Social media marketing is widely regarded as the most powerful marketing tool today, with billions of users and the ability to drive society, it’s key for businesses to be present on social media. Facebook alone records 2.934 billion users monthly. Even TikTok, which is only 6 years old, currently pulls in over 1 billion monthly users, with users spending 850 minutes on the app every month. With social media constantly changing it’s difficult to keep up with users’ needs and that’s why we’ve put together our list of future trends in the social media marketing space. If your business is debating if social media marketing will be beneficial, check out our blog post on the benefits of SMM.
What the future holds for social media marketing?
In this ever-evolving world, it’s difficult to keep up with current trends never mind be prepared for future trends. That’s why we’ve put together 7 trends for the future that, if you start to utilise now, will create massive growth across your social channels.
Live video
Live video content is a massively growing trend on the internet which first started with YouTube back in 2008, and gained the most traffic when Facebook adopted the feature in 2016. Now it is present across multiple social media channels including WhatsApp and Instagram. Live video has been noted as capturing more engagement than prerecorded videos and now 95% of marketers are planning to incorporate live video into their social media campaigns.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) has developed massively over the last 10 years and can be accessed through Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat in the form of filters. This has gone from AR photos to AR live chats seen on FaceTime and Facebook Messenger. AR is yet to be utilised for marketing purposes but it needs to be monitored as it develops. AR will soon develop into a norm and as the amount of users grows it will become an important tool for promoting products and services.
Your audience will take centre stage.
The development of social media gave everyone a voice. No more do people just follow the brands but they can speak for them also. Passing the microphone from your business to your followers can be a great marketing tool for the future. We’re already seeing this growth in customer cooperation with influencers and TikTok videos but as we look to the future we will see this continue to develop and grow as more people look for customer reviews.
Transparency
In this modern era, it has become easier and easier to uncover if brands are hiding information from consumers. Major brands such as Facebook, Nike, and Naked Juice have all been damaged after attempting to lie to their consumers. All millennials and Gen Z’s want brands to be transparent and will favour the brands that are. This means that you can’t be deceptive and instead must be honest and admit your mistakes if you want your brand to be favoured amongst the newer generation.
Stories & Reels
Stories (initially started on Snapchat) have become a standard part of social media and can be across all channels. The short nature of stories lands perfectly with the audience and younger generations favour brands they see on social stories. It’s been found that 58% of consumers have become more interested in a brand they have seen on stories, and 50% of people visited a website to purchase a product they viewed on stories.
Short videos which initially started as stories have taken a further step with the rise of TikTok, now short videos in the form of reels are starting to take hold and will continue to grow into the future. Reels are longer than stories but usually are under 60 seconds with some of them being as short as 10-20 seconds. The breakthrough in reels is being seen on Instagram where they’re gaining more traction than traditional IG videos.
Vertical video content will become the norm
Speaking about Tik Tok’s trends, the network also created a new trend. Kevin Vicker, the social media specialist from the Children’s Hospital of Denver, predicts that Vertical Video will become a common format in 2022. Video is difficult if made for a multitude of platforms, rather than just for social. Social media networks have moved away from vertical videos.
Speaking about TikTok and Instagram Reels, vertical video as a whole will become the norm as we move forward, as opposed to the horizontal view we would find previously with socials such as YouTube. YouTube themselves have realised this and introduced YouTube Shorts which received 3.5 billion daily views in 2020. Looking into the future, it is expected that vertical videos will account for 64% of all videos watched on mobile devices and $4 billion in ad revenue.
Final Thoughts
The social media landscape is constantly changing and what exactly the future of social media will entail is always partly unknown. Before the rise of TikTok, social media platforms didn’t see vertical video content and “shorts” being the future. It’s important that as a business you monitor your marketing strategy and ensure you’re using social media in a transparent way that speaks to your customers. If you begin to take advantage of the parts of the future we’ve identified in this article, you could see growth on your social platforms, in engagement, and sales. We know that with its ever-changing landscape social media can be a difficult tool to utilise and if you’re finding it a difficult factor to include in your business, reach out to a social media marketing team who can help build the right marketing strategies for your business.
