2019 was a big year for social media. From the Zuckerberg trials, the Fyre Festival and finally some privacy changes, 2019 set the table for what’s to come in 2020.

In today’s #SocialMediaMonday Live Chat, we talked about an article released on Hootsuite recapping the biggest lessons learned in 2019.

The Fyre Festival was a major let down to not only ticket holders, but the general population of social media users. Yes, this includes billions of humans. It caused users to further question the integrity of social media influencers, and now it seems people are much more hesitant to trust what they see scrolling through their feed.

With this in mind, Instagram started experimenting with the removal of likes. Celebrities were vocal about their opinion of this change, Nicki Minaj was disappointed and Kanye West was supportive.

Zuckerberg made a public statement about privacy on social media, “The future is private,” why? “because privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves”. Facebook is making more efforts to ensure it’s users’ privacy is protected.

After the Fyre Festival incident, Instagram has made many changes that affect influencers. From the algorithm change to the removal of likes experiment (still TBD if this is going to be a permanent effort), they released the creator account which includes detailed dashboards, audience metrics, and messaging tabs.

To read the full article and learn about more of the lessons learned in 2019, head on over to the Hootsuite blog post discussed today.

What do you think was the biggest event in social media in 2019? How do you think it’s going to impact the social media playing field in 2020? We’d love to hear from you!!

Watch the full clip below: