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2023 Social Media Predictions

Jacob Cardwell
Jacob Cardwell

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And take a deep breath. You have made it through 2022 (nearly, at least). After a turbulent year of war, questionable Twitter buyouts and one of the best Eurovision in recent memory, we now have our eyes (and ears) set on the future.

Whilst we aren’t mystic meg, here to tell you your particular future (although we do host an in-house astrology expert ♈️), we can put our social-first brains together to compile a list of the must-know upcoming social trends. So, put your labcoats on and hop in the time machine because we are taking a brief trip to 2023.

Insider Tea ☕️:

A well-written blog post always has some great sources. So here are some of the Spin teams’ predictions around social in 2023 (trust us, we are experts 😉):

Max (Co-founder and CBO 🕶):
“We’ll no doubt find more brands exploring the halfway-house to the Metaverse by bringing sensory elements and further gamification to social.

With the increased demand for integrity and authenticity on social content, I can’t help but think there will be a moment of reflection on the vehicle itself that’s driving this.”

Sophie (Senior Content Creator 📸):
“Live shopping is going to take over! Think QVC for TikTok. Interactive, live content with influencers giving live, unfiltered, unedited product commentary. Honest, risky, but very effective.”

Emily (Senior Account Manager 🧠):
“With brands like McCain inserting themselves into the Metaverse through their latest campaign collaboration with Roblox, it’s only a matter of time before even more follow suit. Finding an original link to these exciting innovations within social will be a game changer for brands. Clearly, a standalone campaign doesn’t work, and those most native to the Metaverse aren’t impressed. This forward-thinking approach needs to be explored with a long-term strategy rather than a flash-in-the-pan campaign to win over the gaming community.”

Courtney (Account Manager 🪄):

“I can see parodies of social apps being created, my faves being Delayagram, Toebook, and BeFake being introduced into the mix. It’ll allow users to do the exact opposite of what you can do on the real version of the apps.”

(New Spin packages coming soon?)

Cherie (Mid-weight Creative Designer 🎨):

“The rising ‘curated chaos’ design style (@bigsexypizza, @sourpatchkids) of 2022 will continue into next year, with even less focus on clean aesthetics.

With Gen Z’s love for Y2K still prominent, there may be a rise in the older, nostalgic design trends of the early 2000s. Think magazine collages, WordArt ( :/ ) and 90’s digital computer graphics!”

Julian (Account Manager and Horoscope Expert ♎️):

“AR filters will be used for shopping. In fact, Snapchat has already started to experiment with this.

Shopping on social media will become a lot more common across more platforms. Twitter shop, maybe?

The short-form vs long-form content debate will die out. With TikTok allowing longer videos and YouTube introducing shorts, people will avoid prioritising a certain video length.”

Grace (Senior Paid Account Manager 💰):

“Audio and sounds will only become more prevalent for advertisers on social media in 2023. We’ve seen how TikTok transformed the music industry by turning old songs or unknown musicians into total chart-toppers. I think this will be even more important in the coming year.  With social advertising platforms such as Meta bringing out new ad enhancements, such as automatically adding music to your video ads, this can only signify how important audio will be for brands on social in 2023.”

Jacob (Copywriter✍️):

“In line with TikTok and BeReal, the push for honesty and authenticity will finally reach copy next year. After quite a brash and ballsy scene for copy in 2022, next year could be all about relatability throughout the copy. Imperfections, colloquialisms and honesty will become central.”

Now, onto the blog…

Personas are DEAD 🪦

We’ve all seen them. Time and time again, our brand decks have been filled to the brim with made-up individual personas. What do they like for breakfast, what do they watch on Netflix, and how do they spend their evening? Except, there’s a bit of a problem. In 2023, social brands will move further away from personas and target their broader brand communities.

Various social sites echo these through their developments, where Twitter Communities and Facebook groups have been the spaces where consumers treat product recommendations with the utmost sincerity and respect. Navigating these social communities will be critical in 2023. It will soon become less about individual influencers streaming content and more about the dialogue between all community members in these spaces (groups, comment sections, twitter threads etc.).

Here, we must focus on developing connections with communities by truly understanding online interactions – and acting quickly to join them. Good community management will be essential. These micro-communities may have smaller audiences, but they’re worth their weight in gold with high engagement rates.

Over here at Spin, we embed ‘community’ across every brand pillar and every post type to reach and cultivate loyal brand fans.

Listen VERY Carefully 👂

Can you hear that? That’s the sound of sonic marketing. But, no, we aren’t talking about the blue super-fast hedgehog; we are talking about the world of sounds and audio. From a focus on words (Twitter and Facebook) to images (Instagram and Snapchat) to the new epoch of sounds (Enter: TikTok), Social media sites have always played with the senses to keep the user glued to their timeline and engaged with the content produced.

So, how can brands utilise this? The sound stops the scroll in this world where content streams are omnipresent and infinite. Photos, stories, tweets, and videos are now a given, and producing content that activates multiple senses is essential. 88% of TikTok users said sound is crucial to the app’s experience.

From claiming a specific sound to creating your own (Users have used this TikTok sound across 10,400+ TikToks), sonic branding will surely pop off in 2023. So keep an ear out for it.

Live and Let Die 🎥:

With various platforms’ constant push for live affordances, such as Facebook Live, YouTube Live, TikTok Live, and Instagram Live, live video became more widely used throughout the year.

Not too dissimilar to the ancient practice of telemarketing, now anybody with a phone in their pocket can begin to record unprocessed, unedited and unfiltered live videos. Anybody can now start to communicate exciting developments to their audience, capture the excitement of a brand event and even begin to sell some of their products natively on Livestream.

By enabling online buyers to view their products in real time, this trend allows marketers to forge better bonds with their clients. Lives will be critical in 2023 for brands pushing for authenticity and relatability – as the risks of lives often outweigh the positives. And it’s precisely those unmediated risks that bring in waves of dedicated viewers.

(Here at Spin, we expect a more prominent announcement on Instagram live shopping sometime early in 2023.)

AR / VR has arrived (again?) 👾:

Every year AR makes its way onto the trends list. But this year is the time to start capitalising on this trend. With a big expected push from Facebook, who are making the ‘meta-verse’ their thing, we expect to see great metrics across the board on all things Augmented and Virtual Reality.

Potentially a scary space, this will all be about utilising filters, gaming, audio and virtual influencer marketing to push online spaces forward. So, with a potential market of $800bn, get ready to enter the 3D world with your followers.

Tip: 💡 Creating virtual representations of products is a great way to begin to prepare for this coming shift.

Sooooo… Twitter 🐦:

Yeah, so a lot has been going on at Twitter, even in the last few days. The manic and volatile social media has become even more unpredictable thanks to Elon Musk’s acquisition. After dissolving Twitter’s board of directors, the site is clearly heading in a new direction.

One thing we can begin to plan for is the introduction of subscriptions, which Musk has spoken about many times during the buying process. For example, Twitter could start to charge brands a monthly fee to access analytics and a blue tick.

This, combined with celebrities beginning to leave the platform, could signal an end to Twitter. Or, at least, Twitter as we know it. We’ll keep our eyes peeled on this one!

More Fragmentation? 🤔:

Admit it, we all love an underdog. And, after Bereal’s overnight success (and to some extent TikTok’s), who knows what the future holds regarding new platforms? New social media sites like BeReal are projected to appear in 2023 to break into a VERY crowded industry.

However, while new platforms arise yearly with lofty claims of ‘revolutionising social media as we know it’, they mostly remain niche sites. Nonetheless, keeping an eye on any recent advancements in the sector is critical! That’s what our blog is for, though, right?

Are you feeling a little bit lost? We don’t blame you, and we are here to help. Spin is an award-winning pure-play social media agency that combines the sharpest creative minds with the most innovative performance specialists.

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Your Paid Social Creative Isn’t Working And Here’s Why

A year is a long old time in the marketing landscape, especially us lucky lot that get to call social home. In the last year alone we’ve seen Metaverse’s come and go, new platforms (hi Threads 👋), entire name changes (I’m still not over typing “formerly Twitter'' to every conversation X is mentioned), and new features galore.

But the most impactful of these changes to brands is the advancement of AI to power media platforms algorithms. Paid social media buyers usually see extremes on either end of the spectrum when it comes to creative output - brands investing into big campaign ideas and moments, with social being one of many battlegrounds, and brands neglecting creative entirely, focussed instead on growth driving paid media tactics. But with this change in how social algorithms operate, being on either end of this spectrum will be leaving you exposed to plummeting performance.

The very nature of how creative is used on social media advertising has changed. It’s not about turning up in the right place, at the right time with outstanding creative that wins hearts and minds. Today the creative asset itself determines where, who and how you show up at all. And because so much of a good paid social strategy is dependent on the content itself, your approach has to be formulaic enough to measure its performance, without compromising on that creative edge that makes a user actually care to stop from scrolling. Content is hard to measure, but paid social is built to be measured, so identifying a way of combining the two can drive real, insightful learnings that unlock incredible potential. 

A formulaic framework:
For brands that are starting out on this journey, step one is to apply a formulaic framework for creative testing to establish a foundation of learnings to build from. When working with video, applying a modular approach to creation can yield great analysis on paid media creative. Slicing the components of your overall messaging down into segments - whether it’s pain points/desires, social proofing, the proposition as the solution, scarcity - and then building multiple asset variations with each section's orders mixed up.

Measuring their performance from your primary KPIs, and additional storytelling metrics like hook and hold rates help you learn about messaging hierarchy, who your ideal customer is and what motivates them. The same theory can be applied to other ad formats, although storytelling metrics are less rich, so isolating each testing variable is doubly important for learnings. (There’s even ways to give your catalogues a boost through creative learning taken from your strategy, but stay tuned for part 2 to learn more on that…)

Creative diversity: 
Step 2 involves applying the knowledge you gain in step 1 about your community and their behaviours a level further. Using the insights gained to inform new creative styles, formats and innovations that unlock and engage new audiences, without needing to change anything else in your media strategies. Remembering that ad content signals the algorithm and determines how it’s used, so neglecting step 2 and leaning too far into formula and rules and data, i.e. “statics talking about pain point 1 worked well, let’s brief more of those” can actually lead to negative results, shrink your audience pool down and stop you from being able to effectively scale performance. Ultimately, creative has to be creative in order to retain relevance, authenticity and excitement to the human on the other end. That shouldn’t be compromised in the endeavour to gather data and influence performance. 

In summary, creative is not just the key; but the entire vehicle to success. Marketers who fail to embrace this idea, and continue to rely too heavily on their strategic media buying smarts, risk being left behind in a rapidly evolving landscape. So too do marketers and brands who fail to approach creative strategically, with a long term and dynamic lens. Paid social is a unique medium that can teach us so much about our customers; how to capture their attention, engage them, convert them, retain them and make them lifelong fans, on and offline. When used correctly, the opportunity for brands to succeed is endless. 

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10 Things We Learned At Cannes Lions 2024

Phew. 

So here we are, another Cannes down. The biggest one yet? Perhaps not, but for Spin, no doubt. 

We were fortunate enough to take down a big team to get stuck in and see what it’s all about. It was 5 days of an exhausting schedule, digging deep and fully immersing ourselves into everything Cannes has to offer. 

✅ All the clichés are truth. 

✅ Everyone wears linen. 

✅ There are a lot of events on yachts. 

✅ Rosé starts early (for a work event). 

✅ The activations are next level. Shout out Stagwell, Meta, Pinterest this year. 

✅ Getting into Spotify is harder than breaking into Fort Knox.

✅ Celebrities are around every corner and some very big ones. 

✅ At 4AM, it’s surprisingly busy out. 

But here are a couple of observations and new things we learned this year:

1️. Our industry is in a very good place. It is a hive of activity, so much is changing, but under all of it - there is an industry that is thriving with opportunities everywhere. 

2️. You can’t just look at ‘Trends’. You have to recognise the difference between Fast Trends, Short-Term Trends & Long-Term trends. 

3️. You need a combination of Best Practice, Experimentation & Creativity to succeed. As TikTok said, “Use best practice to raise the floor, use test & learn to find your ceiling”. 

4️. Things we’ve known and seen for years and now being discussed at the mainstream level, namely, how the shift to creator-led content leads to greater authenticity BUT it has to perform well. 

5️. We should all be asking ourselves, “how can I be creative, in a data-driven way”. 

6️. According to Meta, 50% of time on Instagram is now spent on Reels and 75% of those reels are with sound-on. 

7️. Some KPIs you may not be tracking that you should - Share-To-View Ratio, Saves, View-Through 30 Seconds. 

8️. As Toto Wolff said, “You don’t want to go from Great to Good. You have to be constantly asking yourself and your team, ‘Are you still the best you can be’”?

9️. As Gary Vee says, modern marketing is all about finding under-valued attention and then exploding it - a lot of that under-valued attention right now is in women’s sports. 

10. We should all be looking towards micro-communities within social to find insights that drive creative ideas. 

That’s a wrap for 2024. 

🇫🇷 Cannes, Merci. 

👫 Spin team, it was a pleasure. 

🫂 To new friends, see you soon. 

Au revoir. 

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Spin Wins Global Social Media Award!

We're thrilled to announce that Spin has won the Best Charity/Non-Profit Campaign award at this year's Global Social Media Awards for work with UICC.

Our campaign was celebrated for its innovative use of video strategy, which the judges described as "exceptionally clever." By integrating creativity uniquely and effectively, we crafted a campaign that not only captivated audiences but also drove substantial engagement and support for a vital cause. The judges were particularly impressed by our approach to the brief, highlighting our "strong creative idea and insightful execution."

One of the key challenges we faced was operating within strict budget constraints. However, this limitation only fuelled our creativity, pushing us to think outside the box and maximise every resource at our disposal. The result was a campaign that not only achieved its goals but did so with flair and efficiency, proving that creativity thrives under pressure.

Max Whicher and Alex Bodini, co-founders of Spin, shared their excitement about the win: "We are immensely proud of our team for their hard work and creativity. This award reflects our commitment to supporting charitable causes through powerful social media storytelling. It's a privilege to see our efforts recognised on such a prestigious platform."

This victory at the Global Social Media Awards is not just a win for Spin but a win for creativity and social good. We look forward to continuing to break barriers and create impactful campaigns that resonate widely and deeply.

To learn more about our award-winning approach and how we can help your organisation make a significant impact, please get in touch with us below.

Thank you to the Global Social Media Awards for this incredible honour and to everyone who continues to support our journey. Here's to more creativity, more impact, and more wins in the future!

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