The 11 Most Important Social Media Trends for 2023

Working in an industry that morphs faster than a Power Ranger can be tough — the social media landscape is always changing. If you’re wondering what’s hot, what’s not, and how to fit new social media trends into your strategy… you’re definitely not alone. But, don’t worry, we have answers.

We looked at the 9 key trends outlined in Hootsuite’s global Trends 2023 report, withal with data from our survey of over 10,000 marketers to bring you this list of 11 social media marketing trends that will dominate the industry in 2023 — and might plane transpiration the way you do your job.

The 11 most important social media trends for 2023

1 . TikTok will take over the world

In our social media trends for 2022, we predicted TikTok would wilt the most important social network for marketing and we weren’t wrong.

But this year, we’re taking our prediction one giant step further.

A host of new full-length releases in 2022 suggest that TikTok doesn’t just want to be the number one social network for marketers. It wants to be the number one social network, period.

TikTok, long known for innovation (its fresh video format was the inspiration for Meta’s Reels and YouTube Shorts, without all), has released at least 7 features this year directly inspired by other social media channels:

• September 2022: TikTok Now (BeReal clone)
• October 2022: Photo Mode (Carousels clone)
• July 2022: TikTok Stories (IG Stories clone)
• March 2022: Search Ads (Google Search ads clone; beta testing)
• October 2022: TikTok Music (Spotify competitor; teased only)
• February 2022: 10-minute videos (YouTube competitor)

These new features, withal with a partnership with Linktree, Shopify and Woocommerce, and speculation well-nigh a podcast app, suggest that TikTok is on a quest to wilt a “super app.”

A super app is an all-in-one app that includes social media, messaging, services, payments, and basically anything else you would normally do on the internet.

TikTok is making moves into the non-digital world as well. Rumors are swirling that the Chinese-owned visitor is towers fulfillment centers in Seattle and Los Angeles in an struggle to take on Amazon in the ecommerce business.

But will all these big bets be successful? All signs point to yes, mostly.

While TikTok continues to grow its user wiring (1.023 billion zippy users and counting as of Q3 2022), it’s moreover unceasingly the #1 app in terms of time spent and overall positive sentiment.

• Users spend 95 minutes per day on TikTok (#1)
• Users spend 23.6 hours per month on TikTok (#1)
• 78.6% of internet users use TikTok to squint for funny or entertaining content (#1)

Also, equal to Google Trends, interest in TikTok Ads (which is a good indicator of merchantry interest in the platform) has increased by 1,125% since 2020.

All this interest is for good reason. TikTok ads revenue is growing so fast it’s set to match YouTube’s ad revenue by 2024. Though Google and Meta are still the biggest companies by far in the digital ad space, that’s no joke for an internationally-owned social media company.

What does this all midpoint for businesses? Well, if your merchantry isn’t on TikTok yet, this is your sign to get on it, now.

To-do list

• Grab an worth handle for your brand
• Explore TikTok so you can start feeling fluent on the platform and find some ideas
• Sketch out the nuts of your TikTok marketing strategy
• Use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to easily schedule your TikToks, moderate comments, and measure your success on the platform from one handy dashboard.
• Start exploring TikTok ads

2. The only new app that will matter will be BeReal

BeReal is a photo-sharing app that prompts users to post one unfiltered, unedited photo per day to a select group of friends. Photos taken outside of the two-minute time frame say how many minutes late they were posted.

The network launched in late 2019, but its popularity exploded in 2022. As of October 2022, it’s the top social networking app on the App Store and has been installed roughly 29.5 million times.

Google Trends moreover shows that global searches for “What is BeReal” and “BeReal app” exploded mid-year in 2022.

Users skew sexuality and young. The majority are unelevated 25.

The app doesn’t have ads or features for businesses yet, which many say is part of the appeal.

listen, we're in the golden age of bereal. no ads, nobody's parents are on it, we still get an adrenaline rush when the goes off. none of these things will last. we must savour the moment

— Jacob Rickard (@producerjacob) July 20, 2022

BeReal gives the feeling of the early days of social media when users mainly posted photos to show their friends what they were up to — surpassing it became the highly curated, ad-heavy space it is today.

Even BeReal’s official communications sound like your best-friend texting you. Without a large outage on their app, the visitor simply tweeted “all good now.” This is the opposite of the highly professional communications strategies of other major social networks.

Speaking of outages, the surge in popularity seems to have unprotected the visitor unaware. Glitches and outages are frequent (with most users opening the app and posting pictures at the word-for-word same time) and threaten to hinder the app’s growth.

Users are moreover limited to 500 friends, meaning that your brand’s usual marketing strategy won’t work here.

Despite this, BeReal’s popularity has unprotected the sustentation of brands like e.l.f. Cosmetics, Chipotle, and Pacsun. And TikTok and Instagram have both released clones of the dual camera full-length (but we don’t know anyone who’s using them yet).

This is why we’re making a big bet on BeReal’s importance in 2023. Plane if the app doesn’t survive the year, its impact is once undeniable.

This is what Gen Z wants from social media: unfiltered, uncurated content that doesn’t ask you to buy anything or make you finger bad well-nigh your life. It’s a fun place to be. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

To-do list

Time will tell if BeReal caves to the pressure to monetize for business. But for now, just make sure you’re paying attention.

• Make a profile and get familiar with the platform
• Experiment with the dual camera full-length on a platform your trademark once has a presence on (i.e., Instagram or TikTok) to see if it gets any traction with your audience

3. You will still have to make Reels

Instagram HQ seemed a wee bit upturned in 2022, with multiple full-length updates and Kardashian-inspired backpedaling. But, in our opinion, Instagram is still the reining platform for brands.

Why?

• Instagram has 1.5 billion daily zippy users (and 2 billion monthly)
• Reels grew by 220 million users between July and October 2022.
• 62% of Instagram users say they use it to research brands and products (Facebook takes 2nd place with 55%)
• It’s the preferred app among 16- to 24-year-olds (yes, it’s still vibration TikTok)
• Its ad platform and in-app shopping tools have been virtually for years, meaning you’re not gambling for ROI

Plus, Instagram is still pushing video hard. For instance, all Instagram videos are Reels now, and Reels are heavily prioritized by the recommendation algorithm. For marketers, this ways that posting Instagram Reels are the weightier way to get in front of new eyeballs on the platform.

Google Trends shows interest in Reels reaching all time highs without Adam Mosseri’s utterance that all videos on Instagram would be Reels (in July 2022).

Fortunately, with the rise of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Amazon Video Shorts (??!), once you’ve made a short video, cross-posting is easy (though not officially encouraged). Just make sure you scrub off those logos and watermarks!

To-do list

• Open up your Reels tab and get well-appointed with short-form video, if you aren’t fluent already
• Differentiate between making videos that are evergreen with original audio, versus increasingly viral-style videos that rely on trending audio, replies, stitches, etc.
• For your original videos, learn how to download TikToks and Instagram Reels without watermarks so that you can cross-post them to all the platforms you like
• For viral-style videos you’ll need to alimony an eye on the trends, and you probably won’t be worldly-wise to cross-post as easily
• Save yourself time and headaches by scheduling all your videos in advance with Hootsuite

4. Clubhouse will die and social audio will get increasingly niche

Every now and then, a new social media app comes withal that changes the way we create and slosh content. Snapchat did it with disappearing content, then TikTok did it with short-form videos. In 2020, Clubhouse did it (or was supposed to do it) with social audio.

Once hailed as “the next big thing” in social media, Clubhouse is now competing versus a new wave of copycat audio-based platforms. In fact, when was the last time you heard anyone mention Clubhouse?

Still racking your brain? Us too.

Nick Martin, Hootsuite’s Social Engagement Specialist (whom we interviewed well-nigh Clubhouse when it first came out) puts it nicely:

“Clubhouse showed that social audio was a viable way to share content and then the worthier networks said “thank you very much” and made their copycat features. Twitter Spaces rules the roost now and while Clubhouse is still around, it’s not people’s first choice.”

According to Martin, Twitter Spaces has been increasingly successful among businesses considering it’s in an app they once use, with an regulars they’ve once built. At this point in social media history, it’s just too big of an ask to build a pursuit from scratch with an expensive media format on a brand-new app — unless that app is TikTok (see social media trend #1).

Downloads have slowed for Clubhouse since its original success in early 2021.

Another worrying signal? Some top Clubhouse executives are leaving the company.

For instance, Aarthi Ramamurthy, former Throne of International and co-host of “The Good Time Show,” not only left Clubhouse, she moved her show to YouTube. Not a great sign of confidence.

Social audio itself is still very much an experimental space, with no well-spoken winner:

• Spotify Live (once Greenrooms), recently stopped funding their creator fund — an struggle to lure creators yonder from Clubhouse — saying simply, “We plan to shift toward other initiatives for live creators”
• Facebook Live Audio Rooms has decided to “simplify” by folding the full-length into Facebook Live
• Twitter has reportedly shifted resources yonder from Spaces;
• Amazon created Amp, but then laid off 150 of the people working on it

And then there’s the data showing that social audio isn’t really resonating with users.

• Only 2% of US teens and adults used Twitter Spaces as of January 2022
• 1% each used Clubhouse and Spotify Live

Though the data looks grim, some believe social audio might thrive with increasingly niche audiences. For example, Twitter’s Super Follows Spaces allows creators to host audio events exclusively for their paid subscribers. And Discord, the platform known for its niche communities, recently built its own social audio feature, Stage Channels.

To-do list

• Unless you’re trying to reach an extremely niche audience, hold off on investing in a social audio strategy
• If you’re a creator, explore the uncontrived monetization possibilities offered by Twitter’s Super Follows

5. LinkedIn will be well-nigh much increasingly than jobs

Have you noticed your LinkedIn feed filling up with increasingly and increasingly personal posts lately? The kind of content you would normally expect to see on your Facebook feed?

You’re not alone. From CEOs crying to overwhelmed parents posting photos of their kids, to breastfeeding advice, the platform is remarkably increasingly personal than it used to be. Some people are plane using the platform to find dates. Why?

A viral post about a CEO’s difficulty with breastfeeding sparks debate in the comments well-nigh whether it would be largest suited to Facebook.

Has the LinkedIn algorithm reverted to favor increasingly personal posts? Or has the pandemic erased the boundaries between our personal and professional lives?

Could it be that trust in Facebook, where we would normally post this kind of content, is at an all-time low, while trust in LinkedIn remains upper – withal with engagement rates? Perhaps most of the other social networks finger so oversaturated that LinkedIn seems like an opportunity to grab attention?

In 2021 we noticed that similar to Twitter, LinkedIn posts without links outperformed those with links, suggesting an algorithm transpiration favoring content that entices people to stay on the platform longer. This still seems to be the specimen in 2022, with most viral posts containing a mix of long-form personal storytelling and photos (almost like blog posts) vs. links to content on other websites.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t seem like this markedly less “professional” trend is going anywhere soon.

• LinkedIn invested $25 million in a Creator Fund, paying 100 creators $15,000 each to “share content, spark conversations, and build community.” (The goal is notably similar to ones held by Instagram and Facebook, neither of which are explicitly professional platforms.)
• It moreover launched LinkedIn Audio Events (a Clubhouse clone) and a podcast network.
• It released carousels and reaction buttons — both originally found on Facebook and Instagram.

To-do list

Don’t worry. We’re not going to suggest you slide into the DMs of a potential soulmate on LinkedIn. For now, experiment with the following:

• Change up your posting strategy to include some linkless posts, such as words of encouragement, cheesy jokes, or short personal anecdotes.
• If you’re toying in thought leadership on the platform, take the opportunity to dig deeper. Help your C-suite execs offer ideas and translating through a personal lens, showing your followers their human side. But alimony it genuine and grounded in reality, or else you could risk backlash.
• Consider hiring a ghostwriter to throne your LinkedIn content strategy, and write posts that stave jargon.
• Use Hootsuite to crosspost content you might typically post to Instagram and Facebook. Track if it performs well on LinkedIn.
• Be shielding not to overshare. Plane though increasingly personal content is trending, it’s still very much a professional app with 6 people getting hired every minute.

6. Gen Z will redefine UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is usually specified as content created by regular people on social media, rather than content made by brands. For example, instead of posting a product shot by a professional photographer, Nike might repost a photo from a happy consumer wearing their new Nike kicks.

UGC is unconfined for brands that superintendency well-nigh increasing sensation and worsening relationships with their customers. It’s pure social proof, and it makes the UGC creator finger special, both of which increase trademark loyalty.

All that said, it has recently come to our sustentation that Gen Z understands the term “UGC” in a whole variegated way: that is, as social media posts produced by freelance marketers or micro-influencers for businesses.

In Gen Z terms, brands pay “UGC creators” to produce content that looks like organic UGC.

Here’s an example:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hootsuite (@hootsuite)

Unlike traditional influencers, who promote brands using their own channels, UGC creators hand over the content they make for distribution on the brands’ own channels. They are less trademark advocates than paid content creators.

We expect that UGC will hold both definitions for a while. But this all points to a larger social media trend: brands outsourcing their social media labor to the creator economy.

Last year, we wrote well-nigh the growing importance of influencer partnerships for marketers. And in 2023, businesses (especially large ones) will protract to squint for help from social media creators in order to reach their platonic audience.

Hootsuite’s 2023 Trends survey found that 42% of businesses with over 1,000 employees work with creators as compared to only 28% of small businesses (those with less than 100 employees).

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2023

But there’s a new side to the creator economy to pay sustentation to: freelance content creators who aren’t necessarily influencers, but who are just really good at social media and sell their services to brands.

This makes sense. Reels and TikToks are growing increasingly popular. And they require a special mix of skills: technical vigilance and professional-entertainer-level charisma. Not just anyone can make a watchable Reel or TikTok, believe us.

Further, traditional UGC isn’t as valuable as it once was on social media. Sure, social proof is still important to potential customers, but with the social algorithms pushing videos over photos, it’s not likely that a photo of the shoe I just bought will plane make it to many people’s feeds.

Lastly, with budgets for marketing campaigns at risk of cuts (*cough* recession), and businesses turning to cheaper ways of content creation, using freelance creators for one-off videos seems like an obvious solution. We only see this social media trend increasing into 2023 and beyond.

To-do list

• Try Fiverr or Upwork to find a freelance UGC content creator (particularly if you need help creating Reels or TikToks) or post a undeniability on your social media feeds
• Use Hootsuite to schedule these Reels and TikToks to go live at the weightier times

7. Social SEO will replace hashtags

According to Google’s internal research, 40% percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are now using social media as their primary search engine. In September 2022, the New York Times plane proclaimed that “For Gen Z, TikTok is the New Search Engine.”

Globally, people of every age group use social media to research brands.

Meanwhile, our own internal research (a.k.a. the test we ran on one of our writer’s Instagram accounts) found that using keyword-optimized captions instead of hashtags increased reach by 30% and doubled engagement.

And on top of that, Hootsuite’s 2023 Trends report found that increasingly internet users weather-beaten 16-24 use social media for researching brands they want to buy from than search.

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2023

So, what does this midpoint for social media pros?

It’s time to add some keyword research to your social strategy. Rather than slapping hashtags into your reprinting without a post is finished, use keyword research to inspire you to make content that people are already searching for.

Even if you don’t see a massive search-fueled jump in traffic and engagement, the worst-case scenario is that you get a tuft of ideas for new posts.

Another social search tip? Hootsuite’s Social Media Marketing Lead, Brayden Cohen, says to think well-nigh your social media profiles as mini landing pages:

“Search is never going to be sufferer when it comes to Google. But people’s habits are changing. They’re using social to search for new products. Whereas beforehand, I think people were just coming to social for reviews or getting to know a brand, now they’re going for social to unquestionably buy…The main thing it’s reverted for me is my perspective. I treat our social pages like a mini landing page and website. I try to imagine using our social channels as the main point of purchase.”

To-do list

• Read our social SEO blog post to get the nuts of keyword research down
• Start incorporating SEO into all you’re doing on social: add keywords to your bio, add alt-text to images, and sprinkle in relevant keywords as you write your captions
• Add SEO to your content strategy: Use SEMrush or Google’s Keyword Planner to segregate some relevant keywords and make content that targets those keywords. Then track what happens (preferably with Hootsuite Analytics)

8. Sealed captioning will be the default on social video

Since the dawn of time — or at least 2008 when Facebook and YouTube launched their mobile apps — social media users have been scrolling through videos on silent. As many as 85% of social media videos are watched without sound, expressly in public places, equal to multiple studies. And viewers are 80% increasingly likely to watch a video to completion if it has captions.

Now that short-form video (ok, TikTok) has eaten the internet, in 2023 we predict that captions will be the default for all published video content. For three reasons:

• Accessibility: not just for people watching on the bus, but moreover for people with hearing impairments
• Engagement: captions alimony people watching to the end
• Discoverability: using keywords in captions is a crucial step in optimizing videos for search, increasing the number of people likely to see it

To-do list

• Learn how to add sealed captioning to your short-form AND long-form video
• Make sure you’re saying keywords out loud in your video so that they show up in the captions, too
• If you’re on TikTok and pressed for time, try the auto-captioning feature

9. Social commerce will protract to grow, despite troublemaking signals from networks

Last year, social commerce was one of the biggest social media trends. As sales blasted past $350 billion in China, North American and European marketers scrambled to position themselves to take wholesomeness of a new way to make money directly on social.

But despite its success in China, North American and European consumers have been slower to reservation up. Some social networks scaled when on shopping features (particularly ones to do with “live” shopping, which is a less worldwide miracle in Western markets):

• Meta shut lanugo its live commerce functionality on Facebook
• Instagram shut lanugo its affiliate product tagging option
• Instagram moreover removed its Shop tab
• TikTok elapsed the launch of live shopping in Europe and the US without a test in the UK failed to meet targets

Does this midpoint the promising future of social shopping is remoter off than anticipated?

Maybe.

According to a survey of 10,000 global consumers performed by Accenture, many shoppers still don’t trust the process of ownership products through social media.

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2023

Their biggest snooping is that their purchases won’t be protected or refunded. They’re moreover worried well-nigh the quality and authenticity of products and sellers on social media. And the third most worldwide snooping is not wanting to share financial information with social networks.

Hootsuite’s Trends report asked survey respondents a similar question — what are the greatest barriers for social buyers? — with similar results.

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2023

Despite these results, eMarketer data forecasts that social commerce is still a huge and growing industry, plane in the US.

Though growth in new shoppers has understandably slowed since the pandemic, by the end of 2022, existing consumers will have spent $110 increasingly on purchases made on social in 2022 than in 2021, with most new proprietrix growth coming from TikTok. This suggests that, despite trust issues, audiences are starting to get used to social media as a shopping channel, using it increasingly than overly before.

And while the live shopping wits may not have been a hit with Western audiences, it’s not necessarily a signal that social commerce is over. Social commerce takes many forms, including shoppable posts/ads, AR shopping, referrals, and plane second-hand marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace, all of which are worldwide tactics used in North America and Europe.

In fact, many believe that Instagram’s removal of its Shop Tab (along with other organic shopping features like live shopping and unite links) is an effort to tie social commerce revenue increasingly directly to ads, expressly now that “recommended posts” are included in the feed algorithm. That ways they want people to buy stuff on their platform, but through paid advertising, considering they make increasingly money that way.

To-do list

Retail and ecommerce businesses should still be paying very tropical sustentation to social commerce — and Western-focused businesses should be proactive well-nigh getting good at it surpassing their competitors do.

• Turn skeptical shoppers into buyers by offering easy returns and refunds, displaying ratings and reviews from other buyers, and keeping buyers notified well-nigh the status of their purchases throughout the consumer journey.
• Don’t invest in live shopping if your regulars is based in North America or Europe. Elsewhere, it’s still worth experimenting with.
• If you’ve got budget, spend it on shoppable Instagram and Facebook Ads.
• If your upkeep is tight, the biggest opportunities for organic growth in social shopping are on TikTok. Post with the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt or wait for the TikTok Shop tab to come to the US.
• Use Hootsuite to save time on consumer service by responding to all your social DMs in one dashboard.

10. You will have to tell your millennial coworkers to stop using GIFs

It’s gonna be tough to unravel it to millennials—especially the ones who are still mourning skinny jeans—but gifs are not only an inefficient technology that is older than the internet, they are … not tomfool anymore.

Of all the trends on social media this year, this one truly breaks our hearts.

What’s our evidence? Giphy, the search engine of gifs, has declined in value by 200 million USD since its peak in 2016. And according to Giphy itself: “There are indications of an overall ripen in gif use due to a unstipulated waning of user and content partner interest in gifs… They have fallen out of malleate as a content form, with younger users, in particular, describing gifs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe’.”

Just considering reaction gifs are passé doesn’t midpoint that all turned-on images are out, however. Using stickers as tools on your Instagram Stories isn’t going anywhere unendingly soon (yes, they are technically gifs.) And creating animations to demonstrate how-tos or product flows is still a much increasingly nimble solution than asking someone to commit to a full video, equal to Denea Campbell, Hootsuite’s email marketing strategist.

To-do list

• Break it to your elders gently
• Help them get fluent in emoji, instead (although there are boomer-only emojis, too)
• Remember that some gifs are practical and still ok

11. Increasingly billionaires will buy increasingly social networks

Of all the social media trends in 2023, this is the one we have the most mixed feelings about.

Social media news in 2022 was a long parade of byzantine sagas as several billionaires set their sights on social. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the versifier formerly known as Kanye West have each joined Donald Trump (Truth Social) and Jeff Bezos (who purchased Twitch in 2014) in funding, owning, or attempting to own, their very own social media platforms.

At the time of writing, Elon Musk has officially sealed the deal on his 44 billion dollar Twitter purchase. Kanye West has proposed purchasing Parler (a right-wing free-speech social network with only 50k DAUs) in October 2022. And Peter Thiel backed Rumble, a inobtrusive video platform, in 2021.

We predict this trend will only protract in 2023 as social media becomes an increasingly powerful gravity in society and business, and suspicions well-nigh the objectivity of algorithms increase (along with fears of censorship and fake news). We may plane see increasingly billionaires create their own social networks, a la former U.S. President Donald Trump.

But this is increasingly unlikely, as Trump’s network has largely failed to proceeds hair-trigger mass, and there is yet to be a successful model of a personality-driven, brand-new social network. Most likely, those with the money to do so will protract to try to grab a executive slice of increasingly established social networks.

However, if this is the way it’s going to go, we really do hope that Rihanna will buy Snapchat and MacKenzie Scott will pick up Pinterest (and maybe Goodreads while she’s at it).

To-do list

Businesses don’t have a ton of tenancy over which billionaires decide to buy which social media platforms. All you can really do is:

• Keep an eye on the news. New ownership could midpoint changes for ad revenues, network policies, and algorithms — and you’ll need to be worldly-wise to explain any sudden drops in performance or shifts in strategy to your boss.
• Continue creating content that resonates with your audience. No algorithm transpiration can get in the way of that (we hope).
• Make sure your followers are pursuit you on all your social channels (just in case one of them tanks overnight due to the ego-driven decisions of a new owner).
• Keep educating yourself and your Uncle Steve well-nigh misinformation and hair-trigger thinking.
• Take superintendency of your mental health and protect yourself from trolls (here are our weightier tips for social media pros).

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage the audience, measure results, and more. Try it self-ruling today.

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With files from Konstantin Prodanovic.

The post The 11 Most Important Social Media Trends for 2023 appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.