After the transformations that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, in the influencer world, 2021 represented a growth in the influencer marketing industry of 42% , which was possible thanks to the industry’s ability to adapt. to the challenges posed by the pandemic and the new ways content creators found to continue working on social media.
Depositphotos.comDuring the year that ends, the impact and progress in social networks allowed Influencer Marketing to go from billing 9.7 billion in 2020 to 13.8 billion in 2021, with an expectation that it will reach 15 billion by the end of 2022.
As we can see, it is an industry that continues to move and that in 2022 will continue to grow.
As an expert in influencer marketing and social media, I have put together these five trends that will be the most relevant of the year to come.
1. The TikTok domain
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Short form videos are so popular and have worked so well to grow TikTok’s audience that other platforms have copied the concept and created their own version.
According to SocialPubli’s 2021 TikTok Influencer Marketing Study , 87 percent of TikTok influencers get a higher audience share from TikTok than from their other social media platforms.
Likewise, 86.5 percent of influencers noticed an increase in their use of TikTok since the start of the pandemic in 2020, and more than 60 percent reported that they have doubled the time they spend on the platform.
On the advertisers side, it is a social space with great potential for opportunities for brands seeking to associate with the most popular influencers of the moment. The same SocialPubli study found that 87.7 percent of marketers find TikTok influencer marketing effective.
In 2022 this trend will continue to consolidate with a platform that does not stop growing.
2. Rise of short video
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Social media users are consuming more videos than ever, and platforms are encouraging content creators to invest in producing them. But to be really engaged, it cannot be just any video.
Keep in mind that as the attention span of social media users continues to shrink, the videos that dominate social media today must have 3 characteristics: be short, attractive and easy to understand.
According to Cisco, in 2022 more than 82% of global online traffic will be accounted for by video content, 15 times more than in 2017.
Currently, the videos on TikTok receive more than 1 billion views every day. According to Search Engine Journal, video posts on Instagram double the engagement of other types of posts, while Twitter claims that tweets with videos get 10 times more engagement than those without video on its platform.
With the growing popularity of TikTok and the introduction of Instagram Reels, the trend in 2022 is that video consumption will increase even more.
3. The moment of micro and nano influencers
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Seeing the overwhelming growth of TikTok, during 2021 Instagram was quite busy launching a variety of new features to facilitate engagement and interaction of content.
The goal: to facilitate the work of content creators.
Collabs was born from these efforts, which helps to reach more followers, generate more engagement or reach a new audience- and the sticker “Add yours” (Add Yours) -in the Stories to create threads to which users can respond -.
But most relevant for micro and nano influencers this year is that Instagram replaced swipe up with link stickers and opened link exchange to all users through Stories .
With this new functionality, micro and nano influencers with less than 10,000 followers can now drive traffic to a brand’s website or landing page directly from their Stories, which was previously only reserved for influencers with thousands of followers.
The trend in 2022 is that we will see more influencers, regardless of the number of their followers, making recommendations and being powerful allies of social commerce
4. More influencers and more niches
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As the industry grows, new content creators will continue to emerge spanning a variety of industries and niches.
At the same time, to seek to gain relevance, influencers will specialize more and seek to stand out as experts in their niches since this makes them more attractive to brands.
What will also happen is that, by creating and sharing specialized content with their growing communities, the term “influencer” will become “content creator”, something that we are already beginning to see many influencers calling themselves creators of content or describe what they do as “content creators for x”.
Social platforms have taken good note of this and have created spaces such as LinkedIn that launched its Creator Profiles or Spotify that Locker Room acquired to offer new options for creating audio content.
5. Expansion of social commerce and new ways to earn money
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The number of social e-commerce shoppers in the United States grew from 2019 to 2020 by 25% to 80 million, a number that is projected to grow to more than 100 million by 2023, according to an Insider Intelligence report.
During the pandemic this trend continued to rise and in 2021 social media platforms continued to invest heavily in social commerce tools to make it easier for content creators and businesses to sell and for consumers to buy.
According to the SocialPubli study cited above, 67.9% of those surveyed declared having bought a product after seeing a post from someone they follow on TikTok.
The hashtag#TikTokMadeMeBuyIt , which users use to post what they have bought thanks to product recommendations on the site, has been used 7 billion times this year, giving us an idea of how powerful recommendations are in the social networks.
In 2022 we will continue to see this trend led by influencers who will help consumers discover and buy simultaneously without leaving the social network.
For most influencers, their main source of income continues to be their collaborations with brands; however, many of them are diversifying their sources of income so as not to rely solely on sponsored content.
Social networks have of course understood this and are meeting their demands by investing in new features that help them earn money.
On Instagram, the leading network in influencer marketing, influencers can make money selling their own products and will soon be able to make money through in-app affiliate marketing.
Other ways to earn money for influencers go through the “badges” in the Lives of Instagram; Virtual tips on Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Clubhouse to take advantage of platforms like Patreon.
