Is your marketing team revaluating and strategizing a new social media plan for the year ahead? Knowing consumer trends is essential to lay the path for your social media strategy in order for your brand to suit consumers’ lifestyles and routines. Here is a summary of 5 social media trends to watch out for in the next few years:
- Social media emerges as a shopping platform
Due to the pandemic, online shopping has increased in popularity with social media becoming an increasingly prevalent tool for shopping. In 2021, it has been established that there are 334 million South Africans shopping online. By 2025, it is predicted to grow to 520 million South African online shoppers.
- Proliferation of short-form video content
Videos have always been a growing medium in marketing, but now thanks to TikTok, Instagram introduced Reels, giving users the chance to upload videos of up to 30 seconds. Thus showing how popular short-form video content is becoming. According to a study, 82% of online content will be videos by 2022.
- Social media becomes part of daily life
The amount of social media users are growing as well as the time they spend daily on these social media platforms. It has been found that people spend 145 minutes a day on social media. Therefore, marketing social media should be integrated into every marketing strategy, in order for your brand to become a part of consumers’ lives
- Facebook remains on top (for now)
So far, Facebook is still the most used social media platform. Facebook currently has 1.845 billion daily users who spend on average, 45 minutes a day on the social media platform. It is important for your marketing team to revaluate their marketing strategy to utilise at least Facebook, if they want to create awareness around your company.
- Shorter attention spans result in more bite-sized content
Studies have shown that the average attention span of social media users is 8 seconds, thus, marketers need to adjust their social media content accordingly. This means using short-form videos and ephemeral content such as Stories .
