Top 10 Social Media Trends to Follow in 2023

11 min readMar 22, 2023

It doesn’t matter the type of business you run. Whether a local restaurant, a large FMCG brand, or a medium-sized e-commerce business. The 2023 social media trends will continue to impact your competitiveness in the market.

This means you have to be actively present on social media platforms. More so, you need to leverage the current social media trends to follow and improve your competitiveness.

Social media trends are impacting digital advertising. To come up with your next social media campaigns, you should be conversant with current trends. Otherwise, your campaigns will attract less to zero traffic.

So, let’s get started!

Current Social Media Trends to Watch in 2023

By following the next top social media trends, you can increase brand visibility and improve your engagement score.

1- TikTok Continues to Rule The World

The popularity of TikTok as a social media trend is not going to diminish in 2023. On the contrary, by launching new features and adaptations from other leading social media, TikTok aims to become THE all-in-one social medium!

The success of TikTok is not bound to user-generated content. TikTok ads have been on the rise over the past few years.

TikTok’s short video feature, photo modes, the “now” mode, and many other features make this app super user-friendly and attractive for users, mainly Gen Z.

But the favorite feature for any brand is, of course, TikTok shopping. This feature allows brands to directly sell their products on the platform.

And people actually love TikTok shopping!

By September 2022, Tiktokers spent $914.4 million on TikTok globally!

If you still haven’t created a TikTok account for your business, go ahead and enter the world of TikTok ASAP!

Also Read: Best Time to Post on TikTok

2- Social Listening Becomes an Indispensable Strategy

Social listening is one of the familiar social trends. However, in 2022 we saw brands focus more on this method of marketing.

Social Listening focuses on monitoring and analyzing the content of social media around a particular keyword or key phrase such as brand name, product, service, or even a person.

Although they share a lot in common, social listening is different from social monitoring.

Having a successful social media strategy these days takes more than creating accounts on different platforms. To win the game, not only do you have to create high-quality and original content, but also you have to listen closely — and of course reply — to your audience.

Brands want to know what people are saying about their products. They also want to know what comments are shared by their competitors and their customers. What’s the reason for investing more in social listening?

Basically, every brand is concerned about the good, and the bad and also wants to find out the ugly.

Every second, customers are discussing brands. Based on a survey by Statista in 2020, 33% of customers use social media to send their complaints to a brand or its customer service.

Source: Amazon Instagram

That’s why to be on top of the game, you ought to consider users’ social sentiments toward your brand.

The good thing about social listening is that you get to know what’s happening even on platforms to which you don’t belong. You might want to refer to social listening as social media surveillance.

Another good news is that thanks to AI and automation, you can use social media trackers such as Mentionlytics to have a clear understanding of what people are saying about your brand.

3- Social Media Ads

Social media platforms have features that enable marketers to personalize the ads. These Ads were and still are one of the most important social media trends in 2023.

Say you decide to buy a watch as a Christmas gift. You search Google a little bit and visit a couple of brands on social media maybe. After a while, you may see different watch ads in your social media feed.

And that’s no coincidence…

Social media ads allow you to target very specific groups of audiences. You can choose to show your ads just to females between 25–40, living in New York; yep, that specific!

This personalization feature of social media ads guarantees that the brands’ messages will be heard by the target audience. Of course, for brands, this means increasing brand awareness, leads, and finally, more sales.

Source: Statista

That’s why advertising has always been a growing trend on social media. Here, you can clearly see how over the years, the ads spending has been on the rise.

This sharp trend can only mean one important thing: Social media advertising works.

In 2023, we’ll see more brands, even with smaller sizes, invest in running ads on social media platforms. Once again, as one of the most profitable social platforms for running ads, TikTok is a giant in generating ad revenues: $11.64 million in 2022 compared to $3.88 million in 2021.

4- Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR)

You’ve already seen AR filters all over social media. So, why exactly Augmented Reality is still among social media trends?

Brands will be -and still are- using AR story filters to create thumb-stopping content.

We know every brand is trying hard to show itself differently, and AR story filters are a great way to do that. It allows brands to add a layer of interactive design and interesting visual elements to their content.

But not just by filters that make you entertain or look like a cartoon character.

AR also can make the shopping experience a lot easier for users. Instagram and Facebook have already leveraged this feature.

Although it’s in the early stages, Augmented Reality has lots of potentials and we’ll surely see some of them in practice in the near future. It’s a strong trend, considering all the other factors such as increasing the use of smartphones and social media.

But how about Virtual Reality?

VR has a little bit slower growth trend compared to AR.

Using Virtual Reality requires special pieces of equipment such as headsets, whereas using AR, all you need is your phone camera most of the time.

Although VR seems a little futuristic at this point, brands have already started to adapt it. Just look at the brands in Metaverse. Microsoft, Disney, and Coca-Cola are just some of the well-known brands that have virtual brands on Metaverse.

Source: Instagram

5- Attention Span Reduces, as the Video Length

This item in our list of social media trends is about videos. With TikTok and Instagram still ruling the social media realm, there is no doubt that we shall see video as a trending social media strategy in 2023.

But with a subtle difference: The shorter the video, the better.

Short-form videos, such as reels, are already popular among social media users. No wonder 58% of viewers will watch a business video completely if it’s less than 60 seconds long.

That’s why over the past few years, the popularity of short-form videos has been on the surge. As you can see, videos with lengths of less than 60 seconds account for more than one-third of all the videos produced.

Source: Vinyard

One explanation for this continuing trend can be due to the shorter attention span of Gen Z users, who are one of the main generations using social media.

Apparently, Gen Z’s active attention span is just 1.3 seconds! Less than any other age group.

But that does not mean that they are lazy. Actually, Gen Z has much more advanced filtering availability wired in their mind. This helps them to decide, in just around one second, what content is useful for them, and what’s not.

Amazing isn’t it?

Not only Gen Z prefers to catch much information in a short and compact way, but also, they only pay attention and devote time to the useful ones.

That’s why as a marketer, you have to make sure the starting moment of your video is engaging enough to draw their attention. And win that one important second.

Considering new features in video creation by social media platforms, expect video saturation even more than before in 2023.

6- Micro-influencers and their Macro Impact

If you thought influencer marketing trends on social media are about to end in 2023, you will be surprised!

Influencer marketing is still one of the growing marketing strategies in social media. Interestingly, 40% of Twitter users say they would buy stuff online as a direct result of a Tweet from an Influencer!

And this is not a new thing in the marketing world. Brands have always worked with celebrities and public faces to promote their brands.

However, what is trending is that over the past few years, micro-influencers (those who have around 10K-100K followers) have drawn special attention.

Micro-influencers share some common traits that make them super attractive to brands:

Micro-influencers drive more engagement rate compared to macro ones;
There are micro-influencers almost in every niche;
With the power of personal communication, they gain a higher level of trust in social media;
They charge brands way less than other types of influencers;
It’s easy to contact micro-influencers and they are usually eager to work with brands

Source: fissyshotit

That’s why experts predicted that micro-influencers will greatly impact the social media market in 2022, and surely, they will continue to grow in 2023.

7- Shoppable Media will be the Next Engaging Thing

Like influencer marketing, shoppable social media continues to be one of the accelerating trends in 2023. As we already see that virtual engagement has replaced offline stores, brands will focus on driving participation through social media.

In fact, social commerce sales generated 992 billion dollars in 2022 and it’s estimated that this number will reach 1298 billion dollars in 2023. That’s around 23% growth.

Not to mention the prediction of social commerce sales for the year 2026, which is estimated to be 2900 billion dollars!

Source: Statista

Various social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram offer this feature of shopping. This will enable users to either visit the product page on the brands’ website or even finalize their purchase on the app itself.

Although the latter option is now limited to social media in some countries, we’ll see more shifts toward this shopping method.

Moreover, some of the evolutions will include more visual content and integration of shoppable feeds. The latter, for example, will enable online shoppers to collect user-generated photos and video content and feature products, automatically.

So, if you want to keep up with the latest social media trends and exploit this great potential, you need to put launching social commerce in your marketing campaigns list for 2023.

8- Social Media for Customer Service

As social commerce is on the rise in 2023, so is customer service.

Not only do customers tend to make more social media purchases, but also they tend to use social media as a way of communication with the brand.

That makes sense since comparing the traditional ways, social media is faster and easier to use. Well, think about the long waiting on hold moments that you previously had when you want to inform a brand about an issue.

Around 31% of customers use social media to make pre-sales inquiries. Also, resolving an issue on Twitter makes people spend 3% to 20% more.

This is one of the social media trends that will be massive in 2023 due to the popularity of social commerce. There are already jobs available that only focus on social media customer service.

The important thing about this social trend is that consumers, as an audience, expect a quick response when they raise complaints through a business’s social platform.

Due to this, brands will develop more active social accounts, hence making them fully accountable to their customers.

9- Gamified Content for that Fun Element

Every brand tries to use different tactics to entertain their users on social media, and gamification of social media is one of them. Many brands in 2022 used gamified content to amplify their message on social media, and it seems that this social media trend is going to stay. The potential ideas could be

Twitter polls,
Rewarding users for contributing to the content,
Posting trivia questions on different social media platforms,
And, creating a social media treasure hunt.

People love game-like experiences just the way they like interacting with each other.

Source: HubSpot’s LinkedIn

In the past, many companies have earned great revenues from immersive gaming experiences and micro-transactions. Hence, we’re looking forward to seeing an app that connects gaming and social media more sophisticatedly and organically.

10- Social Audio Strategy

The last social media trend in our list is social audio. We all remember all the buzz that was around Clubhouse. The growth of the app in the Covid-19 era was so dramatic that everyone thought soon it’ll rule the world.

Well, it didn’t.

In fact, there might be no Clubhouse in the near future!

But that doesn’t mean social audio is dead. It’s actually one of the most robust trends on social media. Some social media giants such as LinkedIn and Twitter have already invested and included some of these audio features like Rooms and Podcasts in their apps.

Discord is one of the emerging and well-known audio live-stream apps in social audio and it’s no surprise if it takes this niche with its unique features.

Let Social Media Trends Guide you

Now that you know all the important social media trends in 2023, it’s time to plan to make the most of them.

Pick the most relevant trend for your business and invest more to get the best of social media for your brand!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/social-media-trends