How to prepare for the most important social media marketing trend of 2022

Trends for social media in 2022 all point to one thing - growth.

In October 2021, there were 4.55 billion social media users – that’s 57.6% of the total global population, according to data from Kepios.

A massive 409 million new users joined social networks in the year preceding October 2021, an average of 13 people every single second. Rolling into 2022, the snowball isn’t showing any signs of slowing.

As the number of users swell, so too does the influence of these channels and the social media teams needed to manage them for brand.

A new era of influence

In 2021, along with the growth of social media came recognition of the effectiveness of social media marketing. Social media teams are finally being seen for the value they bring to organisations.

At Zavy, we’ve known since 2018 that social media has a strong link to ROI for brands, but it has taken a pandemic for many organisations to start to value the business contributions of social media managers.

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Social media managers are no longer responsible for simply creating and scheduling content – they hold internet culture in their hands and are shaping online communities. In the hands of a good social team, brands can build brand love in social media ecosystems and find new ways to stay relevant in the hearts and minds of their consumers.

Marketing managers and business leaders now have social media firmly in their sights, putting pressure on social teams to report effectively and deliver work that gets results.

Social media teams are expanding

Social media teams are challenged to continue to grow and advance in sophistication, at the same rate as social media itself is growing.

The upshot of this is that one-person social teams will be a thing of the past and this year will see the number of social media marketers embedded in in-house marketing teams grow massively.

Senior-level roles are being filled by managers who have been creating innovative and creative movements (often with small budgets and sceptical support) on social for years now – there is a new generation of social media marketing maturity ahead. But, there are huge talent gaps too.

More responsibility, more focus but – no more people?

More than 8000 social media roles are currently listed on Seek – around a quarter of those are for senior-level roles.

Growing and multiplying social media channels coupled with a surge in demand for social media expertise means that the talent shortage might end up being the biggest challenge faced by social media teams. There is stronger demand than ever for social media marketing talent, at a moment when talent is harder to come by than ever.

As well as wider trends in talent shortages, social media in particular is subject to a small talent pool.

Because social media, and our understanding of it, is still very much evolving, it’s not easy to find people with the right skills.

The people moving into social media roles now are the ones who were told (accurately, as it turns out) back in high school the jobs they would do weren’t even created yet. Social teams are recruiting for skillsets that are new and ever growing.

So, how can social media teams keep up with the runaway growth?

Doing more with less – how smart social tools can help social teams prepare for growth

Plugging in clever tools will be essential for social media teams struggling to manage growth in 2022.

Social listening and insights tools will be essential for social teams looking to elevate the sophistication of their work with limited resources. Carrying out social media monitoring and listening manually is simply unmanageable in 2022.

Zavy is one solution for harnessing the phenomenal power and reach of social media and extending the impact of your team. The Zavy Score is a simple benchmark which allows for easier reporting for social media managers. A number of engagement and sentiment metrics are distilled into one number, and an easy-to-follow competitor dashboard.

Zavy helps to improve social media brand health and gives marketing teams a clearer understanding of how they are tracking, and which areas of their social presence they need to improve.

“We use Zavy to measure how we’re doing against industry peers,” says Michael Wood, Marketing Manager at Energy Online. As a small team, going up against much larger and more established competitor brands, simple and effective internal reporting helped them punch above their weight. “To be able to showcase and report internally real time sentiment towards our brand and how we’re doing compared to peers is great. We have paid media metrics, of course, but this is a great visual tool to communicate social media performance – follower engagement and sentiment.”

Their Zavy dashboard is a time-effective way of tracking competitor brands, monitoring trends as they emerge, and feeding insights back into their work. It elevates the impact of the Energy Online marketing team and gives them enough resource to compete on the same stage as more well-known brands.

If you’re watching the growth of social media in 2022 with gnawed fingernails, it might be time to have a conversation with the Zavy team about how this unique tool can support your social media brand marketing this year.

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