2020—it’s a year that, because of its symmetrical numerology, tends to attract a disproportionate share of futurist musings.
Not wanting to be left out (as well as to capitalize on the SEO term “social media in 2020”), I’ve made a list of how social media will evolve in the coming years.
From the rise of social commerce to Gen Z stumbling into an office chair near you, this post will tell you what social trends to expect and prepare for.
In this post, I’ll offer broad strokes. If you’d like a more comprehensive analysis of social media trends, see my 2018 social trends report. In the report, I cover social video, the state of peer-to-peer trust, ROI measurement, and key opportunities for each major social platform.
#1 – Social’s growth continues
We Are Social and Hootsuite recently published our annual global study of internet, social, and mobile adoption across 239 countries.
In our analysis, we found that social media usage will continue to grow. 1 million new people joined social networks every single day in 2017. And nearly a quarter of a billion new users came online for the first time in 2017. This growth will continue—and we’ll see interesting uses of social media come from countries like Africa which currently has the fastest growth rates, with the number of internet users across the continent increasing by more than 20 percent year-over-year.
By 2020, we’ll see the increased dominance of Instagram, especially among older demographics. “Instagram users are a lot more older than people often imagine,” says Simon Kemp. “There are more 45 to 54 year-olds using Instagram than there are 13 to 17 year olds.” As our CEO Ryan Holmes predicts, Instagram will quickly evolve over the next few years and become the new home for brands.
You can take a closer look at this data in our global report (in partnership with We Are Social and Simon Kemp).
#2 – Product discovery becomes more visual (and social)
According to GlobalWebIndex, almost half of internet users follow brands they like or brands they are thinking of buying something from on social media. Search engines, online reviews, and PR are the traditional discovery channels. But by 2020, we’ll see dramatic growth in five areas:
Social for product research
For online product research, search still leads the way. But social is catching up.
In a study of 178,421 global internet users aged 16-64, GlobalWebIndex found that 28 percent of users turned to social networks during their online product research, a number that we’ve seen jump every year.
In fast-growth markets such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, social media dramatically beats search engines for product research.
As GlobalWebIndex also found, social media eclipses search engines as a research channel in the Philippines, Kenya and Morocco.
By 2020, we’ll see search’s grip slip further on product research and social’s influence grow, especially among mobile-first consumers and emerging markets.
Visual searches
Andrew Ng, the Chief Scientist at Baidu, predicts that at least 50% of searches by 2020 are going to be through images or speech.
Products like Pinterest Lens use machine learning to aid in brand and product discovery. As Pinterest’s founder and CEO Ben Silbermann puts it, “a lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords.”
Voice control
“Who ever controls voice is going to control a quarter of all computing,” predicts Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway.
But as Simon Kemp also points out, the transformation that voice technology will bring goes far beyond brands fighting for digital shelf-space on Amazon Echo.
As he explained in a recent podcast, especially for emerging markets, voice will help to make searching (and typing) easier. Voice technology helps consumers who have lower levels of reading literacy, making it a key technology for the next billion consumers about to come online for the first time. This will both change how consumers discover products and how they communicate on social channels—a new set of digital behaviors that marketers will need to adapt to.
Messaging apps
Facebook predicts that by 2020, 80 percent of smartphone users are projected to be using a mobile messaging app. Customer service is one of the most obvious use cases. But many local businesses are using messaging apps as their primary customer communication hub. This opens the door for conversational commerce to extend far beyond messaging, with messaging apps becoming the center of mobile commerce, customer relationship management workflows, and product discovery.
Chatbots
From product galleries on Instagram to product launches on Facebook Live, social content is already used by younger demographics to discover and evaluate products. As more consumers research potential purchases on social networks, it’s a short leap to buying directly on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.
Chatbots will help consumers transition to social commerce, making it easy and seamless to discover products, ask questions, process digital payments, and see automatic updates on your order’s delivery date.
By 2020, the novelty of chatbots will be gone. But for purchases such as choosing a smartphone package or planning a vacation, they’ll be delightfully helpful shopping social companions.
#3 – Social video saturation—and evolution
“Over the next few years, the much bigger driver of the business and determinant of how we do is going to be video, not Messenger,” says Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s easy to see the growth potential of video. According to GlobalWebIndex’s latest data on social video adoption, audience demand continues to grow.
- 56% of internet users watch videos on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram each month.
- 81% of 55 to 64-year-olds are watching videos online each month.
- One in three social video viewers watch videos made by brands every month.
As more mobile-first consumers in emerging markets come online, we’ll see even more growth in this area. For countries with low literacy rates, video is a much easier medium than text to learn about products and communicate online.
And with the rise of messaging—a medium where people type less and increasingly use audio snippets, live video messages, and augmented reality filters—the opportunity of social video has only begun.
But by 2020, marketers will face video saturation. As we found in our 2018 Social Trends survey, 46 percent of respondents said they’re already implementing social videos, with another 26 percent planning to implement in 2018. This means that social video is quickly moving from being an algorithmic advantage to a table-stakes tactic.
While most brands use social videos to boost traffic and reclaim a bit of organic reach, the impact of social video will be broad. Here are a few areas to expect to see radical transformation with social video content.
Social ecommerce
Nearly every consumer is primarily using a mobile device. And video is a much easier medium for learning about products. Companies like MikMak are working to figure out what native commerce experiences look like for “the social video generation.”
With fun, short-form product videos, they help brands directly convert viewers on social channels. Expect to see more companies shorten the path between awareness videos and direct purchases on social platforms.
One-to-one communication
Whether chatting with an investment advisor or getting a sales agent to walk you through cell phone plans, there’s a lot of opportunity for one-to-one videos between businesses and consumers.
For example, teens are typing less in messaging apps and using videos and audio snippets more. Over 100 million people use WhatsApp’s in-app video calling to connect with friends and family. Over 200 million people use the video messaging and augmented reality app Snow.
Marketers will need to adapt to these new highly personal uses of video. In other words, social video will need to become social—an experience that builds a customer community rather than broadcast-style content and product teasers.
Passive networking
Globally, online consumers spend one-third of their time on social media. But as people spend more time on social, we’re seeing new behaviors emerge.
People are sharing less personal information on major networks. Instead, they’re watching videos, killing time, and sharing things to connect with friends.
Video’s impact will be broad here.
As GlobalWebIndex puts it in their latest social video report, “video positions social media as the go-to destination for anything from music consumption to online shopping and live sports broadcast and commentary.”
What to do to prepare:
Social videos can boost traffic. But chasing traffic and adapting to the whims of social algorithms isn’t a winning strategy.
“Only two firms can monetize traffic at scale—Facebook and Google,” says Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway. “Everyone else needs to build a group of loyal followers.”
If you’d like practical tips for using video in 2018, I analyzed the state of social video in Hootsuite’s 2018 Social Trends report.
#4 – Social commerce makes a new push
Social commerce adoption in Europe and North America has been slow. But the next phase of innovation in social won’t come from advanced economies. It’s the emerging economies—consumers that have skipped desktop and traditional search engines—that will lead the way.
From micro businesses to major retailers, social’s role in ecommerce will grow. For example, Instagram already allows businesses to build digital storefronts with visual and video content.
As the analyst firm GlobalWebIndex predicts, “shopping via social channels may be an APAC-based…
