Almost 60% of the world’s population uses some type of social media. People use social media to stay in contact with old friends and reach out to new friends, keep in touch with the community, learn about new opportunities, play online casino games, share content, have conversations and more.
Social media has become an integral part of our daily routines and our lives. Brands, marketers, content creators and other entities who promote their products, services and causes on social media need to keep abreast of the latest social media trends in order to maximize their presence on their platforms.
Upcoming Social Media Trends
Some upcoming social media trends to be aware of include:
Gaming
There are an estimated 3.2 billion gamers in the world and most of them have some type of social media presence. Marketers need to reach out to these players in ways that integrate the brands with the gaming activities. Marketers need to keep up to date with the latest gaming news including which games are the most popular games, which gaming influencers have the largest audiences, how casino players meet wagering requirements and on which platforms gamers meet.
One of the most effective strategies for marketers to reach gamers is to offer tutorials on everything from hardware and software overviews to guidance on best games and what does wagering mean to VIP gamers and budget players.
Bite-Sized Content
Bite-sized and short-form content, especially video content, will dominate social media. Businesses that use video as a marketing tool will do well while businesses that don’t yet use video content will be almost forced to do so. In addition, the shorter, the better. Short-form content has been shown to be invaluable for getting information across about a product or service and generates more engagement from the audience.
It’s no secret that today’s audience has a shorter attention span than previous generations – 8.25 seconds for today’s viewers. High-quality content is still important but it needs to be produced in short form in order to reach viewers.
Crisis Management
Gossip has an entirely new meaning now that information can be shared with thousands of users within minutes. Thanks to social media platforms, any minor issue can turn into a bigger one in minutes. If you have a business, this can cause significant damage both financially and to your business’s reputation.
Look at Peloton whose Tread and Tread+ machines caused an accident that led to the death of a six-year-old child. Peloton only addressed the issue publically weeks after the incident and it took them a month to recall the machines. Social media users were incensed and Peloton’s sales plummeted.
Brands must be able to be prepared to acknowledge and address crises in a timely manner if they need to regain the trust of their audience. Consumers see social media as an important tool for getting businesses to be more accountable and most consumers are ready to restore their trust in a brand even after a misstep if the brand accepts responsibility for the problem and takes steps to correct the issue.
Social media is shaping up to be a powerful crisis management tool and as brands come to understand this, they will be more likely to use it as such in the future.
Influencing Marketing
Influencing marketing has proven to be highly effective but also expensive. Brands that have given nano-influencing and micro-influencing a try report that the engagement rate is higher than that of influencers with the big names and that, in turn, is fueling a turn towards more of this type of influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing involves using “influencers” to promote products. Some influencers draw followers because of other things that they do – acting, instructing, etc – while others attract viewers because their content as an influencer is good. Regardless, audiences have shown themselves to be open to micro-influencer and nano-influencer types of social media marketing which generate more authentic content and lead to more conversions and increased brand awareness.
Nano- and micro-influencing marketing is growing as evidenced by the growing number of agencies that promote these small influencers and the growing number of brands that are searching for these influencers to promote their products.
Interactive
“Interactive” is a term that is over-used but in the case of social media ads, it perfectly describes the attraction of a more engaging type of advertisement that draws the viewer into the content. Brands putting up interactive ads are seeing more viewing time from their audiences and finding that brand awareness is growing as a result.
The interactive ads come at a time when augmented and virtual reality open up new opportunities for the brand to engage the user. With interactive social media ads the advertiser can better engage the viewer. Interactive marketing can involve any activity that ad viewers including taking a quiz, tagging people, responding to a poll, building onto a story, playing a game, etc.
As options for interaction grow through social media, so will the opportunities for interactive social media ads.
Decentralization
When we think about social media platforms we tend to think of the mega-giants – Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. But increasingly, decentralized platforms are attracting users and are becoming viable alternatives to mainstream social media platforms.
Such decentralized platforms address issues that bother users of the big mammoths such as censorship, privacy and control over content. A number of alternative platforms have emerged including Minds, LBRY, Diaspora, Signal and Mastodon and it’s expected that they will grow and give rise to other alternatives.
Cookies Phase-Out
Cookies – digital files that track the websites that you’ve visited – have been controversial ever since they first appeared and now, it seems, they may be on their way out. Cookies allow websites to remember the IP addresses of browsers who have visited their website so that they can track your online habits and direct their promotional materials to those who have shown interest in their content in the past.
Privacy advocates have been fighting cookies for years and customers resent the intrusion which is forcing brands to drop the third-party cookies and look for first-party solutions that will prioritize transparency and consumer privacy. Some solutions being researched include digital fingerprinting, user identity graphs, contextual advertising, data “clean rooms” or data pools and Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs).
