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5 DOMINANT SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS FOR THE FUTURE - read the full article about Social Media Marketing trends 2021, Social Media Marketing and from Brady Shearer on Qualified.One
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- In this video, I want to share with you five social media trends that Im predicting will be dominant in the years ahead.
And right now, were seeing a dramatic shift in the social media landscape, the kind that we see every few years and with changes like this comes outstanding opportunity and potential.
The other side of that coin though, is if youre not paying attention, one day, you can wake up and the rhythms and posting patterns of social can be unrecognizable to you.
But thats what this video is for.
Were going to tackle what I see to be the biggest, most fundamental changes that you need to know.
So lets dive in.
(upbeat music) Well, hey there, Im Brady Shearer.
This is Pro Church Tools, and were here to help you and your church navigate the biggest communication shift in 500 years.
If were just meeting for the first time, consider subscribing and join the more than 100,000 churches and church leaders as we go along on this journey together, and please hit the like button, the thumbs up button on this video, if youre enjoying the content, because it really does help make a difference.
Now, lets get started.
First up, weve got social media trend number one.
This is one Ive been sitting on for awhile, but it came across a TikToK the other day that I cant get out of my head.
And it really crystallized this idea for me.
The creator of the video said this.
- Almost all of his videos are frequent, short, and to the point.
Nobody wants to watch 15 minute videos that are uploaded once or twice a month anymore.
- So this is whats so fascinating to me.
At its core, that statement is basically pitting the two biggest video platforms of YouTube and TikTok against each other.
Its the thesis of TikTok, short, more informal, frequent videos versus the thesis of YouTube, longer, maybe more polished, infrequent videos and publishing.
And this goes beyond just YouTube and TikTok now because Instagram has already announced its making dramatic platform changes to lean more into video in response to TikTok.
YouTube has introduced shorts in response to TikTok.
Facebook Watch is one of the five major focuses of Facebook.
You can see that reflected in their navigation menu.
And what were seeing in real time is TikTok completely changing our viewing habits and dramatically altering the entire landscape of social media due to its influence.
And I only expect that to increase going forward.
Now, if TikTok and short form video is still a bit of a mystery to you, I have published a number of videos to help with that.
Therell be linked in the description below.
Id start with the first four TikTok videos your church needs to make, and then check out Instagram reels for churches and why its so important.
Now, if youre like me at all, you might be wondering just how and why is TikTok being so influential.
I mean, sure, it is one thing for an app to get popular, but why is it transcending to other social apps and effecting the rhythms of social beyond itself? And that leads me to social media trend number two.
Now, if you were born after the year 2000, this may not make as much sense for you, but as a 30 year old thats been here since the beginning of social, the general behavior for most of us has been when a new social platform emerges, we join it.
Now basically, if you were a digital native, you were on all the major platforms.
Facebook and YouTube were the earliest platforms that are still with us today, and Im on both of those.
Then came Twitter.
Im on that, Instagram, Im on that, too.
Snapchat? Yeah, well before its features were replicated by Instagram and others, yes.
TikTok, yes, but I dont see this being the case going forward.
Think of it this way.
Weve now been through at least two cycles where the dominant social platform, first Facebook, and then Instagram, has lost its number one spot.
And keeping up with this pace of change is difficult.
Basically what were seeing right now is socials version of popular music changing over.
You know, my parents would say to me, "Your music is so immature.
Its obscene." Now, my age group is saying to younger people, "Your social apps are so immature and obscene.
I just dont get it." And so whats gonna happen is youre going to have pockets of age groups just stick with the social platform they grew up on, even when its no longer the most popular or influential, just like with music.
And this phenomenon is fascinating to me because again, like popular music changing over, one day, you wake up and you really just dont vibe with the music on the radio or on the charts.
And you think to yourself, "Man music sure has changed.
They just dont make it the way they used to." And sure, its true that music has changed, but its changed because you are no longer its target audience.
You know, fashion is the same way.
Im 30 years old and when I was 20, I couldnt go to church on a Sunday without an older parishioner saying something like, "You paint those jeans on or how do you sit down in pants that tight?" And now, Im sourcing straight leg jeans because the baggier trend of the 2000s has already reincarnated.
The point is this, the reason TikTok is having such an out-sized influence on social media as a whole is because it has captured the attention of the newest generation, Gen Z.
And sure, Gen Z is young now, theyre in grade school, high school, post-secondary, perhaps.
So they dont really qualify as big consumers in our capitalistic societies yet, meaning theyre not influencing housing trends and birth rate and politics, but in the blink of an eye, they will be because heres the thing.
Traditionally, we dont pay too much attention as a culture to the youth.
You know, sure, theyre a primary influence in music and fashion, but thats about it.
Except now, theyre also the biggest drivers behind social and its trajectory, which has massive implications for society as a whole, because of how dominant social is.
And frankly, this gives the young people of today power and influence that previous generations never came close to.
As it relates to social, short-form video is not a trend, its a permanent fixture.
And not only is it now the preferred way of consuming content for many, its starting to make other mediums feel antiquated.
And speaking of antiquated, losing a percentage of your churchs online giving to fees, thats also outdated.
Not the most elegant of Segway there, Ill admit it, but were going to go with it.
I lead a company called Pro Church Tools.
We run this YouTube channel, and were also the developers behind a software platform for churches called Nucleus.
Thousands of churches have paid memberships on our platform.
And one of the products within Nucleus is called Nucleus Giving.
And the reason we built this product was because when youre choosing a giving provider for your church, the most important factor you need to consider are the fees.
And thats because if you overlook this, youre going to end up likely losing thousands of dollars that were given to your church to said fees.
Heres how it works.
Most giving providers will end up charging you around 3% to process a gift to your church.
So if someone gives a hundred dollars digitally, you get to keep 97 of those dollars, and the other three bucks cover the fees.
And this might just seem like the cost of doing business and to a degree, it is, all digital transactions have fees, whether youre giving to your church or paying for your bill at dinner.
The problem for me and my team though, and why we built Nucleus Giving in the first place is that nearly every major given company in the church world, artificially inflates these giving fees to ensure they get to keep a cut of every tithing offering for themselves before they pass on the rest to pay the processing company for their cut.
In the industry, this is known as rev-share.
And this is also why some given companies can advertise $0 per month plans because it requires you to hand over a percentage of every donation you receive in perpetuity to them with no cap.
And this was up, until recently, the standard in the world of church giving.
We wanted to introduce a new standard, which is why Nucleus Giving exists.
We never keep any of your churchs donations for ourselves, meaning we have the lowest fees in the industry, and the fees that we cant avoid are passed onto the giver rather than your church, so you never lose any part of the gift due to fees.
And then for the giver, if they dont want to pay a percentage fee, we provide a path to avoid those percentage fees altogether through giving via their bank account.
So that way no one, not us, not you church, and not the giver are forced to pay these fees, fees that slowly add up and cost the average church thousands of dollars per year.
Now, let me be clear.
Theres a lot that goes into making a decision at your church when it comes to picking a giving provider.
So if you want to explore this more, theres a link in the description to Nucleus Giving.
You can also go directly to nucleus.church/giving and learn more.
You can demo what its like to give on our platform.
You can click this button here that says, "Learn about our pricing model," if you want to go in depth into how the math works on all of this.
You can use our Nucleus Giving savings calculator to project how much your church could expect to recoup from lost fees in the first year, you can even adjust the calculations in the calculator if youve got more precise numbers youd like to compare or hey, talk with us directly if youve got questions youd like to answer, just click shoot us a message at the bottom of the page.
And again, the link for Nucleus Giving is in the description, or you can go directly to nucleus.church/giving.
(soft whoosh) Lets continue now with our social media trends.
This is number three and if youve spent any amount of time on TikTok, youre certainly familiar with creators that split their content up into multiple videos.
And theyll end a video saying something like, "Continued in part two." And its not always the best experience for us as users, especially when you never get resolution on what the original video was all about, but it is effective at getting people to engage with more of your content.
Theres a better way to do this, though, a series.
TikTok released this feature earlier in 2021, they call it Playlists.
And this is when you create a series of content around a single idea and group it all together.
So Ive been doing this a ton recently on TikTok and Instagram with my short form videos.
Basically, Ill share a complete thought in a single video and then I plug another similar video dropping soon, so heres what one of those looks like at the end.
You look at the letter A on this design like in Gods got a plan for your future, the a looks lowercase, thats just what all the As looks like in the Soap font.
You can also see it in the word plan here.
Just a little quirk at this point.
Look for part three.
And whats great about this is that if you liked the first video that you saw of mine and want more, you can dive deeper into my content.
On the other side of things, if you liked this original video of mine that you saw, but you just want to keep scrolling anyway, Im not going to leave a bad taste in your mouth by not completing the original idea that I promised.
And then finally, if you struggle with coming up with new content ideas all the time, creating content in series is super helpful for that.
And obviously we, as churches, should be no strangers to this idea.
The next Sunday is always coming, which is partly why weve been preaching in series for as long as we have.
This is that same idea, but applied to social, and this should come somewhat naturally to us as churches because weve already embraced this content creation rhythm elsewhere.
(soft whoosh) Moving on to social media trend number four.
This one is truly wild.
So for the last 100 years or so, the following statement has been true for most people.
Those that are geographically proximate are also ideologically proximate, meaning you likely share more in common with your next door neighbor than you do with someone across the country or across the world, but the internet inverts this, okay? Because now, many of us find ourselves ideologically closest to people hundreds or thousands of miles away, while we very likely might be ideologically opposite to our neighbors or family.
And this is thanks to social and the internet because I can now find like-minded folks on even the most obscure topics, and lets say a sub Reddit, and feel like Ive found my people and found belonging, which in turn makes the distance between those geographically close to me seem even greater.
And its really hard to articulate just how impactful and far reaching this phenomenon is going to be.
But its something to be mindful of because its already dramatically affecting our day-to-day life.
Now obviously, this isnt a trend thats happening on social media per se, its happening because of social media, but it just illustrates how colossal of a force social is.
Because just imagine a polarizing topic that were working through now in another era.
Lets take the COVID vaccine because as of this recording, its one of the biggest that we have right now.
Lets say this was happening in the 1990s.
Youd have a newspaper or perhaps, and a couple of news channels as your primary influences on an issue like this, an issue where you and I dont have the expertise needed to come to an informed opinion.
So we have to trust what someone else says that presumably does have the expertise needed.
So imagine youre talking to your neighbor about the vaccine.
Well, almost certainly, they read the same newspaper you do, or watch the same nightly news as you, and saw the same interview with the same doctor and thus, came to the same conclusion.
Well, now enter the internet and essentially, an infinite number of sources, experts, those posing as experts in the like, and now when you talk to your neighbor about an issue, contentious or not, you have no idea where theyre coming from, what theyre watching and reading, whom theyre trusting until you talk to them.
And this is creating a ton of ideological disparity between those closest to me, geographically.
Naturally, this has big implications for any organization that operates in a local context.
And of course, we as churches qualify.
So again, something to be mindful of, Id say, just try to start looking for it because its something that were absolutely going to need to contend with as it reshapes so much of what weve come to know about tribes and belonging and shared beliefs.
(soft whoosh) Finally, the last trend for this video.
This isnt a new trend.
Its one Ive seen recycle itself I dont know, at least a dozen times now it feels.
The thing is weve hit the point with TikTok now where its not as easy to see breakthrough growth as it once was.
If youd watch any of the TikTok videos I published a year or more ago, you would have found me pleading with you to jump in now, because there was so much opportunity and so much to be gained, but that it wouldnt last forever.
And this reminds me of a cycle I see with virtually every social platform of prominence.
And if youre trying to grow on social and youre not seeing traction, this may be the reason.
This type of thing can happen to anyone, but in my experience, it is especially prevalent amongst churches.
Heres how it goes.
First, a new platform gains influence usually with young people because its doing something different.
Next, people criticize the new platform and label it a gimmick, you know, we did this with Instagram.
Isnt that app just for taking pictures of food? We did it with Snapchat.
Why would I post content just for it to disappear? We did it with TikTok.
Isnt that app just for dancing? And then, while skeptics are busy criticizing, others take advantage of this amazing new opportunity.
They build an audience, build influence, connect with people.
And then finally, as this platform matures and evolves beyond its original gimmick, the same brands and people, churches and church leaders, that once criticized it, create accounts and eventually complain about how hard it is to grow on social because its just too saturated.
And in two years, the cycle will repeat all over again.
The only way to sidestep this cycle is to be aware of it and take the risks the next time a new platform comes around.
Its easy when a new platform has matured to think to yourself, "Ah, you know, why didnt I get started earlier?" Its much harder when the platform is still emerging to fully commit because youll have doubts in the back of your mind.
Like, well, what if I invest a ton of time and the platform never matures? You know what, if this is just a fad? Or just dealing with the new platform and all its nuances.
The reason the new platform is emerging in the first place is probably because its doing something novel, but thats also what makes it intimidating sometimes to start publishing because it feels foreign and theres a learning curve.
This is just the cycle of how things go.
Being aware of it gives you a greater chance next time of jumping in when others are not yet ready to, which is where the vast majority of opportunity lies.
Thanks as always for your time, attention, and trust.
If you watched to this point in the video, thank you.
Can you leave a comment below just letting me know which of these five trends was most eye-opening to you, if any, you know, which gave you that light bulb moment? Let me know in the comments below, Id love to hear from you and talk real soon.
(chill music)
Brady Shearer: 5 DOMINANT SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS FOR THE FUTURE - Social Media Marketing