Social Media: Our 2023 Predictions
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a huge shift in how brands are using social media to promote their products and services to their target audience.
With 140 million new users joining social media between 2021 and 2022 alone, brands are having to think harder than ever about how they can stand out from the crowd, keep their audience interested and not become lost among the masses.
But not only are they having to think about how to engage their audience, they’re also wondering how to stay ahead of the curve and keep up with the ever-changing trends.
Nobody ever knows what’s going to happen next (especially in the marketing industry) but we’ve put together our best predictions for what we think is going to be happening on social media this year…
AI Will Become More Standard
In 2023, AI will come into the spotlight to allow brands to create more personalized, relevant, and engaging content.
With a focus on creativity, new tools for generating mind-blowing content on social media platforms will be introduced with the aim to increase engagement.
Towards the end of 2022, we already saw TikTok release a filter where users could create an AI image of themselves with the tap of a screen – and it was hugely popular with over 75 million users across the platform.
Virtual Reality might also be making an appearance on the scene, with Augmented Reality functionalities becoming more mainstream.
Short Form Content Will Continue to Dominate
The popularity of short-form content isn’t showing any sign of slowing down soon, as TikTok continues to dominate the social scene with over 1.5 billion daily users.
Since the introduction of TikTok and Instagram Reels, YouTube has followed suit and launched ‘Youtube Shorts’, a very similar concept where users can post landscape videos up to 60 seconds long.
Tailored more towards influencers, ‘Shorts’ pays the creators of the most top performing videos a percentage of total ad intake – could it prove more popular than TikTok’s Creator Fund for professionals?
More Brands Will Utilise User-Generated Content
While we hate to mention TikTok again (we don’t really), the introduction of TikTok Shop, which allows users to link products in their video and then receive a cut if it leads to a sale, has led to more and more people creating videos such as reviews, unboxing videos and even ‘before and after’ style posts.
People often use platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to search for products in order to see what real people are saying about them, rather than going to the brand themselves.
Why should you be integrating UGC into your Ecommerce strategy? According to ComScore, brand engagements rise by 28% when consumers are exposed to a mixture of professional marketing content and user-generated content. (source: https://bit.ly/2zbvfj9)
Due to the relatability of UGC and the transparency it offers online, we can’t see it slowing down any time soon!
Consumers Challenge Brand Authenticity
With BeReal taking the social media world by storm in 2022, the demand for platforms to allow more candid, real-time content is definitely on the rise. At the end of last year, Instagram followed suit and trialled a similar concept, Candid Stories which sends a notification out daily, which then starts a timer in which users can take a dual photo of what they’re doing at that moment.
Brands are certainly picking up on how, unlike millennials, who made perfectly-curated feeds popular, Gen Z enjoy less filtered, less perfected content, and spend far less time thinking about capturing the perfect angle or the best caption.
With more brands realising the appeal of humanised content, could we be witnessing the end of the ‘perfect’ feed?
Want to reach your full marketing potential in 2023?
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