It cannot be denied that Facebook connects more people than any company has ever done before. Businesses know that too. The popularity of social media, especially Facebook, has led brands to rethink their marketing strategies and how they interact with customers. Today, millions of businesses around the world rely on Facebook to connect with people.
This is why it is vital that companies, and marketing executives, in particular, stay ahead of Facebook trends in order to get the most out of their marketing efforts. And that’s exactly why the current Facebook trends 2021 can be a decisive factor for your business.
We approached the topic of how to use Facebook for marketing closely and created a list that you should definitely know. So let’s jump right in:
1. Facebook Live
With one in five Facebook videos live stream and one million users watching live video every day, live video has become one of the most popular types of online content at a rapid pace in 2020 and is right at the forefront of the market Social media trends for 2021 included. In 2019 alone, users viewed an incredible 1.1 billion hours of live content.
Increases are not only possible, but even certain: Because of the global pandemic crisis of 2020, major events and festivals found their way digitally via live stream into living rooms all over the world this year and thus became a ray of hope for many organizers, artists, but also brands. Since an end to this development is currently not in sight, this is reason enough for us to issue “Going Live” with an excellent forecast as a social media trend for 2021.
2. Facebook Groups And Private Messaging
Facebook wants to encourage users and brands to join or create discussion groups. Throughout the year, the platform has put the package in favor of these communities. Simplified privacy settings, engagement statistics, filters on entry; all these measures encourage brands to unite their consumers around a group, rather than a Facebook page.
The same shift was made on Facebook Messenger. Realizing the potential of private engagement, the social network offers new advertising opportunities on Messenger to attract businesses. We can mention the brand new Facebook Leads Ads format which allows prospects to be qualified from a sponsored post. A real step forward for companies who want to generate better quality leads through their Facebook marketing. Your 2020 digital strategy must absolutely include a component on the creation of a group, as well as a conversational axis on Facebook Messenger.
3. Artificial Intelligence
It’s nothing new, you might think. But artificial intelligence will also become increasingly important for small and medium-sized companies in the coming year. The handling has become so comfortable and easy that AI can also be used by “non-experts”.
When used in a targeted manner, it can help improve the exchange of information with customers, break down customer behavior and draw conclusions from it, measure and optimize the value of your brand, understand target groups better, recognize consumer trends, and much more. There are a number of suitable AI tools that offer comprehensive insights into these points, such as chatbots or CRM platforms.
4. User-Generated Content (UGC)
More and more companies are using the content created by users to generate content that they can use in their everyday lives. Especially during these times, this has created a maximum of authenticity, since entire campaigns were created with UGC. You can let off steam your UGC campaign via various platforms such as Facebook, even though you have chosen Instagram as the central platform for the measure.
User-generated content is therefore the most authentic form of word of mouth and has been proven to far exceed the marketing content created by the companies themselves.
UGC is therefore clearly a social media trend in 2021. With user-generated content, you can react to every event ad hoc. In this way, you not only win customers, but they even generate content for you and even market it yourself.
One advantage of a dedicated follower who is used to UGC promotions is the fact that they are a sustainable resource for constructive feedback and future social Build media campaigns. Users whose content has already been featured in an official campaign will continue to participate with content in the future and thus become micro-influencers for your brand. This enables them to develop a digital word-of-mouth process on popular social media platforms.
5. Branded Content
Brand content produced with high quality will continue to be successful in 2021. However, the focus here is not primarily on sales. Create breathtaking content with interactive content, first-class videos, or artificial intelligence that gives your customers unique and unforgettable experiences.
Companies, brands, and people create new content almost every second – that won’t change in the coming year either. That makes it more and more difficult to stand out from this crowd. Therefore, the first-class quality of your content is absolutely essential in order to create your own trends, to place your own content visibly, to stand out from the noise of the marketing campaigns of other brands, and to operate successful digital marketing in 2021.
6. Brand Activism
Customers are struggling with heavy pressures and worries, which leads them to expect their favorite brands to take responsibility and get involved. Social activism in the field of climate change has produced an influencer of unrivaled media value. Influencers in other areas of society are also gaining importance and are calling on companies to be both authentic and accountable. Those who are serious can definitely be rewarded. Attempts like greenwashing are definitely a thing of the past.
Since many political movements gained massive momentum in 2020, numerous brands and companies have already started to digitally represent their values and convictions in social networks. Big names such as Nike, Reebok, and Netflix have been very committed to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and ice cream maker Ben & Jerrys has also set a very good example when it comes to ethnic equality.
7. Nostalgia Marketing
Nostalgia marketing has experienced a real boom in the past period and is one of the big trends in social media. Especially in times that have changed dramatically and are technology-driven, people are longing for familiar and supposedly or actually good moments from the past – it is the soul food of marketing. And it can do even more: The nostalgia factor has been proven to increase the willingness to spend more money on the corresponding products and services.
Instead of tackling the next big thing, nostalgia marketing pushes us to focus on things we already know. It’s about using the familiarity of the old to sell the fascination of the new. No, this trend is not really new, but it really picked up speed again in 2020, when people spent more time at home and watched their favorite films and series for the umpteenth time.
8. Voice Marketing
More and more companies are now using language technology for their marketing strategies. We think it’s a good idea! Voice assistants like Hallo Magenta, Google Assistant, or, of course Alexa have long ceased to be a novelty. The further development of technology and the accompanying ever better recognition of language make them an increasingly relevant possibility to use them as a marketing channel for your own topics. Above all, because it enables users to be reached digitally in places and times that would have been unthinkable in the past.
Another reason for the increasing popularity of voice assistants is the fact that they learn by communicating with the user, so they can constantly develop and respond to customers’ questions and needs better and better. In 2021, users of social networks will get used to using voice as the main source of information: According to research by 2021 70% of search queries should be made via voice search.
[See related article: Do Chatbots Really Help Your Prospects Or Customers?]
9. Facebook’s Newsfeed
The news feed is king on Facebook. The algorithms behind it control which posts you see from your friends and your friends. Every little action you take on Facebook is tracked and everything is considered to determine which posts come up first.
However, sometimes Facebook is misunderstood. Your news feed is clogged with articles you just aren’t interested in and posts from people you don’t really know. This is not good for you or Facebook. They are having a bad time and hardly using Facebook so they are not making any money from running ads.
The first starting point is the Facebook option for news feed settings. This tool allows you to decide which people and pages to show up in your news feed first and prevents you from following people and pages you no longer want to see. The tool is the same on the website, iOS, and Android, so I’ll work through the iOS version.
10. Social Messaging
Email is like this in 2020. At least when it comes to generic emails that no one has been waiting for. The entertaining marketing communication has migrated more and more to social media in 2020, where it really unfolds in 2021. Messaging applications are enjoying ever-increasing popularity and thus represent a huge and largely untapped opportunity to personally interact with customers digitally on Facebook. According to a worldwide survey by Facebook IQ, 56% of users already prefer to contact a company via a messenger instead of the telephone. More than 50% also state that they are more willing to make a purchase from a company with which they can exchange information via a messenger.
Voice messages can also be sent via many messenger services. So combine social messaging and voice marketing and kill two advertising flies with one digital stone.
Conclusion
Facebook is an influential platform and can give companies a large reach – especially when you take every Facebook marketing strategy into account. Nevertheless, one should always see the social network and social media marketing in general as part of the overall marketing mix and not as its center.
As with other social networks, the reach is only “borrowed”. As an externally controlled system, Facebook is in a certain way unpredictable. Companies should definitely use Facebook, but see it as one of many sources of traffic. We hope that this list will help you with your endeavors in marketing!
[Recommended reading: 5 Steps To Creating An Engaging Facebook Business Page]
[Images – Main photo: Pexels (CC0); Girl in London Phone Booth: Picfair, Kris Olin; other images from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
Yen Pedrajas is the Lead Editor at Removal.AI. She is an experienced social media and digital marketer who writes about eCommerce, technology, and startup businesses. She loves sharing about new insights, ideas and strategies about digital marketing.