For small businesses, social media marketing is the best way to have effective marketing in a cost-friendly way. However, social media marketing is influenced greatly by social media trends. Therefore, this article explores the top 10 social media trends worth knowing for small business marketing in 2023. So, let’s jump right to it.
There are over 4.6 million social media users worldwide, and the figure is going to increase with every passing year. With the growing number of social media users, businesses are also increasing their social media spending. It is projected that social media spending will reach up to $384.90 billion by 2027, with an annual growth rate of 9.4% from 2023-2027.
Influencer Marketing
Ever since the pandemic, the number of social-media celebrities or influencers has increased immensely. TikTok has helped many new everyday influencers to emerge. Businesses are also benefiting from influencers greatly, as such influencers help reach a large audience in the easiest way.
Influencer marketing has remained one of the key focus of marketers in 2023, and this is predicted to be the same in 2024. You can claim your share if you boost TikTok followers using established partners. However, it is likely that micro or nano influencers are seen as more beneficial because their audience trusts their opinions. Influencers who specialize in excellent narration related to your brand industry are the best fit. Therefore, it is believed that targeting a few micro-influencers and running marketing campaigns for a few months with them will help small businesses see a boom in their sales.
TikTok Marketing
TikTok became popular during the pandemic, and now it has over 1 billion monthly active users. It is highly popular with the young audience, so it seems best to target the millennial and Gen Z audience. The popularity of TikTok does not seem to slow down in 2023, and so does the marketing spending and the need for a top TikTok Ad Agency.
In fact, 85% of e-commerce brands are going to increase their advertisement spending on TikTok in 2023. So, if your small business is targeting the young generation, then TikTok is best for creating and marketing short-form videos of your brand.
Dominance of Video-Form Content
According to Cisco, 82% of consumer internet traffic will be in video form by 2022, which is almost a 73% increase from 2017. But the dominance is getting more towards short-form of videos, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc.
In addition, many brands are now opting for live-streaming for more engagement with a targeted audience. The live streams often demonstrate a product, promote an event, tell a story, or share other brand news. Therefore, video-form content will dominate social media in 2023, so social media marketing should be focused more on video content.
Growth of Social Commerce
Instead of visiting brands’ websites, social media users now prefer buying products directly from the social media platform. For example, Facebook now provides a separate tab of “Marketplace”.
As per Accenture, social commerce is likely to become a $1.2 trillion channel by 2025. Therefore, small businesses should emphasize on more friendly social commerce experience for users. They can market a few main products instead of the whole store and help consumers complete the purchase with minimal clicks.
Customer Service via Social Media
Customers no longer like to call or email brands for their queries. They intend to have more direct interaction with the brands via social media. As per Microsoft’s report on the Global State of Customer Service, 54% of the participants had a favorable opinion of those brands that address requests/complaints of customers directly from social media.
Customers like to have a feeling of relationship with brands, which is a key marketing tactic for small businesses. Therefore, they should tend to make customers feel more valued and provide them with direct top-notch customer service via active presence on social media.
Behind-the-Scenes Posts
Customers like brands that are transparent and open about the behind-the-scenes work environment. 53% of consumers say that the transparency of the brand attracts them to make the next purchases. Many brands show very formal behind-the-scenes posts, but if they create funny or interesting posts, it can engage consumers more. For example, you can place a camera at the entrance door of your office and record when employees reach in the morning and show the lazy ones in a fun way. Similarly, you can share a video about office pets if you are a pet supply brand.
According to the Facebook survey, 62% of participants acknowledged that they are attracted to brands’ products after seeing them on Facebook and Instagram stories. Therefore, small businesses can create unique and funny behind-the-scenes posts and share them as stories for more engagement from the targeted audience.
Social SEO
With the growing use of social media, users are now also using it for searching brands and products. As per Google’s internal research, 40% of 18-24 years of age users use social media as their main search engine. In fact, Hootsuite’s internal research showed that SEO posts (keyword-optimized captions) resulted in a 30% increased reach compared to hashtags.
Other than the young generation, all other generation groups are also seen using social media actively to search for brands and products. Therefore, it is important for small business brands to focus on more social SEO-optimized content to maximize their chances of winning the top search slots and increasing their reach.
Local Marketing
Social media users are also getting more attracted to brands that are closer to them. Moreover, considering the growing competition, brands are emphasizing more on location-based marketing to grab local consumers.
Geo-tagging in content is the best way to target a local audience. For example, small businesses can use Facebook to boost a post under targeted locations to reach a specific audience. So, small businesses that believe the local audience can bring in more sales must involve local marketing in their 2023 marketing strategy.
The Use of AI
AI is just booming today. There are tons of AI software that are turning hours of manual work into click-based instant solutions. For example, Jasper, ChatGPT, CopyAI, and similar others are now helping brands to create engaging and smart posts and content for their products. Forrester even predicts that AI-based software will grow 50% faster compared to the whole software market in the next two years.
Without any doubt, AI will be a big thing in 2023. Many brands will test out AI capabilities. Moreover, small businesses might seem to even more actively use AI for social media marketing owing to the cost benefits it offers. Therefore, the use of AI in marketing will be another social media trend worth watching in 2023.
Podcast Marketing
The podcast is an emerging video content on social media. Every influencer is either starting his/her own podcast or going to others’ podcasts. And the best part, social media users are actively listening to podcasts. There are globally over 460 million podcast listeners today. The podcast industry is also an excellent place for brands to market. In fact, Nielson surveyed 7,000 U.S. consumers and showed that 78% of the participants said they were not annoyed with sponsored messages in podcasts.
Wrapping Up
Over the past few years, the use of social media has skyrocketed. For small businesses, social media is the best marketing channel to reach a vast audience with minimal marketing capital. The above social media trends are some of the likely ones to influence in 2023. Therefore, as a small business owner, consider the above trends in your marketing strategy and set up rewarding social media marketing campaigns for 2023.