Predicting 2022 social media behaviors

It's November. Yikes! Where did the year go? In less than two months, we'll be welcoming 2022. With that, a new year of challenges and opportunities.

What will social media marketing look like in 2022? While we don't know the exact answer, it doesn't hurt to make some predictions and Hootsuite recently made its attempt to do so.

Hootsuite has released its "Social Trends 2022" report in an effort to predict 2022 trends on social media. The report (which can be downloaded in its entirety here) had 18,100 respondents with 48 percent of the respondents holding a title of director and above and 52 percent being managers and practitioners covering nine industries. I was one of the participants in the survey. (Here is some more information about the survey)

Hootsuite laid out five key takeaways from the survey's result in its 53-page report:

• Brands finally get community right (with the help of creators).
• Marketers get creative as consumers wise up to ads.
• Social quietly matures out of the marketing department.
• Social becomes the heart of the post-pandemic shopping experience.
• Social marketers save their brands from the customer service apocalypse.

Social media is likely going to continue to play a large role in 2022, much like it has over the last two years during the pandemic.

According to an April 2021 survey by Pew Research, 70 percent of Americans are using social media on a monthly basis. Another study, this one by statista.com, showed that people with a social media account has grown 38.6 percent between 2017 to 2021. That is expected to grow an estimated another 10-15 percent over the next five years

The top-three goals for social in 2022 will be brand awareness, customer acquisitions and driving conversions.

When broken down by company size, companies with less than 100 employees will use social media as a way to increase acquisition of new customers (Learn more about that in a previous blog post about small businesses and digital marketing here). Companies with 100-999 employees will use social media to improve the employee experience, followed by brand recognition and risk mitigation, And, for companies with more than 1,000 employees, social media will be used for brand protection and risk mitigation, followed by improving the employee experience.

The predicted challenges for social media use in digital marketing in 2022 will be consistently producing creative social content, followed by the decline or organic reach and need to increase paid advertising budgets on social, and integrating data and technology to build a unified customer view.

That last point is going to be a challenge overall, not just in social media. It's expected by 2023 that third-party cookies will be gone. In addition, companies such as Google, have already rolled out tools for their customers to opt-out of data tracking. Thus, this will make it harder for marketers to get a clear picture of their consumers' demographics.

Facebook and Instagram remain effective platforms, but, there is concern for how long that'll last. TikTok saw a 700 percent increase in perceived effectiveness. In addition, 36 percent of companies are planning to increase their investment on TikTok, compared to only 13 percent a year ago. Pinterest and Snapchat are also seeing growths as well.