I have been pretty busy during these last few months speaking at various social media conferences and events discussing a lot of different topics but the big one has been the latest social trends. Now although I am OLD (don’t laugh) I don’t proclaim to be an oracle and know everything that is going to happen in business and technology but I do feel I have a fairly solid understanding of social media marketing as it is today in 2018.

My agency Prohibition has had its biggest year of growth in the last twelve months and a lot of our core business is now social media strategy and helping implement campaigns that make a tangible difference to the bottom line. But don’t worry PR isn’t dead as much as some would hope. We are still here, to stay hopefully – the job is just constantly changing and you must adapt too. We still have an important role to play at the top table – I just wish the industry would stop cross examining itself and concentrate on innovating and staying ahead of the other marketing disciplines as they are always looking at getting one up on us. We should be the content guardians but we shouldn’t get arrogant or cocky. We should just keep trying to learn – this is what I tell every one of my staff. Today is about reading, learning and adapting – only that way will PR stay relevant. This is a blog topic for another day though.

Those that read my blog regularly will know I am a bit of technology geek and I like to stay abreast of the latest developments, so I have put my thoughts into a short 90 minute presentation and added it to my Slideshare account for you to download and read at your leisure. Now obviously when I present it face-to-face with my jokes, references and non-amusing anecdotes it is far more entertaining but you will get a flavour of where I think we are at today.

The key things I cover in my presentation include:

  1. The rise of Pay to Play – with an examination of the cost of paid social
  2. Influencer Marketing 2.0 and the maturation of the market in the UK
  3. A closer look at virtual and augmented reality with some case studies
  4. The rise of the chat bot and the chat-bot ecosystem
  5. Video – is it really the future and saviour of social?
  6. Facebook Live (now brand incentives have stopped)
  7. The birth of higher quality content and branded TV shows
  8. Outrage – a big rise of 2017-18
  9. Audio is that the real future? (I covered that quite a bit in this article too)
  10. Instagram – a close examination of how Snapchat was daft to refuse Mark Zuckerberg’s advances
  11. Micro-moments and how they are going to move across all platforms
  12. Linkedin – never ignore it.
  13. Twitter – is it still relevant in 2018?

I have tried to reference as much as I possibly could throughout the presentation but I have missed anyone,please accept my apologies now. Social Bakers get a name check as do several others but be assured I don’t make any of the statistics up they are all sourced and referenced where possible.

Have a read through it and let me know what you think in my comments.

I hope you like it.

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.