It’s the first social media updates of 2023, and this one certainly does not disappoint!

Watch the recording and check out the notes below:

Trends and Data

  • Focus on TikTok
  • Social media reach
  • People spend more time on social media than watching TV
  • Video consumption
  • Users continue to turn to social media for their news
  • Product information
  • Organic growth on TikTok vs Instagram

Feature Updates

  • Instagram updates
  • Facebook updates
  • Twitter updates
  • LinkedIn updates
  • TikTok updates
  • YouTube updates
  • Snapchat updates

Trends and Data

The start of a new year brings with it the end of another. This means we have some great trends and data to look back on in hopes that it can help align our marketing strategies for the year ahead.

Focus on TikTok

  • Since 2018, TikTok has been downloaded the most, with 4 billion global downloads in 4 years. This probably doesn’t surprise you, as TikTok has been unbeatable in so many data sets that we have looked at. However, the key message to take away from the data is that the forecast indicates that TikTok is going nowhere. It seems to continue on an uphill climb, so don’t worry about it losing popularity anytime soon.
  • Almost 30% of TikTok users on Android open TikTok every day. This is likely going to worry other platforms, specifically Instagram. Users on TikTok spend 10 times the amount of hours on the app compared to Instagram. The more time someone spends on the app, the more they are able to consume content and the higher chance a creator has of having their content viewed. This can encourage people to move to apps with higher watch time.
  • Mindless entertainment and comic relief are the most popular reasons for using TikTok. This type of data can help us shape our marketing strategy as we want to know what drives users to a platform that we are utilising. The stereotype often associated with TikTok is the ‘mindless entertainment’, so again, this may not be surprising.
  • 23% of users want to discover new products to purchase on TikTok and 20% use it for education and learning purposes. Whilst they may not be the most popular, they are still a significant percentage that is highly useful for brands to know.

People spend more time on social media than watching TV. This shows how significant social media is, which is something you probably know if you are reading this. But the reach is huge!

63% of Instagram users have watched videos on the platform, with Reddit’s video content growing rapidly.

A recent report by Global Web Index identified the consumption of video watching on social media, for those platforms that aren’t necessarily video-streaming platforms. They looked at the percentage of users who watched videos on them. Probably unsurprisingly, Instagram takes the lead with 63%, followed in order by Facebook (54%), Snapchat (42%), Reddit (40%), then LinkedIn (28%). One point to note, video consumption seems to be growing rapidly on Reddit- which is something to keep an eye on.

Users continue to turn to social to get news

  • In comparison to news websites, social media has been the most popular form of news consumption for a few years now. And that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. In Q2 of 2022, 46% of people received their news from social media, compared to 39% reading a news website.
  • The demographics of people using TikTok are interesting to note. Currently, 15% of people aged between 18-24 and 10% of 25–34-year-olds use TikTok for news purposes.
  • Rather than just acknowledging that more and more people are starting to consume news on social media, it’s important to consider the underlying dynamics of news consumption across social platforms. For example:
    • On Twitter, most people pay attention to mainstream news outlets/journalists.Whereas on TikTok, most people look for internet personalities for their news.
    • Facebook interestingly focuses on both mainstream news/journalists and ordinary people.

According to the GWI survey, 61% of Instagram users have used Instagram to find information about products. On Facebook, this number drops to 54%, TikTok showing 52% and Pinterest is 39%.

Those with fewer followers have a much higher chance of being seen on TikTok than Instagram. We know this is due to TikTok’s viewership not being based on your friend or follower list. Do not panic and move everything from Instagram to TikTok, just be aware of the opportunity for organic growth on TikTok.

Trends and Data

Instagram Updates

  • A Reels Share counter is being added, which is another great way for us to monitor our engagement.
  • ‘Shadow bans’ are being demystified. Now, Instagram are having more visibility and transparency around content that may not be pushed out to people who are not your followers.
  • Instagram Communities and Groups are coming. This is essentially Facebook Groups on Instagram. Could this take people away from Facebook? Currently, they are limited to 5,000 followers, so bigger groups are likely limited on Instagram, but it will be interesting to see where they go.
  • The ‘Notes’ feature on Instagram now allows you to add a note to your profile as a ‘status update’. These could be a conversational prompt or just a way to let our friends know what we are up to.
  • ‘Candid’ is Instagram’s take on BeReal.
  • ‘Add yours nominations’ have been launched, which are great stickers for your Instagram story. You could utilise this to tag customers and encourage participation.

Facebook Updates

  • People can now add comments to your stories, which is another great way to encourage engagement.
  • Facebook Groups Content Explorer which allows group admins to go and find content to share with the group and have more internal conversations.
  • You can now share an Instagram DM directly from Facebook.
  • ‘Ready-made’ Reels are now available, making video content much easier to hopefully get more creators involved.
  • Facebook allows you to target your Instagram followers when posting on Facebook is a new great level for Facebook’s Ad Manager.

Twitter Updates

  • Twitter new user signups is at an all-time high, averaging 2 million per day.
  • ‘Blue’ has officially been launched, which includes a number of features to improve your experience on Twitter. There are additional features to this subscription that may appeal to some more people. An important feature is ‘prioritized rankings in conversations. This essentially means that your replies to Tweets that you interact with will be prioritised. This is a paid service, which means that Twitter is becoming ‘pay to play’.

LinkedIn Updates

  • LinkedIn auto-captions are added to the platform, which is key to use for anyone creating video content on the platform.
  • Useful new features have been added such as a new high contrast mode when viewing videos (mobile only for now), a new emoji picker tool, and newsletters will appear prominently in search results under a creator’s name.
  • Competitor Analytics has been updated with some great new insights and data.
  • Carousel creation has been improved and there are some great templates available. Currently, Carousel’s on LinkedIn are outperforming any other post type, so this is another great update.
  • Analytics for creators have been improved greatly, which only adds to the reason to switch a personal account to a creator account.

TikTok Updates

  • With TikTok editing becoming more and more rich, TikTok has now added a ‘Posted Drafts’ feature.
  • Full screen mode is on its way! This will be great for Smart TV viewing but will be interesting to see how people respond to this change.
  • Location tagging is becoming more and more important for SEO reasons.

YouTube Updates

  • Community Posts have been added for creators with more than 500 followers.
  • Shorts analytics have been updated. You can now even see how your Shorts performance is impacting your overall channel growth.

Amazon Updates

  • No, it is not a typo! We genuinely have an Amazon update for you. Amazon has launched ‘inspire’ which is a TikTok style feed for Amazon Influencers. This will potentially improve product discovery and inspiration on the platform.

The 9 trend predictions for 2023

  1. Despite threats of further bans, TikTok continues to be the most heavily used platform.
  2. YouTube Shorts will become TikTok’s most likely challenger and provide brands with a great growth opportunity.
  3. Micro-communities (like Discord and Reddit) continue to thrive.
  4. Collaboration will be essential for growth (thinking beyond your feed)
  5. LinkedIn will lean in even more heavily on ‘Creators’ as personal branding continues to grow.
  6. Social commerce will continue to rise.
  7. Twitter will continue to keep us on our toes BUT emerge as a better platform for brands.
  8. The platform that provides the best monetary incentives for creators will win. Choosing who we work with is more important than choosing the platform we’re on.
  9. Instagram will continue to look for other platforms for inspiration, BUT Reels will continue to be a big focus.

Tinisha Osu is a Marketing Executive with two degrees in Psychology. She is the first-author of a published psychology paper and is beginning her career in marketing through blog-writing, creating social media content and running marketing campaigns.