Marketing Wrap-Up: What Happened During 2022?
What can we say about 2022… A year full of technological revolution, takeovers, turbulence and above all - opportunity! We made it through in one piece (more than can be said for some of our tools), but what steps did we take to get to this point? Let’s take a walk through the last 12 months and some of the moments which shaped, destroyed and reshaped our industry.
January:
Remember NFT’s? In January, Facebook was working on a way to allow Facebook and Instagram users to create, buy and sell NFT’s from within the app. They also began testing ways for Instagram users to showcase their NFT’s on their profile. A quick fad? Perhaps, but they have found a place in tech culture, and we’d be surprised if they didn’t make a return in the near future.
Picture source: about.fb.com
February:
Tiktok changed up the purchase journey, creating an infinite loop rather than your typical marketing funnel. A study done on TikTok has shown that “users are 1.5x more likely to immediately go out and buy something they discovered on the platform compared to other platforms' users.” TikTok also had more video consumption than YouTube (for a time). Proof that pop-culture drives business.
Picture source: seller-uk.tiktok.com
March:
Remember when Twitter started forcing users to view their timeline out of chronological order? Well in March they decided to switch it back due to widespread criticism. The power of the people! The best bit… we thought that was the worst Twitter could throw at us marketers - good times.
Picture source: twitter.com
April:
Next, Elon Musk happened. A bid for Twitter appeared off the back of a feud in cyberspace. Who would have thought some light trolling in front of millions of people lead to the most powerful man in the world making a rash decision. Trolling hurts us all, let’s not forget that. Soon after, a £34.6bn ($44bn) bid to purchase Twitter emerged, and they (unfortunately) accepted! This didn’t go through straight away though - but that’s a story for another day.
May:
Gone were the days of posting your links on a post and hoping someone would later find it - LinkedIn finally lets you add a link to your profile! They also announced that month that they’d seen a 34% increase in revenue. It’s almost like listening to users about their experience is a good thing.
Picture source: linkedin.com
June:
Instagram added the “Pin” feature allowing users to pin up to 3 photos or reels to the top of their profile! Small news in the grand scheme of things, but it set up the opportunity for Instagram to trial some interesting new features later in the year, with updates to the algorithm planned for early 2023. Stay tuned for more!
Picture source: facebook.com
July:
Instagram Reels could now be 90 seconds long! You could also add story stickers to your feel and import your own audio to be used. Again, Instagram leads the way with small, meaningful updates. In the background, Meta overhauls the business suite with new creative tools and privacy updates, eventually leading to Meta regaining some ground on TikTok in the race for most active social platform.
Picture source: creators.instagram.com
August:
A quiet month (relatively speaking). Twitter launched branded likes, a feature that allows Timeline Takeover advertisers to transform the like button into a custom animation for 24 hours. Behind the scenes, trouble was brewing for the community of marketers and students who rely on free tools and freemium software.
Video source: twitter.com
September:
Key Social Media platforms are noted as a threat to Google due to almost 40% of young people” preferring to use TikTok and Instagram to find places to go rather than Google Maps or Search according to Google’s Knowledge and Information Senior Vice President, Prabhakar Raghavan.
Also in September, shocking rumours came to be when Adobe completed the purchase of Figma. Sure we still have Canva, but creating from scratch just became A LOT more expensive. The Adobe Creative Cloud paywall is well known for being a blocker to most students and many professionals, and now they’ve taken our favourite freebie from us.
October:
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter went through. Need we say more?
Video source: Twitter user @elonmusk
November:
After posting a poll that received over 15 million votes, Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump to Twitter, but Trump has said he won’t be posting and will use his own social platform instead. We also saw the downfall of the artist formerly known as Kayne West. We won’t go into details, but it’s safe to say that not everyone should be allowed back on social media once banned. Hindsight is great, right Elon?
Source: Twitter user @elonmusk
December:
Twitter has just implemented new rules stating that posting links to any competing social media platforms could land you with an account ban. That means no more posting to your Facebook, Instagram or any other social platform that rivals Twitter - thanks. And in a surprising turn of events, the surpemely confident Elon Musk asked Twitter users if he should step down as CEO. They said yes, he had an excuse to stay on, later changed his mind, and now says he will stay until a suitable replacement is found. Clear as mud.
Outside of Twitter (it was a big year for the platform), Jack Dorsey suggests he may re-enter social media with a new platform. We also see Mastadon crash as it gets more Twitter refugees, and Hive became a thing of the past (it’s peak lasted less than 2 months).
So, what now?
Good question. We don’t know what comes next. Marketing is always changing, and this year has really focussed on social media, often for the worst reasons. Updates have changed the way we interact with our audiences before pulling a full 180 and landing with a disgraceful nose dive into bad politics - but that’s just social media, right?
While social media will always change, we see it settling to more regular updates and order in the coming weeks. Twitter has done a lot to (unintentionally) steal the spotlight, which in turn means we’ve missed some key updates from Google and Bing about SEO which were buried in the news cycle. We’ve also forgotten about the great stuff that came from the power of social media activism with moments like #WomenLifeFreedon.
2022 was a crazy year, and thankfully we don’t see it continuing into 2023. We highly recommend revisiting how you reach your community in 2023 as we’ve seen wholesale changes to the way users interact with us. In short, that means looking at your analytics, updating your social strategy and don’t forget about Reddit.
We’re doubling down on our marketing funnel in the new year, focussing on generating touch points alongside engagement, and increasing the quality of web traffic rather than volume. That also includes cleansing our mailing lists and reintroducing community engagement programmes to update our engaged lists.
Your strategy will of course be different to our clients’ (and our in-house plans). We’ve kept up and shifted direction so many times in 2022, and now we need to go back to what matters. Speaking with our audience, how they want to talk to us. That question you need to ask yourself is - “how have our users reacted to 2022”.
