7 Facebook Trends To Grow Your Business In 2016

Yesterday Mari Smith, the Queen of all things Facebook, hosted a webinar where she talked about the 7 Facebook Trends To Grow Your Business In 2016. It was a very interesting webinar and there was lots of chat on Twitter about it too at #FB2016Trends.

She started off with some really amazing stats about Facebook which will blow you away.

1.55 billion people are on Facebook each month.
88% of users are accessing FB via their mobile phone
The average user checks FB 14 times per day (I definitely am ABOVE average!!)
People spend on average 41 minutes on FB per day.
925+ million users are using FB Groups.
50+ million active small businesses on FB with only 2.5 million advertising
400 million people on Instagram each month.

We have all seen our organic reach take a dive over the last years, and Mari clearly pointed out that business owners need to now have a budget for FB.

Although I am a strong believer that with the right content you can still reach followers organically – it just takes more work!

7 Trends For Facebook

#1. Video Views Increase

Native Video (video uploaded to FB) = The MOST reach
People are engaging with eye-catching videos and animated gifs
You need to make videos that people feel that they MUST share
360 video will become more important – visit 360video.fb.com
Use tools such as flixel.com. animoto, diptic and adobe post to create video.

Totally makes sense that people want to be entertained on Facebook -and video is great for this.

#2. Facebook Live

Live streaming will become more important to engage with your audience.
Make sure they are engaging, have a good title, keep the broadcasts regular and encourage people to subscribe
This is currently not available to all pages and no timelines are set for a full roll out.

It will be important to have a strategy of what you want to do with this – how are you going to be useful to your audience?

#3. Improved Facebook Search

This is coming to pages and profiles, and will allow people to search FB like they would search a blog.
Facebook Notes is a good way to get your content found on FB – republish your blog posts there.
New directories will be added to FB – fb.com/service and fb.com/places

This is great news for local business!

#4. Increased Mobile

I think this is no surprise – we do everything on our mobile now!

#5. More Content Published On Facebook

Instant articles will be available visit instantarticles.fb.com
Companies will need to decide which is more important – content views versus visits to their website.

Anything that means less clicks to access is beneficial for your followers. So content on your FB page is much easier to get eye balls on. Scary to not have people on your website though – I can’t see people getting rid of their own platform for their content

#6. Facebook Groups

This is the least talked about feature on FB
Definite increase in private groups
Downside is you can’t advertise to it – but you can advertise to a page
Lots of For Sale groups being created all the time for buying and selling items

Loving groups for both my marketing business and my pet sitting business. It’s a great way to build community. Although as we discussed on our Blab last night what is really ever private on Facebook?

#7. Messenger For Business

More features will be available than before – visit messenger.com/business to find out when available.
You can now set your own response time on FB – visit Settings/Messages/Set Time
Instant replies allow you to tell people if you are away from FB

All adds to a positive customer experience – which can only benefit you and your followers.

The biggest takeaways I got from the webinar is that I need to be