We breathe social media today. Quite literally! 

Most people spend a large portion of their days on social media. Given that most of your consumers are here, as a brand, you cannot overlook this communication channel. 

Consumers are now in charge of how your brand communicates with them. 

This is a medium that lets you reach millions with just a few taps and clicks. Connect with your audience, increase your brand awareness and boost your leads and sales

However, social media is constantly and continually evolving. Especially in the last 2 years. Additionally, the competition to get noticed and grab the consumers’ attention is increasing by the day!

This means marketers need to roll up their sleeves and learn the new hacks to make social work for them – because in the end, it is where the audience is! 

We’ll make it simpler for you though. Read on to know more about social media trends to look out for in 2022. 

Social media marketing trends to look out for in 2022

The emergence of social commerce

Online shopping boomed during the pandemic. And social media became an increasingly popular outlet for the same during this time.

During this time, we also witnessed the emergence of a new mode of shopping – social commerce. Social commerce simply means selling products/services directly on social media platforms. At present, Facebook (Meta), Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest are some of the many platforms that are aggressively promoting social commerce on their platforms.

Social commerce is worth over $89.4 billion today! 

Here are some more numbers to crunch on: 

• In 2019, 36% of female internet users in the US engaged in social commerce, compared to 22% of men.
• 60% of people discover new products on Instagram
• 78% of U.S. consumers say they’ve discovered products on Facebook
• 200 million+ Instagram users visit at least one Business Profile daily
• 83% of weekly Pinterest users have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest

Experts believe that very soon, social commerce will become the mainstream mode of purchasing. 

Proliferation of short-form video content

Video content marketing is the new big thing today! Around 59% of people say they’d rather watch a video than read text. As a brand owner, you cannot and should not neglect that number.

Through videos, you can showcase your brand’s core beliefs and what you care about, among many others and create exceptional content that lets you stand out among your competitors.

According to a study by Cisco, 82% of all online content will be video content by 2022. 

However, 68% of people will happily watch a business video only if it’s under a minute. 

Tik Tok is the most popular short-form video content platform today. Users love this app. They spend an average of 52 minutes per day on it.  Younger people ages four to fifteen spend an average of 80 minutes per day on the app!

With Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and so many other platforms also integrating this in their application, short videos have taken the world by a storm. It is only expected to grow even more in 2022.

Shorter attention spans result in more bite-sized content

Yes, the numbers of social media users are just continuously increasing. Yes, these users are spending more time than ever on these platforms. 

We consume content today at a rate that was unfathomable just a decade ago. 

But, the engagement span with posts on social media is also increasingly decreasing. On an average, we only spend  roughly 8 seconds per individual post. 

You’ve got mere seconds to convey your message. This means you need to carefully and wittily plan your content. 

Here are some ways to help you create social media content that gathers your user’s attention: 

• Ensure that one piece of content contains only one main idea 
• Use a captivating hook as titles to your posts
• Include relatable content
• Include eye-catching and visually appealing graphics that evoke emotion
• Repurpose your content into multiple formats (video, infographics, GIFs, memes, etc.)

More augmented reality options

We bet you’ve seen and used a number of Instagram/Snapchat filters. From beauty filters to fun games to even movie-themed filters, the list is endless. 

These filters are nothing but an application of augmented reality (AR) in social media. 

Augmented reality enhances our reality with additions of digital elements to it. Social media platforms have been making a lot of progress in the integration of AR in their applications.

Facebook, for instance, is experimenting with other AR as well as Virtual Reality (VR) applications and will leverage more of these technologies in the near future.

Take Kylie Cosmetics. They recently came up with their own Instagram AR filter to let customers ‘try on’ their lipsticks before making a purchase. While this is a fun filter for users to play around with, it is also promotional in its own sense. So it works effortlessly!

Augmented reality can have a lot of potential social media applications for brands.

Live streaming is the new big thing

While traditional video marketing is something you should definitely leverage, you should also consider live-streaming which has taken this video-savvy generation by a storm!

As the global pandemic forced people to reduce physical interactions with people and stay at homes, live streaming emerged as a popular mode of online entertainment. In 2020, it witnessed a whole new rise of popularity. About 916 million hours of content were streamed last year alone – a 45.4 percent steep increase from the 629 million hours of content streamed the year before!

74% of businesses go live to engage with their consumers now. Unlike traditional videos, live videos let you start direct and instantaneous communication with your audience. It is an effective means to build trust by developing a connection of sorts. 

A recent Instagram Trends Research Study says that 41% of  surveyed Gen Zers attended an event or broadcast on Instagram Live in the past month. 

From brand news and updates to live interviews to product promotion and releases to influencer live streams to even plain Q&A sessions, the scope of content that can be generated through this medium is large.

Influencer marketing will continue to soar

Social media is greatly dominated by influencers today. While influencer marketing is not a relatively new term, its popularity is growing by the minute!

Influencer marketing is a hybrid of celebrity endorsement and today’s content-driven marketing campaigns fueled by common people. Investing in influencers is so much cheaper than running other traditional paid campaigns. Yet, it delivers excellent results almost every time. However, you must be sure of picking influencers from your own niche and demographics to get the best results.

This marketing domain has become so widely accepted and is also continuously and steadily getting better than ever. Today, 17 percent of companies spend more than half their total marketing budget on influencers alone!

Another interesting buzzword you’ll see floating around is micro-influencer marketing. 

Smaller, niche-focused influencers with typically a follower base of anywhere between 1,000-25,000 are called micro-influencers. Despite a smaller follower base, They are considered to have more active and loyal followers than the bigger celebrities with millions of followers. 

An Experticity study on micro-influencers shows that:

• Micro-influencers boast 22.2 times more conversations than average consumer recommendations
• 82 percent of consumers reported that they were highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer

A great example of a brand that made the most of influencer marketing has to be Daniel Wellington. 

And the thing is, you don’t need to reach out to celebrity accounts for influencer marketing. With the help of social listening, you can identify accounts that actively talk about your brand in a positive way and influence their audience to engage with you. 

Rise of social media communities

Social media communities are groups of like-minded folks who talk about shared interests or issues.  Today, brands have started creating social groups to provide a networking platform for their customers. 

Facebook Groups are an excellent example of increasing social media communities that leave an impact. 

The 2020 Community Industry Trends Report shows that close to 88% of community professionals believe that community is critical to the company’s mission. 

According to a 2016 CMX research, 85% of marketers and community builders believed that having a branded online community would improve the customer journey and increase trust. 

But the trick here is going to be how to remain active in the social media communities. You’re going to have to keep a close watch on who’s talking about what to be able to keep the members engaged. 

You’ll also have to focus on ensuring community conversations are headed in a positive direction only, as it may impact your overall reputation. 

With a social media monitoring tool like Radarr, you can manage community conversations with ease, and regulate the track they pick up with timely sentiment analysis. 

User-generated content will be important

We know producing great and engaging content can be exhausting. So sometimes, let your customers lend you a hand.

User generated content (UGC) is any type of content including pictures, videos, images, reviews created by your well, your users! 

Did you know that 92% of consumers trust UGC more than any other type of marketing content? Thus, UCG has an 81% higher chance of conversion. 

Additionally, user-generated content is cheaper to produce, more relatable, less time-consuming and helps your brand stand out among the others. 

This type of content helps your brand:

• Build trust
• Persuade consumers to make purchasing decisions
• Promote authenticity

Social media for customer service

While social media was initially just a medium for people to connect with their friends, family, and acquaintances, today social media is so much more than just that.

By accommodating businesses and brands in its ecosystem, social media gradually made room for product discovery, brand engagement, and now, even customer service. 

Brands started noticing that many customers try to reach out to them on social media. This is mainly because social media stands out as a more direct mode of communication, thus meaning quicker responses. 

But you don’t need to fret about being able to reply in a timely manner to your customers – only if you have a social media monitoring tool like Radarr. 

Conclusion

Social media is continually evolving. But to catch up with what’s changing and how you need to be on social media and tune in . That’s exactly what we did while finding these social media trends – we leveraged social media listening and the insights have helped us evolve with time. 

Ready to nail every trend in 2022? 

Get started with social listening today to predict trends, patterns and more of your target audience.  

Book a Radarr Demo.