Member Avatar for happygeek

It's that time of the year again when the whole 'prediction' business machinery gets fired up. So I thought I would grab some of the ones from my inbox that are perhaps most applicable to the digital marketing sector. The following were inspired by some crystal ball gazing by the folk at the Talkwalker social analytics people, and caught my attention today. So, what does the gathered DaniWeb consciousness make of them? Accurate, likely or total nonsense?

Here goes:

  1. Facebook will become a major competitor to YouTube during 2018 in terms of 'social video' consumption. This on the back of the introduction of new features to help creators with video discovery, especially a preferential boost in the newsfeed for original native video. A dedicated video app is also in the pipeline.

  2. Conversational UI will march onwards and upwards, an AI-powered army of chatbots that will nurture leads and drive sales. Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are all investing heavily in this area.

  3. Be it video or Augmented Reality, 'rich media' for an immersive experience will close the gap between engagement and purchase. If your ecommerce environment is dated, you'll be losing out.

  4. R.I.P organic social reach. Paying for visibility on social media will no longer be optional, as organic reach not only nose-dives further in 2018 but commits seppuku in the process.

  5. The marketeer is dead, long live the influencer. Maybe the most controversial of the predictions, but influencer marketing has already proved itself in consumer-facing environments and is predicted to storm B2B marketing strategy in 2018. OK, so it may not actually kill traditional online marketing, but it will sure as heck have to be taken seriously and implemented alongside it.
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Dani AI

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A quick, evidence‑backed retrospective on ’s Dec 7, 2017 predictions — short verdict: several ideas were directionally right, a few were overstated, and context mattered.

Facebook’s big bet on native video (Watch) did grow viewership but did not displace YouTube as the creator/long‑form hub; publishers and creators complained that Watch struggled to find the same independent audience. (cnbc.com) At the same time Facebook’s Jan 11, 2018 News Feed shift to “meaningful interactions” reduced the visibility of public Page content and accelerated the move toward paid distribution. (telecomtv.com)

“Conversational UI” saw heavy experimentation in 2017–2018 — Messenger alone hosted hundreds of thousands of basic bots — but many were narrow and brittle, useful for simple FAQs and lead capture rather than full sales funnels. Treat them as staged automation, not a magic replacement for strategy. (link.springer.com)

Rich media and social commerce matured in the years after 2017: Instagram rolled out in‑app shopping and checkout (making discovery→purchase shorter), and AR experiences (IKEA Place being an early example) proved valuable for certain categories like furniture and try‑ons. These formats improved conversion where product visualization matters, but they didn’t instantly transform every ecommerce funnel. (later.com)

Influencer marketing became a mainstream line item — a multi‑billion dollar channel that complements, not replaces, traditional marketing — but it brought more sponsored noise (the trend warned about) and stricter oversight (FTC guidance on disclosures). (statista.com)

Practical takeaway: prioritize owned assets (email, search/SEO), use high‑quality rich media where it maps to purchase intent, treat bots as workflow automation, and allocate paid spend intelligently—including creator partnerships—with clear KPIs and disclosure compliance.

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Member Avatar for jessicaaustin

Great post thanks for sharing with us

Member Avatar for happygeek

Thanks. So do you agree or disagree with the predictions then? :-)

Member Avatar for AssertNull

How about

Number 6: Sponsored "news", "matchings", and "research" will grow in 2018 to the point where there's more of it than the real thing and it reaches critical mass. This will include all measurements of popularity, likes, polling, etc. EVERYTHING will be ads of one type or another and you'll have to be even more savvy than ever to wade through it.

Number 7: The Overton Window will shift to make this acceptable, in part due to pollsters and "like"-counting selling out to the highest bidder.

Number 8: A second Overton Window opens that makes all this unacceptable to a small, but growing segment of the population. There will be money to be made off of this second Overton Window.

Number 9: The two Overton Windows will separate to the point where they no longer overlap, resulting in at least two completely different populations. People become even more divided.

I don't consider this a hijack. I think it dovetails nicely with your 1, 2, and 4.

Member Avatar for happygeek

Agreed with number 6. Numbers 7, 8 and 9 could be considered a single item concerning the Overton Window dividing - do you get paid by the word? ;-)

Member Avatar for Abdullah_14

Your points are 90% to be agreed and you said about RIP about organic traffic no it will never die for sure.

Member Avatar for AssertNull

do you get paid by the word?

More succinctly...

You can fool some of the people all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time, but a huge chunk of advertisers no longer care about the rest of the quote because they feel they gain more by fooling people than the backlash they get from people not being fooled and resenting the attempt.

commented: yep +16
Member Avatar for oouzo_1

Social Media, is good platform!!! Thanks for the article.

Edited by happygeek because: spam deleted
Member Avatar for imtylerbanks

without any organic social reach you can get nothing, no one wants to buy a thing in popup ads anymore!!

Member Avatar for agustina

Thanks for sharing great information about social marketing predictions

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