Tuesday Tidbit: 4 tips for marketers from the Internet Trend Report

Update: For more recent trends visit:

HowSociable's 2023 Internet Trends Report which was released earlier this year.

You may have seen that Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report was released earlier this summer. However if you're like me, you also saw it was 213 pages, you glanced at it, and then you got consumed by your day-to-day work and neglected to change anything about your digital strategy based on the report. That's why you gotta love TechCrunch for putting the top points into a two minute video. Moreover, that's why you gotta love our Tuesday Tidbit for choosing 5 points for marketers to incorporate into their digital strategy. 

What's growing this year and what should you as a marketer capitalize on?

1. Video viewership:

• Which platforms? Snapchat, Facebook Live
• What can you do? Try out Snapchat for your social media strategy – Read how this college did so. Or make a video following this infographic. 

2. Messaging:

• Which platforms? WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
• What can you do?
  • Encourage your sales team to respond with WhatsApp instead of phone calls (you may get a 40% increase in response rate) and your support team to respond on WhatsApp for their support tickets (as does NowFloats). You could also use it to send new offers or say happy birthday to your more loyal customers that you know are interested in your content. 
  • For Facebook Messenger you can initiate a private convo for clients through a Messenger Code (learn more here). Be aware that if you heavily promote your Facebook page, you should make sure to have a system in place so you can keep up with the traffic and get messages to the right coworker.

3. U.S. advertising: 

• Which platforms? Google, Facebook
• What can you do? 
  • Keep up with Google via the AdWords site and know how to be effective with a modern keyword strategy. 
  • Get creative on Facebook: Learn how we cut costs & increased ROI on Facebook ads.
  • Find ways to stand out on other less crowded advertising venues like LinkedIn, Twitter & Instagram

4. Predicting the rise of voice interfaces for computing input:

• Which platforms? Siri, Alexa, Google Search
• What can you do? 
  • Make content with long-tail keywords and questions in mind; rather than writing around how you would type a question, think about how you might ask a question aloud.
  • Study how it's working as best you can – this article helps – keeping in mind things like how analytics has no way of tracking how often people come to your site through voice search (which may change) and you can't control how your site shows up through voice search.