The report, "Social Media Trends for 2023," developed by consumer insights platform Talkwalker and partnership with software company Khoros, predicted ten trends for 2023 that will help brands engage better with their audiences on social media. The new report, which determines the following trends, gathered data across multiple media including news sites, social media channels, blogs, and forums. In the coming years, companies are expected to embrace social listening as a tool for business insights.

In the coming months, we are expected to see the rise of social audio, with audio rooms, meetings, streaming of live events, voice messaging, etc. The video momentum has only increased with the main social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn improving their video capabilities to keep up with growing popularity and emerging trends.

Major social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are improving their video content to catch up with this snowballing trend, which is being attributed to the growth of TikTok. With TikTok’s rise, and Instagram’s self-declared video value, it is not surprising that short-form videos are going to be the trend of social media in 2022.

Given the growing trends in social media that are focused on video and graphics, it is not surprising Instagram will account for a large portion of ad spend across social media. For the time being, Instagram ads are proven more suitable to boost brand awareness, whereas Facebook ads are for conversion purposes. Marketers see influence marketing as an effective form of improving conversion rates, while also increasing the brands reach.

Influencer marketing involves working with an influencer to create content or promote the brand. To get results, brands will engage in other marketing initiatives such as influencer marketing.

Brands will be more compelling if they connect with influencers that publish genuine, unfiltered images from their daily lives, as opposed to the cheesy photos and posts most social media users are used to seeing from influencers that publish phony content. Self-aware customers of today want to engage with brands, and by extension, with influencers, who inject substance, authenticity, and credibility into the marketing mix.

If BeReal’s rise is not evidence enough that social media users desire more #nofilter moments on their feeds, Stackla recently revealed that 88% of consumers cite authenticity and relatability as the main drivers in making their choices about making an in-app purchase and engaging with brands. In response to the fraught relationships between brands and their audiences, and heightened cynicism among consumers, authentic content, posts shared in real-time, personalities, and bodies with which social media users can relate, has become more than just a demand.

While the social media strategies of 2022 focused on TikTok and social commerce, looking forward to 2023, we can already see trends shifting, which luxury brands should take note of. More brands are expected to be joining the platform throughout 2022. With an increasing number of people looking to participate in the Creator Economy, 2022 will see brands encouraging a hungry community of social media users to produce content they can then repurpose into official brand accounts.

Facebook and Instagram will still be preferred platforms for social commerce. By late 2022, it is likely that shoppers will want to be able to purchase products right from a social media outlet, without ever leaving an app, with Facebook Shop or Instagram Shop, as well as TikTok Live Shopping. Its Social storefronts and Facebook Shops will be the most-used features of its platforms.

From Shoppable posts to Instagram storefronts, social networks are constantly evolving as a shopping platform. Brands and marketers will take advantage of this and integrate social commerce into their sales strategies. Brands will learn rapidly what products and purchasing formats are most effective for their customer bases, and major platforms will roll out additional improvements and new features that will help businesses boost sales with both organic and paid social tactics.

In 2023, we expect to see more businesses understanding the value of short form videos and adopting the concept of social content as entertainment instead of simply advertisement. Now that we have established video content is the future, we can go deeper and dig deeper into the trends of videos across social media, examining which types of videos are the most effective, so that you can improve your video marketing strategy for 2022. If you are not creating videos right now, it is time you incorporate it into your content strategy.

In the meantime, see how you can enhance your marketing strategy today using media tracking. Instead of stressing over your next social media marketing strategy, enlist the help of a skilled marketing team, and allow them to position your brand for success on social media in the new year.

For this marketing strategy to work, you will want to establish a tone of your brand and stick to it, while lining up your social and email campaigns so they work in tandem. In the coming years, social managers should expect that social KPIs will rely heavily on two-way communication between users and brands, with platforms looking to keep the most compelling posts on top of feeds.

If predictions hold, by next year, TikTok will have emerged as one of the most efficient social media platforms for marketing. Some may claim TikTok will overtake Facebook to become the top social media platform worldwide, but this is not likely to happen by 2022, as the number of Facebooks monthly active users is at 2.853 billion, according to data from Hootsuite. According to a prediction by Insider Intelligence, in 2022, TikTok is expected to be the world’s third-largest social media network.

About 78% of marketing companies consider Facebook to be an effective marketing tool, while 70% consider Instagram to be an effective marketing tool. This list of the top 9 most significant social media trends of 2023, which are dominating the industry -- and may even be changing how you do your job -- is based on 5 major trends identified by Hootsuite’s Worldwide Social Trends report 2022, as well as data from Hootsuite’s survey of more than 18,000 marketers.

Useful Links:

https://www.mediatoolkit.com/blog/social-media-trends/

https://influencermarketinghub.com/social-media-trends/

https://freshcontentsociety.com/11-key-social-media-trends-to-watch-in-2023/

https://www.prweek.com/article/1803371/top-10-social-media-trends-2023

https://www.curemedia.com/social-media-trends-2023/

https://www.prdaily.com/6-social-media-predictions-to-guide-your-2023-strategy/

https://socialmediamarketing.net/social-media-trends/

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/social-media-trends

https://www.creatopy.com/blog/social-media-trends/

https://marketing.sfgate.com/blog/social-media-trends-for-2023

https://theenterpriseworld.com/most-important-social-media-trends-for-2023/