Hey hey, we’re back with fresh new episodes in 2022! And to kick things off, let’s chat about the big social media trends for 2022. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that we are continuing to see the rise of video content, so how can you leverage that for your own brand? We’re chatting about that, plus a few other things to watch out for this year.
Key Topics:
- What type of content will dominate social in 2022?
- How to get started with Instagram Reels and TikTok.
- How you can enhance your business with a membership.
- The social media trend that will never go out of style.
Mentioned in this Episode:
(The following links may contain affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you make a purchase)
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Transcript
Mindy Marzec 0:56
Hello, hello friends. It’s Mindy. I am back behind the microphone. I am so excited to be back after a bit of a hiatus for the podcast and as you can probably tell, there have been a few changes around here. Actually just one major change and that is of course, I rebranded the podcast and change the name. The former name was influencer education which is a name that well it kind of flows off the tongue. I really liked it, but it doesn’t like what I’m trying to convey, which is that we shouldn’t focus on being influencers. We should focus on our content. And that is the joy of contents. Podcast, was reincarnated. And I’m really excited about the name. I really stood on this change for a while, and I landed on the joy of content first of all, for those of you who don’t know, joy is my middle name. And I really like my middle name. And so I’m very happy to incorporate it into the title of this podcast now. And then of course, I focus on all things content marketing. So the joy of content just made sense for me. And then one other reason I really liked the name the joy of content, is because if you’ve been listening for a while if you follow me on Instagram, which is at Joy content, you then you know that I really like to focus on the mental health challenges of running an online business and putting your life out there. Social media and all cultures that come with. I think that paying attention to our mental health is so so important. And so I really feel like the joy of content reminds us that creating content is supposed to be fun. It’s not supposed to be stressing us out 24/7 It can be a really joyful and fun experience. And so I hope that you like the new name. I hope that you find that it’s a good fit for the topics that we talked about. And I’m so very excited to say that instead of doing seasons, where I create batch episodes and drop them all at once, the joy of content is going to move into a bi weekly schedule so I will release episodes every other week. Right now we’re doing on Wednesdays so every day you will have a new fresh episode of the joy of content ready for you and your podcast player of choice. So I hope that answers some questions about why I decided to rebrand I changed the name as you can tell, you know pretty much our logo is the same the topics are going to be the same. It’s still the same me still the same Mindy but I hope that that name reflects, you know better about what we’re talking about and the topics that we cover, and I hope you really like it. Of course I’m always open to your feedback. So again, you can visit me on Instagram at joy, content, or visit joy of content.com to see all of the resources I have available for you. You can find all the past links are educated. So it’s there, as well as show notes for past episodes and contact me through the website as well. Alright, so moving on to this episode topic, which is talking about what I think will be the biggest social media for 2022. Now at the time this was recorded and the time I’m posting it, it’s early February 2022. So it’s it’s still close to the start of the year. And I think I can get away with doing an episode about social media trends for the year. So you’ve heard me say many, many times that social media platforms are constantly evolving. And we have to evolve with them if we want to remain successful on those platforms. So what I’m going to do with this episode is chat about what features you should be focusing on to maximize your reach engagement. And growth. So when we’re talking about these trends, do you have to use them? Do you have to follow along? No, not necessarily. But these are the things that I think you should be focusing on in order to maximize your reach.
Mindy Marzec 5:58
Alright, so the first thing I want to talk about probably no surprise is Instagram Reels. People still think about Reels as a new feature, and it’s not a new feature anymore. They launched almost two years ago, it was August 2020 when Instagram launched Reels for everybody. And almost two years later they are as popular as they ever been. Instagram is constantly playing around with the format of Reels and adding new features to it. So they are really putting everything into Reels and I think that if you are on Instagram, you should be putting everything into Reels as well. I know there are a lot of creators who are hesitant to dive into Reels or any video for that matter, because it feels really daunting, but I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to do a lot of the stuff that you see on people’s Reels. You don’t have to edit fancy transitions. You don’t have to learn a complicated dance. You don’t have to point around at the screen. You don’t even have to show your face if you don’t want to. Some of my best Reels in 2021 were simply a trending sound over either a compilation of videos I had stored on my phone or one specific video I had stored on my phone, mostly videos I took at Disneyland that don’t even have my face in them. So my best tip for getting started with Reels or even if you’re already doing Reels and you want to put more effort into the platform or learn how to grow with Reels, simply watch a few Reels. You can watch them by just going to the Reels tab at the bottom of your Instagram app and scrolling through it’s kind of like the Explore feed for Reels. So it’ll show you what’s trending. It’ll show you Reels that are popular. It will show you Reels that it thinks Instagram thinks you will like based on your history. You know, what the algorithm thinks is something you would like and just see what inspires you see what stands out to you. Save the audios that you like, you don’t even necessarily have to think, like oh, I know the perfect idea for this trending sound. Just see what inspires you, see what you like. And you can either save that Reel so you can reference it later or just save the audio so that when you are feeling creative, you can go back and have that audio handy.
Mindy Marzec 8:39
So speaking of Reels, we should also talk about its predecessor, of course, TikTok so I’m going to say that trend number two that you should be looking into is TikTok because the platform is not fading away anytime soon. It’s just getting bigger and bigger and more and more popular. You know it was just a few years ago when TikTok was viewed as a platform for solely Gen Z. And that is certainly not the case anymore. Whether Gen Z likes it or not, sorry, but the olds are here. We’re invading the platform. And many of us are finding success with it. So just like any social media platform TikTok works best when you have a solid niche and stick with it. I do hope to interview a successful TikTok creator for a future episode because I at this point I certainly am not using TikTok pretty much at all. I really want to but I just haven’t found the time to dive into it and do it right. So I would love to interview someone who is a successful TikTok creator so that they can share their expertise with you but my for now my advice for someone who isn’t familiar with TikTok is just like with Reels. Just watch a few and get familiar with the platform. See what stands out to you see what inspires you there are so many ways to create video content. And again, I think a lot of people feel like you have to be talking to the camera or you have to put in this complicated production and I promise you that you don’t have to do that. You can film simple videos. You just have to find what works for you, what works for your personality, what works for your level of creativity so that the process feels fun and creative and not stressful. So Trend number two, look into TikTok. I will be doing the same going forward this year and using TikTok more.
Mindy Marzec 10:42
Moving on to trend number three, I think we’re going to see a lot of this in 2022 and that’s platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok. They’re developing their own ways to help creators monetize their platforms directly within the app. So for Instagram, we’ve already seen things like badges for live streams and bonuses that Instagram has paid select creators are creating content. And then Tik Tok has a creator marketplace that makes it easy for creators and brands to connect and partner with each other on sponsored content. As far as Instagram goes, they already have announced that they’re planning to launch a similar marketplace to that called brands collab manager. And what this does is it diminishes the need for third party agencies who kind of broker deals between creators and brands and just creates a more seamless transaction for both parties. Facebook has been using brands collab manager for Facebook Pages for I believe, a couple of years now, and some lucky creators were chosen to also connect their Instagram accounts to the brands collab manager. I have not been able to do that yet. I have not been granted access by the Facebook Meta gods yet. I’ll be checking down again to see when it rolls out, but hopefully in 2022 it will roll out for more creators.
Mindy Marzec 12:21
And then another tool for creators to be aware of for Instagram is a native affiliate program. Again, where creators can easily share affiliate links for products that they recommend. And the viewers can actually seamlessly purchase the products right through Instagram. They’re not taken to a third party platform or to a website. You can just seamlessly purchase that product without ever leaving Instagram, which of course is a dream for Instagram because they don’t want people leaving their platform. But it also works well for creators because it makes shopping easy for their audience. This idea of course sounds really intriguing. The feature is currently being tested with a very small number of creators and brands. But we should see it expanding larger to more creators this year.
Mindy Marzec 13:16
Okay, and this is the part of the show where I just want to warn you again, you should never put all your eggs in one basket so to speak. You know Instagram is a great marketing tool. But I always recommend that people use social media as a marketing tool to move your audience members onto your own platforms like visiting your website, or signing up for your email list. But if you can use these creator tools to to earn some extra dollars. I think obviously that’s super awesome. So I’m really looking forward to learning more about these collaboration tools when they fully launch should be sometime this year in 2022.
Mindy Marzec 14:03
So this actually segues nicely into the fourth item I want to talk about, which is subscriptions and community memberships. So Instagram just recently announced that they are going to be adding a subscription feature to creator accounts. Right now they’re testing it on a few and of course Facebook has had subscriptions for Facebook group owners for a while now. I have never personally used it because again, I don’t, for me, I don’t want to put a subscription model within a platform if I were to do it, and I do hope to experiment with it someday. I would take it off of social media and put it on its own independent platform, but it’s pretty cool that Instagram is expanding subscriptions to Instagram, after testing it over on Facebook, where apparently it’s done pretty well. So what subscriptions are for those of you who may not be familiar with it, it’s going to be a way for your audience to pay a monthly fee. It’s generally like paying a recurring fee for exclusive content from you. And so what it means is that there’s a little bit of extra work there to create that premium content for your paying subscribers. But hopefully it is worth it because obviously it’s a pretty I don’t want to say easy way to monetize, but it’s a way that you can get another stream of revenue without only working with brands or only getting web ad money or only doing affiliate so it could be a really nice additional income stream for people who want to put the time and energy into it. Now subscription models aren’t anything new. We’ve seen subscriptions with places like Patreon, or for a different industry, there’s of course Only Fans, and Twitch which is a popular gaming live streaming community. They also offer a subscription models so this isn’t anything new. But if you are solely using Instagram, you may have never really experienced the subscription model before. So what are the types of things that you can offer with an Instagram subscription for paying subscribers? The details we don’t have much of quite yet but I’m guessing there will be things like you could do a live stream for your subscribers, you can do stories that are just for your subscribers. Perhaps you could even just do static content or reels that are just for your subscribers. I’m not totally sure everything that Instagram will have to offer, but for subscription models, but it’s definitely going to be something that you can offer that makes people feel like they are supporting you and they’re getting extra content from you. So it is a really cool idea. I just personally wouldn’t do it within Instagram. I’m a part of a couple business memberships. One is SPI Pro, which I’ve talked about here on the podcast before and SPI Pro is hosted on a platform called Circle. So it’s a completely different platform from any other social media account. It kind of is set up like a forum like an online forum. And there’s different topics and there’s different zoom hangouts with various members of the SBI pro team with different topics. For example, once a week, there’s an office hours where members can come hang out in zoom and talk about where they’re stuck with their business or business ideas or just kind of bounce ideas off people, which is pretty cool. So there are lots of ways that you could serve a community through a membership.
Mindy Marzec 18:19
And that actually, again, segues very nicely into the fifth and final trend that I want to talk about in this episode, which is that community, the concept of community is going to be bigger than ever going forward. I truly believe that. I think that it’s a really, really great time to be a creator and a great time to be building a community of people who like the same things that you do. Now, the concept of growing a community online isn’t anything new, of course, myself and many other people have been talking about building community for years, but I think Reels has helped us a lot where things are kind of shifting from the concept of I want to be an influencer and everything is about me, me me, to, I want to create this content. I want to bring people together. I want to create a community of loyal followers, friends, community members, however you want to reference it. But I think that that group mentality, we instead of me, is going to take people a lot farther. And the reason I think that Reels has a bit to do with this is because with a Reel, you lose that idea that you have to be polished and perfect. And if you think about it, I think Stories really helped with this as well. But with Reels you definitely reach a lot more people. And I think the Reels that we see go viral, have some sort of human connection in them. We see something of ourselves in that Reel and that’s why we relate to it and we think oh, I really like this person. I’m going to check them out. I want to be this person’s online friend, and I’m going to join their, I’m going to follow them on Instagram and join their community essentially. And I really love that personally, I’m a big fan of the community, you know, community over competition. You know, I refer to my audience and my community instead of a following, or, you know, users, things like that. Of course I still slip up and use those terms sometimes but I really do try to think of the people who listen to the podcast, the people who are on my email list, the people who follow me on Instagram that people in my groups, we are a community and I just really like that mindset. And I’m hoping that 2022 sees more of a shift from thinking I am an influencer on influencing these people. A shift from that to this is my community. We’re all in this together. We’re all helping each other and so I think that’s really cool. And so I encourage you to think about today, how you can serve your community. How can you do something for them, versus what can they do for me? Alright, so that’s my rant. On community.
Mindy Marzec 21:54
And before I wrap up this episode, I just want to remind you about the trend that never goes out of style. And that of course is to always show up as your authentic self online. Always Be true to yourself. Always be sharing your knowledge, be helping others be a good online friend. And if you do all that you can never go wrong.
Mindy Marzec 22:20
So again, thank you for joining me on this first episode back from our little break here. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. As always, you can give me feedback, you can go to Instagram at joy of content, or visit my website joy of content.com I always love to hear your feedback. Of course if you enjoyed this episode if you’re happy we’re back I would love a review on Apple podcasts and summaries of interviews lined up with suddenly good juicy topics. So I hope that you’re looking forward to that. I hope that you’ll continue to join me here on the Joy of Content podcast.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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