It’s 2023 and we are hitting the ground running with the latest trends and strategies for social media marketing and content for the new year. In this blog we’ll discuss some of the potential trends to look for and start implementing into your business to stay engaged with your audiences, engage the existing ones, and grow even bigger.

#1: Short-Form Video 

It’s no surprise that videos have become the leader when it comes to content amongst many social media platforms. TikTok started the trend and reels (both IG and Facebook) have helped video grow. It’s not slowing down anytime soon. If you want your business to remain top of mind you’ll need to create short-form videos.

Do what is most comfortable to your brand. If you enjoy making goofy videos and it caters to your audience, go for it! If you’re more comfortable shooting content based on information or teaching your audience something, then focus solely on producing one to two incredibly helpful videos a month. It’s not necessarily about frequency but quality and repetition. Your consumer will learn your style and habitually will fall into pattern with you. 

#2: Proactive Audience Engagement Converts

Social media is as congested as it’s ever been making it more difficult to stand out amongst other businesses. The only way you’re going to survive is by being proactive and strategically engaging with your consumers. You’ll need to turn these followers into paying customers and developing a strategy to do this now will set you apart.

How will you do this?

• Create content to attract the right audience and potential client.
• Create engaging content to identify specific people in your audience who’ve shown interest in your offers.
• Reach out to those people and start a meaningful conversation with them.
• Close the deal.

This may seem time consuming at first but if you want to make the most out of your content, focus less on creating tons of it and more on how to convert those followers into customers. The followers and engagement are great but if they don’t convert, is your time well spent?

#3: How Customer Care Will Lead to ROI

As social media develops, many people are forgetting about the importance of customer care. The brands engaging in social media customer care will continue to stay ahead of competitors. It’s one of the only marketing initiatives that tackles taking care of current clients and can actually lead to generation of new ones. Focusing just on content and not engagement and connecting will help you stand out. 

It’s now easier than ever for companies and brands to communicate directly with their customer base. A social media customer care program provides the perfect opportunity to listen and engage in brand conversation.

So much time and money is spent on content marketing but there is so much content being produced daily it can get overwhelming. What they really want is connection. Here’s how you can:

• Look over your social media channels to see where most of your customer care conversations and commentary is happening 
• Create content that gets people talking (e.g., stating their opinions and feelings)
• Respond to questions, complaints, and messages in your dm’s as quickly as possible on your social channels
• You can use social listenings to find conversations about your brand/company where you are being mentioned but you aren’t being tagged 

Keep this up and you’ll win 2023.

#4: Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizes Marketing

This year we will see rapid adoption of AI tools. This will unlock creativity at a level and scale that has never been seen before. This will allow AI to do much of the creative work leaving time for marketers to explore ideas that were previously beyond their reach. Those marketers who use AI solutions will have a strategic edge over those who don’t. 

Here are a few tools to keep your eyes and ears peeled for:

• Mid-Journey- “a text to image AI platform enables anyone to create stunning visual images with nothing but written prompts.” This will easily allow companies to have images that relate to their consumer’s interests and needs very quickly and creatively. 
• ChatGPT- “a natural language processing tool that brings incredibly high-quality writing assistance to marketers.” This will help embellish the customer experience and create personalized and efficient messaging to save time on your end as well. 

#5: Facebook Marketing Trends 

It’s no surprise that Facebook is also having to adapt and make changes to keep up with the other social media platforms such as TikTok. 2023 will be no exception. Look no further than video, specifically, 9:16 format and Reels. They’re going to be trending and staying on top of this will help keep your brand relevant with the rest of the successful businesses.

The short-form videos are actually growing in popularity. Although this is true, marketers should also test publishing in the Reels format with short vertical videos as regular feed posts too. In some cases, the latter might actually perform better! Try out both and see what’s working and what’s not. 

Interestingly enough, what we focused on so heavily before like engagement, followers, reach, etc. won’t be as important as you think moving forward. Try focusing instead on what matters to your brand, quietly building relationships and growing your businesses without all that fuss. 

​​Social media will always be important to your marketing strategy but it’s time to focus on what’s important to you and your business versus just jumping on some temporary trend that everyone else is doing. 

It’s time we go back to our social media roots, when we could create meaningful and lasting connections, be a part of a community, and building relationships was easier. We miss the depth that Facebook used to provide us and the more immediate connections we could make. 

Keep pushing for this in 2023. We’ll get back to our roots by doing so. 

#6: Machine Learning and AI Improve Facebook Ads

Facebook and Instagram Ads will get better results with AI and machine learning in 2023. It’s already been better than the beginning of 2022 and will deliver better results with a lower cost. We think this is due to some making the move over to TikTok who really want to leverage video more frequently. 

Wider campaign targeting is also becoming better as the algorithm improves, which will make it easier for advertisers to maximize their budget. We won’t have to do as much audience testing which will make it easier for advertisers to get better results as Facebook will do a lot of the optimization for us.

Facebook is bringing back some of the tools that they had taken away, like the longer 28-day attribution window and attribution comparison. This means they’re getting better at the modeling process and will help advertisers see more of the results from their ads. 

AI will become more important in making the ad creation process faster in terms of writing ads and creating the right images too. We’ll be able to plug in what type of text we want and what type of image to create and then make adjustments as needed. The thought is that Facebook will incorporate this directly into the platform some time in the future.

#7: Authenticity Rules Over in the Instagram Feed

Such a heavily discussed topic in the last few years but I think it’s obvious to see now that Instagram may be shifting their target audience to the Gen Z crowd. Interestingly enough the entire Instagram Trend Report this past year only surveyed Gen Z users making this even more accurate. Millennials have been the main focus from the start that grew instagram and brought it to what it is today. 

The reason for the shift was caused by Gen Z not getting on with Instagram’s “perfect” perception. This is why many moved to TikTok because of its authentic persona and realism. We see this as a new trend for Instagram that will not stop anytime soon. Content will become more authentic, and so will their creators. People who show up as themselves, businesses that stand for a specific cause, and platforms/businesses that promote well-being in life overall.

When it comes to new features (outside of Reels), I believe we’ll see a lot of new ones rolled out related to helping creators monetize. Audio-specific content, like podcasting, has been discussed more recently .

The Instagram Trend Report showed two things: social media users plan to monetize their platforms this year and Gen Z users hope to hear podcasts from their favorite social media creators in 2023. 

Knowing this, the focus will definitely shift to cater to their needs. We can already post almost every type of content on Instagram: stories, photos, videos, long-form “blogs” with guides, direct message, voice memo, go live, etc. We wouldn’t be surprised if podcasting became an addition to this. 

#8: 2023 LinkedIn Trends: Video Is Seen Less

LinkedIn has been creating a lot of advancements to the platform over the past year. They’re making it very clear what will and will not work best. 

Shorter posts will continue to perform well. As a result of more content being created and our shortening attention spans, shorter-form content will continue to do better. Newsletters were rolled out to most users in 2021. Initially, these had a high engagement rate but it’s clear that newsletters are getting less engagement than before. Keep your posts short—anything from 150 to around 1,200 characters will perform best.

Something I found quite shocking since all other platforms are promoting the opposite, is that videos will be seen less. They’re not performing as well as they may have hoped. You may have noticed that LinkedIn added auto-captions to videos and introduced the capacity for the viewer to switch to high contrast for better visibility. Despite these new features, video is being seen by far fewer people. Be sure to test and measure repeatedly so you can keep a close eye on what’s working and what’s not. Similar to the written content, keep your videos shorter too (30-90 seconds). 

Still images will help a post get higher engagement. It seems that LinkedIn audiences do want pictures! Posts with images are performing better than those without. Be sure to check in with your audience still but the trend is showing images are here to stay. We’ve also noticed an uptick in the number of document posts with a combination of text and images. Try to add between one and four pictures to your posts, use document posts for instructional purposes, testimonials, and displaying products.

Not so shocking, but personal content will continue to do well. The past 3 years have shown a significant increase in personal content on the platform. As business trends continue to change in favor of creating more personal relationships in the working environment, the same will happen on LinkedIn. Create personal content within your marketing strategy but don’t let it take over and leverage as you see fit with your brand. Try to relate any personal content back to the work environment.

Get After IT!

There is so much changing and evolving in the social media and marketing space as the growth of AI and technology develops with our consumer behaviors and demands. Keep an eye out for the latest features and updates. There’s a reason these are being introduced but find a way to use them that works with your company and makes sense with your marketing strategy. Don’t join a fad just because it’s “popular” for the month. Join because it gives you inspiration and allows your creators to think about something in a new light. 2023 is your YEAR!