2022 was a year of big change and turmoil in the world of social media. Mark Zuckerberg faced even more scrutiny over Meta, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and various platforms came under fire for their online safety policies.
I have to say, it was quite an adventurous year to be working in the digital space and it certainly kept us on our toes. But what can we expect as we head into 2023?
- Twitter won’t die, but it will continue to make hasty decisions and break things – Musk will continue to battle with the platform and its audience, and “try” to make it safer, smarter and more profitable, but he’s certain to make some more wrong decisions along the way.
- LinkedIn will be the norm for CEO comms – we’re already seeing a shift in the expectation on CEOs and business leaders to communicate wider than just in the media. Many business leaders have taken to LinkedIn and we’re seeing some do it really well – Alison Rose at Natwest, Ben Francis at Gymshark and of course Bernard Looney at BP.
- But debate will rage about the quality of LinkedIn’s algorithm – Headland’s digital team has a real divide in their opinion of the algorithm. I personally love it and the way it shows you what content your connections are engaging with and that it is not as time-bound as Twitter – it means I don’t have to be on the app 24/7 to see everything I want to!
- BeReal will remain mostly brand-free (at least for 2023) – BeReal grew massively in 2022, it gave people a platform to be their authentic selves and stop hiding behind filters. But at the moment, whilst the platform only allows you to actually connect with someone and share your own profile, not just follow people, I just don’t see how brand accounts will work.
- Podcasts will suffer from a middle-aged spread – the pandemic escalated the rise in popularity of podcasts, both from a B2B and B2C perspective and it became an easy and effective way to communicate with your audience. But, we can expect some sort of fatigue to set in and whilst those podcasts that are already successful are likely to remain so, we can expect it to be harder to penetrate an already busy space. But social media platforms will continue to innovate and offer this service as part of their product – think Twitter Spaces and LinkedIn Audio.
- Influencers will continue to influence the influenceable – influencers have shot up in popularity and we’re seeing people become influencers in all sorts of topics whether that be activism, fashion or money, and whilst we’re all influenceable in one way or another, we can expect this to continue.
So, it looks to be a quiet year ahead…