The state of Social Media in 2022 and What’s Coming Next

You might recognise that particular "itch" to check-in if you haven't been on Social Media in a day or two, but did you know Social media has been in a funny place since the start of the pandemic?

Back in the spring of 2020, engagement soared on all platforms. True, as people began to self-isolate, social media became a lifeline to stay connected but yet as the months passed, social media quickly started to feel like Zoom. Yes, it was a lifeline, but you could become quickly exhausted by it.

As I mainly specialise in B2B marketing, I started tracking a couple of social media influencers that have a marketing spin to their offerings to see how they were doing. The vast majority of their social media posts are either videos or links to blogs, podcasts, or events. Historically, this seemed to work for them as in the fall of 2019, most of them got anywhere from 100 to 2,400 likes on their posts.

In the fall of 2020, things had changed.

They were maintaining their posting schedules and sharing several times each day, but their engagement had dropped to somewhere between 20 and 200 likes. That may still seem like a strong performance until you take into account the 329K followers. That means that even with 200 likes, they have engaged less than one per cent of their audience (.06% if you want to be exact).

In September of 2021, a scroll through feed shows that most of their posts are getting 20-30 likes, and they have dropped down to posting no more than once a day.

And the funny bit is that the posts that are making the biggest impact have nothing to do with marketing or business. It’s usually a shot of their dog or personal life that sees the most engagement.

In general, it's crazy how social media changes every year. We've seen platforms that get tons of engagement, lose relevancy in a short period of time like Clubhouse. And we've also seen platforms like TikTok just explode in just a couple of years.?

Today I want to talk about the state of Social Media in 2022, how did we get here and I will also try to make an educated guess on what’s coming next so that you can up your game and be prepared. And don’t worry I’m not going to give you cliche chewed-up advice like “create (and curate) engaging social content” or “research your target audience” … and etc.

We are going to have an honest conversation here.

Fame breeds trust, at least in our culture.?

Everyone is famous to fifteen hundred people. Some people are even famous to three thousand. And that’s a fascinating new phenomenon. When there are three thousand or ten thousand or five hundred thousand people who think you’re famous…it changes things. Not simply because they’ve heard about you, but because people they trust have heard of you as well.?

So the race to be slightly famous is on, and it’s being fueled by the social and tribal connections permitted by the internet. We give a lot of faith and credit to the famous, but now there are a lot more of them. Over time, once everyone is famous, that will fade, but right now, the trust and benefit of the doubt we accord the famous is quite valuable.?

Social Media companies are amazing in the sense that they figured out a way to monetise family ties, friendships and connections.

It is in human nature to crave social validation. I wonder if there's an easier way to boost your ego than posting a status and gathering numerous “likes” from your “friends” and “followers”.

Social media has brought the power to reach a massive audience at (literally) our fingertips. We can choose to show the aspects of our life that we want others to know and can conveniently hide what needs to be swept under the rug.

We are in control of who we are perceived to be and for some people perception equals reality. It becomes hard for them to stop because the pleasure they derive is unparalleled. No amount of recognition or appreciation is ever enough and they keep returning for more.

Social media is not leading people into becoming someone else, people are controlling the media to suit their own narcissistic needs.

People are not obsessed with the media as much as they're obsessed with themselves.?

So what’s the use of Social Media in 2022??

The main one is to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders, by leveraging the information “users” provide by selling it to advertisers and presenting you with as many ads your eyes can muster. At the end of the day, most social media sites are just glorified databases on some company’s server.

The second main use is to communicate ideas or words to people and arguably bring people closer together. However, as social media matures, most people see that it is not really true.?

Real communication is nuanced and full of context and meaning. Most social media services provide only shallow extensions of this, in order to make people feel like they are more popular or “liked” than they would be in real life.?

It is an illusion of real communication. It's like pretending that emojis will ever take the place of a full written sentence or paragraph. It can’t and it won’t.

For a few, they are able to make a lot of money by using so-called social media, however, usually, these people have either the drive, looks, or the right circumstances to really be successful in other things. However, this gives the impression that ANYONE can get rich on these platforms when in reality, very few can.?

To the most cynical among us, Social Media, in general, provides half-cooked tales of bringing people together and sharing experiences, however, UNLESS you pay for those services with cash, all the FREE services focus on either using your data to make money, or they use YOU watching and reading their ads to make money.?

So now let’s look at the Paid Advertisement side of things.

Does it worth paying for an ad in Social Media in 2022?

The short answer is - NO! It’s the false promise of the internet. Just like that anyone can sing or write or dance or do comedy or freelance and so you’ll be fine.

Except you won’t be fine, because you can’t live on that. The internet can live on that, Google, Facebook, Upwork, Fiverr and Amazon can live on that, but you can’t. And neither can your business.

We hear about the outliers, the kids who make millions a year with their YouTube channel or the fashionista with millions of followers. But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.?????

So how did all this start? How did we start believing in “the magic of digital advertising”??

We’ve been promised that:

1. We can reach people more precisely online than in any other medium. Not just the demographics of what they look like, but the psychographics of what they believe and what they're looking for.

2. We can reach people instantly. We can decide to run an ad at 10 a.m. and have it reach people beginning at 10:01 a.m.

3. We can measure everything.

These all are of course good but since advertising is faster, cheaper, and more measurable than ever before, why isn't this the focus of all our marketing? Why isn't this the beginning and end of the discussion?

Because online advertising is also the most ignored advertising ever created.

It's not unusual to run an ad in front of a hundred thousand people and get not a single click. It's not unusual for an entire ad campaign to start, run, and finish without making any impact on the culture.

Advertising is unearned media. It's bought and paid for. And the people you seek to reach know it. They're suspicious. They're inundated. They're exhausted. You didn't pay the recipient to run that ad, but you want the recipient to pay you with their attention.

So you're ignored.

It's not that advertising can't work. It's simply that it's not the right answer for everyone, at least at this moment.

You are not going to get that magical fountain of results as you are being promised. I hope you will, but it's pretty unlikely. While there are plenty of people happy to sell you a miracle a self-running, passive funnel of leads and income-these magical funnels are rare.

That's because the lifetime value of a new customer rarely exceeds the cost of running the ads necessary to get a new customer.

Why?

Because people are so distrustful, and the web is cluttered, that the ads rarely have enough power to pay for themselves. People see so many ads, with so many promises, that the cost of engagement has gone through the roof.

The truth is that most brands that matter, and most organisations that thrive, are primed by advertising but built by good marketing.

They grow because users evangelise to their friends. They grow because they are living entities, offering even more value to the communities they serve. They grow because they find tribes that coalesce around the cultural change they're able to produce.

So what you should do is to Earn Trust!

In a world that scans instead of reads, that gossips instead of researching, it turns out that the best way to earn trust is through action.

People remember what you did long after they forget what you said.

When they asked for a refund for a defective product, what did you do? When you lost their data, what did you do? When you had to close the plant and their jobs were on the line, what did you do?

As Marketers, we spend a lot of time talking, and on working on what we're going to say. We need to spend far more time doing.

Talking means focusing on holding a press conference for the masses.?

Not talking means focusing on what you do when no one is watching, one person at a time, day by day.

So what do you need to do??

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic recipe for everyone and everything but I can suggest one thing. Earn your permission!?

Earn your own permission and own it.?

When we use a social media platform because it has plenty of users built-in, we're not really building an asset.

Sure, for now, you can reach your followers on this platform. But over time, the platform makes money by charging you, not by giving away their work. And so you'll need to boost a post. Or worry about what happens when the platform tries to increase its stock price.

Put permission is at the heart of your work, earn it and keep it. Communicate only with those who choose to hear from you.?

The simplest definition of permission is the people who would miss you if you didn't reach out.

You should own that, not rent it.

In regards to the Social Media trends in 2022. Let me tell you:

1. Videos are going to get even shorter.

2. Marketers and companies will try to make their social advertising more sophisticated. With social ads, you'll need to get super creative and obviously spend even more if you want to stand out in 2022.?

Just so you have an idea, research conducted by Hootsuite shows that more than half, 51.4 of the 18,000 marketers they surveyed are applying to increase their social spending in 2022. That means that in order to stand out, you'll have to get creative and differentiate your brand from the rest of the competition.?

3. Companies will stop improvising with their social media strategy and start hiring more specialists.

4. We will see more platform diversity and omnichannel because it's become harder and harder to rely just on one social platform.