3 Takeaways from Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2023 Report

Toward the end of last year, pandemic restrictions finally started easing up and markets were booming—but as we lurch into 2023, things look much more delicate. A looming recession, mounting inflation, declining consumer spending, and workforce reductions across major business sectors have made things precarious for businesses of all sizes. 

Despite this uncertainty, social media marketers are experiencing a defining moment in history – and, a really positive one at that. After more than a decade of growing pains, social media marketing has finally matured as a profession, and many social marketers find themselves in a position of relative security — getting larger slices of the overall marketing budget and more agency over their work.

But now is also the time for marketers who work in social media to really double down and prove their worth. 

How, you might ask? To get you started, here are three highlights from our Social Trends Report that  will help you make the most of your social strategy in 2023. 

1) Protect your budget from scrutiny 

Social media has finally earned its seat at the boardroom table, and while this newfound visibility among the C-suite is a major step forward in building social into the overarching business plan, it also has the potential to open it to higher levels of scrutiny—especially as leadership whips out the budget magnifying glass over the coming year. 

During market downturns, many execs will look to shore up costs and manage expenses as much as possible. In the marketing department, the pressure will fall on individual contributors and middle managers to clearly demonstrate the value their work brings to the table. 

This is where social media practitioners might run into problems. Our survey found that when it comes to social media, seniority has a major impact on how individuals perceive and demonstrate the value of social. While practitioners were 17% more likely than the C-suite to say their organization uses impressions/views to demonstrate ROI, we found that C-level executives were 13% more likely than practitioners to say they used sales/revenue to demonstrate ROI. 

How can you mitigate this discrepancy in expectations? Start by tracking metrics that align with your business objectives. Social media metrics can give you a ton of insight into the reach of your content, the audience that it’s attracting and engaging, and the overall sentiment of your brand – but tracking the right metrics is the key to understanding your social ROI and proving the business impact to executives.Start by focusing on a few metrics that help you tell the right story and build your business case. 

2) Get strategic and specific about the social networks you’re using. 

From Stories to Reels to Twitter’s ill-fated Fleets (remember those?), social media networks have spent much of the past decade tripping over themselves to copy their competitors’ most successful features. 

This game has not only come at the expense of the user experience but also at the expense of the sanity of social media marketers, whose work lives now revolve around constantly adapting their social strategies to meet new formats,  and wondering when the next network change will upend their carefully-organized campaign. 

What the networks have failed to consider is that user attention is not a zero sum game. Our Global Digital Report found that the average social media user is on seven social platforms, and our trends survey further validated that concept with more than 84% of TikTok users saying they are also on Facebook and almost 88% of Twitter users are also on Instagram. People don’t only get different types of value from different networks, they explicitly use different social networks for different purposes – and  adding competitor capabilities to one network doesn’t change the perception that people have spent years forming on how they use each specific network. 

That’s why Instagram Reels, for example, is struggling to compete with TikTok—even though it’s basically the same thing. 

And that’s why successful marketers know that strategy is more important than tactics.  

As the Frankensteining of social networks continues, what the most confident marketers need to do is spend less time worrying about which copycat feature to start using next and more time exploring platforms that best reflect their business goals. 

With this in mind, as you begin building out your social strategy for 2023 and beyond, focus on creating content that’s well suited to those platforms and the content that you know your audience is looking for, rather than trying to keep up with every feature-level change the networks throw your way. 

3) Don’t disregard customer service. 

Last year, we predicted that marketers would take a greater role in customer service in 2022. And, to their credit—and ours—they have. Less than 8% of organizations we surveyed said their customer service team was exclusively responsible for providing customer service on social and messaging apps. Remarkably, almost half (49%) of organizations said that social customer service was usually or exclusively the responsibility of the marketing team. 

Unfortunately, what we’ve found is that many marketers don’t feel equipped to take this on; only 21% feel they do a good job servicing customers on social channels, according to a survey by the CMO Council and IBM. Because of this disconnect, many businesses are leaving customers hanging and revenue on the table, says Chris Campbell, CEO of reputation management software ReviewTrackers. “I think the biggest thing that's still a missed opportunity for a lot of businesses is just taking the time to respond to your customers,” he says. “Right now we’re just hanging up on them when we’re not responding to their queries.” 

We get it: Social was never meant to be a customer service channel. But now it really can’t be ignored. Social media has taken an outsized role in customer service—and businesses, as well as practitioners, are caught dealing with the repercussions. 

After all, if marketers see it as their responsibility to build brands, ignoring customer service is detrimental to that goal. Remember, a brand isn’t just a logo or a promise; it’s a result. It’s a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company – and it’s every marketer’s responsibility to make sure that gut feeling isn’t soured by unanswered DMs.

Ready to get started?

That’s it! Well, not really. We’ve got plenty more where that came from. To read the rest of the trends and gain access to tactical takeaways, case studies, and all of the data we compiled from our survey of more than 10,000 marketers , you can download the full report here!