Social Media Trends 2023
Your guide to the future of social marketing,
commerce, and customer service.
Adapting to endure
A defining moment in business gives social media marketers the opportunity to cement their worth
Toward the end of last year, pandemic restrictions finally started easing up and markets were booming. 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, many social media marketers find themselves in a position of relative security—they’re getting larger slices of the overall marketing budget and more agency over their work. After more than a decade of growing pains, social media marketing has finally matured as a profession.
In 2023, successful social marketers will take the time and effort to carefully assess their opportunities, use a scalpel rather than a cleaver, and think about the long-term impact of their short-term actions. Those who do will cement their worth once and for all.
We hope our 2023 social media trends report serves you well in the midst of a defining year.
Explore the trends
Trends in Social Marketing
Creators boom, budgets bust, and marketers wise up to the dangers of cross-posting. What to expect in social marketing in 2023.
Trends in social commerce
Social overtakes search engines and marketers work to build trust in social shopping. Here’s what’s ahead for social commerce.
Trends in social customer service
Chatbots help keep customers happy and marketers lean into customer service. Peek into the wild future of customer experience.
Research methods
This report is based on a survey of 10,643 marketers conducted in July 2022.
We conducted primary interviews with dozens of social marketing practitioners, leaders, observers, and partners.
Our primary data has been supplemented by secondary research from The Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, Deloitte, Edelman, Insider Intelligence, Forrester, GlobalWebIndex, The CMO Survey, and others.
About the survey
Job function of survey
respondents
Graphic showing job functions of survey respondents with practitioner (30%), manager (27%), C-level executive (16%), director (14%), other (11%) and VP (3%)Business size of survey respondents
Target audience of survey respondents
Graphic showing the target audience of survey respondents with primarily consumers (31%), primarily businesses (18%), even split of consumers and businesses (27%), primarily businesses (18%), only consumers (14%), and only businesses (9%)
An overview of Hootsuite’s global Social Trends 2022 survey
- 10,643respondents
- 109countries
- 32%director and above
- 11+industries
- 56%managers and practitioners
Definitions
The use of social media networks across all components of the marketing mix: product, price, promotion, and place.
The process of selling products and services directly through social media.
The process of delivering proactive customer service (finding and responding to brand conversations with the aim of satisfying customer needs before they ask) and reactive customer service (responding to customer-initiated transactions or service inquiries) over social networks.
