Toward the end of last year, pandemic restrictions finally started easing up and markets were booming. The situation appears to be much more problematic as 2023 approaches. For firms of all sizes, the situation is hazardous due to a coming recession, rising prices, decreased consumer spending, and labor reductions across key economic sectors. We hope that our study on social media trends for 2023 will be helpful to you in the upcoming year.

1. The Future of Social Marketing

Creators can help small businesses with their most acute marketing challenges. However, the majority of small businesses don’t work with creators. What’s the biggest barrier to entry for small businesses? Cost. “Our main challenge is just the volatility of pricing,” says Ruby Soave, head of influencer marketing at Student Beans. “There’s such a lack of standardization of how much work should cost that negotiating good prices gets murky.” 

Most organizations don’t go through agencies to find creators. Less than a third (28%) of brands that work with creators do so through agencies or third-party platforms, according to our survey. For small business owners, this means less overhead and much more control over who you choose to hire and negotiate with. 

In 2023, marketing practitioners and leadership have to have a deeper conversation about goals to make sure everyone’s on the same page. If that conversation doesn’t happen and social remains so visible within the marketing budget over the next year, there’s a risk that leadership may pull investment if they don’t truly understand the value of the channel. All social media metrics can tell you something about whether you’re achieving objectives and meeting your goals. But tracking the right metrics is the key to understanding your social ROI.

People go to different networks for different reasons. More than 84% of TikTok users are also on Facebook and almost 88% of Twitter users are also on Instagram. People don’t only get different types of value from different networks, they explicitly use different social networks for different purposes. 

With so many demands on their time and resources—and with networks looking more and more similar by the day—it’s no surprise that 52% of respondents to our survey said they cross-post content to multiple social platforms with as few changes as possible. Just 18% of marketers create different posts from scratch for each platform. Therefore, successful marketers know that strategy is more important than tactics.

2. The Future of Social Commerce

Consumers say the biggest barrier to purchasing through social is trust. What’s behind the tepid adoption of social commerce? A lack of trust in both social networks and vendors. The top two concerns for social buyers stem from a lack of trust in vendors, according to an Accenture survey of over 10,000 consumers. Their biggest concern is that their purchases won’t be protected or refunded. They’re also worried about the quality and authenticity of products and sellers on social media.

Google’s been the go-to in search forever - but that’s changing. Today, Google faces new and maybe not-so-unlikely competition from social media platforms. Younger generations, in particular, are going to platforms like TikTok and Instagram to do things like figure out where to go for dinner, buy that sweater they saw on the street, or spend their fleeting vacation days.

When it comes to shopping, more people under the age of 25 turn to social media to research and evaluate brands. And social’s utility for marketing goes well beyond advertising: Gen Z uses social media more than search engines to evaluate products, compare prices between competing brands, and make decisions about where to spend their money. 

3. The Future of Social Customer Service

Shoppers think the quality of customer service has dropped massively. Even among organizations that prioritize social customer service, conversational AI is still in its early stages. In our survey, only 26% of organizations that said they use social as a primary customer service channel told us they use chatbots on social and messaging apps. And of the organizations that do use chatbots on social and messenger apps, more than half of them (53%) adopted chatbots at some point during the pandemic.

Most customer service requests are variations of the same few questions. Use your chatbot to bring online traffic in-store. According to our internal data, 90% of in-store appointments made by our chatbot lead to a purchase and one in four customers are net-new. In 2023, the businesses that keep their focus on digital customer service stand to win out against those that don’t. Cost-effective chatbots are a quick win for those looking to better their online customer experience while shoring up expenses and limiting overhead in the short term.

It is believed that social was never meant to be a customer service channel. But now it really can’t be ignored. Social media has taken an outsized role in customer service - and businesses, as well as practitioners, are caught dealing with the repercussions. 

After all, if marketers see it as their responsibility to build brands, ignoring customer service is detrimental to that goal. A brand isn’t just a logo or a promise; it’s a result. It’s a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. 

4. Conclusion

After more than a decade of growing pains, social media marketing has finally matured as a profession. In 2023, successful social marketers will take the time and effort to carefully assess their opportunities, use a scalpel rather than a cleaver, and think about the long-term impact of their short-term actions. Those who do will cement their worth once and for all. 

Source: HootSuite