Social media predictions for the future of 2021

Sahail Ashraf posted on 18 August 2021

There’s still half a year to go, but we thought we would share some of our predictions around social media marketing in 2021.

The rest of the marketing year looks pretty exciting, to say the least. Post-Covid, we can look forward to social media marketing becoming innovative and fun. At the same time, we can see some trends maturing and proving to be the established ways of doing things. 

We thought we would take a look at some of the predictions we feel are important for social media marketing for the rest of this year.

First up, usefulness

We have always talked about quality at Locowise. It’s the one thing that can guarantee the longevity of your approach, as well as the effectiveness of it. However, Covid has provided the world of social media marketing with a little quirk that could have huge potential for brands.

During Covid, many brands had their content literally delivered from home, or at least home offices. There wasn’t always an opportunity to create content with the usual high budget production values, and this was not a problem. 

As long as you were able to create content that produced immediate value, you were onto a winner. And that is what many brands that did well in the first half of 2021 achieved. They kept the ‘usefulness’ of their content at the forefront. This way, they kept giving the audience what they wanted. And yes, production value is now coming in second place to usefulness. 

And ‘snackable’ too

Content has gone through many changes over the past few years. Right at the very start of things, when blogging was taking off, people were developing huge posts that would take an hour to read. 

This is no longer the case. Attention spans are very short now, and people just won’t react in the same way to long pieces of content that take up too much of their time. Instead, they need ‘snackable’ content.

This kind of content is stuff they can digest quickly (hence the name). So brands that are focused on creating infographics rather than blog posts are producing snackable content. If they are tweeting high value stuff, it’s snackable. Put all of that against a  long-form blog post and you have the way forward. Keep it short and incredibly valuable and you have content that will gain attention on social media.

The era of live streams

Covid had another effect on social media marketing, as a number of brands found that it was a good idea to create a live stream that helped their audiences. This could have been a Q&A session (or the ubiquitous ‘ask me anything’) or a simple product demonstration.

Brands also found that company news could be launched effectively through a live stream. Basically, live streaming is now an established and powerful source of engagement, especially if you have the audience involved. 

This will not change. In fact, we can see it becoming a huge part of what successful brands do as 2021 comes to a close and beyond.

Online shopping

For obvious reasons, online shopping really took off during the pandemic, and this has had a knock-on effect for brands.

With social media, you will have noticed that the big platforms like Facebook and Instagram have made it incredibly easy to buy products on their apps. This is because these platforms noted that online shopping has real convenience at its core, and if it is done well, people will leap at the chance to buy. 

This doesn’t leave smaller brands out of the loop. Companies can simply use these platforms to sell their own products and reap the benefits. Our point is simple. Expect social media channels to basically become ecommerce portals as well as social spaces. In the run up to Christmas, this will become very apparent.

If you’re a social media marketer, get yourself on board with Locowise, the one-stop metrics platform. We will even give you a full 21 days to try it out for free.