Top 7 Social Media Trends in 2021 That Every Business Needs to Adopt

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Top 7 Social Media Trends in 2021 That Every Business Needs to Adopt
Updates
New year, new opportunities. 
The only thing that is constant in pandemics is change – especially when it comes to social media platforms.
Social media showed to be a blessing for both marketers and users during the time of COVID-19. 
Access to social media and interacting with friends and family has helped boost users’ mood, get a sense of well-being, and survive the required social distancing.
On the other hand, we have marketers who understood social media’s importance in consumers’ lives, encouraged the offline customers to transfer online, and hurried up to connect and engage with their target customers’ favorite platforms.
The social media landscape is changing so fast. The need to stay up to date with the latest trends in emerging now more than ever. 
No worries. We gather all the latest social media trends you need to fuel your social media strategy and connect to our audience on their favorite platforms.
If you still don’t have these updates, be patient – they are coming on your way. 
This post will share the latest updates in social media and, based on them, analyze their current adoption and predict future social media trends.
Trends that will mark 2021:
Come back next month to learn all the new updates or subscribe below, and we will send you useful how-to articles on how you can implement these new features today and uplevel your social media marketing strategy. 
1.Direct to consumer interactions becoming more direct
The pandemic was a test of how capable are brands to gain the trust of their fans. Those brands that encouraged users’ content, whether employees, influencers, or shoppers sharing their experience or asking questions, outperformed their competitors effortlessly. 
This served as a good lesson – it’s not about the production value anymore, but the quality of human connection that matters. Building trust through interacting with fans shows to be a must-have in 2021. 
Several social platforms developed features to tackle precisely this:
Go more direct on TikTok with Q&A options
Although YouTube still rules the long-form videos, when it comes to engaging with fans, TikTok is mastering it. The platform announced launching a new Q&A option that will allow users to ask creators questions that will answer in the upcoming video clips.
This is how it will look like:
New! TikTok’s got a Q&A feature!
Creators can add Q&A button to profile allowing followers to leave questions which they can answer via video replies or in a livestream
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) January 19, 2021
As you can see in these screenshots, creators can have the option to switch on the new Q&A function. Once the Q&A icon is enabled, users can pose questions via the creators’ profile.
When tapped, viewers can type their questions in the composer.
Creators can see the list of queries and use it to prepare answers for their next video content. Additionally, visitors can also see the list of questions users have asked the Creator and even vote for their favorite one. Awesome, right?
This is not a direct competition to Reddit or Quora, but it’s definitely an innovative way to prompt fan engagement and maximize connection within the app. We cannot wait to see how this will work in practice.
2. Niche social media platforms are becoming more popular. The rise of Clubhouse
This year we expect to see more than 3 billion people using social media platforms. And as the number of social media users is expanding, the number of platforms emerging in the social media sphere is growing.
This poses a massive potential for open-minded marketers to try new emerging social media networks and reach a large and engaged audience.
Here are the most promising ones in 2021 you should keep an eye on:
Takeover your industry niche Club on Clubhouse
Clubhouse is the new community app based on audio conversations organized within niche categories. 
The concept of an invitation-only platform has helped it to become viral amongst opinion leaders and community creators. 
It is already becoming the first to go to location when getting relevant opinions on the latest digital marketing and tech topics (mostly). Why? 
Well, because its early adopters happen to be exceptionally well-established company founders, social media marketers, influences, musicians, public speakers, and cool brands. 
So what can you do now? Here are the steps how to get started with Clubhouse: 
Get an invitation and install the app. If you are still not on the platform, find a way to get an invitation (if you need one, let us know we have a few) it is still iPhone available only. 
Set up your profile, bio, pic, and similar 
Get inside groups and clubs that are relevant to your knowledge
Listen and learn how other people interact
Once you go through the newbie period, you will start getting some ideas for you and your team to start getting more involved. 
Being an early Club creator is a good idea if you want to adopt an up-and-coming trend very early. 
So, to create a Clubhouse Club, you will need to become eligible by being more active, organize Room chats, and similar. Once you are more involved, you can fill in the application form and apply to create a Clubhouse Club. 
In the meantime, you can still organize Closed Rooms or within a Club that you are already a member of. 
3. Influencer Marketing will continue to grow
The popularity of TikTok and Instagram influencers skyrocketed in 2020. This trend significantly escalated during the extended lockdowns that inspired people to become content creators and attract a huge follower base. 
These networks are top-rated among millennials, but seemingly for specific industries, Linkedin is getting the throne from the more traditional ones, such as Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook. 
Most brands try influencer marketing to see how it works, but as finding the right niche influencers, most of the brands have gone all in. 
Nearly 90% of all marketers find ROI from influencer marketing comparable to or better than other marketing channels.
Now, as 2021 is unwrapping influencers and their power in specific industries is undeniable. For example, once a prominent fashion influencer posts a photo of the latest winter collection or creates a live video showing how it looks like on them, the brand can expect it to sell out in a matter of hours. 
This power was never seen before in any other channel – mostly because of the enormous reach these people have.
Influencers have indeed adopted the short-form video format such as TikTok and Instagram Reels videos. We should expect that this format will continue to get immense exposure and, thus, more significant users’ adoption. 
4. User-generated content becomes a must-have section for e-Commerce websites
UGC continues to be the center of building trust and supporting customers in making better purchasing decisions. 
Individual influencers and creators will drive brand recognition and be the first to provide reviews and promote new products. 
And brands are already aware of the power of the content they create around their products. 
Having social media aggregation tools such as EmbedSocial, brands can aggregate the UGC created by other people on social media and sync it with their website.
Social listening will help you be on top of your brand mentions. So, don’t forget to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand on social media and show them on your website.
5. Social commerce leading the hyper-adoption of new products
As we mentioned, influencer marketing is already the main channel for building awareness and is becoming the secret weapon for convincing customers to make a purchase. 
Therefore, social commerce will exponentially grow in the coming years. 
And the numbers are here to prove this trend: 
‘In 2019, social commerce sales in the United States were estimated at 22 billion U.S. dollars. As social media’s influence continues to increase, U.S. social commerce is projected to reach 84.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2024 and accounting for 7.8 percent of U.S. retail e-commerce sales.’
Source: Statista
6. Programmatic advertising is becoming mainstream 
The proliferation of digital channels has made it so hard for marketers to correctly target prospects with the right message, on the right device, and at the right time.
Faced with these challenging market dynamics and increasing pressure for ROI, marketers can rely on the functionalities of social media platforms ads that are getting even more advanced options as time passes.
Targeted automatic advertising allows marketers to understand the networks’ algorithm and use the wide availability of demographic data to create relevant marketing campaigns, save time and reach out to more people.
Here are the latest updates that are changing the game in social media ads:
Save time with automatic Pinterest ad targeting and creation
Pinterest is trying hard to rank as “the destination for personalized shopping”. The latest update shows that they are on an excellent way to achieve this goal.
The platform announced launching a new way to automate tailoring ads to different audiences with a new ad specialty – dynamic creative.
This is a massive deal for advertisers. Apart from saving them time and resources, they will automatically create hundreds of ads with unique messaging to their desired target audiences.
Additionally, this will allow them to test various creatives and identify which elements drive higher performance.
Once the update is rolled out, advertisers can use Dynamic Creative platforms such as  RevJet ,  StitcherAds , and  Smartly.io  to design their own performance-driven Pins, with dynamic audience-specific messaging.
7. Social media Stories will out-throne the Feed
The Stories format seems to be on every leading social platform for a reason. Stories proved to be one of the most popular growing social media trends among users. Their usage growth certainly indicates that they are here to stay (and marketers should use that wisely).
Due to the fast adoption of the format, Facebook already predicted that the Stories views would overcome their Feed’s views.
Here are the latest updates when it comes to Stories on social media:
New Stories Panel at the top of Pinterest’s feeds for reaching the community
Pinterest showed that despite being a platform for finding inspiration, it’s also a great place for creators to reach their communities and share their passion and interests with like-minded people.
Since the beginning of January, some Pinterest users have noted a more dynamic format of the Stories panel, with a unique visual flair. This is not a bug. ???? Pinterest tests a new Stories panel at the top of the user’s Feed.
This is what it looks like:
Before you roll your eyes and say that this is already a familiar format, wait a minute. Story Pins are not the same as Stories on other apps. The difference is that Story Pins live within a Pin, and they don’t disappear after 24 hours. 
This feature is still in testing right now, and we can expect it to roll out in the upcoming months to every user’s profile.
However, this looks like an exciting, engaging way to generate interest in Story pins and, once again, prove Stories enormous popularity.
Instagram is testing a new way to display Stories on desktop 
Although users connect to Instagram mostly on mobile phones, it shows genuine care for its desktop version users. 
As reported by Engadget , Instagram started redesigning parts of the UI to suit the big screen better. One of them is transforming Instagram Stories into a carousel format to give users an easier way to go through Stories on desktop.
The new design’s goal is to make Story discovery and consumption a lot better and minimize the need for extra clicks.
What can we expect next?
Just 2 years ago, we thought chatbots would critically replace sales and customer service. Now, it turns out that this trend is adopted but not at all critical.
The importance of following trends is to try them out, test in your own industry, and see what will stick. 
Don’t sit and wait for your competition to get unfair advantages just by adopting social networks where some of your new customers might spend much more time. 
Just be aware, follow, read and we are here to update you with all the latest. 
At this point, we are closely monitoring what might be the next social media trend. 
And the ‘to watch’ list for becoming new trends are the following: 
Augmented reality; 
Live streaming and real-time podcasting;
Instagram and TikTok videos displayed at the top of the Google mobile search results.
To wrap up
Is there any social media trend we have missed? We are continually updating this article, so drop us a line and let us know which social media trend deserves to be part of this list.
Dance is the Content Marketing Manager at EmbedSocial, responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content about social media marketing, and online reputation.
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