Social Media Marketing Trends

Every business from a multibillion-dollar corporation to a small business needs social media marketing. In a world where 4.62 billion people use social media, a business can’t afford to ignore this valuable low cost marketing avenue. After all, even the local mum and pop store has a Facebook page.

But between Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok it can be difficult for a business to navigate the murky waters of social media marketing especially as the algorithms change and trends come and go so quickly.

Here are the top social media marketing trends for 2022 and how to apply them for your business.

Video content is king

This one is not news with a capital N anymore. We have all known for a while that video content was rapidly overtaking static posts but 2022 is going to be a game changer for video content. Now Facebook has incorporated reels and Tik Tok has released an upgrade to the platform enabling us to do ten-minute videos, everyone is scrambling to work out what this will mean for YouTube. It’s quite a jump for Tik Tok, the platform started with a maximum video length of 15 seconds and prior to this update the longest video you could upload to the platform was 3 minutes.

Tik Tok’s latest update is a clear challenge to YouTube, where the average video length is 11.8 minutes but what does this mean for businesses?

If you’ve used Youtube as a part of your content strategy or inbound marketing efforts, then it’s time to get familiar with Tik Tok. The type of video content you create for YouTube might not work for this more relatable and relaxed platform. Editing on Tik Tok is snappy and trending audio is a must even if it’s buried under a voice over.

On Facebook, long form video content and short snappy reels are going to play a large part in your 2022 content strategy.  Invest in a videographer if you have the budget and if you don’t, start experimenting and get a tripod for your phone because you’re going to need it!

Educational / entertaining / relatable content

So, we know we need to make more video content this year, but what kind of video content? The rise of reels and Tik Tok has resulted in a holy trinity of successful content – educational, entertaining, relatable.

Now, not all your content can be all three and for your business it might not be relevant to your business’s brand profile to produce entertaining content. For example, if you’re a tech business that creates and manages software for other businesses, making people laugh is not going to sell your product. But educational and relatable content might work for you, present a problem your ideal client might have and solve it, this communicates your value and role in their world.

On the other hand, if you’re a cake decorating business you might not want to make educational content, showing people your favourite cake recipe might be too close to giving away trade secrets. So instead create entertaining content, mesmerising cake swirls, decorations coming together or relatable content sharing the moment when things go wrong.

Relatable content is often undervalued by businesses, but we should all be leveraging it because no matter who your ideal client avatar is, even if you’re a B2B business you’re marketing to a human being, and people empathise and identify with honest content.

Reduce your hashtags on Instagram

Yes, you did read that right. For years we were cramming 30 popular hashtags into every post, but now the experts are saying less is more. While there is no fast and clear consensus on the ‘right’ number of hashtags to use on an Instagram post the recommendation is to use between 3 and 11 focusing on the content of that specific post and keeping it within the niche of your business’s content.

Part of the reason they are advising people to pare down the number of hashtags they use is because there are a lot of posts out there with irrelevant hashtags on them. This makes it harder for Instagram to show people content they like. If you reduce the number of hashtags, you’re more likely to change your hashtags for each post instead of doing a copy and paste job and you’re also more likely to use hashtags relevant to that particular post.

Memes are back!

Finally, this one is going out to all the millennials out there, memes are back baby! Memes are effective marketing tools because it applies trending visuals and jokes with relatable content that can show your audience the value of your product or service.

Memes are fun but it’s a quick-fire strategy style, to utilise meme marketing you need to be on the ball, watching the trends and picking up on stuff before it’s been overused.

We hope you found this article helpful. Remember when it comes to social media marketing only apply what fits with your brands voice and your content strategy, consistent and valuable content will always trump trends every time.

John Wilson

John Wilson is a branding and website design expert. He boasts over 10 years of digital marketing experience. He loves to share his expertise and insights on all things digital marketing by keeping this blog up to date.