It almost doesn’t matter what business you’re in today – social media is the king. Reaching potential customers, creating a community, spreading the word about your awesome product or service – it all happens on social media.
That’s why it’s important to follow what is happening each year on the social media scene.
With the growing number of social media platforms, the competition to grab the audience’s attention is getting harder each year. Social media in involving and constantly inventing new ways to engage the users, entertain them, and make them spend more time online.
In this article, we will look at the latest social media trends, how they work, and why they are effective and we will make some predictions for 2022, so you can always be a step further from your competitors. Let’s dive in.
1. Top Social Media Trends
2. What Social Media Trends Can Do For You
3. How Social Media Looks in Numbers
You may also be interested in our new article Digital Marketing Trends 2022: How To Win An Audience and Keep It.
1. Top Social Media Trends 2022
The first social media trend we are going to look at doesn’t come as a surprise but it’s very, we repeat, very important for your successful social media presence:
Trend 1: Videos
Videos are becoming more and more popular on social media. Wondering why? If you say that one picture is worth 1000 words, then one video is worth like 1000 pictures. In 2022 they will continue rising in popularity on social media.
The reason for videos being so popular is because they engage more – the autoplay function and the popular in recent years 3-5 seconds attention-grabbing introductions grab the attention more than a static image. Social media is thriving on videos – it gets more of the users’ time on social media, and it uses new ways of advertising to reach the audience – non-skippable video ads for example.
Not in the last place, it is a well-known fact that people prefer to watch a video instead of reading text.
There are many tools and software allowing you to create a compelling video in just minutes and make it easy even for the average user to grab the attention of the audience. So no wonder, more and more people are dumping simple text posts and images and focusing on videos instead.
Stories are not very different from how “videos” grab the audience’s attention, that’s why they are next on the list of social media trends.
In this infographic, we featured some of the most relevant to the topic data from the full statistic report by Wyzowl after surveying 813 unique respondents at the end of last year.
Trend 2: Stories
Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories are even more important in the upcoming year. As the millennials are using these features a lot, you should definitely get as much as you can from them.
Many Instagram users noticed a decline in users’ engagement when they didn’t use Stories. It’s simply not enough anymore to just post pictures and photos, no matter how awesome they are. It’s just that the algorithms push you to use Instagram stories and more of its newer features. If content creators don’t adapt, sadly, their engagement dies off and their likes and visibility on the platform significantly drop.
And here are the facts:
- 500 million users now use Instagram Stories every day
- 86.6% of Instagrammers post on Instagram Stories
- 15–25% of people swipe up on the links in branded Stories
The facts are always more convincing, aren’t they? Here are some more then.
Trend 3: User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content is becoming very popular, and the reason is that it looks more natural and more believable. It looks more realistic because the feedback for a product or a service comes from a more “neutral” side.
How do you do it? Well, one way is to encourage your audience to make a video with your product, to post a review, or else. The secret behind the success of this social media trend is simple: people trust recommendations from other people – it is more likely to trust the opinion of Mary, who lives in your neighborhood and goes to your school, instead of a brand who, presumably, just wants to sell you the product.
User Generated content is preferred by marketers more often – it gives great results and creates more organic traffic and engagement.
These statements are based on research by Shopify, Merkley and Partners, and Comscore.
Trend 4: Tik Tok’s Rise
2020 was the year of TikTok – it becomes so popular so that in December 2020, it has more than 800M active users. Now it is one of the most popular social media, and it will be a huge social media trend in the upcoming years.
Its users are mostly Gen Z, who become more and more targeted by marketers, so don’t expect TikTok goes away in the next few years! We are quite sure that more companies will look at TikTok and plan their campaigns using the platform.
What makes this social media trend so successful is that young people like challenges and things happening fast. TikTok offers just that – creative short videos and interesting challenges among the young audience. With this sweet recipe, TikTok will likely reach 1 billion users by the end of 2025. Or even faster. Don’t forget to follow the trends and see how they evolve! That way, you will be always on top of your social media game!
2. What Social Media Trends Can Do For You
2.1. Use Segmentation to Target the Right Buyers
It’s important to be updated with the social media trends each year because these trends can offer unique marketing and business possibilities, that other media can’t offer. Technologies and user behavior are constantly changing and evolving, that is why it’s important to be up-to-date and to use the knowledge and changes to our advantage.
One of the advantages of social media is segmentation. With social media, you can target different types of audiences, which is almost or next to impossible with TV and radio, for example.
All social media platforms collect a huge amount of data one can use to target the perfect buyer persona. For example, you can segment people by gender and age, but also based on interests, hobbies, and competitors. This will continue to be the best advantage of social media when it comes to advertising and the reason why businesses invest in it. With segmentation, you can easily find real potential buyers of your business and focus your marketing on them.
2.2. Encourage Online Reviews, Engagement from the Community, and Build Trust in Your Brand
One of the best ways to build trust in your company is to have and display online reviews. Encourage your clients and customers to give feedback, write a review for your products and services on Facebook or other platforms. Not only you are increasing the buzz around your brand, by comments, discussions and feedback, but also becoming more visible and “loud” in the social media sea. In short, it’s more likely to be noticed, when there is an active, participating community built around your business.
Another benefit of asking for feedback and reviews is, that you can easily see what your customers are happy about, or even where you can improve on. Don’t forget that building a rapport with your clients is one of the best assets for your business.
Once you’ve asked for a review after completing a successful project, you can share your clients’ reviews. You can do that with the help of images, videos, or even screen captures. This gives you credibility and it shouldn’t take a lot of time to put together!
2.3. Use Social Media Shopping to Reach Untapped Audiences and Users
Don’t miss out on using social media for shopping – use them for linking to products, or you can use integrated online shops (on Facebook). In 2020 more than 80 million businesses used Facebook to connect with customers. Now it’s the right time to create a shop on popular social media and connect with your customers fast and effectively.
And here are some other figures to keep in mind, if you are still trying to decide where and how to focus your efforts: for 92% of the people in stackla.com research, the preferred platform for social commerce was Instagram (77% opted for Facebook, 57% Twitter and 47% Pinterest).
2.4. Infographics are Always Effective = Always in Trend!
Well, infographics are anything but new on the scene, but they are extremely useful and engaging. That’s why they will continue to be preferred content for social media.
In fact, 65% of B2B marketers have used infographics for content marketing, which makes it one of the top five most used types of content.
The reason behind the success of infographics is that you show that you are an expert in your field and you can be easily understood with beautiful and clean visualizations.
Ok, but how to create an engaging and infographic that stands out? Here are some useful tips:
- It should be within your business field, theme, topics – show your expertise
- Make sure to include useful and interesting information about a topic that your audience would love to read
- It should be designed with a clear structure
- A plus is to include some interesting comparisons, references, facts that will make your audience want to read more
3. How Social Media Looks in Numbers
Let’s look at some numbers and compare how social media platforms perform – how many users they have and what is their age. (See infographic below)
3.1. Different Social Media and Users’ Age
You will see from the following statistics that today, almost everyone is on social media and not just one.
You will also notice that although Instagram has a primarily younger audience, all the other platforms have audiences of all ages and also with healthy percentages from each group.
As you can see, a clear leader, for now, is YouTube, which again proves our point that video content is a crucial part of your business. The rising star here is TikTok, which can’t go unnoticed and it’s experimenting with engaging audiences of different ages.
In 2022, you will notice that social media is not only targeted at younger generations but the products will be made more available, attractive, and engaging for all ages.
3.2. Social Media by Gender
Now that we’ve looked at social media and the audiences’ age, let’s see what’s the presence of females and males.
- Facebook – 54% female, 46% male
- YouTube – >50% of users are male.
- Instagram – 51% female, 49% male
- TikTok -63% female, 37% male
- Reddit – 69 % male, 31% female
- Snapchat – 61% female, 38% male
- Pinterest – 70% female, 30% male
- Twitter – 50% female, 50% male
As you can see, with small exceptions, social media’s prevailing audience is females. There are some media equally represented by the two genders and usually, they are the ones, who have been here the longest. Thus said, we can expect that newer platforms will also attract more male users with time. And honestly, who can resist checking what interesting is happening on these platforms that women spend a lot of their time on?
Final Words
By now, you should be armed with all the numbers and statistics around social media to make educated choices for your business. We hope we also gave you inspiration and insight into the social media trends for 2022 and that you will be impatient to try them out and see how your business grows!
Which is your favorite social media trend? Is there one that you haven’t tried yet?
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