To give you a jump start on the new year, we asked industry experts about their predictions for the future of location, marketing, and technology in 2017. We'll be posting their responses over the next month here on the Yext blog. Follow us on Twitter @Yext for new posts, and tweet at us with your own predictions.
By Daphne Earp
VP, Ecosystem Partnerships, Yext
2017 is going to be a year where new tech players emerge as central figures in the world of local search, leveraging their unique data sets to connect consumers to businesses around them.
Facebook's new recommendations feature will make it easier for consumers to first tap their social networks to get recommendations for local goods and services before going to traditional search engines that have limited ability to personalize their results. As Facebook becomes more of a local search destination, business reviews will play an increasingly important role in their data set.
Voice search like Alexa and Siri will continue gaining popularity, but will require a rich ecosystem of third-party app integrations to really take off. Those apps, like TripAdvisor, ZocDoc, Seamless Web, and Square will provide companies like Apple and Amazon with important data about the user that can help make results relevant based on preference, previous behavior, transactions, etc.
Snapchat will expand on their business Geofilters to add key data that drives visits like address and hours of operation to the user experience. These improvements to their ads products will be an important part of their strategy as they aim to grab SMB ad dollars from Facebook.
Lastly, Uber will continue building a compelling location-based rider experience with their in-app feed, and potentially expose more of their data on where people are going to suggest nearby events or popular businesses to their users.
This post is part of a series of 2017 predictions from industry experts.
