Visual Contenting March 2016 | Page 10

Other social media sites are following suit and are entering the social commerce arena. Instagram for example has introduced the Shop Now button alongside its recently launched ads program. Users can now buy products directly through the platform, a feature businesses can include in their advertising and marketing campaigns. Other networks like Vine, Snapchat and others are also riding the trend and will make the eCommerce feature a standard element before 2016 ends. Visual Contenting The New Publication Game It’s normal for digital marketers to publish content on their own websites and other online channels first before generating external links to this content and posting them at various social media sites to generate traffic. But there’s a new publication game that businesses and digital marketers will surely pick up in 2016. At the forefront is Facebook’s Instant Articles, allowing digital marketers to publish full-length articles through the social platform. What sets these articles apart from the traditional external link posting is they load as much as 10 times faster and are more interactive than standard postings, giving readers a better and more beautiful user experience. This offers a more dynamic and more sophisticated way for disseminating content, and other social networks are picking up the pace and joining the ballgame. One is Twitter’s Project Lightning that has the