The number of social media users continue to grow in 2022 and there are 4.62 billion social media users (note: this number is not for unique individuals), a +10.1% increase from last year, as you can see in the image below from the latest report made by We Are Social & Hootsuite.
The number of social media users has doubled this year compared to 2016 (6 years ago) and tripled compared to 2012 (10 years ago).
There are 6 social media platforms with more than 1 billion users in January 2022, and these social media networks are:
1. Facebook – 2.91 billion users
2. Youtube – 2.56 billion users
3. WhatsApp – 2 billion users
4. Instagram – 1.47 billion users
5. WeChat – 1.26 billion users
6. TikTok – 1 billion users
YouTube is the social media app where users spend most of their time on a social media platform (23.7 hours/month) compared to Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or Snapchat where users spend 8 times less time (3 hours) monthly. TikTok is coming strong at the top and is already the second social media platform by the time that users spend on social media networks, with 19.6 hours/month, the same time users spend on Facebook.
It’s clear that more and more users are on different social media channels every day and you are losing big time if you don’t know how to create a social media strategy for this year. There are a lot of things recommended by the most experienced marketers like:
– increasing the quality of your gear used in your live videos, short videos, etc.,
– using short-form video and digital storytelling more often,
– going to where your audience is,
– sharing different things that’ll help others get to know you better,
– focusing your attention on growing an engaged community around your brand etc.
In order to give our audience the most useful social media marketing tips for 2022, I asked 20+ marketers about their opinions and recommendations for this year, too.
You’ll find useful and practical information in every answer from this marketing roundup article, so I recommend you read this article and share it with a friend, colleague, partner, etc. who doesn’t know where to start their social media campaign for 2022.
What are the most Effective Social Media Marketing Tips for 2022?
Keri Jaehnig
Founder & CEO
In a nutshell: Evaluate. Refresh. Collaborate … authentically.
1) Social media audit – Update old, integrate new, refresh graphics, captivate your audience.
Many brands and solopreneurs have great social media profiles, but they have been left too long and may be out of date. At the same time, platforms and trends change over time. So should your social media strategy.
We have been making a big difference for business brands and solopreneurs by auditing their social media presence and updating their social media strategy. In turn, they are attracting new customers and increasing sales.
2) Video – Reels, stories, LIVE.
Facebook and Instagram are prioritizing Reels. For those with target markets that spend time on these platforms, it is wise to create reels that entertain your audience with fun video.
Stories too. Images and video. Use the fun stickers for polls, hashtags, GIFS, etc. There are many opportunities to engage your audience and nurture relationships!
LIVE video still gets the best engagement, on all social platforms. Use this in Reels, Stories and in Facebook and LinkedIn posts.
3) Podcasts – Share your expertise in a mode where you can own your content. Collaborate if you must by partnering with another professional to create content. Share authentically so you shine through — Here, viewers and listeners are looking for like-minded leaders. Not sure about this? Be a guest on podcasts to start and build comfort level.
Reminder: Fish where your fish are. TikTok might be popular, but possibly not with YOUR audience. Do the research!
Curious how the social landscape has changed in a year? Check out my social media marketing tips from 2021.
Neal Schaffer
Author, The Age of Influence
The answer to this question is easy: Shortform video. Every social network is giving priority to this content format, whether its TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Google Web Stories, or Pinterest Idea Pins.
The problem is that, while you can gain massive visibility when done right, it might not lead to actual conversions. You see, this type of social media content must be considered a type of billboard to gain brand awareness. Leading people from shortform video to your website and conversion requires creativity and probably makes sense to collaborate with influencers on for best results.
I believe that shortform video is still relatively new and there is always a lack of supply because of the relative difficulty it is to create them, so there will be plenty of opportunities for your brand to shine in 2022 if you do shortform video right.
Timothy Hughes
Co-founder and CEO
Social selling companies outperform non-social sellers. We see a staggering performance uplift from being sophisticated on social media and helping buyers to jump to the conclusions that you, the seller, wants. This uplift in performance is reflected in surveys from Gartner, SAP, Salesforce and countless others. So if social sellers outperform non-social sellers why isn’t everyone doing it?
The fact that our customers are all on social media and it significantly shapes their thinking about why that want to work with is obvious to us all. Capitalising on this though is a different matter.
Computer based training, hints & tips, “LinkedIn trainers” all represent a series of tactical solutions to what is a strategic problem. The knowledge of what creates a compelling social presence and behaviour is not a secret…but simply learning the skills and techniques is not enough. People need to actually USE those skills.
Typically, lack of time, lack of empowerment, fear, failure to take responsibility for prospecting are all cited as “reasons I didn’t become a social seller” but ultimately it is usually a lack of support.
When organisations become social the raft of benefits is significant, better relationships with prospects and customers, increased revenue and pipeline, increased visibility, trusted advisor status, greater share of voice all of which help sell more, but the benefits don’t stop there as organisations become the employer of choice and and the greater shared sense of purpose means that not only is it easier to recruit great people but they choose to stay longer too.
In 2022 business need to take social media out of the tactical box and take it on as a strategy, after all this is what high performance companies did in 20221.
With a digital organisation (anchoring social media across sales, Human Resources, procurement, etc) the business will gain significant competitive advantage in sales, retaining employees, recruiting employees, supplier relationships etc and it is this that will power lead generation, increases in win rates, deal size increases, becoming the employer of choice etc.
Marji J. Sherman
Vice President, Digital – Cognito Media
Live, breathe, Meta.
Meta is NOT going away. Facebook is not going away. As it was predicted to decline in past years and has fallen in specific ways, Meta breathes new life into the social media giant. As much as some marketers may want to live in a marshmallow world of believing that Meta is some Mark Zuckerberg fad, 3D networking is just the beginning of how Meta will change how we interact with our consumers, but how our consumers interact with the world.
I don’t care what your role is in your organization. Become a Meta expert immediately. You will not only look fancy and intelligent at (Zoom) dinner parties but ensure your company and job survive in the years to come.
Create Micro-Communities
I am a massive fan of the term ‘micro.’ I predicted micro-influencers would dominate the influencer space. I expect and have solid proof that micro-communities will dominate social media. For a year, I’ve run a test following conversions via Facebook groups to find that the micro, often now discarded, communities on Facebook have a far higher conversion rate than Facebook ads thanks to their ability to target a hyper-focused audience.
Social Accountability
Consumers will be intelligent social media users in 2022 and can quickly determine how you are targeting and how your social messaging affects subgroups. It seems easy enough >> DON’T MAKE PEOPLE FEEL BAD on social media, but it’s a lot harder than you think. Social accountability means educating your digital team from the inside out on diversity and inclusion, as well as how social media networks affect certain people like teenage girls’ mental health (looking at you, Facebook.) Provide your team with the education they need so you can produce content that adds positive value rather than destructive stereotypes and emotions.
Andy Crestodina
Co-Founder / CMO – Orbit Media
Quality makes a difference, right? Quality content, quality promotion …but what about the quality of your gear?
The camera is actually one of the big differences between the good and the great social media marketers. You notice it in a split second as soon as you see their videos. Here’s what a pro setup looks like:
And here you can see the desks of 27 social media influencers. The best have desks that look like mini-studios. None of the gear is super expensive. So in 2022, upgrade your gear and look better in every video and in every social stream.
Ted Rubin
Co-Author of Retail Relevancy, Speaker, Strategic Advisor, Provocateur
I believe everything we do in our personal lives and business revolves around relationships… now more than ever. With effort, an online relationship may begin from the request to connect on LinkedIn, or a Facebook friend request, or following someone on Twitter or Instagram; but make no mistake – that initial request or follow will never create the relationship. Trust is built upon interaction, when you’re true to your word, authentic, and genuine. To build relationships online, you (as a brand or individual) have to offer value in return. Be it via valuable information or personal introductions, engagement and interaction will remain key.
The authentic practitioners of social marketing – those who last, build connections, and foster relationships – know how to be authentic, honest, and real, without going over the top. They might touch on a controversial subject, but they’ll do it thoughtfully, rather than offering a rapid-fire opinion on every trending topic. They’ll let you in on meaningful details of their personal lives without sharing so much that you feel like you’re at someone else’s family reunion. They’re not perfect, but they embrace that fact and accept that they can’t please everyone.
Most importantly, they’re comfortable in their own skin – which is important both online and out in the world. I gravitate toward people who are authentic and confident in who they are, and I try to be the same way when dealing with other people. I may not always say exactly what you want to hear, but what I do say is coming from an honest place. My opinions are just mine, and I try to provide enough background that you’ll understand where I’m coming from, even if you don’t ultimately agree.
On a marketing, social, and influence level, you’ll often go much farther being authentic than you will by only saying and doing the expected. But this isn’t just about building a following. Being who you are, connecting with the people who matter, and refusing to be dragged down by the negative, ultimately makes for a happier life with more freedom. Just be “you,” and the rest will come along.
#FollowThePath #RonR… #NoLetUp!
Virginia Zuloaga
Digital Marketer – Founder of Brieffin Consulting –
Co-Founder of CreaGeen
Digital Storytelling separates Amateurs from Pros
As storytelling gains fans all over the online marketing realm, the importance of this global trend has influenced ultimately every single market that is present on social media. Whether you are a public figure or an industrial brand, stories are a wise way to entertain audiences at all levels.
For B2B and industrial brands, storytelling is an incredible tool to humanize products and services in a way that completely changes the perception that audiences may have of them. They are also at the core of building relationships and trust, two essential factors that help to highlight the impact that the solutions offered by these sectors have on both business operations and employee performance and wellbeing.
Leave it to the experts: Outsourcing
Every day we see the increasing demands of marketing performance within saturated timeliness, with everyone competing for attention on every social media platform. This makes it very hard for companies to succeed with their social media efforts when they don’t have the resources to hire a specialized marketing team, or even an in-house marketing expert.
Marketing outsourcing is the latest growing trend which provides digital talent at a fraction of the cost. The benefits are endless starting with the experience that a specialized marketing team or expert brings to the table, greater skills, knowledge, and efficacy, accessing the right tools and technologies, staying up to date with trends and updates in tools, features, and algorithms, just to name a few.
Design is everything.
As far as brand recognition goes, high-quality graphic design for social media is one of the most demanding skills from digital marketers, as great design triggers greater engagement.
In addition to sharing real stories, with on-the-spot photography, high-quality design is essential in terms of branding to create recognition, and consistency.
There is a distinctive feature with humans: the predominance of visual memory, perceiving images better than text. Visual elements stick in minds faster and more easily, sparking memories and triggering emotions.
We might not have much time to read the millions of stories shared on our timelines in a day but liking what we see can spark our curiosity to learn more.
Dan Gingiss
Chief Experience Officer – The Experience Maker LLC
Be Responsive! This is one element of the WISER methodology that I introduced in my new book, The Experience Maker: How To Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can’t Wait To Share. Today’s consumers expect a relationship with the companies they give their hard-earned money to, and that includes being responsive when they ask questions, compliment a brand, or complain.
Remember that people who complain do so because they care; they want you to fix the problem so they can continue doing business with you. If they didn’t care, they’d just leave quietly and go to the competition. Engaging with a customer shouldn’t be looked at as a chore, but rather as an opportunity to expand and cement a lifelong relationship.
Alexandra Varodi
Community Manager Specialist
The last 2 years taught us that if there’s anything powerful on social media, it’s the online written words. The words of real human beings that can make an assumption or share the experiences they had with a brand.
1. No social media strategy should be planned without firstly going deep into social listening. In 2022, knowing exactly what people think about a brand and what discussions they are starting around it will be fundamental for the implementation and effectiveness of a strategy. Monitoring all the comments and mentions and responding as quickly as possible to the questions and conversations that target a specific brand are two crucial actions that will make a big difference between competitors.
2. Focus your attention on growing an engaged community around your brand. Get to know your audience on a more personal level. Study your followers’ interests, the accounts they follow, their hobbies, and how they interact with other brands on social media. The more information you have about them, the stronger your position in the market. The engagement rate will make a massive difference between competitors, and the number of followers will soon become irrelevant.
Jessika Phillips
Award Winning Marketing Strategist, International Speaker & Passionate Founder of NOW Marketing Group
The overall focus for 2022 will be to build relationships in order to turn followers into our biggest fans, our clients into our biggest advocates, our team members into our biggest evangelists, and our community members into collaborators. It’s about showing up to relate to our customers on a personal level while operating with a service-over-selling approach.
Doing this will allow us to create organic marketing momentum that attracts, retains, and secures the brand; it serves as a magnet instead of a bullhorn and is truly how we outcare the competition.
Stephanie Nelson
SEO & Social Media Maven
I doubt my top tip will ever change: Go to where your audience is. This has been a cardinal rule of marketing for time eternal. Whether you’re looking at print, email, direct mail, social or otherwise, you want your messaging to be seen by the folks most likely to buy from you. Don’t waste time or money on a buckshot approach. Find out where your market is and advertise there.
My second tip is also an oldie but a goodie, and a bit connected to Tip #1. Make your marketing messaging match across all outlets. The old adage was that consumers need to see your messaging three times in order for it to stick. Enter digital, and humans now have an attention span shorter than a goldfish’s (literally).
Studies now show that people need to see your messaging SEVEN times (more than twice what it used to be only 10 or so years ago) for it to stick with them. Your best bet is to keep the look, feel, and message the same throughout all of your advertising. Even if you change things up a bit to fit ad specs and the differences in ad outlet demographics, the more you can keep the same, the better chance you have at registering with your target market.
Ravi Shukle
Founder Social Media Agency Karma Wolf
In 2022, there won’t be any new groundbreaking content we haven’t seen. However, what will change is how we consume it. 2022 will be the year to create micro video content. These will be short snippet video content. As we compete for more attention on social, it’s getting harder to stand out in the feed.
That’s why short form video content will help to convey your message in a more engaging way helping to stop that scroll and engage your fans and followers. These videos need to educate, entertain and inform.
Maria Ganta
Marketing Expert
Post helpful and valuable content for your audience
Make sure your content is helpful and fits with your business objectives.
When planning your social media content calendar for 2022, don’t think only about the design part.
Yes, having visually nice posts is important, but make sure your posts spark conversations.
For example, you can:
- Use social media polls to ask your followers questions.
- Do some Q&A sessions to offer them the opportunity to know your brand better.
- Create challenges.
Randy Milanovic
CEO and Founder
Be yourself. I’m not talking about personal branding, which is reputation management. I’m talking about sharing what matters to you. If it is your opinion on US politics, your favorite sunset photo, or your best-performing blog post, share it. Keep mindful of your privacy, of course, but feel free to share the things that’ll help other humans get to know you.
One of the positive outcomes of Covid is that we’ve been given an opportunity to build relationships online. That’s something we haven’t experienced since the days of GooglePlus where I feel I made over 30,000 friends. You can then take those relationships private via DMs, phone calls, emails, and web meetings quite easily. Plus, once we get Covid under control, there’ll be new opportunities to enjoy adventures in person.
One of my favorite new discoveries is adplist.org, which provides a free platform for mentorship globally. 1:1 and 1:many conversations without expectation. Brilliant.
Shane Barker
Digital Strategist
The most effective social media marketing tips for 2022 are to use social media influencers, invest more in machine learning and AI chatbots, and develop methods to measure the results of your marketing activities.
You should automate stuff like social listening and content scheduling using powerful social media marketing tools such as Tagger’s Signals, Awario, Hootsuite, and Buffer.
Miruna Dragomir
CMO
Test, measure, and kill. With so many formats popping up, it’s simply impossible to create content for all constantly and frequently. Make sure you test them all to not miss any opportunity. Once you do, prioritize the ones that work best. You can reduce the frequency of those that don’t and use them for repurposing alone. FOMO on formats is becoming unsustainable.
Don’t forget about LinkedIn. There are a lot of new shiny objects all the time, but I believe LinkedIn continues to be a very good place for building credibility and positioning a brand or person as an expert in the field.
Julia Campbell
Digital Marketing Expert and Podcaster
Ask yourself or your brand these two questions: What worked best last year? What could we level up if we truly focused? Focus and streamlining are going to be the rage in 2022 – no more needing to be on every single social media platform and spreading yourself too thin.
Find your audience and find your groove – what kind of content do you like to create? What lights you up? What helps you make a connection with your customer, your donor, your stakeholder? Just because 3 billion people are on Facebook doesn’t meant it’s where you need to be. Go deep into one or two platforms rather than going wide on a dozen.
Viveka von Rosen
Co-Founder and Chief Visibility Officer
We have whittled almost all our social engagement down to what we call the PVC method. Personalize, Add Value and a Call to action. Whether it is a LinkedIn Post, a tweet or a YouTube video, our social media follows this methodology.
And what we have found is significantly increased response and engagement rates.
When it comes to personalization – P – with a public post, you can’t really personalize to an individual. But you can personalize to a buyer persona. In our case that is B2B Sellers and Sales Leaders. So, you will often see our content addressing our buyer persona directly: “Hey #SocialSellers and #SocialMarketers, if you have a great marketing asset to share….” (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/linkedinexpert_socialseller-socialmarketers-vengresovids-activity-6631257340962234369-u25F)
The second letter – V – means bring value. (We’ve known that since the beginning of marketing.) The problem is, if you are not creating content for a specific buyer or buyer persona, then you can’t really know what their needs, wishes, desires or points of pain are. And true value comes when you can address that with a solution. But if you know what they need or want, your social media post (or video or podcast or infographic) can address it and offer a solution. This is NOT about advertising your services. No one wants that. But you can often give advice and share free solutions that will help build the KLT (Know, Like and Trust) factor.
Finally, you have your CTA – call to action. Which should not be “Buy my stuff” or “you don’t know me for Adam, but let’s set up a meeting.” To continue to build KLT, you need to start conversations. A great way to do that is with a CTA that asks a question, asks for feedback, asks for examples, asks for replies in comments below.
Once your audience begins engaging with your content, you can further develop your relationship with them, start your conversations and then take it to the next level.
Ingrid Kibler
Head of Global Social Media
Simple, seamless integration. Social Media is an important part of the digital space and will need to work together more than ever with its counterparts to deliver a simple, yet effective user experience.
This user experience needs to encompass both the digital and physical worlds for a best-in-class model, and teams that can organize themselves internally to deliver this externally will push their companies to the forefront of the competition.
Christina Garnett
Senior Marketing Manager, Offline Community and Advocacy HubSpot
Celebrate the people who love your brand. Brands have crisis comms plans and are looking for fires they need to put out, but they don’t take the time to also water the flowers. Making the people who love you feel seen and appreciated will only make them want to share how great you are even more. It turns happy customers into advocates who will drive business to you.
Social is about connection. Just as you should have a plan for content publishing, you should also have a plan for how you reach out to other accounts, what kind of content you respond to or like, and determine how your brand can build relationships with other brands as well as consumers.
Jeff Korhan
Small Business Speaker, Author and Founder of Landscape Digital Institute
In many ways, what’s old is new again for social media in 2022. In the early days of social media, people were more intentional, focused on learning as much as possible from their communities. These established practices will see a resurgence this year as newer platforms such as Discord enjoy increased growth.
Before social media marketing, we simply had social media. We’ll see more marketers getting back to that, less marketing, and more social. The practical tip is to use social media to actively learn from communities. Establish systems to track these conversations that may evolve into co-created solutions that are more likely to be realized.
