Would you like to discover emerging social media marketing trends that you can put to work right now? Wondering what will matter in 2023?

I’ve researched and rounded up some predictions on key social media marketing trends for 2023 that business owners and marketers should be aware of.

1. Short form video content leads the way

Without question, the strongest type of content across most of the major platforms in 2023 will be short-form video. Consumers have simply fallen victim to their own attention spans! Short-form video, spurred on by the success of TikTok, is now the content type of choice.

To navigate the change, I recommend a few things:

Do what’s right for you and your business. Not every person or brand has the ability to be goofy on TikTok. But everyone can be informal and educational. Instead of shooting for a style that isn’t you, find what you can provide through video that’s useful to the audience you’re trying to reach.

Create videos when you have something to say. Forget what people say about the frequency required to break through algorithms. If you produce one good video a month, this is better than forcing out rubbish more often for the sake of it.

2. Prioritise social customer care

Many marketers have made social media more about content and less about connecting. This puts social media in trouble; the whole premise of connecting and building relationships gave way to the broadcasting of infomration without a real aim at building trust and loyalty.

Instead of focusing on content, focus on customer experience and conversations. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – they’re increasingly using social media to:

• Discover new brands and products
• Research product features and reviews
• Make buying decisions
• Ask support questions

Simply put, they want to talk with your brand digitally with as much ease as they would in a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Research shows that since the pandemic, brands have gotten worse at responding to mentions on social media.

Brands spend enormous amount of time on money on content marketing, but what people really want is connection. Embrace this thinking by:

• Examining your social media channels to see where most of your customer care conversations are happening
• Creating content that gets people talking
• Responding to questions and complaints and quickly as possible on your channels
• Find where your brand or products are being mentioned but you aren’t being tagged

3. Authenticity rules over curated perfection

TikTok has become so appealing due to its authenticity of the every day person. Your coffee doesn’t need to be aesthetic, you don’t have to “look perfect” – you can show up as you are and create. Other channels, particularly Iinstagram, will start to value authenticity over “perfect content” to attract its Gen Z audience. Not just in content, but also creators. People who show up as themselves and businesses that stand for a cause.

When it comes to new features, I believe we’ll see a lot of new features rolled out on Instagram related to helping creators monetise. Maybe we’ll even get audio-specific content, like podcasting.

4. LinkedIn influencing grows

LinkedIn added almost 100 new features in 2022. Their Creator Mode encourages people with personal profiles to build a following, which will become more prevalent in the new year. 2023 may be the year that LinkedIn joined YouTube and Facebook in paying creators and allowing them to monetise their presence and content.

There also appears to be a growing focus on SEO. LinkedIn already has a new tool to optimise your new and existing articles; time will tell if using these tools will help people find your older articles.

5. LinkedIn content trends

Interestingly, video seems to be performing less well on LinkedIn than it ever has. My advice is to test it on your audience, keeping length short to 30-90 seconds. Still images will help a post get higher engagement. Posts with images are performing better than those without. There’s been a huge increase in the number of document posts with a combination of text and images. Use document posts for instructional purposes, testimonials, and if you have them, displaying products.

Personal content will also continue to succeed – create personal content as part of your marketing strategy but don’t let it dominate. Try to relate any personal content back to the work environment.

Current thinking is that more personal content will lead to a reduction in the amount of ‘salesy’ content. People are increasingly aware of the need to build relationships to do business and convert leads.

6. LinkedIn content boosting

LinkedIn announced that they are rolling out the ability to boost personal profile content. Up to this point, we’ve only been able to promote company page posts. We know that company posts don’t get the same interaction as perosnal posts, so this could be a boon to those companies whose executives are actively sharing great content on the platform.

7. TikTok Live Shopping

TikTok Live Shopping is currently rolling out. The experience lets customers click and buy without having to leave the TikTok app. This is a huge opportunity for product-based businesses. My advie is to get familiar with the new features, so you’re ahead of the curve when you get access to them.

Also, TikTok is rolling out a feature update that will allow anyone to send you a DM on TikTok, very similar to Instagram. This opens up the opportunity to have private, one-to-one conversations with people who don’t yet follow you.

Over 40% of people on TikTok right now are over 30. They aren’t posting content, they’re consuming it. As TikTok matures, its features are maturing for both creators and viewers. In late 2022, the character count for descriptions rose from 300 to 2,200.

8. YouTube leans further into short videos

Competing with TikTok and Instagram Reels, YouTube has made some major changes, introducing YouTube Shorts. They’re showing up in search results on both YouTube and Google, plus they’re linking back to YouTube channels more than ever, giving creators a bigger reason to be experimenting with this type of content on the platform.

This year, YouTube will also be releasing its podcasting platform. It will be a huge opportunity for anyone doing podcasts and also for people creating multiple types of content. This new podcasting section really aligns with YouTube’s overall direction, moving to become the one major content hub for all types of content.