Social Media Trends for 2022

All right. So today we're going to talk about social media trends for 2021 and also social media usage for 2021. So what I wanted to be doing here is I'm going to pull some research up from Pew Research and we're going to take a look at this. All right. So looking at the screen over here, it shows that a growing share of Americans say that they use YouTube, Facebook, and Facebook remains one of the most widely used online platforms among US adults. You can see over here, YouTube's at 81%, Facebook at 69%, Instagram at 40%. And then, you know, we have kind of the rest, right? You can see TikTok is over here. It seems like they've kind of petered out a little bit. But Instagram, you can see the growth is kind of slowing down while YouTube is picking up. The key thing to understand here is that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, right? And Google owns YouTube. I was looking at some other numbers over the years. And when we think about YouTube, it's growing. It doesn't matter how many subscribers a channel has, whether it's 10,000, 1 million, 5 million, 10 million plus or so. It's still growing 10 to 15% quarter on quarter for a quote unquote mature business. And I just think YouTube's gonna get bigger and bigger because a lot of people are going to it to learn stuff. I'm watching YouTube when I'm eating lunch or, you know, if I'm eating dinner. So I enjoy it. You know, I learn a lot. I learn a lot from the interviews, watching CEO interviews. So I'm getting better on YouTube. And I think education's not gonna stop. People wanna get better, right? And I think a lot of people are educating themselves. My cousin, he learned how to garden from YouTube. So of all places, right? And it seems to make a lot of sense. And so Facebook, it seems, interesting that they're flat. And I think Facebook's done a fairly decent job at keeping people engaged. There's communities in there. Sometimes you want to keep in touch with your friends, you want to message people on Facebook as well. So they've kind of managed to keep people there. And Instagram, I see it petering off a little bit because, you know, there's these other social channels that are continuing to grow, right? LinkedIn looks interesting at 28, but you can see at a certain point, like, it's explosive growth for these social media companies, but then they start to slow down. What I'm most interested in when it comes to social media trends. Thinking about the channels I'm most excited about, especially for 2021, it's definitely YouTube, which is why you see me making videos like this. I have a friend, Noah Kagan, he has a channel where he grew from like 40,000 or 50,000 to maybe 130,000 or so in a year. He's spending a lot of time and money on YouTube. I think he said he spent like $240,000 in a year, which is a lot of money for YouTube. I'm really interested. I think long-term it's a good play. I just love learning and I love teaching, which is why I'm doing these videos right now. Facebook is okay. I just kind of leave it there. I really log in like maybe once a week or so just to check in on some messages. So that's maybe showing how people are engaged with Facebook. Instagram, I mainly use it for posting content. You know, occasionally there's people that DM me. So, you know, we might get something done there. I've actually hired some people from, from Instagram directly as well. So I'm most excited about YouTube. I'm very excited about LinkedIn. You know, now Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so they're putting a lot of dollars towards it. LinkedIn, super exciting to me because the organic reach is so strong even right now. And I just think it's going to get better and better. And so a lot of the business I do happens to be around B2B. Number 3 would probably be Twitter. I get a lot of value from Twitter because, you know, I get to interact with some of the smartest people in the world. Some are world leaders. Twitter DM has been great. I'll get people on my podcast, people that are kind of movers and shakers. Sometimes you don't know, like one of your tweets is just going to take off and a lot of people are going to see it. I know one guy, his name is Sean Peery. He has the My First Million podcast. He did a tweet storm, which is just a series of tweets. And it talked about how he thinks Clubhouse is going to fail. I think it got 7 million impressions or So he got on CNBC as well. He got a lot of powerful people that saw his series of tweets. And then I would go with maybe Instagram. You know, I'm not sure I would consider some of these chat programs as social networks. You can, you know, Facebook Messenger, you can consider WhatsApp, you know, social as well. If we're gonna look at it that way, I'm also then gonna count podcasting. So I'm gonna put podcasting as number 4 because you have Spotify making a hard push in the space. Apple's kind of continuing to hold the fort there. I share some of my favorite podcasts with other people. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of dark social. We'll just put it that way. So those, those would be my top 4 in 2021. If you were to say, hey, you want to start a blog? I would say probably not because blogging is really difficult and there's over a billion blogs right now. You probably want to go for something that has less competition. So you'd go for LinkedIn, the organic reach is strong, right? Or you might be going for a TikTok or just depends on who you're trying to sell to, but you want to go where it's, you don't have as many people that are trying to compete and create. So Podcasting, I think we're still under 2 million podcasts right now in the world. That's where it's not that competitive. But then also where's, where's organic reach super strong? I think YouTube has good organic reach once you get going. LinkedIn has great organic reach. I think TikTok has great organic reach as of this recording. You have to make a strategic decision on, on where you're going to target first, especially if you're targeting your first social media platform. Maybe you start to focus on one platform first and then you start to scale bigger and bigger and then you start to branch out to other platforms. You start to repurpose. So I'm very bullish on, on YouTube just because, you know, they've done a great job from a product perspective. And they're also good at staying on top of copying, right? So TikTok, they came out with their TikToks first, and then Instagram copied with Reels, and then YouTube now has Shorts. I just think it's great. Let me know what you think in the comments, and don't forget to like this video. Hit the like button because it helps us grow, and we'll catch you later.