There’s no way to escape social media
By: Linda Gasa
Tags: Social Media Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing, Social Media

The year 2020 has been, well, challenging to say the least. But not for social media! With all the working from home, the lockdowns and quarantines, social media is thriving in an all-time high demand.

As a venture hub and marketing agency, eCartic is keeping a close eye on the latest trends and novelties on social media. Without a doubt, social media plays a huge role in digital marketing activities and the brand’s reputation these days. Recent data shows that more than half of the world now uses social media with an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day switching between an average of 8 social networks and messaging apps.

Not only people have started to use social media more to keep in touch, to entertain themselves, but also to support their small businesses, because, let’s face it — if your business doesn’t exist on social media, how will people find you during a lockdown?

However, the situation has changed the content production too, now more than ever people are hungry for fresh fast-produced content, not to be confused with lesser quality, the visual look, as well as theme coherency, is still important.

With this intention, social media platforms have made it easy to generate engaging content fast, with little planning, and without involving a huge team of professionals, making it easy for individuals and small businesses. We’ve seen big and small companies live-stream events and conferences, roll out home-made advertising campaigns, use influencer generated content, and take the advantage of the ‘’here and now’’ that has never been as important as it is with our current situation.

It has been a great year for Tiktok; this generation-Z popular platform has doubled its downloads just over a year, becoming a close rival to Instagram, which fortunately hasn’t been sitting it out. Not only did Instagram quickly react to the popularity of Tiktok videos and rolled out its own version ‘’Reels”, but also launched ‘’Guides’’, re-shaped the home screen and shopping functionalities on the app. Not stopping there, they also broadened the promotion options and made it possible for brands to directly promote collaboration partner’s posts, which is great for increasing both brand awareness and sales.

It’s important to realize that also user behavior has changed during this oversaturated period of time — people aren’t as naive as they used to be and have learned to question the things seen and read online. Authenticity is key. People are looking to connect and to join online communities, they want to read about real experiences, real problems, and participate in problem solving to celebrate victories together — online. More and more influencers have started to talk about mental health issues, the pressure social media exerts on us (and especially young people), and even have started to share their real-life vs Instagram realities.

Notably, Influencer marketing as we knew it has changed too. Followers have started to pay attention to how many of the influencer posts are advertisements, forcing influencers to be more creative and to carefully consider the amount (and brands) they’re promoting on their feed.

In summary, the year 2020 has made it clear — social media is and will continue to be a powerful marketing tool that can’t be ignored. I’m excited to see what the next year will bring to us — social media marketers.