Social media trends that actually came true this year.
Nice social media trends, sure, but I haven’t seen anything come of them yet. Too often we see empty trends go by. Promises of golden mountains we never actually see. The newest social media app Clubhouse is a good example of this. Everyone was talking or writing about it and the hype was enormous. Yet now, a year later, we hear absolutely nothing anymore about the once so promising app. But which trends do actually live up to expectations?
Hootsuite’s social media trends
The social media trends we’re covering in this article come from the ‘Hootsuite Social Trends 2022’ report. Every year, Hootsuite releases a social media trend report with the five biggest trends. This report is made based on the opinion of various specialists. According to Hootsuite, the social trends of 2022 are the following:
The ‘brand strategy’ trend
Consumer attention has for a while now been shifting from big influencers to small niche groups that better match their interests. The expectation is that brands will work more with these smaller influencers who’ve built up a niche community.
The ‘social advertising’ trend
Marketers are going to spend more money on advertising on social media. The challenge involved here is that a different way of advertising is desired. With an ad on social media, you interrupt the consumer’s scrolling experience.
The ‘return on investment’ trend
Social media is outgrowing the marketing department. Marketers’ confidence in measuring social media ROI has grown enormously compared to previous years. More and more ways are also being found to deploy social media for other purposes. The expectation is that social media will play a bigger role in the entire organisation and no longer just within the marketing department.
The ‘social commerce’ trend
Online shopping is changing. Where it all started with webshops, it quickly moved on to apps, and nowadays we can also already shop on social media. The expectation is that shopping via social media will become the new standard.
The ‘customer care’ trend
Due to the staff shortage all over the world, many businesses are dealing with longer delivery times. This development is guaranteed to result in more dissatisfied customers. Meanwhile, social media is increasingly being used to submit complaints. For the social marketer, this is the perfect challenge to pull the company through the wave of complaints.
At first glance, these are trends I stand behind. But now that we’re already seven months further along, it turns out not all trends in this report live up to expectations after all. Let’s go through them together, one by one.
The ‘brand strategy’ trend
During the pandemic, more and more online ‘communities’ emerged. These particular groups consist of people who share the same interests. You can imagine this is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. Find a group full of potential customers and get to work. The only question is how you get into these groups. According to Hootsuite’s trend watchers, this should happen through the creators within the group.
Were they right? Yes. More and more businesses are investing in collaborations with so-called creators. You see, for example, big brands shelling out millions to appear in a short TikTok. Or smaller businesses partnering with a small influencer who bakes cakes, to promote their new cake spatula, for example. The benefit of these collaborations is that you know for sure you’re creating a certain reach. The groups around these creators or influencers are often very loyal and watch virtually all the content the person in question puts out.
What will this look like in the future? The most important question we need to answer to find out whether this trend continues into the near future is: “Is it possible for smaller creators to make a living from this?” The world around influencers is fairly new, and the ways to earn money are still fairly limited. Currently, all the money comes in through paid collaborations. So what happens when businesses have less money left over for this way of advertising? Will the smaller influencers then continue to exist? Fun to keep an eye on.
The ‘social advertising’ trend
As consumers, we’re getting increasingly better at noticing when a business tries to throw advertising through our content. We’re happily scrolling through Instagram and suddenly you see a completely unsubtle ad. This ruins your experience and makes you scroll past the ad as quickly as possible. That’s not ideal for the advertiser either. This means marketers need to become increasingly creative to make sure the ad matches the content the consumer expects. But how are they doing at this?
Channels like Instagram and TikTok make it cheaper for businesses to advertise effectively, and marketers are eagerly making use of this. The cost of placing an ad hasn’t gone down, but the desired content is a lot easier to make. By, for example, jumping on a relevant TikTok trend in which you cleverly manage to work in your product, you as an advertiser already come a long way. It feels like organic content, and consumers will be less quick to scroll past this. Still, there are plenty of businesses that haven’t quite got the hang of it yet and continue in the old way. Is this going to change in the future?
The chance that ad budgets will keep getting tighter is fairly high. That’s why it’s incredibly important for businesses to put more creativity into their ads. TikTok and Instagram try to help with this by making it easier to jump on certain trends that are happening at that moment. One of the problems we might well run into is that it becomes harder to distinguish yourself as a business. When everyone commits to the new way of advertising on social media, there’ll be little room to remain unique. A fun challenge for the creative marketer.
P.S. Let’s not forget that it remains mandatory to indicate in your content when it’s a sponsored deal.
The ‘return on investment’ trend
Social media has undergone gigantic growth within business culture in recent years. Where it all started as a task that was briefly picked up by the receptionist, it quickly became a task for the marketing department. Nowadays, many larger companies have separate social marketers and content marketers sitting specifically for the social media accounts. And the belief is that this will only continue to expand further. It’s a matter of time before social media is deployed to help the entire company with a wide range of goals. At least, that’s the expectation. How’s this going so far?
The idea that social media will be deployed more widely in the short term mainly comes from marketers who work with social media on a daily basis. These marketers see the valuable information that comes from daily interaction and therefore also see the effect it can have on the entire organisation. But we don’t really see it happening yet. Management and other departments aren’t yet sold on the idea that social media can produce important insights for them. In the short term, this is a trend that won’t see much progress, but perhaps this is different in the longer term.
A fun question for the coming period is which departments could concretely benefit from social media. The challenge for marketers here is convincing the other departments by providing concrete insights. What can social media mean? And how are we going to map that out?
The ‘social commerce’ trend
During the pandemic, there was a huge hype around the end of the physical shop. Regularly something came by about the danger of online shopping and how this would make the physical shop obsolete. Now that we’re finally out of the pandemic (knock on wood), the opposite turns out to be true. Consumers are in fact happy they can go back to physical shops. Online shopping has indeed led to a number of great developments. Including social commerce, or shopping via social media. How is social commerce doing now?
We’re not as far along as expected. The expectation was that social commerce would be the biggest new development within online shopping. But what we see in practice is that this isn’t the case yet. Currently, social media is certainly used while shopping, but more to orient and as a search engine. So social commerce is being used, but it’s not yet where we had expected it to be. Will this still happen in the future?
We see that social media is currently used more often to discover brands than the regular way of searching via Google. This is especially the case among younger people. In addition, we see various social media channels busy rolling out different updates focused on social commerce. For example, a while ago TikTok introduced the live shopping feature, where people can move directly to purchase from a livestream showing a particular product. The biggest problem consumers still run into is a lack of trust in the buying process. And this partly means social commerce isn’t yet as big as it could have been.
The ‘customer care’ trend
We’re actually all affected by it: the staff shortage and the problems with delivery times. Products that two years ago were still on your doorstep the next day now take longer. The prediction was that this leads to a substantial increase in complaints and questions for customer service. This coincides with the need for customer service via social media. An ideal opportunity for the social marketer to distinguish themselves and really help the company, you’d say. But did this actually happen?
What has certainly happened is an increase in complaints and questions. What happens to a lesser extent is these complaints coming in via social media. Many people still go to the website to lodge their complaint there via the contact form or phone number. Among younger people, we do see an increase in the number of complaints coming in via social media. The threshold is of course also a lot lower for this generation when it can be done via social media. As we all know, there’s a certain impatience among the youngest generations. This means the complaints therefore shift towards social media. At the same time, this means the social marketer does need to solve the complaints, since not everyone always has access to the account. I expect that in the future we’ll deal with a lot more complaints and questions via social media. But how does that stand for the experts?
The experts at Hootsuite think the social media manager will get an expanded set of tasks. This also directly means the social media manager gets more say within the company. Whoever takes on more responsibility also has more of a say. Furthermore, continuous work is being done on improving automated chats. This means more chatbots come onto the market, and so the price also goes down. That’s why the expectation is that more businesses will start using automated chatbots to solve common complaints. Once again interesting to keep an eye on these developments.
Real social media trends
So you see, not all trend reports are nonsense. When you put in enough effort into gathering relevant information from relevant people, it becomes easier to establish specific social media trends. For example, this report had over 18,000 respondents, more than 15 expert interviews, and worked with data from more than 200 countries. And that produces reliable trends. But even when you make sure you have all the data you could need, you still can’t predict the future. Or should we give it a go anyway? Which social media trends do you foresee for the future?