8 Interesting Social Media Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2022 [Infographic]

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Have you started thinking about your social media marketing strategy for next year?

Learning about the key trends likely to affect how potential customers use social media in 2022 will help.

The team from Red Website Design has researched the latest social media marketing trends to watch out for in the infographic below. Let’s take a look at the results of their research.

1. Social media has emerged as a shopping platform.

As shopping became more virtual during the pandemic, social media platforms became an increasingly popular shopping destination.

The number of social commerce buyers in the U.S. has increased by 25.2% and will reach over 100 million by 2023.

2. Short-form video content has proliferated.

TikTok is a social media platform that is dedicated to short-form videos. In the first three months of 2020, TikTok was downloaded 315 million times, setting a record for quarterly downloads by any app.

To compete with TikTok, Instagram launched Instagram Reels in 2020. Reels enables users to record and post videos up to 30 seconds long. This is on top of Instagram’s two other video options, IGTV and Stories.

According to one study, up to 82% of online content will consist of videos by 2022.

3. Social media has become part of daily life.

Social media is far from a new concept. But searches for the term are still up 17% over 5 years.

The number of social media users is growing, and the amount of time they are spending on social media platforms is growing, too.

On average, people spend about 145 minutes on social media every day in 2021 — about one hour longer than people were spending on social media in 2012.

4. Facebook remains on top (for now).

Facebook remains the most-used social media platform in the world, followed closely by YouTube. Despite some negative press coverage, Facebook’s growth is not slowing down.

The platform currently has about 1.85 billion daily users and had about 23 billion total visitors in January 2021. The average user spends about 58 minutes on Facebook every day.

Despite the success of some new platforms, the major players are expected to continue to dominate the market in the coming years. 

5. Shorter attention spans result in more bite-sized content.

Yes, people are spending more time on social media, but they’re devoting less time engaging with individual posts. Studies suggest that the attention span of the average person today is 8 seconds!

Social media platforms are adjusting to this by increasingly offering bite-size content such as short-form videos and ephemeral (disappearing) content.

6. There are more augmented reality options than ever before.

Searches for “social media AR” are up 81% over five years. The augmented reality (AR) market is still in its infancy but is projected to gain momentum in the coming years.

AR and VR (virtual reality) are expected to become more mainstream as mobile networks become more robust and faster. By 2023, the AR market is projected to be generating $70-$75 billion in annual revenue.

7. The utilization of user-generated content is growing.

Businesses are increasingly incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into their social media marketing strategies.

Brands that include UGC have a 20% increase in return visitors and a 90% increase in time spent on their websites. UGC images are also 81% more likely to convert.

8. The “unbundling” of Reddit is having an effect.

Ten years ago, Craigslist was essentially “unbundled” into dozens of separate niche verticals. Many huge companies were created as a result, most notably Airbnb, Zillow, and Indeed.

The same thing is happening to Reddit.

Discord (now valued at $3.5B) carved the first big chunk out of Reddit as the “Slack for Gaming.” It listened to the needs of the League of Legends gaming subreddit and grew off the back of that community.

8 Social Media Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2022 & Beyond [Infographic]

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