Social media is seeing disruptions in long-standing networks in 2022. The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk has brought about vulnerability and volatility in a social media site that’s arguably one of the backbones of the social media space.
Social networks like Hive and Mastodon have begun to make inroads into space that has been roiled by changes to Twitter, creating an opportunity for new social networks to invade the previous Twitter-Meta duopoly. Meanwhile, short video formats continue to expand, with people looking for bite-size content to have a conversation with. Here are some important social media trends as of November 2022.
TikTok May Have Congress Problems
All social media platforms gather information about their users. That is the nature of the medium. However, with a new incoming House majority eager to make its mark, it’s likely that TikTok will be particularly targeted on account of being developed in China.
Certain parties in the incoming United States Government wish to have a scapegoat in the Chinese government and its ruling Communist Party and will likely use TikTok as a proxy target in their ongoing combativeness toward the United States’ largest global trading partner. The FBI has concerns as well and may investigate the social network.
Twitter Definitely Has an Elon Musk Problem
Twitter remains the world’s premier social media platform. Originating in 2004, it was brought to prominence by celebrities and politicians using it to communicate with fans and constituents and remains highly popular social media site that many people use on a daily basis to communicate with their online community. Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform resulted in a disruption of its user base. With Apple signaling uneasiness about its continued presence on Twitter, there may be new questions about the platform’s viability going forward.
Twitter’s Userbase Splinters To Hive Social, Mastodon
While a substantial contingent of users will remain on Twitter so long as Twitter remains a viable platform, some users are looking for an alternative. Tumblr is still around, but a less prominent alternative because of the controversies over adult content that led to its user base fleeing for more permissive platforms like Twitter (then), which also had a higher profile.
Hive Social is one of the two social media platforms absorbing the bulk of the Twitter exodus. The previously obscure, image-focused social media platform struggled for a few days under the load of incoming users but appears to have been rebounding. Hive Social advertises a chronological feed versus Twitter and Facebook, which curate posts based on an algorithm that can result in people responding to tweets or posts that are days or months out of date. Hive Social balances a chronological timeline with curated content on the basis of user interests and reintroduces features like profile music that have last been seen on social media on the now-defunct platform MySpace.
Mastodon is the other major social media platform absorbing departing Twitter users. Mastodon advertises similarities to Twitter and its interface is much like Twitter’s, but in terms of its functionality, it closely resembles Discord, with users offering curated Mastodon servers that cluster like-minded users together.
SEO Will Expand Into The Social Media Space
Hashtags have been part of social media since the media began. Twitter started using hashtags in 2004 to organize content by subject, and they became community spaces rather than just agglomerations of subject matter. Hashtags like #shoutythursday and #derbytwitter are not just ways to search for content, but communities of supportive people gathered around a specific theme.
With Generation Z’s online presence concentrated in social media, many members of Generation Z have begun using social media search engines as a primary alternative to Google. Social media SEO will become increasingly important in this environment, as hashtags become less important to accurate research as well-formed SEO words and phrases that can guide customers to your content.
Short Video And TikTok Will Continue To Shine
Regardless of legal and regulatory troubles that it may encounter in 2023-24, TikTok is a global phenomenon and, especially with Twitter suffering severe issues relating to Elon Musk’s takeover, it only promises to grow and expand in the coming years. The problems with Twitter, however, will only accelerate already-existing trends in social media.
Short video content is a compelling form of interaction, with videos of 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Short-form video has the highest ROI of any form of social media content, with a 30% ROI. 84% of people have been convinced to make a purchase via short-form video. As of March 2022, YouTube Shorts had is already racking up a staggering 5 trillion views, or roughly 700 views per human being alive on Earth.
As the world’s premier short-form video online service, TikTok has competition from Meta subsidiaries, Facebook and Instagram, in the form of Reels and Stories, respectively, as well as Alphabet-owned YouTube’s Shorts functionality. As the originator of most videos that eventually end up on these other platforms, however, TikTok stands to benefit the most from its brand recognition and strong presence in the online video space. Snapchat’s Spotlight functionality serves as a competitor to TikTok, and restricts its availability to creators – brands are not permitted to post Spotlights on Snapchat, though this may change.
LinkedIn Integrates With GitHub
LinkedIn is the most popular professional social media platform on the internet. With a base of 875 million users in 20 countries, 10% of the world’s population is active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s alliance with the programming depository website GitHub allows the business social media giant to offer tech-focused training through its LinkedIn Learning section. These modules are by some of the most visible programmers on the internet, through the internet’s most trusted name in coding. Learn more about LinkedIn by giving us a call, your Tampa digital marketing agency!
Social Commerce Is Increasing Its Market Share In 2022 And Will Continue In 2023.
Social media marketing is one thing, but e-commerce via social media is also becoming increasingly prevalent. With seamless integration of social media and e-commerce allowing customers to purchase products directly from a social media post, e-commerce SEO is going to become an increasingly important skill for social media marketers.
According to a new report from Accenture, social commerce will grow three times as fast as traditional e-commerce in the coming years, estimating a global market of $1.2 trillion by 2025. Over half of American adults have made a social media purchase in 2022. One of the biggest challenges for social commerce coming from those who have not made a purchase on social media is the preference for traditional retail formats (44%), with distrust of platforms with payment information (43%) a close second and unsureness over the legitimacy of the products (33%) being a third major factor.
Facebook has the most trust of any of the social media platforms for social commerce, but only 45% of buyers said they felt confident on Facebook. Craigslist continues to lose market share, despite having been the original social commerce platform. It is also not currently in the top 5 social commerce platforms. Craigslist may be draining overall confidence in social commerce. In fact, many social commerce habits, such as being wary of sellers and finding highly public places to make purchase transfers, were born out of hazards found on Craigslist.
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