2019 Social Year in Review

At the end of each year, I like to look back at the social trends I predicted at the start of the year and see how I did. It's like the Instagram Top Nine, but for social trends. Or, in true perfectionist, overly competitive personality style, I like to make sure I was right.

One example of this: in a post I wrote in 2016, I talked about how messaging is the new media - social communications were getting smaller and Gen Z was shaping a new 1-1 trend. At F8 in April 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced "the future is private" and focused on Facebook's shift away from the news feed and towards private communication & messaging platforms. Have I mentioned I like being right?

If you want to skip the 2019 year in review and dive head first into 2020, I wrote this post on 2020 trends.

Prediction #1: Social Commerce Will Follow Consumer Behavior and Win

Prior to 2019, there were many attempts to crack the code for social commerce, many things called social commerce that weren't, and solutions that were ultimately beneficial to the retailer or social channel, but not consumer-centric or consumer-demanded.

Social commerce was developed and pushed, before the consumer was ready to pull. Buyable pins launched in 2015, but consumers weren't quite ready to buy. Facebook first tried to launch "Stores" in 2011 but ultimately removed that feature (note: shopping is back now but in a different form). We were pushing features at consumers that did not want to transact on social.

We started to see a shift in this dichotomy around 2016-2018, where the consumer behavior began to shift at a quicker rate than social platforms were developing commerce focused products. So, my first prediction for 2019 was social commerce will start to follow consumer behavior and win. This was truly a huge shift in momentum that had started to pick up in 2018 where social platforms seemed to be playing catch up vs. trying to build things consumers weren't ready for.

Consumers have been using Pinterest to shop for years, but 2018 was the first time marketers could leverage Pinterest Shopping, a tool that actually connects the pins to the product feed (much like Google Shopping or Facebook Dynamic Product Ads). New Pinterest Product Pins have driven retail site traffic by 40% from the previous Buyable Pins format. 

Right or Wrong? RIGHT

To be fair, one way to make sure you are "right" when you predict things is to make vaguely worded predictions like "win." But, I digress...

Social is the perfect channel to play in the commerce space because it is so largely mobile. In 2020, 49.2% of all e-commerce sales in the US will be conducted on mobile devices. Messaging apps will also make an impact. Over 200 million users added payment information to WeChat giving Tenecent, WeChat’s parent company, 37% market share of the Chinese mobile payment market3. While social messaging and commerce are still growing in the US, looking at China allows us to see how user-behavior may continue to evolve across the globe. 

On March 19, 2019, Instagram introduced checkout on Instagram, allowing users to purchase products without ever leaving the app. This product has huge potential as Instagram has capitalized on a lot of the social commerce landscape through influencers. According to a CivicScience survey, 34% of daily US Instagram users have purchased a product/service based on an Influencer/blogger. This is higher than any other social network, with Twitter at 29% and YouTube at 26%. If Instagram continues to grow at its current rate and influencers continue to be a large force on the platform, we can expect further shopping developments on Instagram to be extremely successful.

Facebook announced Facebook Pay in November 2019 - providing users with a secure way to transact within their family of apps. This looks a lot different than the Facebook Store of 2011.

Final thoughts: Social Commerce will only continue to expand in 2020, attempting to capitalize on the mobile payment ecosystem.

Prediction #2: The Year for Visual Search to Take Off

The search landscape is continuing to rapidly evolve, with voice and visual search forcing marketers and brands, especially in the commerce space, to adapt. Visual search suits itself perfectly for social, a visual-based platform. This wasn't new to 2019, but visual search did become more advanced, prevalent on more channels, and connected closer to commerce than ever before. 

In a survey in the US and UK, 62.2% of younger and 61.7% of older millennials said they would like to add the ability to search by image (visual search) to their digital shopping experience. This ranked higher than shoppable content, augmented reality, and even live chat (digital assistants). Visual search revenue is expected to hit $12.7 million in 2019 and grow to $835.7 million by 2022. Further, consumers are more receptive to being served visual information over textual.

Right or Wrong? It's Complicated

Much like voice search, visual search is still not quite marketable. We can't yet bid on voice searches and we can't bid on image searches. However, we do see the trend continue to grow from a user behavior and adoption perspective.

On July 30, 2019, Pinterest introduced two new shopping features: browsable catalogs alongside Pins, and personalized shopping ideas in the feed. Pinterest released this news in conjunction with a study they did with Neustar. The study found that Pinterest ads made up 11% of total media spend for the five brands reviewed, but created 18% of incremental sales and revenue. They concluded that ads on Pinterest are 2.3X more efficient than social networks, 1.5X more than paid search, and 1.1X more than display. Seems great on paper, but we have to dig in more. 

Pinterest offers dynamic retargeting within Shopping that drives stronger performance than overall, but we still can’t scale it to the extent of other feed-based tactics across digital. When consumers know what they want to buy, they turn to other commerce, social, search and digital channels.

But, when consumers are discovering what they want, and turn to visual search, Pinterest pulls strong. Neustar found that more than 75% of the sales from Pinterest came a week after ads were seen. Pinterest notes that 97% of the top 1,000 searches are for non-branded search terms – capturing people when they are still exploring, and not yet ready to buy. Meanwhile, generic text terms on search tend to be our worst performing search tactic. Pinterest is winning at discovery, but still not quite there when it comes time to close the sale. In order for Pinterest to really dominate, it has to win the entire purchase journey, from discovery through the close. 

Final thoughts: Visual Search will be integral to the discovery phase of the consumer journey but, like voice search, has developments to make in 2020 to become marketable.

Prediction #3: Social Will Try to Compete With Streaming Platforms

Time spent per day with subscription OTT (over-the-top) video is expected to hit 42.56 minutes, increasing 10.7%, in 2020. This means OTT is growing faster than time spent with audio, social networks and the online video category as a whole. Further, pay TV (linear TV) households are expected to decrease to 82.9MM (-4.2%) while non-pay TV households (i.e. cord cutters and cord nevers) are increasing to 44.3MM (+10.2%) in 2020.

So, we know social has an opportunity to secure more TV and Video dollars, but it also needed to fundamentally change to do that. Feed-based experiences won't make the cut.

Right or Wrong? RIGHT

This is another great example of a way to write a trend and make sure you are right...

Facebook Watch hit 140 million daily users in June 2019. To put this in perspective, Netflix hit 139 million subscribers (meaning they do have more viewers) in 2019. Hulu has about 82 million viewers. If Facebook Watch continues to grow at the rate it is (+86.7% from December 2018 - June 2019), and knowing it has over 2 billion global users, it could become one of the largest long form video streaming platforms in use. Further, the 140 million users spend an average of 26 minutes per day watching video (up from 20 minutes in December 2018). Facebook is pushing Watch with a combination of exclusive content and a media campaign promoting adoption.

Facebook also released IGTV for longer form video on Instagram in 2018, but has yet to release concrete user statistics.

Final thoughts: OTT and streaming will only continue to grow in 2020, leaving huge opportunities for social platforms like Facebook Watch to capture video dollars.

Prediction #4: Stories Are The New Feed

Back in 2018, Stories were set to surpass feed consumption, growing 15X faster than feeds. Creation and consumption for Stories was also up 842 percent from early 2016. Stories existed across multiple social channels, and were growing faster than any other format. 2018 was basically the year everyone and their mother got a Stories format (even LinkedIn).

Right or Wrong? RIGHT

Stories continued to grow massively in 2019. Stories in the Facebook ecosystem hit 500 million daily active users, that is over 2X Snapchat.

Not only are Stories growing in consumption and users, they are also changing the way that users engage with content (and ultimately brands) on social. On Instagram, people engage differently than feed: 40% of Stories are video, 60% played sound on, and 1 in 5 results in a direct message. Users can shop in Stories, from retailers, DTCs and from influencers. Instagram also expanded its dynamic product ad format to run in Stories in 2019.

Even with the clear success of the Stories format, there are still lags in advertising, many due to brands not creating enough Stories-specific content. Facebook tried to help with this by allowing feed formats to auto-create a Story to expand placements over the last couple years, but still, some brands struggle to get on board.

Final thoughts: Stories are killing feed growth. If brands aren't creating vertical-first content in 2020, they will risk falling tremendously behind.

The Bottom Line: 2019 was all about commerce, long-form video and Stories

Bring on 2020.

Sources:

• PracticalEcommerce: Top 51 Facebook Pages With Stores
• Statista: U.S. mobile retail commerce sales as percentage of retail e-commerce sales from 2017 to 2021
• ARtillery: The Camera is the New Search Box
• ViSenze Study: New Research from ViSenze Finds 62 Percent of Generation Z and Millennial Consumers Want Visual Search Capabilities, More Than Any Other New Technology
• Variety: Facebook Watch Hits 140 Million Daily Users, Premiere Dates for Upcoming Originals
• Statista: WhatsApp Status DAU
• Techcrunch: Stories are about to surpass feed sharing, now what
• Adsmurai: Instagram Stories Dynamic Ads Sky Rocket Sales through Stories