The past two years’ events will heavily influence companies’ social media marketing strategies in 2022.
With over 3.7 billion people on social media, ignoring your company’s online presence means not only missing out on these potential clients but also falling behind rivals that are properly managing theirs.
While social media trends continue to shift at a sometimes dizzying rate, businesses are contemplating how to effectively connect their customers in 2022 as the year 2021 draws to a close. While the ever-changing internet scene may seem intimidating, there are a few crucial trends to watch in the next year to guarantee your marketing goals remain on track.
Using social media to sell
The rise of social commerce has been propelled by the epidemic’s widespread use of social media, and it shows no evidence of abating.
With 81% of consumers already researching possible purchases via social media, it makes sense to eliminate the extra step of travelling to an external website and instead enable them to shop straight from the applications they currently use.
Each extra step a consumer must complete before making a purchase is a chance to lose the attention and perhaps a transaction. This barrier is removed from the consumer experience by using social commerce, which allows you to select and target the items that will appeal to your audience the most.
Video content reigns supreme.
While visual content has been there for a while, it has become a key component of brand content plans this year. With TikTok’s 173 per cent year-over-year growth and Instagram’s embrace of video content, the value of high-quality video content will continue to rise through 2022.
Short-form videos, in particular, are well-suited to fast-paced social media sites (and attention spans! ), and over 39% of businesses are already using this type of content to promote and sell their goods and services, with 30% claiming it generates a higher return on investment than their websites.
Videos perform better and produce greater levels of interaction than text or image-based content, but their adaptability allows them to be easily adapted across numerous social media platforms. As a result, more organisations will certainly balance using new video trends and features while giving value to their target customers in the next year.
Paid advertising vs organic reach
More companies are confronting the difficulty of a drop in organic reach, with the average organic reach of a Facebook post at 5% and Apple’s iOS update enabling users to opt-out of Facebook monitoring entirely.
If you want to reach your audience, you’ll need to use paid advertising more than before. In addition, businesses will surely profit from dedicating a portion of their marketing budgets to sponsored advertising since social media click-through rates and costs-per-click are still better than many other kinds of paid media.
Paid advertising may be made more successful by strategically targeting paid exposure and personalising content to the groups of your audience most likely to buy your product or service, as well as promoting your best-performing articles.
This isn’t to imply that organic content should be ignored; it’s still important for generating awareness and interaction, and many firms are using a location-based strategy in their online marketing efforts to attract local audiences and raise awareness.
The Social Audio Year
With over 10 million active monthly users as of February, this year for drop-in audio app Clubhouse and Twitter following suit shortly after with the debut of its social audio platform, Twitter Spaces, this new kind of content is expected to become a big element of brand marketing in 2022.
It varies from podcasts in that it is a real-time dialogue in which listeners can actively engage while also providing a new platform for organisations to generate intriguing new types of thought leadership material.
While providing companies with a chance to directly interact with their prospective consumers, social audio provides the intimacy and genuineness of hearing thought leaders have actual, unscripted dialogues on various subjects. This new kind of conversational marketing is an effective technique to personalise the consumer experience while establishing trust and confidence.
Even though social audio platforms are still unexplored ground, their apparent appeal to viewers means that companies who master this new medium have the opportunity to become market leaders in these burgeoning sectors.
The future of social media in 2022
If brands want to continue serving their customers successfully in 2022, they must be aware of three crucial social media trends.
However, this does not imply that marketers should ignore marketing fundamentals; just following a trend without a coherent content and marketing strategy is unlikely to pay off in the long term. On the contrary, you can most successfully use trending content if your marketing and sales divisions are aligned and your marketing objectives are defined.
