Biggest Social Media Trends in 2020
TikTok – the Social Media Platform of 2020
Source: BBC News
It goes without saying that Tiktok took the internet by storm in 2020 – culminating in being banned by Donald Trump on 12 November 2020 for ‘foreign security’ reasons. TikTok employed 1500 people in the US alone – a smart move considering the record high unemployment rates in the US as a result of the pandemic lockdowns.
Still – according to Google Play and App Store data, the app was the most popular pandemic pastime of the year it seems – it was downloaded 15 million times in March 2020 alone – and this is a world record number of downloads of any app in the history of the internet. The UK users accounted for more than 745,000 of these downloads.
In total – Tiktok has now over 800 million users (! – that’s TWICE the entire population of the US!) and is rapidly catching up with Instagram (1 billion).
If this is too hard of math for you – we’ve got good news.
You can now do Tiktok as a career!
Look at the TikTok consultant search volume in Google Trends over the past few years:
…and you can even run a TikTok agency as business these days, it seems:
Source: Google Trends
How to qualify for the job?
Your TikTok stats need to speak for themselves. Good news: it doesn’t take years to earn a celebrity status on TikTok: Bella Poarch created her first video in April, went viral with her lip-synch singing in August, and amassed...941.6 million likes and 48.9 million followers by now:
If you don’t have the angelic face of the 23-year old American-Filipino TikTok influencer, but want to learn more about Tiktok marketing and content strategy- check out our earlier post on it here!
Reels
In a dramatic bid not to fall behind TikTok and fall into obsolescence used only by grandmas like Yours Truly, Instagram introduced TikTok-esque reels on August 5, 2020.
Reels allow users to create short (15-second) music-videos with filters, subtitles, special effects, and a lot of other creative stuff that will make you look like you’re a supermodel and have a life online even if you don’t.
+ you can share your reels not only with your Gram followers, but also on Facebook, and in the new ‘bs marketplace’ Instagram audaciously called ‘Explore’, that so far has been showing me mostly before-and-after clips from plastic surgery and weirdly smiling blond ladies jumping up and down in different clothes.
But there’s some good stuff too, if you’re into dark British sense of humor:
Source: Abigail Chandler
Stories Everywhere – LinkedIn Stories
Following the success of Facebook Stories (and Instagram Stories, of course), LinkedIn followed suit with LinkedIn Stories on 20 October 2020. The response from the LinkedIn community has been a feeble frown so far (just like with LinkedIn Groups, which are mostly haunted cemeteries for shameless content plugs), giving a clear indication that what works in B2C and teenage girls, does not necessarily work with B2B and suited up men in their 40s.
Just wow.
Instagram Music Sticker
Source: TechWiser.com
The epitome of the ‘world divided’ – Instagram Music Sticker – arrived in June 2018, but as of December 2020 – it’s available only in some countries (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, France, Canada, and Germany.)
Outside those selected few, all you’ll get when trying to add Jingle Bells to your cosy socially isolated Christmas shots is an error: “Instagram Music isn’t available in your region”.
If you’re a hardcore Gram user from e.g. Russia though – you can sidestep this though with a VPN.
Instagram & Facebook Carousel Ads, Facebook Lead Gen Ads
Source: Facebook
If images speak more than a 1000 words – then you can now say 10,000 words with the up-to-10 images in the Facebook Carousel ads. Everyone is using them, just like with Facebook Lead Gen Ads, because organic reach is definitely dead (very dead-dead) on Facebook, and if you want to get anywhere with your Facebook efforts in 2020 – you gotta pay!
Facebook Lives – long live LinkedIn Lives!
I don’t know if you noticed but there are substantially fewer Facebook lives filing our walls in 2020 than before…my guess is that Facebook wants to cut down on the very expensive format, thus slashing its organic reach.
Still – LinkedIn rolled out an open beta of its lives and you can apply to have access to this feature too.
Video is going strong
You may want to say it’s human nature – and there’s simply no sign that video is going anywhere (away from social media, at least). To facilitate your cinematographic endeavours – we’ve launched Twitter video scheduling and LinkedIn videos in our social media scheduler this year. Why not try it for free?
If you still need more prep before your debut – here’s a useful guide to Facebook video strategy you should read.
Corona Memes
Needless to say – the corona crisis is what dominated every aspect of life this year. Social media didn’t fall behind – and soon after a country after country started introducing lockdowns – social media started to swell with corona memes – here’s our selection of the best ones.
‘How it started vs How it’s going’ viral posts
The viral ‘how it started vs how its going’ meme that got applied to abso-effing-lutely-every-thing on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter alike originated back in September when a user named @vjllanelles posted her soon-to-go-viral post about her & her partner’s relationship goals.
The post took a life of its own and soon social media were literally peppered with analogies – sometimes of a deeper meaning:
2020 – What’s new in Postfity?
Well, despite the pandemic, we didn’t let the sleeping dogs lie – and also released a bunch of useful features in 2020:
Social Tips Calendar
First and foremost – we know you don’t have time to come up with social media posts. We know that, because otherwise you probably wouldn’t need a social media scheduler 😉 so – we came up with a calendar of post templates for every day of the week you can use when creativity is scarce.
LinkedIn and Twitter videos
Twitter Snapshots
Styled Tweet Snapshots shared to Instagram were all the rage in 2020 – and no wonder. There are lots of benefits:
- content repurposing saves tons of time – sharing snaps of your Tweets to your IG feed is a great way to produce more compelling content out of what you already have. Especially if you’re running out of pretty photos (which we all are – hello pandemic.)
- you get to promote your Twitter on your ‘Gram and get more Twitter followers
- it will make your Instagram feed more diverse and engaging – especially if you’re in a field with a high Twitter presence, such as politics, social sciences, finance, economy etc. (see more here)
- cross-promoting your content on different social media accounts is a great way to increase your visibility.
Now you don’t need to be a graphic designer to create them either – check out Postifty with our Tweeter snapshots for free!
And that’s about it when it comes to 2020 social media marketing trends – hope you found them inspiring! Now go check out our special Christmas promo and have a great New Year!
