Social networks are firmly entrenched in our lives, and their influence will only grow in the near future. Social media and social media marketing, or SMM, techniques continue to grow and develop. A couple of years ago, SMMs worked in a low-competition environment. Their task was to attract clients from social media, networks and build brand awareness.
Today, every site has a huge number of brands and entrepreneurs. Competition is growing, and advertising becomes simpler and more accessible, but it is also more and more difficult to break through banner blindness.
That is why our web development company will tell you how your business can stand out in a competitive covid environment using social media trends.
How did social media trends change?
As soon as there is a new advertising template or presentation of information, your competitors will start adopting it. There are so many ads that users practically ignore.
At the moment, there are a number of major social media trends that started to develop on social media last year. All of them appeared due to the enduring interest of users in social networks.
This has become a kind of driving force for innovative solutions with a long-term perspective. The last years were not easy for marketers, and now we face a brave new world. The fundamental factors in the further development of social media marketing will be both the social changes that have taken place this year and the emergence of new technologies and ways of consuming information.
Top 12 social media trends
1. Naturalness
It would seem that naturalness has always been in demand. In fact, it was in the era of the development of social networks that the most important trend in both visual and textual content became real, living emotions, poses - capturing moments of non-staged life.
We must not forget about the high standards of users, and high-quality content will always come at a price. Now the fastidious audience is drawn to a real, open, sincere life.
2. Everyone is a brand
We already know that audiences are more interested in watching live profiles than commercial brands. Humanity in texts and emotions, photos filled with everyday life - this attracts more and more followers.
This year, a new wave of bloggers includes specialists and masters of their craft who we encounter almost every day: taxi drivers and couriers, plumbers and electricians, stylists, and manicurists. They began to differentiate themselves from the companies they work for by becoming public freelancers. In the future there will be more of these personal brands.
3. Socially oriented marketing
The outgoing year has revealed many social problems from a new angle. Now it is important for companies to talk not only about the product and the usual global problems, but also about new important topics for society, such as equality, education, mental health, finance, changing food trends, etc.
Brands need to be more socially sensitive in all aspects of their communication. This means becoming socially conscious and focusing marketing on your mission. Mission-driven marketing campaigns will allow you to communicate with your audience on an emotional level, creating a stronger resonance with your brand.
Moreover, brands are beginning to openly engage in dialogue with users on topics that were previously taboo in communication.
4. Storytelling
In the context of stories, this term refers to the interconnectedness of your stories. It retains attention and, helps focus the audience on your stories, not because of the need for products or services, but because of human interest. The presence of some logic in the story turns them into a kind of series that you want to watch to the very end, no matter how many episodes there are.
It's nice if the stories are connected to social media posts in apps like Instagram. If someone prefers a longread, they can read the post, but if short stories are more interesting, they will stop at stories. The new social media trend gives the client a choice.
5. Focusing primarily on engagement
Previously, it was believed that if the information has enough likes, then it was worth giving attention. It made sense — since so many people liked it, it makes sense to read the content. The only problem was that due to factors such as boosting likes and intrusive advertising of information, “thumbs up” were no longer perceived as an argument.
The reflex worked its way out of our nervous system as quickly as it got there. Engagement is now essential. In order to understand what it is, you need to look at a broader concept - statistics. This demonstrates profile promotion, user interest in content, and so on. It consists of many criteria, but here are the most important ones:
- coverage is the total number of users (unique) who viewed your content.
- engagement - a set of likes and comments under a post or story (in the case of stories, likes are replaced with polls and tests);
- views - focusing on the number of actions, not users (five views from one person remains five views, and are not converted into one);
- saving - unlike likes, it is impossible to wind up saving.
Involvement among all these factors is the most important thing to measure. The explanation for this is very simple: this indicator, by combining two directions at once (likes and comments), shows how much the audience liked the presented material as objectively as possible.
Marketing is not a one-sided game. In order to achieve your sales goal, you need to increase audience engagement through a shared story. Reciprocal actions lead to engagement and, as a result, drive sales.
6. New formats and evolutions of social networks
The incredible boom of TikTok shows that users are tired of old communication formats. They are waiting for new ones and are ready to actively use them.
At the same time, classic social networks have not lost their market and have every opportunity to quickly adapt to changing trends and consumer habits. They will implement similar formats, adding new functionality and making them more attractive to users and brands. In addition, they will develop their own new formats of interaction.
Brands should master new formats now in order to organically integrate them into classic social networks and into their communication in the future.
7. COVID-19 principles in content
Even if the coronavirus pandemic ends soon, its effects will be felt for many years to come. This will especially affect the communication of brands and their customers. Therefore, it is worth adopting any interaction with the audience under the four key principles of COVID:
- community - companies and their clients should be united by a common goal;
- contactless - replace offline with online where possible;
- cleanliness - adhere to digital hygiene and do not litter the information space with fakes and manipulations;
- сompassion - take an inclusive approach, being compassionate to different target audience groups.
8. Nostalgic Marketing
You can get out of the situation with the help of memories. Nice flashbacks from the past always generate a sentimental boost. If we now consider the idea in terms of advertising, then the likelihood of getting the coveted click increases significantly.
9. Life without "fakes"
In 2020 erased the line between real facts and fiction. Perhaps it can be considered a record for the amount of misinformation on the Web. Now brands carefully filter information published on social networks and reduce the number of "fakes." Experts recommend prioritizing the reduction of malicious content in accounts. The rise of digital misinformation, tagging of accounts, bots are some of the important problems that social networks are now solving.
Social media has always blurred the lines between fact and fiction, from the heavily edited lives of some Instagrammers, fake reviews and posts, to spoofed Twitter accounts. The health crisis caused by COVID-19 has highlighted the issue of disinformation. Society is faced with an uncertain future, and this uncertainty has created a hotbed of false stories leading to life-changing decisions.
The marketing industry is a watershed in this direction, thanks to the technical advancement of algorithms and the social demand for content purity. Brands should be prepared to spend more resources on checking content. And if you violate a platform’s content rules, be prepared for sanctions that will only intensify.
10. "Remixing" content
Another new social media trend that develops in new formats of content creation is "remixing." This is an approach that allows and encourages you to take existing formats, templates, or ideas and rework them to express the user's personality and ideas. It appeared and is still growing, thanks to TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Masks and stickers on Instagram are great for this approach. There will be even more opportunities for co-production in the future as brands provide templates for users to create their own content. This will allow for more organic connections between companies and consumers.
This year brings even more opportunities for remixing, as brands engage with new audiences and create additional content that allows them to stand out.
11. Conversational Marketing
The development and evolution of technologies for interaction and voice control create new communication formats on the market. It became easier for users to speak to their devices, and marketing got a new channel and ways to interact.
In the past, the voice was important for communication and calls far outweighed the use of text messages. Now half of the consumers write more than they speak on their smartphones. However, voice communications, searches, notes, audio messages, assistants, and even voice tweets are returning to the marketing industry. The audio format has become more accepted, which has served as the development of podcasts.
We will be waiting for new formats for creating, voice searching, and delivering information using voice. A business needs to be prepared for users to receive and find information about products and company news in a voice format.
12. The free promotion will die
Social networks have thoroughly studied the algorithms of user behavior, gained access to all the necessary information, and increased technical resources for tracking actions. Now they take care of the cleanliness of the sites, because of increasing requests. In addition, the eradication of gray promotion methods will allow sites to receive even more resources from classic advertising tools.
It also became clear for brands that cheating does not give a high-quality result. Performance indicators have not been measured by the number of followers and likes for a long time.
Everything points to the fact that any kind of "cunning promotion" will finally die. Punitive measures will only intensify, and the risks of losing your account will be incomparable to the possible result.
Conclusion
So, Covid-19 brought many changes in the development of social media trends. The main task is to use this situation to your advantage. People are tired of masks, fakes, and lies, and the Internet is giving away the opportunity to show things as they really are, to enjoy the beauty of naturalness and uniqueness, and to use our creative potential to the maximum.
To be at the top, you should follow these social media trends and constantly develop your site! And our web development experts will help you with this with this difficult task.
