I was delighted to be asked recently to contribute to a article at Austin Marketing on what to expect in healthcare marketing in 2017.

My prediction is that demand for live video will grow in 2017 as consumers want a more immediate and real connection to healthcare brands. Marketing will be less about pre-produced, scripted videos, and more about delivering an authentic experience that people can connect with and feel part of.

In 2016 we saw the rise of mobile video consumption on platforms such as Snapchat and Periscope. In addition, the main social media platforms all rolled out new features and products around live streaming.

With the launch of Facebook Live, Facebook, in particular, is putting greater attention on live video in its algorithm – a move marketers cannot afford to ignore. The ability to reach and engage consumers will increasingly be driven by video, and this, in turn, will expand to include better marketing and advertising options for healthcare brands in 2017.

Read more predictions

What do you predict will happen in the coming year?

Do you want to grow your LinkedIn network? Interested in practical, scalable ways to establish your professional credibility?

A recent article from Social Media Examiner shares four great ways to build trust and grow your influence on LinkedIn.

#1: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

A strong professional LinkedIn profile creates opportunities for meaningful connections and interactions with other professionals. The article recommends securing your vanity URL, selecting a professional profile image, using industry keywords, avoiding jargon and buzzwords, and including recommendations.

#2: Proactively Grow Your LinkedIn Audience

If you want to grow your LinkedIn audience quickly, you can’t sit on the sidelines waiting for people to notice you.Make an effort to increase the quality and quantity of your connections by inviting your existing contacts on LinkedIn and finding potential contacts to connect with.

#3: Publish Content on LinkedIn

Sharing content on LinkedIn helps you stay top of mind with your core network. It positions you as an influencer who constantly delivers value with high-quality, engaging content. Consider too, publishing your own original content on LinkedIn Pulse  – a super way to showcase your expertise.

#4: Foster Your Community

Simply growing your network on LinkedIn isn’t enough. While more connections mean better social proof, gaining real trust requires an ongoing relationship-building effort. You can do this by commenting on people’s posts and updates, endorsing their skills, and participating in groups discussions.

LinkedIn is an excellent platform for establishing influence and thought leadership, but building influence doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort to expand your network. Many people give up before they achieve significant progress. Follow the advice in this article and you will soon start to see results.

Are we connected on LinkedIn? Send me a message and let’s reconnect if we are. Or if we are not yet connected, send me an invite and I’ll be pleased to connect with you.

https://ie.linkedin.com/in/marieennisoconnor

I love these kinds of articles which predict the future of social media. As marketers we need to keep an eye on trends and be ready for future changes in the social media world.

This article from Marketing Land presents six high-level possibilities for social media’s next phase of evolution.

1. Monopolization – one platform coming to dominate the social media landscape – Facebook anyone?
2. Pay-only visibility – are we in the end times of social media’s free lunch?
3. Individualization – Already, social media platforms are recognizing the demands for customizability and personalization in their user bases.
4. Niche segmentation – niche specialists will provide more novel experiences than their massive, slow-moving counterparts – think Snapchat.
5. Virtual and augmented reality – futurists have been including VR and AR in their predictions for the future of social media for a while now – this one is definitely on the future cards.
6. Streamlining  – social media apps becoming one-stop shops for everything you’d want on the internet.

What do you think of these predictions? How do you see the future of social media evolving?

You might also like to read: What You’ll Need to Build the Agency of the Future

Buongiorno from Milan this week where I’ve been attending #ESCP2016, the European Society of Coloproctology Annual Meeting. On Wednesday I was part of a social media panel – the only non-clinician (and female!) speaker on the panel.

The title of my talk The Other Side of the Firewall: Social Media Developments in Other Specialities concerned how patients are using new digital technologies to tear down the medical firewall to access health information.

We’ve now entered a new era of networked knowledge, meaning knowledge in the form of ideas, information, wisdom – has broken out of its traditional confines and now exists in a hyper-connected online state.

And this is also true of medicine.

In the new medical paradigm, Web technologies and applications are radically transforming established notions of what it means to be a patient. We’ve entered an era of self-empowerment and self-advocacy amongst patients facilitated by digital technology.

I spoke about the growing recognition of a particular subset of patients who have become specialists in managing their own health and are sharing their expertise not just with other patients, but with physicians and researchers too. Finally I shared some of my favourite examples of this from the ePatient world.

I really enjoying listening to the other panellists who spoke about how they engage online in surgical social media, and I’ve been impressed with their work in actively encouraging surgeons to embrace the digital era. And finally, it’s always fun to see how the numbers stack up thanks to Symplur’s analytics.

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Catch up with a Storify curation of tweets from the conference.