Social media business trends in 2020

Many changes can be expected in 2020 in the fast-growing industry of the digital. Social media is rooted in our day to day life and with the lockdown and social distancing situation, social media has been the key to communicate for most of us.

As a business owner, there isn’t a better way to market your product or services than the web, allowing you to spread your message to millions of users when using the right strategy.

A great way to have your strategy on point is to observe the trends and be ahead of them to know what type of content works and worth to be created. It will also allow you to know on which platform this piece of content will perform the best. Always remember to adapt these trends to make them relevant to your brand and to offer something different that will make you stand out.

So let’s see how the trends in 2020 are going to look like:

Video Format

A new format of content that is now attracting a lot more engagement is the video, this explains the virality of Tiktok app and the increase of views on stories as short-form videos are gaining in popularity. Video is a format that will soon dominate social media, so if you aren’t creating any we highly recommend you to add this type of content in your digital strategy to be ahead of this fast-growing format trend. You can create long-form videos for IGTV, Facebook and Youtube, or, you can start with short-form videos to post on platforms like TikTok, Instagram stories or even on your Instagram feed, depending on your industry and also on the social media platform that you are using to drive sales for your business.

Mobile responsive website

Everybody is having access to a smartphone and more and more website visits are made on this device, this is why you should make sure in 2020 to have a mobile-friendly business’ website so that all your pages are adapt to this format to offer a great customer experience.

Tiktok

This is the revelation of the year, the platform has more than 500 million downloads, offering only short-format video (between 1 to 60 seconds) and a unique way to create and edit your videos on the platform, a very innovative social media app that wins the hearts of teenagers but not only, many brands are now seizing this opportunity to market their products using influencers of the platform. So don’t miss out and discover this promising platform that highlighted the creativity of many influencers, promoting products in unique ways.

According to several studies, the average active user spends 2 hours a day on the platform, a statistic to take into consideration as you want to market your business where your audience is.

Story tool

Ephemeral content is getting more notoriety over time, unlike a post on social media, the story calls to the urgency to consume this content as it only lasts for 24H. Also, people appreciate the 15-seconds video format and marketers understood this well, that’s why when you scroll through stories you will see ads that appear every 4 stories!

This ephemeral content first appeared on Snapchat, a social media platform mainly used by the Post-Millenials generation nowadays, after seeing the popularity of this content increasing Instagram adapted it creating the “story tool” in August 2016, and Facebook followed this trend at the end of 2016. Recently, Linkedin announced that they are going to implement a story option on the platform, seizing the opportunity after seeing the constant evolution of this type of content over the last 4 years.

Micro-Influencers

Micro-influencers will be more valued by brands that are considering the quality over the quantity. A few years ago it was very easy to grow on social media using some tacky methods and bots which now days wouldn’t be approved by social media guidelines (mass follow/unfollow, mass liking & commenting...).

Also, it has been proven that most of the time big influencers have bought their followers and the likes on their posts, so they don’t really have an engaged community interested by their content.

Thanks to applications like HypeAuditor, brands can now access Influencers’ insights to make a decision before working with one. HypeAuditor taking into consideration the quality of the engagement to highlight any bots activity that has appeared on the account, so you know if the engagement really is authentic. Overall, most of the time it has been proven that micro-influencer had a better engagement and a greater relationship with their community.

This is why in 2020, we highly recommend you to use your influencer marketing budget to hire several micro-influencers instead of only one big influencer, the quality of the content will be the same and you will get a better return on investment if you select the right accounts to collaborate with.

Niche Social Media Platforms

So far, Facebook was the main social media platform that everyone has, then Instagram came in and those two used to dominate the online world reunited billion of active users. However, in the past years, we have seen niche platform emerging like Linkedin, reunited professionals, Twitch oriented for gaming community… Those platforms are evolving and gaining in notoriety allowing communities that share the same interest to reassemble. One sure thing is that niche platforms will perform well in 2020 and become more and more popular.

Customer Service

People are now expected brands to have a social media presence to be accessible to answer any of their request as quick as possible. A new expectation that might sound challenging for brands but when the communication is successful it makes it easier to build trust, improve your brand image and create relationships with customers. Therefore, we highly recommend you to at least have an online presence on one social media platform to answer any customer request and exchange with your community and clients.

We hope that those 7 social media trends will help you get your business ahead and understand the importance of a social media presence for your brand in 2020.