiving 75% of their traffic from social media, it’s important to establish a promotion strategy to get the word out and generate buzz. A great way to encourage engagement, provide a score users can share on their social media channels.

4. Tickle them with humour.

Humor is likely to enhance brand recall and influence buying decisions when well integrated with your marketing message. Also, everyone needs more laughter in their lives. Bring that, and you instantly create a connect with your viewers, and then you can give them your message. Unfortunately, although we all believe that we’re hilarious, not all of us can make high-impact humour. To pull this off you’ll have to hire the right comic talent and be well informed on the preferences of your Target Audience.

The resources and options are out there to make content that attracts attention. Find the best content for your brand and audience. From there, form a content strategy around that. If your posts are relevant, valuable, and have interactive features, you will notice a positive effect on your social media engagement.

Why in these latter days has the landing gained such a large popularity? The answer is simple. It allows the designers involving their imagination to create a really wonderful picture that is easy to distinguish from the competing sites. The effective landing (as, indeed, any web resource) has its own rules and regularities.

1. Professional design.

A salesman must always be well-dressed, right? Your landing page is also like a salesman. So, you need to give it a professional look. The more professional your page looks, the more visitors will believe your story. Don’t hesitate to spend some money on hiring an experienced web designer, as it will pay you high dividends.

2. Never send traffic from an ad to your homepage.

You should never drive traffic from your promotional campaigns, whatever they are onto your website’s home page. Home pages are usually cluttered with information, there are many possible actions a visitor can take, and the most important one might be missed. Hence you want to drive traffic from your promotional campaigns to a page that is aimed at only one thing getting them to take the action that is the goal of your campaign. An effective landing page is a crucial component to helping you convert browsers into buyers.

3. Declutter.

Cluttering landing pages is one of the top reasons why they fail. You don’t want too many high-density images. A widget or two is fine. If you have an excessive amount of content boxes, your customers become overwhelmed, and it takes away from your content. In bad cases, it can even be hard for the customer to know where to click. You don’t like clutter in your house or yard, so don’t put it on your page. Watch for information overload and providing too many choices. Keep it simple.

4. Probability of conversion.

Any conversion rate optimization work is simply trying to increase the probability of conversion. You’ll never achieve 100% conversion, you’re increasing customer perception of value and decreasing perception of cost to maximize the amount of people who convert when they wouldn’t have otherwise because they now:

♣ Better understand the value your product provides and how it ties into what they really want
♣ Have to endure less cost to take that conversion action

5. Get to the point.

We all know people have short attention spans, so why aren’t we considering that in landing page creation? Online audiences tend to avoid reading through an entire page of informatoin. They will, however, “forage” for information by visually scanning the screen until they find what they’re looking for. So when designing your landing pages, get straight to the point. People came to the page for a reason, so make sure you address that reason clearly and succinctly by highlighting the value of what you’re offering and how it addresses their needs, interests, or problems. Use clear headers and sub-headers, use easy-to-scan bullet points to explain what they’ll get from the offer, emphasize key points using bolded text or italics, and keep things as brief as possible.

Do not waste your time on allegories and hints. You need the result, don`t you? So, learn how to promote and sell your products properly. Speak directly, but avoid the aggressive tone and don’t irritate the potential customers.

By now, you’ve probably heard the term “dark post” bouncing around the social media world for years. But what are dark posts, exactly? Instagram pics with bad lighting? Edgy content from death metal fan pages? Status updates from Darth Vader? Sadly, no. The reality is much more straightforward. Dark posts are targeted ads on social media. Unlike boosted and organic posts, though, they don’t appear on your timeline. They also don’t show up in the feeds of your followers.

Instead, they show up as sponsored content in the feeds of users you’re specifically targeting. Because they’re not “published” the same way as organic posts, dark posts are more formally known on Facebook as unpublished posts. They’re not formally on your page. Effectively, they only exist for the targeted users that see them. To avoid confusion, we’re not talking about dark social here, it’s actually totally unrelated. Dark social refers to traffic to your website from social media that isn’t detected by analytics tools. Dark posts, on the other hand, are simply social media ads that don’t show up on your timeline.

Although Facebook invented the concept, dark posts exist on all major social media platforms.
When advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter, you can select whether to boost organic content or create a dark post. When it comes to Snapchat and Instagram, all of your ads are technically “dark posts” by default. But why bother coming to the dark side? Well, there are a lot of benefits to creating dark posts on social media.

Dark/unpublished posts

Let’s start with dark/unpublished posts. These posts are ad objects that appear in consumer timelines, but do not exist on the company’s social page. They appear as normal-looking posts, but have calls to action like “Learn More,” “Shop Now,” or “Like Page.”

Dark social

Dark Social is an entirely different beast: it has nothing to do with ads. It refers simply to the private sharing of links via mediums that don’t pass a referrer in traditional web analytics platforms, such as email, Slack, Text, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. When we break down the term Dark Social, “Dark” relates to the fact that these conversions are often falsely attributed to direct traffic in your web analytics tool. The “social” component comes from the fact that this is a social interaction of two or more people. If it makes it easier, just think “private sharing.” Dark Social data is absolutely critical, not just for social teams, but for your marketing organization as a whole. In fact, you should be viewing Dark Social as its own marketing channel, one that contains a goldmine of data. Right now, around 80% of all sharing is dark. 80%!!! These private shares represent consumers who are typically at the bottom of the marketing funnel and/or huge fans and advocates of your brand. These are people sharing links to your products so that their friends, families, and co-workers will buy them, read your articles, and share your quizzes to help determine “Which Wildlife Excursion Should You Try In Manitoba?”

These interactions are occurring all the time, and you are missing the chance to optimize your content for goal completions that matter to your business. You are missing a nuanced perspective on the social activity sitting in your direct traffic bucket. Using this data, you can learn which products, content, or other web pages resonate most with your audience, so you can transform your social, email, and ad campaigns around the topics people likely to buy and engage deeply with your brand care most about.

Want more views, clickthroughs, shares, and overall engagement on your social media posts? You’re not alone. According to the 2014 State of Inbound Marketing, 84% of marketers cited organic, top-of-the-funnel sources like social media, blogs, and search engines as rising in importance in 2014.
Posting visual content is one of the most important things you can do to improve your social media strategy. A successful social strategy will often include photos, videos, and screenshots of infographics or other graphs.
But posting visual content for the sake of posting visual content isn’t the best way to optimize your presence on social media. It’s important that your visual content be compelling, relevant, and correctly formatted. Here are some tips to create visual content:

1. Have an established palette or theme.

Stick to similar visual styles across all platforms so your brand carries on a consistent appearance.

2. Use Canva.

Canva enables you to create content, like quote photos, infographics, social media header artwork and photo collages. A particularly handy feature of Canva is that you can size your artwork based on which social media platform you need it for. Canva offers a collection of images, colors and fonts to help you with your creations.

3. Create a hit list.

Having a Hit List can be a great way to source inspiration in order to create your own images. Now, don’t get too excited. Nobody is ending up in the trunk of a car. It’s simply a list of pages or profiles to follow in order to get ideas for what to share and what to create. Share the content you find on a hit list and share your own original content consistently too. Other people are out there looking for great sources of content so if you can end up on their Hit List, even better! This is not about copying. It’s about inspiring you to create your own visuals and putting your own spin on it.

4. Have a brand or style that will inspire you.

Finding a source of inspiration can really help you jumpstart your visual marketing career. It’s not about mimicking a style, but rather adapting elements from different areas and making them part of your own style.

5. Use The Stocks.

The Stocks is a compilation of several of the best royalty-free stock photo websites in one place, in addition to a few paid stock photo sites. You can use the photos for both editorial and commercial purposes, and alter them any way you choose. No more worrying about paying a couple hundred dollars for credits on a stock photo site that isn’t all that great anyway. Pexels and Pixabay are my favorite of the stock photo websites that can be found via The Stocks.This site also has video, audio, icons, fonts and colors that you can download.

Things move fast in Visual Content Creation world. Remember, some of these tips and tools will suit you, some won’t but you can treat it as a “pick and mix”.  Jump in and take what works and use them to create visual content for social media in new, more efficient ways!

Social Sharing is now an integral part of our internet experience. Social media is constantly on the rise and it is becoming popular with older folk as well. With so much information on the internet, it is a real feat to track down what you really need. Search engines make it possible to find information that you need, but social media also plays a significant role in helping you find your favorite websites. Why ? Your friends or the people whom you follow have a lot in common with you and when they share something, it is far more likely that you’ll find the shared information of interest. 72% of internet users are active on social media and it represents a marketing opportunity which you cannot ignore. After search engines, it is social media that drives most traffic to websites. Unlike normal advertisements and television slots, it serves as a 2-way communication and helps build brand awareness.

Creating good content is only a job half done. Getting it before the target audience is the other tricky half. That’s where social sharing can give a leg up. You can tap a share button from almost any screen and content is instantly shared. There are many Social Sharing Plugins For WordPress available which you could use on your website.

1. Monarch Social Media Sharing Plugin for WordPress.

Monarch is the premium social sharing WordPress plugin by Elegant Themes, and in our opinion it really is one of the best social media plugins you can choose for your WordPress website. Included with their developer and lifetime licenses, Monarch is the perfect solution for all of your social sharing needs. With more than 35+ social networks, 5 different button locations, 6 pop-up and fly-in triggers, optional counts, custom colors and more all built-in you can literally build your own one of a kind set of social buttons.

2. Social Warfare.

Social Warfare comes from the Warfare Plugins company. It’s a simple and sleek solution for getting your posts and pages shared. The main reason users like Social Warfare is because the buttons are attractive.

3. Easy Social Sharing.

Easy Social Sharing is one of the best free social sharing plugins for WordPress. Firstly, it is our home product i.e. created by ThemeGrill, tested and also used in many of our own and client projects. Secondly, it is easy to use, simple yet powerful that is suitable for beginners as well as experts. Like its name, Easy Social Sharing plugin has simplified social sharing on WordPress.

4. Sumo Share.

This isn’t your typical WordPress plugin. Sumo is a suite of apps designed to help you grow your traffic. While you can use these apps with any site that supports HTML, they have a specific WordPress plugin which makes setup extremely easy. The app that allows you to add social sharing buttons is called “Share”, and it performs brilliantly. There are a huge number of places that you can add your social buttons to and it’s all done by a clickable interface. Just click on where you want them to go. You can select a different placement for mobile devices too.

5. Revive Old Posts.

Revive Old Posts is a well known and very effective plugin that will help to get constant traffic to the old posts on your blog. With this plugin you can completely automate the process of sharing your old posts, you can schedule it and add hashtags automatically right from your WordPress dashboard.

It is important not to go overboard and put in all the WordPress social sharing plugins that are available. Add only what is necessary and what is suitable to the demography of your site’s audiences.

Snapchat is a social media platform by which users communicate through chat and time-limited media. Many businesses are jumping on board with the app, finding new and creative ways to use Snapchat for marketing. Yet there are still some businesses and marketers who are not quite there—be they skeptical, unclear about, or just not interested in Snapchat. Like any social media platform, Snapchat isn’t for every business. However, there are several benefits to marketing through Snapchat if it is in fact the right fit. The infographic looks into the following:

1. Snapchat in numbers.

First, the infographic delves into mind-blowing statistics to prove the popularity of Snapchat and its sphere of influence. With 100 million daily active users, an average user spending 30 mins on the app and 8 billion Snapchat daily video views, the staggering numbers prove the enormity of the app’s success.

2. No stale profile.

Early advice for businesses just getting started with Facebook was to make sure to post to profiles regularly. Failing to post regularly could mean that a person arriving at a profile that hasn’t been updated in weeks, months or years (if at all) would likely leave rather than choosing to Like the Page. With Snapchat, however, there is no profile to review before choosing to become “friends” with a contact or company. Thus, the frequency at which one posts can completely be controlled by the marketer – choosing to post when they have something worthy of sharing versus feeling the need to always post (creating a more authentic experience for both parties).

3. Reward current customers with mobile coupons.

Because Snapchat is ubiquitous with its young target market, it allows brands to deliver offers and coupons in a matter of seconds. Coupon snaps not only reward customers, they provide incentive to bring them back for more.

4. Increase brand awareness.

With over 10 million active users on this platform, this means that there are 10 million different opportunities to build awareness to your brand! Most businesses today are only present on Facebook and only a mere 2% are present on Snapchat! This is a great chance for your business to take part in this niche as a creative advertising tactic and a way to stand out.

5. Gain exposure.

When it comes to usage, Snapchat has some impressive stats. Of the 158 million people who use Snapchat every day, the average user opens and checks the app 18 times per day, totaling about 25-30 minutes spent on the app per day. If you want more exposure for your business, you need to place yourself where your audience is. If your audience uses Snapchat, then it’s time to create an account! Speaking of creating an account—once you create your account on Snapchat, you can upload the QR code to your other social media accounts and make it easy for your current followers to add you.

At this point, Snapchat for business is easy to get started and very low maintenance to manage. While it might not make sense for companies with older target audiences to join Snapchat, the rest of us can get started with very little risk. One word of caution, however, is that similar to how Instagram used to be, there is no way to switch from a personal account to a business account and back without signing in and out. This was a hassle when Instagram did not offer a quick way to switch and social media managers should be very aware of what account they are posting to before submitting a Story. As with all social networks, a responsible and trusted member of the team should feel empowered to post to the accounts they manage at-will but some general guidelines should be discussed and documented.

Is your business one of the over 600 million accounts currently on Instagram? Are you part of the force that contributes to the 95 million photos and videos shared daily on Instagram? Are you one of the 48.8% of brands currently making their presence felt on the platform? By 2018 the number of brands on Instagram is expected to rise to 70.7%. This means that Instagram could very well overtake Twitter this year! Have you optimised your Instagram business account to get the most out of it for your brand? Here are tips to dominate in instagram this year!

1. Don’t beg your followers to turn on notifications for your content.

If you’ve hooked your followers so hard that they subscribe to your posts on their own, congrats. Ask them to subscribe to you and you’re showing just how afraid you are of falling off their radar. It’s a bitch move. Above that, those who are likely to turn on notifications to brands will likely subscribe to many others as well. What’s going to happen once they start getting bombarded with notifications from everyone? They’ll unfollow you or leave the platform altogether. No one likes spending that much time with even their favourite brands.

2. Step up your hashtags.

Hashtags are your secret weapon to success, especially since only 20 percent of Instagram posts have 6 or more hashtags and 53 percent of posts only have one hashtag. This means you’ll instantly boost your engagement by stepping up your hashtag use, but remember it’s also about quality, not quantity. Every post needs to have multiple relevant hashtags that are specific to your audience. To choose the best hashtags, pay attention to what others are using and use hashtag tracking tools like RebelMouse, Tagboard or Talkwalker. Also, Socialmention.com and Twubs are great places to look. It is hard to influence an Instagram users search history, but Instagram hastags you can control 100%. So take full advantage.

Then, whenever you’re hosting an event, having a promotion, or just need more people to walk through your door, use these hashtags, along with your location to get in front of more people. You can take a look at the way I user hashtags on my business Instagram.

3. Filters.

Statistically Mayfair is the filter that attracts the most engagement. But don’t get hung up on that. We’re only talking a very minor advantage. What the most popular channels do though is use one filter consistently. When someone is exploring your channel for the first time and viewing your images in grid view, your posts will look more appealing if there isn’t a mix of image styles that clash with each other.

4. Stories and Live Video.

Everyone following you has a banner at the tippy top of their news feed, so make sure you’re up there and have great content to share! With stories, you have a semi-permanent block of time (24-hour period) that gives you a lot of flexibility in being topical or current. Both live video and stories let you be more unpolished than what you would post on your regular timeline, so you can focus more on what you’re sharing rather than how. Live video is especially great for engagement because followers who tap into your video can directly comment, so you can ask questions, stir discussion, and become a real living figure for your brand. Live video is great for showing processes and people will stick around to watch if you can promise a final product at the end of it.

5. Develop your brand Instagram strategy before you post and stay true to it.

Posting all willy-nilly may earn you a few ‘Hearts’ at first, but over time you’ll fall through the cracks without a solid foundation.

There is a lot more to social media than just posting and waiting for likes. Use the ideas here to develop a strategy that works for you. Create engagement with a large number of people, and subsequently build your business in the process.

Social media is a very new aspect of our businesses that have taken over significant parts of not only our marketing plans but also our personal lives. Major platforms battle for prominence and significance by adjusting their business models to provide better returns for their shareholders while intending to improve the user experience. As these systems develop, how you use these platforms for your business must change as well. Here are 10 social media challenges to face in 2018:

1. Keeping pace with changing algorithms and platform innovations.

Organic reach is the elephant in the room, because of its direct impact on budgets, but there are changes, advancements and opportunities across the social media spectrum. Some of those changes can be key to a platform’s effectiveness for a particular brand.

2. The Unstoppable Rise of Video.

You already know the importance of video in your social strategy, but there is one common mistake many marketers are tripping up on – making video just for the sake of having video. Many marketers overthink their video content and end up wasting time producing something that falls flat with their audience. Video is still one of the biggest social media challenges, though there are many simple yet effective solutions. Keep it simple yet captivating. Remember to grab emotion with your video content and make the messaging relevant to your audience’s problem and how you can solve it. Brainstorm a few scenarios where you can go live on Facebook to showcase your culture (which is also great evergreen content). Encourage your employees to share your posts on their personal socials and share on-the-job photos when applicable.

3. Social Media Return-on-Investment Monitoring.

Short-sighted social media vanity metrics will no longer cut it in 2018. It is time to let go of follower counts and page likes and instead focus on factors like customer service expenditures, brand perception monitoring, talent acquisition, supply chain analysis, and reputation risk management. Developing a social outreach strategy focused on ROI monitoring will require brands improve their analytics measuring if they hope to achieve ongoing success.

4. Higher Engagement Rates Between Brands & Customers.

Brands are suddenly realizing the impact of social media engagement and creating lasting relationships instead of just treating social as a platform to advertise their products. It’s absolutely essential to keep your followers happy by providing a network where they can reach you. According to Instagram, at least 80% of its users already follow a brand on the network. Don’t leave your golden chances for communication behind. In 2018, it’s going to continue to be about making relationships and providing feedback when users need it the most from you.

5. Proving the ROI of strategies.

Even when implementation goes flawlessly, effective measurement of your success is crucial. New tactics employed to meet platform changes are especially important to evaluate.

With so many new features on each social platform, how are you supposed to know which ones you really need to spend time getting familiar with? Many smaller brands are growing weary of the influx of new updates. No one can blame anyone. Everybody loves it, but everyone should understand that it is hard to keep up with social trends when you’re not in the thick of it every day.

Social media management software solves a huge problem for competitive businesses – stumbling over the commonness trap.  This means that they will not only help distribute content evenly, but get you acquainted with how that content is performing in front of different audiences. Basically, it sets up the basics of modern crowd-branding and helps you understand what works the best for your product, taking into consideration user personas and specifications you may not be aware of. Are you looking for a new social media management system, or upgrading to a better one? In order to help you make the right decision, we’ve listed the 5 leading social media management tools to watch out for in 2018.

1. Rocketium.

Visual content captures the most audience attention and is prioritized by many social media networks for delivery to your news feed. Regarding information mediums, video is king as the most engaging content type, which means if you’re not producing videos then you’re robbing yourself of audience interaction. Rocketium is an awesome choice to produce videos in a quick and alluring way. With an array of styling options and royalty-free visuals at your disposal, users can easily create stylized videos in minutes, no previous experience necessary! Here’s a plus: Rocketium allows users to share the same video in different dimensions, optimizing the content for various social media platforms.

2. Hootsuite.

The free plan is decently robust with the ability to: Manage 3 social profiles in one place, Schedule 30 posts in advance, Generate leads with social contests. The free plan also includes basic analytics for tracking followers and various growth and content statistics and two RSS feed integrations. Not too shabby!

3. SocialDrift.

Used by McDonalds, Sprint and major industry influencers with millions of followers, SocialDrift is an Instagram marketer’s best friend. The platform automates Instagram interactions, which help to organically increase follower count. Users just need to provide SocialDrift with information about ideal Instagram followers, and the platform will use machine learning to engage users through likes, comments and follows. Because of this engagement, users will frequently follow accounts in return. In time, SocialDrift can dramatically increase the number of high-quality Instagram followers through the platform’s Instagram bot, named Securebot.

4. AddThis.

AddThis is a social sharing and engagement tool found on many websites. It comes with share and follow buttons to easily distribute your content, boost your social media presence, and grow your audience. Aside from website marketing, AddThis provides valuable data on audience behavior: social engagement, number of people sharing your content, and where traffic comes from.

5. BuzzSumo.

Use it to research keywords and trending topics your audience is interested in. You can use it to find interesting new posts to share, or to search for content ideas based on what’s performing well. And, if you’ve got some extra cash to invest, BuzzSumo Pro is a powerhouse for competitor research.

Improve your social media marketing this year with a slew of new tools. Create content to promote your brand, engage with customers, and track your success.

For marketers, end of the year is the time where they measure and evaluate the effectiveness of their social media campaigns to see if their efforts have made a significant impact on their revenue. They may also be finalizing their social media strategy for the year to see if they are properly allocating their resources, while some are probably already looking into their marketing plan for the upcoming year. Our social media strategies are constantly evolving. We need to keep up with the trends and learn to ride with the changes. Just as technology and consumer behavior will evolve in unpredictable ways, we should be prepared for these new developments as these will change the way you connect with your audience. We must plan for these changes, so we do not get caught off guard when that time comes. While it’s hard to predict how the future of social media marketing will look like in the next 10 years, there are several trends that can be forecasted.
Here are some expert predictions on how of social media marketing will look like in the future:

1. “Hire” more chatbots and leap into the future of social media marketing.

You’ve seen them.  You go to a website, and almost immediately a person sends you a message asking if they can help you. But that person isn’t really a person; it’s a chatbot, programmed to interact with you Chatbots are arguably a big part of the future of social media technology, according to Shana Haynie, co-founder and COO of Vulpine Interactive, a social media marketing company based out of San Diego. “If businesses aren’t jumping on this bandwagon, they should be,” Haynie says. She is particularly impressed with Facebook Messenger chatbots. “People can easily opt-in to your messenger list, where you can set up simple, or extremely intricate, workflows to guide your subscribers towards your desired results,” Hayne says.

2. “When news breaks in the future, it will be covered by a multitude of eyewitnesses streaming live video.

These streams will knit together into a single immersive video, enabling the viewer to virtually experience the event in real time. For better or worse, the world will feel like it’s right around the corner.”- Cory Bergman, BreakingNews Co-Founder

3. Smart speakers.

Consumers are increasingly discovering new ideas, content, and products on smart speaker systems. In fact, most analysts project that the majority of search activities will be conducted through products like Alexa and Google Home. Since much of what we do in the world of social media and content marketing is geared toward helping people find our products, this is a vital trend. When we ask Alexa to find an answer, we don’t get a list of blog posts, videos, or research reports to choose from, we get the ANSWER. So this is a profound development for marketers.

4. Brands will exist across news feeds, stories (where possible), and within messenger services.

The intention isn’t to inundate, but to better integrate into the daily lives of their audience. Bots and virtual assistants for messenger services, or devices such as Amazon’s Echo, allows brands to be seamlessly present. This is happening today with Uber’s and Domino’s availability to take commands on the Echo, and with Harvard Business Review’s bot on Slack. It’s possible that Facebook will open up its M assistant to work with brands to empower more suggested activities based on the conversations users have on its Messenger app. – Kristine Neil, Owner and Creative Director for Markon Brands.

The most recent political cycle has exposed a lot of what was rotten in social media, making us all so constantly aware of what is wrong with ourselves and others that we barely have space in our heads for anything other than frustration and anxiety. If they’re smart, new social media platforms will understand that create a new kind of social networking, a kind that actually feels like a personal asset instead of a detriment.