The buzz surrounding 2017 social media experts is that Twitter is a potential target for acquisition. These rumors stem from the projection that Twitter stock will drop to $10 a share as soon as next year. While we know Twitter will likely undergo significant changes in 2017, will a new owner be the biggest change for the platform? Let’s take a look at what we think might be some other big updates in the coming year.

Advertising

I believe that Twitter will follow Facebook’s lead and make it even harder to garner a high number of reach and impressions organically. It’s likely that in 2017, using Twitter advertising to boost your tweets will be the only way to guarantee they are noticed. We’ve already seen Twitter replicate Facebook’s algorithm this year, which means they’re in the perfect spot to start putting the pressure on financially supporting your posts. Either way, it’s probably smart to start planning to up your social media advertising budget in 2017. Brands will be rewarded with tremendous community growth and soaring engagement numbers when they add advertising dollars to their Twitter strategy. From what we’ve seen in the last year, sponsored posts are the future of social media for businesses.

Character Count

You may have also noticed the recent roll outs and rumors swirling around the perpetual 140 character limit that we’ve all come to know and… well, deal with. Twitter has already lifted the limitation of sacrificing your images to save your character count, and the word on the street is that links are the next to go in the character limit rule book. Will the character limit be expanded past 140 all together in 2017? We can only hope. Just think of all the possibilities of your tweets if they were no longer restricted.

Video

Up until now, video content has been the rising star on every social platform except for Twitter. 2016 has been the year of Facebook Live, Snapchat, Instagram Stories, Gifs, etc., proving that people enjoy and respond to a good video. It’s only inevitable that this pattern will continue, and video will become a staple for your Twitter content plan as well. Get ahead of the trend and start planning your 2017 video content for Twitter now.

While we didn’t use our crystal ball to write these predictions, we can reasonably expect Twitter to make several updates in the near future based on the platform’s financial standings alone. After witnessing the transformations in advertising and reach just in the last year, we can say with confidence that these are the trends marketers should prepare to take advantage of in 2017.