Social Trends Digital Marketers Should Keep An Eye On In 2023

Social trends are ever-changing and it can be difficult to keep tabs on what’s hot and working and what is ‘so last year’. We’ve dug around in the data available and found some of the most successful and important trends in the marketing world. These trends are likely to change in the future, but for now, they’re what you want to focus on.

Let’s get straight into what you’re here for.

Social Trends To Keep An Eye On In 2023

Some of the current trends many marketers saw coming for a while and have become quite established. Others are still becoming dominant. Either way, these are the social media marketing trends that you want to know about.

Micro-Influencers

Influencers, in general, are still a big deal in the marketing world. Using social media influencers have become a massive trend in the past few years. However, this has made the influencers become financially stronger and able to be very expensive. Thus, marketers are turning micro-influencers. 

These guys have big followings too, but they’re not as known as influencers. With that said, micro-influencers still hold a lot of sway and are involved in their community. Using such a person would be almost as beneficial as using influencers at a more affordable price.

You should be able to find many micro-influencers in your industry who would be happy to work with your brand. A huge benefit of using influencers with fewer followers is that they tend to get more engagement from their posts. This means you could be getting much more value for your money.

TikTok is so certain that influencers are important that the platform is paying people to join the app and start creating content.

Messenger Apps

It has been found that more people make use of social messaging than social media itself. This is especially true about the younger users. Users are taking advantage of the most popular social media platforms to chat with their friends. Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, and Viber are some of the top platforms used by millennials. 

Messenger is used by more than a billion people and back in 2017 already, more than 2 billion messages were exchanged between people and businesses every month. These apps are growing more popular with every passing day the communication abilities making them easy choices.

This offers businesses invaluable potential to build their customer service and grow their brand loyalty.

Public Feeds For Better Reach

As a marketer, you know that brand reach is an important part of any marketing strategy and essential for growth. Public feeds can now be used to help out with reaching new and broader audiences.

It is suggested that you don’t just rely on organic social media alone. Rope in the benefits of social media advertising and influencer marketing as well. This will go a long way towards increasing your reach.

Stories Are Still Growing 

Instagram really know what they were doing when they came up with Stories and more than 400 million people use them every day. They’ve become a staple of the platform and greatly loved by users. 

Marketers can use Stories to enrich their strategy on social media. Facebook Stories is are also very popular and this popularity isn’t likely to decrease. In fact, it is expected that the popularity will increase.

Automation 

Marketers who want to stay on top of things will make use of automation to handle the ‘easy stuff’. This includes responding to query messages. 

However, you should have a decent balance so not everything is taken care of by bots. People still want to know there are people behind the brand they’re interacting with. Social trends won’t change the most basic needs of social media users.

Balance Between Private and Public Engagement

Users are expecting more privacy in the future and marketers will need to remember that. You should have a good balance between privacy and public feeds. Of course, public feeds are still the driving force of social media platforms. 

Brands have to improve their reach with public feeds and then also have private channels where customers can reach out. If you can strike the perfect balance here you have great potential to keep your audience very happy and engaged.

Websites Must Be Mobile Responsive

Many brands do not seem to understand that making their sites friendly for mobile phones is extremely important. People are spending almost 70% of their time on their phones, so you truly need to be mobile-friendly and responsive.

According to Google, over 60% of people are not likely to come back to a website they had difficulty with. What’s even worse, 40% of these people will go to a competitor’s site after such a failure.

Google has also made changes to its search algorithm to accommodate mobile responsive websites. This is not just a social trend but something digital marketers must be aware of.

Trust And Reliability – More Than Social Trends

Having trust and faith in a brand is vital to its success and this will continue in the future. This is yet another point that is more than a social trend. With so much fake news and divisive political agendas causing chaos, a reliable brand will stand out amongst its competition.

Create strong bonds and relationships with your audience and always be open and transparent. Incorporate employee advocacy as well as customer feedback. Let your audience see that you are a good guy, but don’t just fake it. You have to actually be a good guy.

Ephemeral Content 

This kind of content is only available for a short time before it disappears and is very popular. Since people’s attention spans are so short, ephemeral content is one of the social trends that are bound to grow even more.

This kind of content is what made Instagram and Snapchat’s fleeting Stories so popular. People seem to really love seeing something that will be gone soon. If you can work it into your strategy, you’d be reaching a lot of curious eyes.

Voice Technology

The use of voice search on the internet is growing very rapidly and it will be important in marketing as well. comScore predicts that about half of internet searches will be performed through voice. It’s even possible that searches will be done without ever looking at the screen.

The same way you have to optimise your content for mobile use, you want to do so for voice searching. We suggest that you check out this interesting article about the Alexa strategy, you’ll learn a lot. Also, keep an eye on our blog, we love sharing our knowledge with the masses.

Offer Value

This should go without saying and flows in with having private channels that your audience can trust and rely on. You have to offer quality to your fans and followers to keep them satisfied. People head to these channels so they can get away from impersonal and noisy public feeds.

So, as a brand, you need to make sure that what they find there is of high-quality. Have a purpose for engaging with your audience in these channels and stick to it. You have to ensure that your audience feels that their needs are met. Client satisfaction is the most important marketing aim.

Advocacy Is More Important Than Algorithms

Although we are always worried about algorithms and how much they change, advocacy is actually more important. Brand advocacy is about getting customers to talk good things about your brand.

It can be quite a task to get proper content and share it to promote advocacy but it pays off a lot more than focusing on algorithms. When it comes to social trends, this is an important one.

Here’s an example of employee advocacy: A woman thanked the company for its on-site childcare. She shared her story while also showing what makes Patagonia so awesome in her opinion. Her post got thousands of reactions and put the company in a very positive light.

The best thing is, the company did not have to pay for this kind of exposure – by giving employees what they want, they got happy workers to spread the word.

Be A Leader

To have a successful brand, you have to lead your employees like a boss. You have to be a representation of your brand’s mission and purpose. That way, you’ll inspire your employees and your audience as well. Use leadership and authority in your strategy to show your audience that you are a reliable expert in your niche.

Keep Your Promises

Many would say keeping your promises doesn’t count as one of the social trends, but more emphasis is falling on being honest these days. Brands that make empty promises will not be tolerated for too long. Make sure that when you make a promise, you keep it.

TikTok

This platform is continuing to grow even bigger with every new subscriber and is expected to grow even bigger in the future. Already, TikTok boasts with more than 800 million users. If you want to discuss social trends, TikTok will definitely be mentioned.

TikTok is most popular among users between 16 and 24 so if your audience is young, this is where you have to be. TikTok is great for creating and sharing content as well as collaborating with other users and brands.

We suggest that you keep tabs of what’s going on over at TikTok to keep your marketing fresh and up to date.

Social Trends – Video Content

Video marketing remains an ever attractive, versatile, and shareable medium to reach your audiences. The saying goes ‘a picture says a thousand words’, just imagine how much a video can tell. 

With video marketing, you can create amazing content that can educate, entertain and inspire your audience. If you’re not already making use of video content, we highly suggest that you reconsider. We discuss using video content here and here, and you’d do yourself to check it out.

Niche Marketing

Because there is so much content on the internet, over-saturation is a real problem. There is a way to create content that will entertain your audience. The key is to focus on your niche and build content around that.

When you’re focused on your niche, you can make sure that you create high-quality content in your chosen industry. That way, you’re contributing to quality content that is becoming more scarce every day. If you’re just about throwing as much content as possible out there, you’re causing over-saturation.

Niche industries are usually smaller but that just means you can find your audience much easier. It is also possible to connect with your audience with more ease. Your marketing strategy can also be much more precise.

Generation Z Is Where The Future Lies

Generation Z is between 13 and 22 and is going to be the target market of many (if not most) future marketing strategies. They are very connected, very opinionated and focused on activism. They support LGBTQ matters and similar social causes. These youngsters will be roughly 40% of all consumers from 2023 forward.

This generation has grown up with the ability to always express themselves online and marketers need to know that. It is suggested that you do your research on what this generation likes, approves of and doesn’t like. Understanding them will go a long way to effectively marketing to them.

Final Thoughts On A Social Trends

Social media is evolving all the time and won’t stop doing so in the future, if ever. Every new year, new trends and algorithm updates are changing. All these changes shape the ways people interact on the internet.

You have to plan your social media marketing strategy with all the current trends in mind. It is important that you consider how you can use the trends in your planning. Just remember that you should not jump on the latest trends without studying it first. Then, create a solid strategy and work from there. It is possible to use social trends to your benefit, as long as you do your homework. Now that you’ve learnt about the trends of 2023, you should check out our blog. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn!