Commentary: Alex Lecomte on Social Media Trends for 2022


Last year, as planned, social media spaces kept expanding: Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, and Snapchat are still among the most used platforms and provide a great source of interactions for the brands. Year over year, the average social media growth is estimated at 12% of active users. They were 2.078 billion in 2015, 3.196 billion in 2018 and 3.960 billion in 2020 (source: Backlinko) Currently, 4.48 billion people are using social media (worldwide), this number represents the double of users from what was registered in 2015; so clearly, if your brand is not represented even a minimum, on these social digital spaces, your company is not up to date.  Seventy-two percent of the total US population is actively using social media and 99% of the worldwide users are accessing through a smartphone.  In a nutshell, in 2022, if your brand fits in: You can open and feed an account on each platform. According to our 7 Veils monitoring analysis, even with the limitations due to our adult activities, there is no doubt: Social media now represents the first source of traffic for most of the brands.   This impressive and sustainable growth has secured a virtual space where companies can share their brand values, commercial messages but also opened a solid channel to dialogue with their customers (directly benefits to the control quality, technical support, and R&D). Nevertheless, as a consequence, it also represents a qualified source of traffic.   In 2022, based on the current projections, content quality should be a bit more prioritized. More and more people are using social media as explained above but we also see that the amateur/homemade productions are becoming more elaborated, more stylish and impactful. The filters, the animation, the concepts themselves are just taking another step and thanks to so many talented creators, social media visual content which used to be disdained by older users and intellectual pseudo-elite has stepped out of the teenage zone and gained undeniable business value.  Content production, in general, has always been one of the key elements for consistent Social media strategies, at first very amateur-ish and then with the growth of influencer marketing, more professionalized, the scenery and conceptualization of the picture are evolving. The use of filters and editing tools is also now a very common and even expected result in some of the posts. But, here is the catch: Social media is still this wild world full of hyper-critical, not to say judgmental, users. This hostile environment is expecting your brand to have something to say but also to be human. This translates by an expectation for high-level photos and video editing and production together with “real life” (faked) candid shots and a spontaneous glimpse of (faked) real life.  This is why we strongly recommend a mix of styles and qualities to balance the challenging: "Social vs Sales" dynamic. Also, even if the importance of video content keeps growing, we do suggest to keep an additional track of simple text and pictures posts to feed the algorithms at several levels.  For any question or help about social media, you’re more than welcome to email [email protected] Alex Lecomte is the managing director for 7Veils, a leading social media marketing agency for the adult industry.