Here, top minds in social media advertising weigh in on where businesses should put their emphasis in the year 2022.
Social media marketers have a lot to think about when they plan their strategies and budgets for 2022.
With 57% year-over-year revenue growth, its first billion-dollar quarter, and 300 million daily active users, Snapchat has emerged as a key player in social media marketing.
Against the background of scathing whistleblower evidence and increased calls for its regulation, Meta emerged as the platform formerly known as Facebook.
They’ll be looking for alternatives to Facebook as they deal with the platform’s low organic reach (5.2%) and engagement rate (0.25%).
TikTok, which has as many users as Instagram has had in its whole over the past many years, is one of these potential replacements.
YouTube, which has over 2 billion unique visitors per month, will serve as the second.
One of the first forms of social media, along with photo-sharing sites, social networks, blogs, and microblogs, they will rediscover that YouTube is a video-sharing site.
Facebook, for example, adopted a “video first strategy” in 2014, while Instagram said in 2021 that it was “no longer just a square photo-sharing app” in order to shift its emphasis to video.
Because of this, they have less opportunity to connect with potential buyers.
And it’s the only one that really stands up on CTVs, or linked televisions. (eMarketer predicts that there will be 113.1 million US YouTube users in 2020, rising to 130.8 million by 2022).
Thus, in 2022, social media marketers will seek to have YouTube at the top table.
Note: I only include the eMarketer projections for CTVs below. When you factor in users from desktop computers as well as mobile devices, YouTube has far more.
When it comes to targeting and personas, brands will go more specific than ever before.
Increases in digital advertising spending (by an expected 12.7% in 2021 and by as much as 49% in some places) and the impending cookie-less future are pushing personalisation and segmentation forward into 2022.
To reach their respective micro-segments, many firms may divide their advertising spend among a wide variety of channels, employing a wide range of smaller influencers.
This shift also indicates that brands are abandoning more rigid personalities. You know the ones; they have a name, a picture, and some basic information like age and location. And you test according to the preconceived notions you have formed based on that information.
By 2022, however, companies will be using far more specific and actionable forms, such as marital status, music taste, and movie preferences.
Designers, UX/UI experts, and content producers are just few of the professions who have started developing and using task-based user personas.
For instance, while designing anything, a designer may include:
- Screenshots of user interfaces that are particularly popular with a given demographic
- Their preferred colour schemes
- Most frequently visited advertisements
- Different sorts of sites are geared more towards being used for business or school than for leisure.
Creators of material may want to pay greater attention to the linguistic and behavioural variations between tasks including work, learning, and amusement.
Marketers are now taking into account a wider range of psychological data, such as consumers’ personalities, decision-making processes, ad preferences, and end objectives.
It is often up to the PPC expert to track down this data. But AI and ML are getting better and better at their jobs.
Existing software like Mnemonic AI and Delve is able to recognise a wide range of character features and is making great strides towards recognising finer-grained patterns.
And if it follows previous AI systems, it won’t be long until they can see trends that even the most seasoned user behaviour practitioner misses.
Meanwhile, those that put in the time and effort to fully understand these demographics will be rewarded.
Marketers will adjust to attribution problems and increase budget diversification.
Marketers will need to adjust to the reality of less obvious attribution and think about social as part of a holistic media strategy rather than connecting outcomes directly to one social platform as social platforms continue to encounter privacy and tracking difficulties.
As more advertisers come to terms with the fact that once-stable platforms like Facebook can experience volatility in advertising prices and consistency in outcomes, and as up-and-coming platforms like TikTok continue to acquire market share, these shifts will also contribute to an increase in the variety of media spending across platforms.
A lot of work goes into the algorithms that power paid social bidding.
For marketers on social media, 2017 was a year of ups and downs. Data modelling for better reporting and bidding is likely to see some tweaks and experiments in 2022.
As the bidding models’ algorithms are adjusted to function in a more privacy-first environment with greater data ambiguity, I expect (and hope) to see gains in performance for advertisers.
In a similar vein, I think we’ll see platforms experimenting with new ways to retain people on their sites, with an eye towards boosting conversion rates and putting more emphasis on first-party data in the hopes of providing marketers with fresh testing and expansion options supported by more accurate information.
Acceleration of preexisting social trends
What to expect on social media in 2022MightyHive’s Head of Enterprise Consulting Ilya Cherepakhin
In 2019, four social media movements will gain even more traction.
First, social media platforms are putting more effort into (and, one hopes, making more success with) content control.
The second change is a more extensive usage of paid social offers across the whole customer journey.
The onus of accountability for the platforms’ users’ actions is increasingly being placed on social media.
Previously, platforms had greater leeway in how actively they participated. That possibility ended this year due to a series of events.