8 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2022
Are you mulling over your social media strategy for the year ahead? Want to learn about the key trends likely to affect how potential customers use social media?
Here’s a quick summary:
- · Social media emerges as a shopping platform
- · Proliferation of short-form video content
- · Social media becomes part of daily life
- · Facebook remains on top (for now)
- · Shorter attention spans result in more bite-sized content
- · More augmented reality options
- · Growing utilization of user-generated content
- · The “unbundling” of Reddit
1. SOCIAL MEDIA EMERGES AS A SHOPPING PLATFORM
As shopping became more virtual during the pandemic, social media platforms became an increasingly popular shopping outlet.
Infact, the number of social commerce buyers in the US has increased by 25.2%, reaching over 80 million. And that number of forecast to exceed over 100 million by 2023.
2. PROLIFERATION OF SHORT-FORM VIDEO CONTENT
TikTok is a social media platform that is dedicated to short-form videos. In the first three months of 2020, TikTok was downloaded 315 million times around the world, setting a record for quarterly downloads by any app.
To compete with TikTok, Instagram launched Instagram Reels in 2020.Reels allows users to record and post videos up to 30 seconds in length. This is on top of Instagram's two other video options, IGTV and Stories.
According to one study, as much as 82% of online content will consist of videos by 2022.
3.Social media becomes part of daily life
Social media is far from a new concept. But searches for the term are still up 17% over 5 years. Not only is the number of social media users growing, but the amount of time that users are spending on social media platforms is growing too. Onaverage, people spent about 145 minutes on social media every day. This is about one hour longer than people were spending on social media in 2012.
4. Facebook remains on top (for now)
Facebook remains the most used social media platform in the world, followed closely by YouTubDespite some negative press coverage, Facebook' growth is not letting up.
The platform currently has about 1.845 billion daily users and had about 23 billion total visitors in January 2021. The average user spends about 58 minutes on Facebook each day.
Despite the success of some new platforms, the major players are expected to continue to dominate the market in the coming years.
5. Shorter attention spans result in more bite-sized content
Yes, people are spending more time on social media, but they're spending less time engaging with individual posts. Studies suggest that the attention span of the average person today
is 8 seconds. Social media sites are adjusting to this by increasingly offering bite-size content options such as short-form videos and ephemeral (disappearing) content.
6. More augmented reality options
Searches for "social media AR" are up 81% over 5 years. The Augmented Reality (AR) market is still in its infancy but is projected to gain momentum in the coming years.
AR and VR are expected to become more mainstream as mobile networks become stronger and faster. By 2023, the AR market is projected to begenerating $70-$75 billion in annual revenue. Social media networks are getting in on the trend early. AR has been incorporated into Instagramfilters since 2017. In 2019, Instagram stepped up the AR game even further with an option for users to create their own filters.
7. Growing utilization of user-generated content
Businesses are increasingly incorporatinguser-generated content (UGC) into their social media marketing strategies.
Brands that incorporate UGC have a 20% increase in return visitors and a 90% increase in the time that consumers spend on their websites. UGC images are also 81% more likely to convert.
8. The “unbundling” of Reddit
10 years ago the classifieds site Craigslist was essentially "unbundled" into dozens of separate niche verticals. Dozens of huge companies were spawned, most notably Airbnb, Zillow and Indeed. The same is happening to Reddit.
Discord (now valued at $3.5B) carved the big first chunk out of Reddit as the “Slack for Gaming”. It listened to the needs of the League of Legends gaming subreddit (r/LOL) and grew off the back of that community.
