Top Social Media Trends for Retailers: Instagram Stories, Influencers and Social Commerce

What’s the next big trend on social media? For retailers, the answer has huge implications for marketing strategies, ad spend, brand awareness and growth. Based on our latest social media data, there are three big trends that every retailer should consider as they plan their strategies. They include the surging popularity of Instagram Stories, the steady expansion of influencer marketing, and the emergence of innovative new social commerce capabilities.

Ad Spend Shifts to Instagram

Although most advertising dollars still go to Facebook, the rapid rise of Instagram is nothing short of remarkable. Year-over-year, ad spend on Instagram Stories has grown nearly 70 percent, and now accounts for 10 percent of total Facebook ad spend. (Remember, Facebook owns Instagram.) During the same period, ad spend on Facebook Stories has grown by only 0.3 percent. When you take a longer view and measure the period from January 2018 to the end of Q3 2019, there has been a 10x jump in ad spend for Instagram Stories.

The reason for this shift is obvious: Instagram is king when it comes to engagement. Looking at the world’s 50 biggest brand profiles on Instagram and Facebook, Instagram continues to have more interactions on profile posts than Facebook. For retailers that are ready to shift their ad spend, there's still much potential to be realized in Instagram’s large audience and high engagement rate. As you can see in the graphic below, retail currently ranks No. 2 in total interactions on the Facebook platform. On Instagram, however, it ranks No. 5, behind other industries including fashion, e-commerce, beauty, and auto.

Credit: Socialbakers

Influencer Marketing is Expanding, Not Shrinking

Reversing an overall downward trend, the latest numbers show that social media influencers are still a popular marketing tool for retailers. The use of the #ad hashtag by Instagram influencers has grown 60 percent. And the No. 1 brand associated with Instagram influencers is retail giant Walmart. In fact, Walmart had twice the number of mentions from twice as many influencers as the second-place finisher. As these numbers demonstrate, consumers are increasingly seeking out reviews and trusted voices when making purchasing decisions. This represents a huge opportunity for retailers to team up with influencers to create an authentic connection with their target audience.

Social Commerce is a Game-Changer

One of the biggest trends on social media that retailers need to be aware of is the introduction of social commerce capabilities. In a nutshell, social commerce is the ability to make a purchase directly from a social media platform. Instead of heading to a shopping site’s app or to an online store after discovering a product on social media, a user can immediately click and buy. In fact, very soon it will be possible to run the entire marketing funnel, from discovery to post-purchase customer care, via social media. There’s plenty of reason to believe that this growing social commerce trend will only continue and eventually overtake e-commerce as we know it today.

Other Trends

There are a number of other social media trends that will continue to play out in the coming year. These include the growing popularity of video posts to engage users, the use of virtual reality (VR) to drive product discovery and purchases, the rise of social media phenomenon TikTok, and the almost exclusive viewing of ads on mobile devices (95.8 percent of the time) compared to desktop (4.2 percent of the time).

For retailers, all of these developments offer a rich field of possibilities to gain faster, better results from their social media marketing strategies. As always when it comes to social, the smartest approach is to stay on top of the latest data and keep asking, "What’s next?"

Yuval Ben-Itzhak is the CEO of Socialbakers, an AI-powered social media and digital marketing solution.