In 2018, the world of social media changed drastically. Social media companies fought to out-do one another by making relevant updates to generate more traffic and increase ad expenditure on their platform. The following are the top three biggest changes seen throughout the year.

Stories Become Mainstream

In 2018 we saw the launch and the increase of ‘Stories’ usage on platforms other than Instagram and Snapchat. YouTube Launched their stories platform to any creator with over 10,000 followers, which may be driven by the appeal of shorter video content based the success seen by other platforms.

Both Facebook Stories and WhatsApp status saw a rise in users with 150 million and 450 million daily active users respectively. According to TechCrunch, stories are growing at 15 times the rate of social media feeds and are projected to surpass them in the foreseeable future. We’re seeing a big change in the way people are viewing content. One conclusion could be that stories are the fastest, easiest way to consume the latest content on a user’s feed and people simply don’t have time to scroll through their feed to consume lengthy content.

New Video Channels Emerged to Compete with YouTube

A big reveal in 2018 came from both Facebook and Instagram with their own long-form video platforms. Throughout the year, YouTube was faced with criticism because they showed ads on videos which companies deemed inappropriate and were also been criticized for their lack of proper compensation to creators. YouTube has also been criticized by their own user-base for being disconnected from why users engage with the platform. In 2018 YouTube launched their annual YouTube Rewind video which was created to showcase the best creators of the year. YouTube rewind 2018 became the most disliked YouTube video of all time with of 15 million dislikes as it did not accurately represent YouTube’s community whatsoever. Both Facebook and Instagram saw an opportunity to find enter a new, lucrative way to sell ad space.

IGTV launched as a way for Instagram creators to create longer videos for their followers without creating multiple stories. Instagram has yet to release statistics for the new video platform however TechCrunch claims that Instagram’s IGTV launch partner creators are still getting around 6.8 times the amount of video views on their feed than on their IGTV.

Facebook Watch was launched internationally in early August 2018 and now claims to have over 400 million monthly users. Facebook seems to pose the biggest threat to YouTube; they have already begun to attract YouTube creators to their platform and can grow the platform quickly because of their current user-base of 1.6 billion.

Big Changes to eCommerce

This year, eCommerce became a greater focus for social media networks as they looked for new ways to generate income. In late September, Snapchat added Shoppable Snap adds which allowed companies to import product catalogs to create ads. With this addition, companies advertising on Snapchat were reporting up to 17 times more engagement compared to standard Snapchat ads. Snapchat expects the expenditure on their ads to grow to over 767 billion by 2020.

With the launch of shoppable posts in 2018, Instagram also integrated eCommerce into their platform. Users can now see price tags on a post and click through to purchase an item. The shopping feature is a great way for bloggers to sell their merchandise or for a company to sell more of their products.  Instagram claims that they want users to have a seamless experience when using shoppable posts to purchase an item.

2018 saw some big changes in the world of social media in terms of advertising, new divisions of social media networks, and the way people consume content. In 2019 we will learn how these changes play out on a longer timeline. Hopefully we will continue to see social media networks making more creative, innovative decisions to stay relevant.