The social media trends for 2020 are a very important element of the marketing strategy that all companies must know in order to surpass their competitors and always be one step ahead. Business owners must tend to implement the latest trends in their company’s strategy and get full advantage of social media platforms for attracting new customers. That way they will also improve the company’s social media marketing (SMM) strategy. Regardless of the size of the company, entrepreneurs need to utilize all social media that their targeted audience uses. That way they will stay on track with the latest technologies and will know how to take advantage of each social platform separately.
The major social media platforms currently are Facebook and Instagram. In addition to them, people use other social media apps such as LinkedIn for B2B strategies, YouTube for reaching larger audiences, as well as other trending platforms. However, the question is: “Will this stay the same forever?” 2020 brings new social media trends that may reshape the social media landscape, especially with the emergence of new platforms that were not so popular till now. To discover more information about the latest social media trends that will dominate the new decade, read more about five of them that we chose as the most important:
- Temporary Content
- Emergence of New Social Media Platforms
- Domination of Video Content
- Expansion of the Social Commerce
- Reshaping of the Social Media Landscape
Temporary Content
Temporary content is one of the social media trends for 2020 that companies need to pay attention to. The temporary content is also known by the term “ephemeral content” and it stands for content that is available on social media for a short period of time after which it disappears entirely. People nowadays are addicted to such temporary content because their attention span is short and they want to consume content in a rapid manner. Great examples of temporary content are Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat Stories, which disappear after 24 hours. The content shared via Stories is more engaging and acts as an addiction to users, so they spend hours scrolling through one Story after another.
Business owners who want to follow the latest social media trends must take advantage of the temporary content and publish their companies’ content on these platforms. Building a brand requires following the trends such as the temporary content. Companies tend to post a Story on one of these social media platforms at least once per week in order to stay up to date with the trends and get people’s attention.
Emergence of New Social Media Platforms
Till now, the social media trends were revolving around the two major and most popular platforms: Facebook and Instagram. Other popular social media platforms are LinkedIn for businesses and for developing a B2B strategy, as well as Twitch for the gaming community. In the past several years, other platforms have begun increasing their dominance and approaching the already popular ones mentioned above. In 2020, other social media platforms, such as TikTok for instance, will continue emerging. Youngsters have made TikTok so popular that even companies are beginning to discover new ways how to use these platforms in their favor. TikTok is a social platform where companies can create their personalized marketing channel. This channel can be used for creating new branded videos for the company.
Once companies create their own accounts on TikTok, users can get an immediate preview of the short one-minute videos that the companies post. The company’s videos will get higher engagement even if the number of followers is very low. This is one of the advantages that TikTok offers to companies. Moreover, marketing a business on TikTok will increase the user’s engagement, due to the fact that 90 percent of TikTok users enter the app numerous times on a daily basis.
Domination of Video Content
Another of the newest social media trends for 2020 is the increased domination of the video content. It is general knowledge that younger people do not want to waste their time reading long articles. Instead, they prefer watching short videos that will grasp their attention while providing them with beneficial information at the same time. Video content is engaging users regardless of whether it is in a short format for TikTok or Stories, or it is in a long format as the videos for YouTube. In 2020, most of the online content is expected to be converted into video content, adapted for each of the social media platforms.
Companies that have not yet created video content are advised to begin with their content strategy in order to keep up with the latest social media trends. Furthermore, they need to become aware of how to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for optimizing their video content and obtain a high position on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). To begin, business owners can begin uploading Stories on their social media platforms and then pass over to longer videos for YouTube.
Expansion of the Social Commerce
In 2020, social commerce will continue to expand as one of the social media trends that are going to mark the new decade. Popular brands have been using social media platforms to sell their products. The most used platforms for social commerce in the past years have been Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. In the new decade that has just begun, business owners expect social commerce to be the new retail channel, in addition to websites and offline stores.
Social commerce is one of the social media trends that is expected to continue growing through the introduction of features such as posts that enable online shopping. Business owners who have recognizable brands will continue using social commerce for improving their sales strategies. Companies plan to use social networks and evolve them to retail platforms that will help their brands to sell their products easily. That way social commerce will continue trending and business owners will carry on with shoppable posts on social media.
Reshaping of the Social Media Landscape
The final and most interesting social media trend for 2020 is the possibility of having the social media landscape reshaped. In the last year, there has been a rumor that social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram will remove the number of likes under every photo. Removing the number of likes on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is due to the fact that people see the number of likes as a determination of their social value. This in many cases has proven to be very bad for people’s mental health and that is why Facebook and Instagram plan to reshape the social media landscape by removing the number of likes thus preventing a social value to be added to each person.
However, if these media platforms reshape the social media landscape, brands will be unable to measure the impact of their Facebook or Instagram campaigns. Removing the number of likes from the two most popular social media platforms may cause problems with the companies’ campaigns. However, this may also prove to be useful for brands because they may get encouraged to invest their money in Facebook and Instagram Ads and track the Return on Investment (ROI). Getting marketers to use the ads features could also cause a major transformation in the social media marketing strategy. If this works, other social media may try and do the same reshaping method by removing the number of likes. We can hardly wait and see whether this trend will happen or not.
Sources:
- hootsuite.com/research/social-trends
- searchenginejournal.com/2020-social-media-trends/342851/
- searchenginejournal.com/social-media/
- searchenginejournal.com/social-media/biggest-social-media-sites/
- influencermarketinghub.com/social-media-trends/
- medium.com/@bryanswitalski/6-surprising-advantages-of-tiktok-marketing-for-your-brand-e777d5771f68