Hot Social Media Trends to Be Aware of in 2021
Social Media has become an integral part of people daily lives and nobody can neglect the facts. Social media has not just changed the way we interact with our friends, it has created an entirely new way to consume all type of content including photography, fashion, news, travel inspiration and so on. Social media has now become compatible with digital marketing and going hand-in-hand together with the brand’s online campaigns. However, every brand will experience what worked a few months ago may not get the same result for now. Consumer habits will change and platforms will evolve same goes with our strategy.
The key in 2021 will be finding a balance between people and social media. Brands must go broader reach using the social channel public feed and taking them to a private channel to focus more on one-on-one communication and deeper relationship with the customers. Always stay up-to-date on the latest social media trends because it can help to fuel your social media strategy
If you want to leverage some new trends to build a stronger and more engaged audience and community here are 16 latest social media trends for you to try on your business.
#1 Social Media Trend – Short-lived Content Will Continue Gain Popularity
Short-lived content is something that is only available for a short period of time and disappears later, and that’s where consumers are always on Instagram and Snapchat Stories, a new type of social content. People attention spans are short and that’s how the pattern of people consuming content is changed.
According to Hootsuite, 64% of marketers have already incorporated Instagram Stories into their social media strategies to accelerate social performance. Here’s another study from Social Insider, at least post a story once in every 4 days. 
As we should know that only account with more than 10,000 followers has an additional feature to add a link in Instagram Stories to drive your audience to a landing page for possible conversions. So, let’s be more active on Instagram Stories to achieve this small but powerful social milestone.
#2 Social Media Trend – Instagram Is Removing Likes
Instagram has decided and announced on removing public likes. The origin of this implementation is mainly to correct the detrimental of people’s mental health by not determine a person social value with “likes”. The trend signals to remind brands to look beyond surface-level data. Brands had moved away from traditional marketing methods like advertising and paid an enormous amount of money to influencers as an advertiser medium to promote their products instead. However, these changes made brands could not accurately measure the direct impact of their campaigns as easily as the past. Hence, brands have also started to invest in Instagram Ads as well to track for measurable metrics of the campaign ROI.
#3 Social Media Trend – The Expansion Of Social Commerce
Social Media platform like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest have long been used by brands to promote and sell their product or services. With the demand and response, so social commerce has become a new retail avenue for brands. This trend will go further more and more social media network to introduce selling features like shoppable posts.
Hence, brands and marketers must leverage and incorporate these into your ultimate sales strategies.
#4 Social Media Trend – Video Content Will Continue To Dominate
Video form of content is one of the most engaging and most-shared forms of content on social media, it can be a short-form video like on Tik Tok or Instagram Stories or a long-form video like on Youtube or IGTV.
If you are not creating video content currently, please update and include it in your content strategy. In the near future, videos will definitely dominate social media. Here’s how Niko Neko Matcha created a visually appealing and tempting video on their Instagram account that garner very high reach and engagement.
You can start bit-by-bit with Instagram Stories, the easiest form of short video content can be done with your smartphone then slowly explore with IGTV & Youtube when you are ready! Otherwise, you may consider to let the expert like our agency to handle it for you.
#5 Social Media Trend – Adoption Of Technology
If you are on social media always, you will start to see some brands social media campaign adoption of technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Users are demanding greater and more engaging experiences with all these technologies. Sephora as an example,
Augmented reality (AR) filter is another recent popular Snapchat and Instagram Stories feature. It was introduced to enhance our visual content shared on social media. Here’s a customise Instagram Filter we have created for a beauty brand Voceane.
#6 Social Media Trend – Influencer Marketing Continue To Soar & Goes Nano
Influencer marketing is definitely not a new trend, and all the brands and marketer foresee it’s going to continue to dominate on social media. Social media today is dominated by people and influencers with all the content created to promote brands are paid and getting them a new living lifestyle.
Marketers are not just collaborating with 1-2 influencers, that’s not gonna give you much impact and long-term result but working with the whole network of small, relevant and niche influencers which can go up to hundred or thousand of them. Moving forward, more brands will continue to work with more multiple of small influencers: micro & nano influencers instead of one celebrity.
#7 Social Media Trend – Social Media As A Customer Service Platform (Connection + Community + Experience)
Consumer demand has grown, so do the demand for customer services. In the past, the way of most business handled customer services are mainly through a hotline number or via email but often ended up with not 100% satisfaction due to the lengthy and slow process of resolution.
Here’s the new mindset of people: The relationship we build with customers is more important than the product and service we sell to them. Often people are looking for connections on a personal level with businesses and brands that feel like part of their community. Hence, the business will need to put more effort being more helpful and understanding customers as a “friend” in the social community.
Social media is also being viewed as being so convenient and easy to use as a method of handling customer service on the platform so it’s going to a big trend in 2020. According to the pie chart showing that majority is expecting good customer service response from social media are high. 
It is important for a business or brand to listen to the audience and provide value to them, truly connecting with help humanize our brand and gain trust at the same time which is leading us to our goal converting more happy customers. Remember community will always be the key to your success.
#8 Social Media Trend – Personalisation Is Paramount
Personalisation is a global recognised trend in all industry. One of the key aspect for a business to leverage on personalisation can be working on the delivery of social media ad as the platform allows advanced targeting and customise your preferred audience with your tailored visual to show the right ads to the right people.
Not sure if you have realised and experienced if you have been checking on certain keywords, product, or website next minute you will see ads for similar products all over your feed. The more ads you have been clicked and interacted with, the better the robot will understand your online behaviour and preferences in order to feed you more personalised ads.
#9 Social Media Trend – Get Creative!
Who wants to go to a brand page and just see a bunch of “buy buy buy” post or boring meaningless post that does not resonate to their life and solve their problems.
So in 2020, start being creative, interesting and think of the box to show your worth by feeding quality consumable contents.
#10 Social Media Trend – The Rise Of Tik Tok Disrupting Social Video
Facebook is no longer the one-stop-platform it used to be, the younger audience are favouring to other platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube and Tik Tok! “Early-mover” advertiser who embraces and started smaller networks now like Twitter, Quora, Reddit will enjoy the pioneer carrot and the environment of low cost due to lower levels of competition.
The organic reach on Tik Tok it’s even better than the early of Facebook. According to Oberlo research in March 2019, Tik Tok has over 500 million active users worldwide.
#11 Social Media Trend – Reimagine Social Analytics
Great marketers will continue investing in measurement and analytics reporting tools that go beyond the standard vanity metrics and toward meaningful metrics that will more accurately align with business objectives and goals.
With the recent implementation of less-like focus, how can marketers analyze? Social media platforms must update the analytic dashboards to provide more transparency behind the measurement.
#12 Social Media Trend – Use Employee Advocacy To Your Advantage
Your employees are the important assets of your company, so empower them to empower your brand. Somehow the audience always finds employees generated content helps to build brand trust and relationship.
Hence, we strongly encourage every company to start employee advocacy on a smaller scale with the employee and you will see the wonders engagement.
#13 Social Media Trend – Storytelling 2.0
Emotional and interesting stories are a perfect way to get attention and greater engagement. Using a narrative to communicate a message and make the person who views feel something and inspire them to take action. Stories can be told in pictures, verbally, written form, audio or videos.
#14 Social Media Trend – Leverage User-Generated-Content
Brands leveraging and re-purpose user-generated-content is not a new thing. Some brands like Daniel Wellington and Sudio use many influencers to create content and tag the brand on Instagram, eventually encourage customers to be a brand advocate to create content and tagged the brands too!
However, even though we can leverage with some UGC content for brands account, we should have a place to fit in our other content mix.
#15 Social Media Trend – Social Media Communities Or Private Groups
Social media communities are social groups that are created by brands to provide a networking platform for customers to join and talk about their shared interest. Group members can discuss various topics publicly within the group, share their experiences, and seek solutions to their challenges. Whereas brands can seek feedback and consumer insights from the conversation.
There are brands like Sephora and Watson has already started to create Facebook groups for more engaging and personal conversation rather than just having a Facebook page to get likes.
#16 Social Media Trend – Authentic Content Key To Social Selling
As a brand, the content we produced has to be authentic as consumers are more likely to listen to review and getting insight from real people before they make a decision to purchase. In order to keep the contents real and authentic, we can always leverage with UGC content, employee advocates, customer reviews, testimonials, interviews and etc.
Leverage these trends on your brand social media channels and stay ahead from your competitors. Social media is a fast and competitive space, you may speak to our expertise to ace your social media game at wink@tinkersociety.com when you need.
