Probing Into the Role of Augmented Reality in Social Media and Its Future

Augmented Reality or AR has made its presence felt in social media and is impacting its performance so much that the experts have even considered it to be the future of social media. It is quite some time now that Augmented Reality has taken over some of the most popular and widely used social media platforms in the world, such as:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram

However, things did not stop just there. The AR technology is continually changing, and new versions of it are introduced every day. Therefore, this raises the most crucial question: how is AR going to impact and change the future of social media?

Marketers and brands are now worried and apprehensive about the future because they use one or several of these platforms for their business marketing and customer services. Depending on the particular platform they use, marketers, therefore, in particular, are in need to know the answers to several questions such as:

• Whether or not they need to make changes in their current marketing plans
• Whether or not they now need to buy Instagram followers or continue to get them organically
• Whether or not they need to invest time and money to discover new ways to increase their sales and ensure business growth.

Ideally, this seemingly harmless fun has already disrupted different industries such as education, healthcare, marketing, manufacturing, navigation, and more. Therefore, it is high time to know about its accessibility, potential, and feasibility.

Affect on social media trends

The extensive use of AR in social media will change the approach of delivering content on social media. Marketers will have to look for new approaches to implement and take the help of different application developers to come up with better and more effective AR-based ads. This new approach will result in:

• More interactive content and
• More of 3D than 2D content.

Therefore, marketers now need to focus more on AR integrations and develop a better AR lens. For example:

• Snapchat used AR integration to accommodate a large number of active users and
• Facebook partnered with more than 700 brands to design their AR plan.

All other followed suite within their capacity to use Augmented Reality technology to explore the advertising features. The primary idea behind this is to create a new approach that will suit the purpose of the new audience on social media. This will help them to explore new markets on social media and achieve their sales goals.

Monetizing Augmented Reality

According to a research report on AR and social media published by Business Insider Intelligence, AR has the potential to link the physical and digital world. This relationship has transformed how brands and businesses engage with their users and customers through social media platforms.

Ideally, such integration has enabled social media platforms to explore and exploit the love of the consumers for AR, of which Facebook and Snapchat are the two best examples.

• They have made the best use of it to monetize AR with different alluring advertisements.
• This has also enabled them, in turn, to provide their users with a better and higher branded experience.

In short, this approach has enabled the brands to find newer and better ways to make the best use of their creative skill to make their storytelling more immersive. This has enabled them to reach out to a larger set of audience who love and appreciate their approach and feels encouraged to respond.

Impacting the marketers

AR in social media has also impacted the marketers directly because all significant and popular social media networks of this world today have embraced it. They have released different app updates that comes with innovative and latest AR experiments. Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, these updated apps have helped the people to take selfies using AR filters, play AR-based games, and more.

Apart from amusing people, AR in social media has opened new target markets online. This technology has helped the marketers and brands to advertise their brand and product to attract new customers in these markets and interact with them.

The future expectations

Brands and marketers expect that local SEO will play a significant role in the future. This will be an additional benefit enjoyed by the marketers and brands apart from the services provided by Google Lens. This will provide the businesses with a more competitive playing field for local SEO than they had ever before.

• Most of the businesses will focus on Augmented Reality SEO because it will be the most powerful and helpful tool for finding the exact location of a company.
• This will also help the businesses to read online reviews as well as find other businesses to compete with.

On the other hand, AR will help the consumers significantly as well with its effects on Local SEO. Consumers will now be able to use AR apps to gather more information about a business. With the development of technology, they will now be able to find local search results quickly and effectively using their smartphones. All they have to do is use the phrase ‘near me’ with their search queries.

What do all these mean? This means that you should have a local SEO that is robust so that your business is found more easily among the crowd.

Ways Augmented Reality change the social world

Looking at the effects of AR on social media landscape at present, you can have a pretty fair idea about what it has on store for the future.

• It will improve the games that you play because games use AR extensively. The concept of mobile-based gaming will change entirely with the use of AR and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping or SLAM technology, which is developed by NASA.
• AR can be used for the safety of the people on the road. These specialized AR apps, created the Moscow Ministry of Internal Affairs initially, uses an accompanying website to warn drivers and pedestrians about the dangers to prevent road accidents.

It is also used in art and politics, indicating that AR is here and is not going anywhere soon.

Author’s Bio:

Pete Campbell is a social media manager and has immense knowledge about email marketing and Instagram promotion. He loves to travel, write and play baseball.