Top Tips for Social Media in 2023

Every second, 11 new people join social media, bringing the total users worldwide to 3.8 billion. This growth will only continue as more and more individuals acquire smart devices and adapt to working and interacting remotely. As more people have hopped online for both social and personal reasons, we can expect that the traditional platforms will increase and adapt to new user behaviour.

Instagram
Instagram continues to be a top performer and relates well as it allows for text, photos, carousels, and short and long videos (reels). Instagram has 58% more engagement per follower than Facebook and has over 100 million users watching or posting videos daily. Users are highly engaged and are drawn to comment, like, watch, and save content they like.

• Use Instagram as part of your content strategy. The average engagement per post is higher than Twitter and Facebook combined.
• Use more carousel posts for more engagement and likes. Use 10 slides of a carousel to create a story, and include calls to action such as “swipe left” in your carousel captions.
• If your goal is to drive conversations, video posts receive the most comments.
• Longer captions perform well, but only when content is relevant. 
• Large profiles with over 100K followers should use 6 hashtags in the first comment for more engagement, impressions, and reach. Hiding the hashtags in the caption works for smaller Instagram profiles, with a following under 100K.
• Make sure to include more videos/reels into both your regular Stories, as well as your Story ads for higher CTR.

Facebook
Through improved ads, more groups and a large (and very vocal) audience, Facebook can still hold its own among social media networks. Due to its vast and diverse audience, many brands still heavily rely on Facebook marketing when they plan their annual strategy. However, there are some strategic moves that need to happen moving into 2022:

• Post albums to get more likes, but use videos to drive conversations. When creating albums, use short captions of under 10 words and emojis for better engagement rates.
• Opt for the vertical format in videos as this also translates well to Facebook formatting. 
• Use videos between 2 to 5 minutes to drive conversations.
• Go live for over one hour to double engagement.
• Add a description length of over 300 characters to your videos to increase engagement.
• Place the majority of your ads on Facebook, to receive the highest CTR, with lower costs per click (but keep in mind, Facebook has compliance rules – stick to their guidelines and your ads will perform well). 

Twitter
Since Elon Musk’s controversial takeover, there have been warnings to advertisers to sit and wait. Twitter might not be the best platform in terms of engagement, but it is the go-to network to find and discuss information. Because it’s more informational and not as visual as Instagram, it’s more important than ever to understand how to write a great tweet, and what can make it stand out from all the noise. Something new to note this year though: Twitter is going big on the consumer game. The platform is all set to launch its shopping feature with Shop Module. The feature will allow business profiles on the platform to showcase their products.

• The platform has launched its Live Shopping feature wherein users will be able to check the products through a live video stream. Apart from checking out the products, the users will be able to engage with the live event too. With this move, brands and businesses can get real-time engagement. Twitter is all set to create a wave in the e-commerce market with this new feature.
• This also means Twitter is paying attention to videos. Leverage this wave of media by posting more video content to the platform and prepare your business for the possibility of live shopping through Twitter’s business account.
• Successful brands post on average 195 posts/month. 
• The majority of users on the platform are between the age group of 18 to 29 years. This means marketers can target the growing audience base on the platform with their marketing strategies.
• Avoid asking questions in the caption, as it leads to a decrease in engagement. Remember, Twitter is all about liking and sharing – not massive conversations.

The creator economy is now worth over $100 billion, and it’s just getting started. It’s defined as the class of businesses built by over 50 million independent content creators, curators, and community builders including social media influencers, bloggers, and videographers, plus the software and finance tools designed to help them with growth and monetization. Many platforms have started to invest in creator marketplaces and creator tools – like TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn. These tools help make it easier for creators to connect with their audience and collaborate with brands.

• As social media platforms into the e-commerce space, it makes sense to invest in creators who are driving engagement, growing engaged communities, and promoting products. There are thousands of creators who’ve seen huge growth within the span of a year or two – they’ve simply found their niche and stuck to it.
• For you, this means starting with good and engaging content. Blogging is a great place to start. With WordPress users producing about 70 million new posts each month, there’s no doubt that blogging is an excellent medium for content expression.
• This also means becoming active on social media. Because social media is at the core of most content creators’ businesses, they are active social-media users. According to MBO Partners creator economy study, 96% of content creators say social media is very important (71%) or somewhat important (25%) for building their online reputation and brand. Today’s influencers on social media have the power to affect and shift consumer purchasing behaviour through relationships with their online followers. 

• Studies show that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support
• 72% of customers said they would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. In fact, 84% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video (Optinmonster). Additionally, 79% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy or download a piece of software by watching a video.

Tiktok is a popular short-form video sharing social platform where celebrity and amateur creators alike share user-generated content from dance, cooking demos and makeovers to animal videos and social media challenges. This content is proving extremely popular with the audience base of Tiktok, of which 41% are aged 16-24.

Meta (which owns Instagram) was losing out to TikTok which is why Instagram rolled out its Reels, offering influencers, brands and fans alike the opportunity to create short 15 second videos.

Video is a much easier medium than text to learn about products/services and communicate online. Video is also becoming a passive way to network. People like to kill time watching videos and sharing them with friends and family. It’s a quick and entertaining way to learn and it isn’t going away.

Marketers have to adapt to these highly personal uses of video. Social video will need to become more social—an experience that builds a customer community rather than broadcast-style content and product teasers. Businesses would be wise to consider adding video to their content library and tweaking it to best fit with their target audience.