With the year coming to a close and the dawn of 2023 just across the horizon, it’s time to look forward. We’re looking at the new emerging trends for social media marketing so you can enhance your conversions and meet your business goals.

Learn more about how social media marketing can guarantee a successful campaign for your company.

Conversion Rates per Platform in 2022

You need to think outside the box to enhance your social media marketing conversion rates. So far, the industry standards for various platforms have been:

• Instagram: 1.85%
• Facebook: 9.21%
• Twitter: 0.9%,
• Snapchat: 0.6%
• YouTube: 0.5%

It’s also worth noting that these numbers improve dramatically with paid promotion on these platforms.

Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing

Social media is an integral part of inbound marketing because it pairs well with the rest of your content. Social media boosts content marketing and helps propel your numbers without much waste readership.

The purposes of both these types of marketing can be very different. Social media is meant to create engagement through participation while content marketing is about consuming. It also offers two-way communication while content offers information, entertainment, or emotional effect. Social media content is where they converge.

With this in mind, how should one approach content on social media?

• Visual content is still the most engaging
• People are less likely to share videos for brands unless they offer some incentive (make it part of a challenge or giveaway to beat the odds)
• Shorter and Punchy is usually the best type of content
• CTAs enhance engagement
• Hashtags are often forgotten but still serve a powerful role in marketing

Social Media Marketing Partnerships

Collaboration was a big sell in 2022 and appears to be growing. Platforms like Twitter have integrated ways to publish tweets with someone or in groups and TikTok is all about bouncing content in response to other content. We expect other social media platforms to increase features that allow for collaborations and partnerships.

Features such as the ones on TikTok and Instagram allow brands to partner with creators more effectively. It allows for better influencer marketing, brand collaborations, and affiliate marketing.

Here are some ways we think social media platforms could hit it big with partnerships in the future:

• Sponsored content
• Gifting for reviews
• Guest Blogs
• Takeovers

Guerilla Marketing & Social Media

Guerilla marketing can be tricky since it’s a nebulous term with many diverse connotations. Yet, it should be a priority for any company as it offers unparalleled levels of engagement. It’s a marketing tactic that utilizes unconventional interactions or surprises to promote a product or service.

Guerilla marketing will become more popular in the coming years because the ad space is so saturated with traditional methods. This leaves companies to pull crazier stunts just to stand out. We’ve seen some great examples in 2022:

• Firehouse Subs launched a social media Rewards Week as a way to earn customer loyalty, drum up donations for fire rescue teams, and drive signups and redemptions via its app
• The Barbie Movie launched its #Barbiecore trend to get high fashion involved with sharing items with a particular colour scheme (including campaigns from Valentino and Jimmy Choo)
• McDonald’s started their menu hack campaign where online users submitted various mixtures of their foods to create all new menu items, garnering tons of brand exposure and customer engagement

In terms of making your own guerilla marketing campaign, think of it in terms of the digital marketing strategy framework to simplify the process:

Traditionally, in the final step of the framework, we engage the customer after reaching out to them and making propositions. In guerilla marketing, you re-engage the customer and push forward what makes your brand special to create sales and positive brand associations. It’s about being daring and reaching out to customers.

To do this, identify your core identity, what channels you want to use, and how best to drive engagement with your particular target group (define what your product means to them and build on that using a buyer persona or segmentation strategy). Find the relevant hashtags, keywords, and content format and build from there. Physical activity and challenges are particularly useful on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok.

B2B Social Media Marketing

In terms of B2B trends, LinkedIn is still the king. While other applications have been rising up, there are few that have captured the market so well. Even with the loss of tools like InMail in many regions due to the GDPR, it’s an indispensable tool.

Another major platform trend is that companies are bailing from Twitter, calling it high-risk. With high-profile businesses treating the platform with scepticism, we predict it will become less useful as a B2B resource. This may change in the future with additions to the platform policies but, as of now, fraudulent tweets are a real hazard (as Eli Lily learned):

B2B companies are collaborating more and more as we see companies giving each other shoutouts or entering each other’s mentions. This provides a good opportunity to pair with each other or meet at events or simply express similar values. It bridges two audiences and is relatively cheap as well.

Social Media Community Management

An important part of understanding social media advertising vs marketing is that marketing builds on the bigger picture. More than just advertising, your job is to build a community. Our tips for social media community management include:

• Focus on community-based social media such as Discord or Reddit Pages where users can be more dedicated.
• Use these community features to gather feedback, host Q&As, and build more beta-test applications or early versions.
• Create hashtags or easily recognisable ways for your users to contextualize their content.
• Send up chatbots, monitor social media for replies, and consider Google Alerts for certain keywords. This will let you engage with the community and preempt conversations.

Social Listening

Social listening is going to become a major tactic for companies in the coming years.

What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring? Social media listening is the action of gathering data from platforms to evaluate and improve your brand performance. This is a complicated process involving all channels and even competitors’ performances. The goal is to derive actionable insights from a large dataset of customers.

While social media listening is a broad category with long-term goals, it encompasses monitoring within it as a short-term and reactive process. Social media monitoring can serve as a brand’s customer service over social media. This is the practice of getting ahead of issues (crisis management) and handling customer queries (crisis management).

Social listening is a major part of building conversational marketing in social media. Here’s how social media listening increases customer advocacy:
– It involves analyzing and learning from customer feedback and conversations.
– Social listening helps identify the biggest fans and improve their experience.
– Tracking mentions and assuring advocates the brand understands their concerns.

Starting the Conversation

Talking to your audience is the optimal way to use social media but getting a conversation started can be daunting. Here are some engaging social media questions that can boost your engagement and get your audience talking according to recent trends:

• Ask users to share their favourite product of yours or their favourite feature.
• Ask them to repost with a picture of them using your products.
• Do polls on topics of the day (“would you rather ___ or ___?”)
• Get users to repost for the chance to get discounts.
• Engage in AMAs and ask them to post their biggest questions for you.

What’s Next After Social Media?

Is the time for VR or the metaverse finally here in 2023? We’ve previously covered these issues in previous articles, but it seems VR has multiple applications but the Metaverse is still a way off from being a workable platform.

Social media drives business revenue by creating community, building on branding, creating awareness, and conversing with customers. The next evolution of all these processes could be in media formats that are far more interactive such as VR or AR.

Similarly, ephemeral content platforms like TikTok appear to be growing continuously. Community platforms like Discord and Mastodon are growing as well, which offer an alternative model of social media. We expect these trends to continue onward with the possibility of larger platforms regressing for more personal ones.