7 hottest digital trends in social media marketing in 2022

Social media platforms are becoming more social. If you follow the latest news on the internet, it’s not hard to imagine the future and see something big there.

Brands go personal now. Boundaries between a business and a customer are vanishing. Honesty and inventiveness are the keys to the heart of customers who crave new content all the time.

Social media marketing is no more about planning posts, sending targeted messages, and being near at hand. Instead, it’s about creating, giving, and receiving out-of-the-box experiences that trigger emotions and blow minds.

2022 is the year of enhancing these experiences and reconsidering how to deliver them.

Here are the 7 hottest digital trends you need to know to ace 2022.

1. The Metaverse and Immersive Experience is Here (Well, Almost)

In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced the trend that will be at the top in 2022 and beyond.

With over $10 billion of investments under the belt, Zuckerberg has enormous plans to change how we interact and access data on every level of everyday life by combining the most advanced technologies we have right now.

The co-founder of Facebook defines the Metaverse as the ecosystem where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.

In an interview with Gary Vaynerchuck, Mark Zuckerberg said, “There’s a virtual reality side, and there’s an augmented reality side. VR is here… We’re going to start seeing normal-looking AR glasses that project holograms into the world within the next five years. I think that’s a somewhat conservative estimate.”

Zuckerberg didn’t say precisely when he and his team will bring us the Metaverse in all its glory. However, one thing is clear — immersive experience is one of the most important digital marketing trends for the next ten years, and brands should start to find ways to bring one to consumers.

What can your business do about the Metaverse?

• Explore the possibilities of AR, VR, and artificial intelligence for your business
• Focus on now but keep an eye on the future

2. TikTok Marketing Will Continue to Explode

While Meta wants us to imagine the world without digital screens, TikTok is expanding its presence on them with over 1 billion active app users and TikTok TV for LG TVs, Samsung, and Android TV.

In 2021, TikTok skyrocketed as the world’s next big platform, with nearly 170 million videos watched per minute. Becoming a part of this original and innovative community of content creators is a new trend that will stimulate the platform’s growth in 2022.

More people and brands are excited to join TikTok because of its freshness and innovation in content creation. TikTok has changed the game. TikTok videos are more human, and creating them is way funnier and simpler than elsewhere. Other platforms that have already reckoned with this fact are adapting to new rules.

Businesses that experiment with TikTok marketing, follow three major TikTok trends right now:

Trend 1. Consistent short videos (between 21 and 34 seconds in length) better tell real, amusing, and eye-catching stories.

Trend 2. Influencers provide businesses with valuable experience in creating better TikTok videos increasing brand awareness.

Trend 3. In combination with organic content, paid ads help achieve marketing objectives more effectively.

How to gain attention on TikTok:

• Create a sense of community with longer videos that collect over 5 million views globally
• Sneak peek at most popular creators for new ideas
• Follow the hottest hashtags to create trendy content
• Optimize the content creation process with third-party apps
• Use TikTok Creator Marketplace to find creators that match your business and collaborate with them
• Take advantage of TikTok video templates to make your content more attractive

3. Social Video Content Will Be More Diverse

As one of the most promising platforms in 2022, TikTok is disrupting video marketing.

Having introduced the YouTube Shorts format (which is still in the beta phase), YouTube is no longer the mainstay of long-form content. Instagram released Instagram Reels that deliver people a genuinely TikTok-ish experience.

The appearance of the 5G technology that makes connection speeds incredibly high will make the video format even more popular than it is now. Major video platforms are going through content wars, and the tremendous popularity of video will only facilitate them in 2022.

Due to the fierce competition around YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, we’ll see the new ways of people and businesses making organic content and paid video ads.

Brands that haven’t found the video platforms that best fit their marketing strategy have to do that the following year.

Here are video marketing tips for small businesses in 2022:

• Be real — find your authentic tone of voice and stick to it.
• Get viewers interested during the first couple of seconds of the interaction.
• Ask your customers to create video testimonials.
• Stream live and promote your streams in advance.

4. Brands Will Reimagine Customer Experience with Social Commerce

Year over year, more customers use social media to find and buy products. 

According to a survey by eMarketer, 48% of US consumers bought something via social media.

In North America and Europe, 30% of e-commerce companies already sell via social media. 

In the United States, the number of social media shoppers amounts to 80 million at the least. Statista anticipates this number to grow almost by 37% in 2025.

Social media has already changed how customers perceive brands and is about to change how brands perceive customers. Social commerce made it possible for the relationship between companies and consumers to go on a different level. 

In 2022, brands will obtain an excellent opportunity to reimagine customer experience on every touchpoint of the shopping journey. Along with marketing their storefronts and selling directly on major platforms like Facebook and Instagram, brands will use their social media pages as the primary source for expressing themselves. 

Here are best practices for social commerce:

• Make sure the product catalogs your upload to social media shops are up to date
• Fill up relevant business information such as contacts and working hours
• Experiment with live commerce as an extra promotional channel and one of the promising business trends in 2022
• Keep up with customer reviews and use them to enhance customer experience

5. Brands Will Prioritize Social Customer Support

Social commerce is growing, and emotionally vulnerable and financially devastated customers due to the pandemic demand support more than ever. Therefore, professional social customer support will play a pivotal role in increasing brand awareness, improving customer experience, and promoting products and services on social media in 2022.

According to the Facebook Messaging Survey, 64% of people would send a message to a business rather than make a call, while 60% don’t mind receiving personal messages.

Messaging will stay the universal means of communication between brands and customers, and brands will focus their attention on creating meaningful personal connections. 

How to create a supportive environment within your social media community:

• Sound like human
• Respond quickly and consistently
• Design an identical branding for all channels
• Prepare a protocol for customer issues
• Answer customers’ questions, reviews, and connects
• Use customer feedback to enhance customer experience
• Set up chatbots to automate the assistance process
• Create one more channel dedicated entirely to customer care (and promote it)

6. Social Advertising Will Become More Authentic

Don’t make ads. Make TikToks. 

Stop interrupting. Start inspiring.

These slogans reflect current social media advertising trends that are here to stay in 2022. It isn’t as strange as it sounds, but paid ads on social media will become more organic.

When it comes to social media branding, creativity and authenticity will be everything for consumers in 2022. Authentic content on less traditional social platforms like TikTok and Pinterest made people love ads. Customers are eager to see brands everywhere. 

Marketers will increase their advertising budgets to spend more money on more platforms in the following year. According to statistics posted on AdWeek, 74% of businesses have already allocated one-third or more of their marketing budgets for planning social media advertising strategies.

How to benefit from social media ads:

• Don’t advertise. Tell stories
• Find organic posts with the highest level of engagement to know the content formats your audience will appreciate the most.
• Create lists of custom audiences that consists of potential customers and current buyers to retarget them
• Animate your ads to spark customers’ interest
• Use minimum text and focus on visuals

7. Social Audio Will Have More Impact

Social audio is the echo from the podcast explosion a few years ago.  

It has never been easier to communicate on interesting topics online when audio is wireless. Fed up with visual content, millions of people enjoy talking with each other and listening to others.

2021 has become the year of the social audio rise. 

Clubhouse, the leading social audio platform with over 10 million active weekly users, closed a $4 billion evaluation deal. Responding to that, Facebook rolled out Live Audio Rooms and podcasts available on iOS and Android apps. Spotify introduced its live audio app Spotify Greenroom. Twitter allowed everyone to host a chatroom in Twitter Spaces, and Reddit announced Reddit Talk.

Clubhouse introduced a monetization program that will increase the number of creators. LinkedIn is testing social audio experience in their app.

2022 will become the year of social audio experiments. Social audio has tremendous potential for brands as a new form of online marketing. Brands will have plenty of social audio platforms to examine possible marketing techniques and experiment with them. 

How to gain the trust of listeners on your social audio:

• Join audio spaces related to the topics of your target audience interest
• Plan a lineup of shows where each show will be the part of a broader narrative
• Share insights and expertise
• Stay genuine and unbiased
• Interview your industry experts and influencers

Make sure you keep tabs on all the emerging trends and stay ahead of your competition. For even more insights into the digital world in 2022, check out Depositphotos’ creative trends for 2022.