8 SEO and Social Media Trends You Need to Know About

If you feel a bit behind the times when it comes to SEO and social media, I can’t blame you. I read the news every day, adjust my company’s and clients’ strategies regularly and still feel behind. That’s because trends never stay the same for very long, and there are always new ones emerging to challenge the status quo.

Related: 6 New Social Media Marketing Tools the Experts Use. You Should, Too.

If you haven’t taken a scrutinizing look at your SEO and social media strategies lately, now’s a good time to take inventory and see where you fall, in relation to the latest trends and tactics in the industry. These eight trends are some of the most important to know about this year.

1. Live video and real-time engagement
There’s no question that video content is on the rise, in popularity and significance. Users have faster, more mobile internet connections, and the flood of written content on the web has left users hungry for something more visually engaging. Beyond that, live, in-the-moment content is becoming more important in the social realm thanks to mobile experiences and constant communication. These two trends together are facilitating the rise of live-streaming video, which is being promoted by most major social media profiles, and you can expect it to grow in both streaming and viewing figures.

2. Digital assistants and voice search
Digital assistants like Siri and Cortana have been steadily growing in sophistication and user adoption for the past several years, and now a new kind of digital assistant is emerging -- the home unit. Amazon Alexa and Google Home are just two examples of how voice search is gradually gaining significance in our daily lives. What does this mean for search? It means an even lower focus on short, core keywords, and a higher focus on long-tail keywords and on conversational, colloquial types of searches. You will have to adapt your content accordingly.

Read more: 8 SEO and Social Media Trends You Need to Know About