Social media marketing in 2022 is a confusing landscape. Just 3 years ago, there were only two social platforms a brand needed to have a presence on: Facebook and Instagram.
These days there are dozens of platforms. LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap Chat, TikTok, YouTube… the list goes on. And on. And on and on.
So the burning question is – does your brand need to be active on every single one of these platforms? The answer is no. Hard no.
But, like. How do you know which ones to be on?
The answer is that your brand should be most active on the platforms that your target audience are most active on.
As the social media landscape has become more and more competitive, the platforms have had to niche down and target smaller segments of the audience. Just like every other industry ever, really. So where is everyone hanging out online these days?
Keep reading to learn about social media marketing in 2022, and where your users are spending their time engaging with content.
Social Media Platform Breakdown in 2022:
I have started to view Facebook kind of like a directory listing. I think every business – especially local business’ like hairdressers, restaurants, residential builders or tradesmen, childcare centres, florists, and other business-to-consumer brands – needs to have a presence on Facebook.
Having a presence on Facebook doesn’t mean posting three times day, constantly loading stories and videos, and investing hours and hours in building your audience.
Having a presence just means that you have a profile for your business that is kept up to date with the latest information. A lot of people look to Facebook to find address details, look at reviews, and look up opening hours. When they are doing this search, you want to make sure that your business – and the information that they’re looking for – is available. A lot of consumers are also starting to rely more on Facebook Messenger as a preferred communication channel with brands – opting to send a message rather than pick up the phone.
So if your company or brand doesn’t have a profile, then you are potentially missing out on customers.
As to how active you need to be on Facebook – well I’d say a post once a week would suffice. Use your Facebook feed as more of a notice board to share new products, daily specials, changes to opening hours, stock availability and other news-worthy announcements.
Facebook Groups:
I also think it is worth mentioning that Facebook currently has a lot of opportunity for businesses to promote themselves and reach new audiences in Facebook Groups. Most local communities these days have a Facebook Group where residents in the area share community news, traffic updates and town gossip. Most of them also encourage their members to support the local small businesses and will allow promotional posts from small businesses from time to time.
So if you are a local business and you’re not an active member of your area’s community Facebook Group – I highly recommend you join; some of your most engaged and loyal customers could be hiding in there without you even knowing!
Instagram:
Instagram is having a bit of an identity crisis in 2022. There is a huge opportunity for the platform to take advantage of the recent Social Shopping trend, fuelled by Covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns. A lot of the new features to be added to the platform in the past 12 months really seem to revolve around making it easier to shop online from Instagram, without ever having to leave the app.
However, while this opportunity seems like an obvious choice and ripe for the picking, the Insta team seem to be more concerned with copying everything that TikTok does.
Social media platforms age out pretty quickly. Kids don’t want to be hanging out in the same places online as their parents, so the moment you start to get mum’s signing up to a social media platform it promptly becomes uncool, and the kids migrate to something new.
We saw it happen to Facebook when Instagram first launched, and now we’re seeing it happen to Instagram with TikTok.
The Instagram feed is starting to behave more and more like the TikTok feed with videos that have been shot in the ‘reel’ format performing better than traditional photo-and-text posts. If you’re active on both platforms, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the content is being created for TikTok, and when it has run its course on that platform, is being repurposed onto Instagram. This means that there isn’t a lot of great unique content on the Instagram platform at the moment.
The people who are still trying to create new content aren’t getting the eyeballs that they deserve because they aren’t doing it in the reel format, and the people posting reels are just repurposing content from TikTok.
So Instagram is feeling a big stale at the moment. I wouldn’t write it off completely because there are still a lot of active daily users – and I am sure there is opportunity there for brands and businesses to create new unique content in the reel format specifically for Instagram. But I’m just not seeing a lot of that happening yet.
Hopefully, Instagram sees the light and changes tactic, opting to focus their energies on the ecommerce social shopping space instead, where I think they could really carve out a unique offering.
TikTok:
Ok, so following on from Instagram we have TikTok.
TikTok has a young demographic at the moment – but as it continues to grow, more people in their 20s and 30s are joining the platform.
This is a social media platform that has really managed to merge entertainment with social media. YouTube tried to do this, but never really got the ‘social’ part down pat. People spend hours and hours a day on TikTok, consuming 60 second video after 60 second video.
The videos and content at their core are entertaining. Some are educational and promotional as well – but they certainly aren’t promotional.
I think there is great opportunity for brands that are light-hearted and jovial to have real success on TikTok. There are a lot more eyeballs than content creators on the platform at the moment, so if you can come up with some entertaining content to film, then you can really cut through the noise.
I see TikTok as being a really great platform to grow your brand awareness – you’re probably not going to see a huge quantity of direct sales or ROI from the platform, but you might see spikes in your website traffic, in people searching Google for your business name, and in foot traffic if you have a physical address. TikTok can help get you on the radar, and then your other sales and marketing channels can work to close the sale.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is my personal favourite. It is an amazing platform for building a personal brand and establishing yourself as an industry thought leader. It is one of the easiest platforms to build an organic audience on, and decent content posted on company profiles can easily reach 120% of your audience – with out any paid boosts!
There is so much that I love about LinkedIn that it is probably deserving of its own blog article but here are a couple of things:
- The search functionality – there are no other social media platforms where you can search for your target audience by their demographical information. LinkedIn lets you search by location, by job title or level of industry experience, by company size and by several other factors. You can then connect and engage with these users in a one-to-one format. If you tried to do this on any other social media platform, it would be creepy af.
- User behaviour – people tend to use LinkedIn during business hours. They also tend to view the platform on a desktop instead of a mobile device. This has a number of benefits – more space / real estate for your content and marketing messages, as well as more attention span. They are looking directly at your content, rather than having one eye on your content and the other eye on the latest episode of MAFs. It also makes replying to comments and messages easier – you don’t have to make yourself available from 6pm-10pm every day because that is when your audience is most active. Rather, you can keep an eye on your comments and inbox during business hours.
- Users-to-Content Ratio: There are currently more users on LinkedIn than there is content. This means that when you post content, you don’t have to spend hours analysing hashtag data, or strateising the best time of day to post. Content on LinkedIn has a much longer lifespan – it’s a slow burn, and you can be getting comments and new views on posts weeks after the post first went live.
LinkedIn works best for business-to-business brands and professional services, but I’ve noticed a lot more people in industries like construction, retail, childcare, and e-commerce starting to join the platform, so it will be interesting to see how that effects the algorithm and content trends.
Social media marketing in 2022 – and beyond
Social media platforms change and evolve quickly. They are constantly delivering new features and tools to their users in a bid to claw back a bigger share of the market, as well as to cement their presence within the segment that they currently have.
Different platforms become popular with different demographics as existing platforms ‘age out’. Just because your audience aren’t currently on a particular platform right now doesn’t mean that they won’t be in 6-12 months.
At BeKonstructive, we always advise our clients to pick the platforms that make the most sense to them NOW – but to keep an eye on how the others are tracking and trending with their demographic. It is better to do 1-2 social media channels really really well than to try and spread yourself too thin across 6. Social media is about consistency – consistent posting and engagement gains momentum over time and leads to greater brand awareness and audience growth.
If you’d like help with your social media strategy, get in touch with BeKonstructive today!
