Top 7 Social Media Platforms for 2022

The social media landscape is ever-shifting, with some platforms seeing meteoric rises in popularity while others fall by the wayside. While giants like Facebook and Instagram have cemented themselves as long-term leading social media platforms, businesses should aim to diversify their advertising efforts and maximize their brand reach potential. 

But as with everything marketing-related, strategy is paramount. Going all-out on a trending social media platform, only to waste time and money when said platform plateaus or even dips in user number can be detrimental. 

The possible volatility of new social media platforms 

We’ve seen this happen as early as a few months ago. Clubhouse, an audio-only app, was founded in March of 2020. Less than a year after the beta release, the startup saw an explosion in popularity and a valuation of $4 billion. 

Talks of acquisition by Twitter, tweets by Elon Musk, and the overall virality of the platform saw millions of users flood the app. Rooms were hosted by popular celebrities and business thought leaders like Kevin Hart, Mark Zuckerberg, Gary Vaynerchuck, Ashton Kutcher and Grant Cardone. 

It seemed like Clubhouse was on a surefire path to success. 

And then, like all trends, the buzz around Clubhouse died off. 

We won’t go in depth about why exactly the app started to lose its user base. The main takeaway is to be careful about which platforms you invest in and to make sure whatever platform you end up choosing actually makes long-term sense for your business. 

Today you’ll discover the top social media platforms for 2022, as well as some new social media platforms you’ve maybe never heard of, but could be extremely powerful promotional tools for your business. We’ll also uncover ways brands can utilize each platform’s features to accelerate growth.  

Growing social media platforms for 2022 

TikTok

An overview of TikTok: 

• TikTok was launched in 2016 by the Chinese startup ByteDance 
• TikTok acquired Musical.ly, a platform with 200 million users at the time, in 2017 
• In September 2021, TikTok reported 1 billion monthly active users worldwide 

TikTok was possibly the hottest social media platform of 2021. Within a few short years the app managed to surpass Facebook and WhatsApp as the most popular social media platform. TikTok was also the first ever app not owned by Facebook to surpass 3 billion downloads. 

TikTok’s audience skews young. As of March 2021, users in their teens accounted for 25 percent of TikTok’s active user accounts. 

The majority of the content on TikTok is short videos embedded with trendy music or sounds. Sounds are usually audio clips from popular videos that circulate the app as millions of users attempt to create their own viral clip. 

You may have already considered adding TikTok to your repertoire but got stuck on what content would actually capture users’ attention and mainly, how to monetize that attention. 

Marketing on TikTok is still in its infancy but once you understand the TikTok formula and apply it to your content, your brand can grow organically in no time. 

Chipotle is one brand that gets the quirky, fast-paced and casual nature of the app. The #guacdance, which was the second TikTok challenge that Chipotle introduced in 2019, urged guacamole fans to show off dance moves dedicated to avocados, aimed to increase Chipotle’s brand awareness amongst the younger age groups. And it worked. The campaign amassed over 1 billion views to date.

Chipotle’s feed feels very native to the TikTok platform, with every video fine-tuned to resonate with TikTok’s young audience. Take this emotional advert as an example. 

@chipotle

ppl don’t talk about farmers enough. help us support the future of farming. link in bio 🌱

♬ Fix You – Kacey Musgraves

If you want to succeed on TikTok, tweak your content so that it captivates the attention of younger audiences. Use and create hashtags and trends (make the trend easy enough for anyone to join in), post consistently and you’ll see your reach grow considerably. 

Reddit 

Reddit overview: 

• Reddit was founded in June 23, 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian 
• Reddit is the 20th most visited website in the world 
• Most of Reddit’s traffic comes from the United States  
• Reddit has 430 million monthly active users 

Reddit has been around for a while now and isn’t traditionally labelled as a trending social media platform. The company proclaims itself as “the front page of the Internet” and for the most part, that’s true. Google any topic, put “Reddit” at the end of that query and chances are you’ll find a thread pertaining to that topic. Reddit is host to an abundance of communities ranging from skincare fanatics, PC builders, mechanics, and sports fanatics. The site is dominated by discussions and threads that can rack up thousands of replies where users voice their opinions, tell jokes or share personal stories.

Users can award other users gold, silver, or platinum badges to threads or comments they particularly liked. 

Despite Reddit’s obvious popularity, the platform has historically been valued at a fraction of its peers. The website has remained static and not much investment has been made to modernize it. 

But last year changed that. The platform is looking toward growth as it bans controversial communities, builds out new tech, tests different content formats, and experiments with new business models. According to The Verge, “The company says it made $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021, up 192 percent compared to the same period last year.” 

With Reddit now valued at $10 billion dollars, a 2x increase in app downloads in 2021 compared to the previous year and plans for an IPO somewhere on the horizon, Reddit could be a golden opportunity for advertisers. 

Not so fast. 

Reddit is notorious for eating pretentious marketers alive. The communities on Reddit are very tight-knit and hostile toward any kind of self-promotion. 

Most subreddits, especially the popular ones, have very strict rules against posting for the sake of profit. Some advertisers try to get around this by using fake accounts, upvote bots, etc. and all fail. Redditors have seen it all before. 

So how do you advertise successfully without creating an angry mob in the process? Give value. 

1. Create an account, go digging for all the subreddits that might be relevant to your brand. You can do this by going to Google and searching “Reddit + [industry keyword]”. 
2. Listen. Browse and get a sense of what kind of content really engages these different audiences. 
3. Engage. Upvote, comment when you have something to actually add. Answer questions, engage in discussions and share jokes. 
4. Share. Create a piece of content that, based on your previous research, is sure to resonate with your targeted community. 

If you’re wondering what to share, start with an AMA (Ask Me Anything). Craft a captivating headline and use your industry experience to answer questions. Bill Gates’s AMA amassed over 40k likes in just 4 hours. 

LinkedIn 

An overview of LinkedIn: 

• LinkedIn was created in 2002 in Mountain View, California by Reid Hoffman and a founding team from PayPal.
• Microsoft acquired LinkedIn on June 13, 2016, for $26.2 billion 
• LinkedIn has over 690 million MAU as of 2020 

Since its inception in 2002, LinkedIn grew past its original value proposition as a job board. Today, millions of professionals and high profile market leaders share their thoughts on various topics ranging from business development and marketing to vaccines and NFTs. 

2021 spelled an especially successful year for the company as quarterly growth increased significantly, primarily thanks to the lockdown and worldwide screen time usage increases. 

As a place where professionals and business owners hang out, companies started to realize the potential of LinkedIn for generating leads and driving quality website traffic. Influential personalities like Gary Vee even commented on the effectiveness of LinkedIn for business growth. 

There are traditionally two routes you take when marketing on Linkedin. 

1. Organic 

Growing organically on LinkedIn isn’t as hard as it is on Facebook and Instagram but it still requires effort, primarily in terms of content. Remember, LinkedIn’s audience is mature. They’re professionals who generally understand their markets very well. 

When you create content, make sure it’s well-researched and above all, valuable. Network with different thought leaders, engage in discussions, collaborate and be authentic. 

Consistency is also incredibly important. Kontentino’s ultimate LinkedIn scheduler keeps you ahead of the curve by managing all of your assets in one place, supporting all major LinkedIn post formats, enabling seamless team collaboration.  

2. Paid 

LinkedIn is the number 1 platform for social media-driven B2B leads. LinkedIn offers native ads that appear in-feed, sponsored messaging, text ads and dynamic ads that are automatically personalized to your audience. 

Instagram 

An overview of Instagram 

• Instagram was created by Kevin Systrome in October 2010 
• The initial Instagram product only took 8 weeks to build 
• Instagram grew from 1-300 million users in 4 years 
• Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 

Launched in 2010 as a photo-sharing site, Instagram quickly grew to one of the top social media sites in the world. As word of mouth spread, influencers started to accumulate massive followings, users started getting hooked on the fast-paced nature of the platform and Facebook quickly caught on. Since then, Instagram reached the milestone of 1 billion monthly active users in 2018, making it the fastest growing social network by 5% growth per quarter, significantly ahead of Facebook. 

As of 2021, Instagram was the second-most used platform used by marketers worldwide. In addition, the total number of users that marketers can reach with ads on Instagram is 235 million more than in 2020. For perspective, Facebook’s advertising reach increased by 139 million users. 

This data indicates how fast Instagram is growing and brands are taking full advantage of the platform’s Business Tools like Instagram Shopping, Insights and Promote. 

YouTube 

An overview of YouTube: 

• YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, in San Mateo, California 
• YouTube was bought by Google on October 9, 2006, for $1.65 billion 
• YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. 

We’ve all heard of YouTube, we’ve all used YouTube. It’s a cornerstone of the Internet and is currently the second most visited website in the world. Ever since YouTube introduced ads in 2009, advertisers have been using the platform to grow their business and engage users with stunning videos. 

So what makes YouTube a good social media platform for 2022? Its growth. 

YouTube’s worldwide advertising revenues amounted to seven billion dollars in the third quarter of 2021, representing a 43% year-over-year increase. 

Brands took advantage of the increasing popularity of YouTube creators. By sponsoring a mass of videos created by established creators, brand searches sky-rocketed on both Google and YouTube.

This video by Dollar Shave Club wouldn’t have gained over 20 million views on its own. The company partnered with hundreds of YouTubers to create near-instant buzz around the brand. Their first video literally launched the company and is still their most popular video. 

Four years later, Dollar Shave Club was acquired by Unilever for a reported $1 billion. 

While things have definitely changed since 2012, marketing spend on YouTube has only grown, with companies utilizing the platform’s powerful search capabilities, pre-roll video ads and creator partnerships. 

Twitch 

Twitch overview: 

• Twitch was founded in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear 
• Twitch was originally named Justin.tv, which was essentially a single channel featuring founder Justin Kan, who broadcast his entire life 24/7 
• Twitch has 140 million MAU 

Twitch is a live-streaming platform primarily dominated by video game streamers. Famous Twitch broadcasters like Ninja, who was featured on the cover of ESPN, can draw in hundreds of thousands of viewers and millions of dollars in prize money and donations by fans. 

The platform saw incredible growth in 2021 in large part thanks to the pandemic, and average concurrent viewers have climbed to over 2 million. Twitch revenue also grew from $1.5 billion to $2.3 billion in the space of a year. Twitch’s primary revenue drivers are paid subscriptions and paid gifts. 

In August of this year, Twitch announced it was experimenting with Stream Display Ads, a new native ad format that would help streamers earn additional revenue. 

🔬 We are experimenting with a new ad format: Stream Display Ads!

These are less disruptive ads that allow viewers to see and hear Creators while being displayed. Creators will receive ad revenue for each SDA shown. This is an optional feature.

📚 https://t.co/DzYp6yIT5a pic.twitter.com/a9qo7Dam6n

— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) August 2, 2021

While this ad format is still new, brands have been using Twitch to promote themselves for a while now. In 2015, Old Spice launched a campaign where Twitch viewers would control a man’s life for three days. The campaign targeted Twitch’s primary demographic of young men and experimented with a more light-hearted, goofy approach. 

In addition to streams and banner ads, brands often partner with creators to sponsor streams. 

One example would be when Hershey’s and Reeses partnered up with streamers DrLupo and Ninja to promote the new Hershey’s Reeses’s Pieces mashup bar. The duo live-streamed for 12 hours and used on-screen graphics for product awareness. 

The only combo better than @Ninja and myself…@Hersheys and @reeses.

We're talking about #HersheysMeetsReeses and #TwitchCon on stream!

Click —-> https://t.co/bfo3ogEeHe #ad

— DrLupo (@DrLupo) October 23, 2018

Discord 

Community marketing is being heralded by many experts as an essential building block for any brand’s marketing efforts. 

Initially launched in 2015 for gamers, Discord has since grown to house a diverse group of countless communities where content creators, businesses and artists come together and chat. 

Spurred by the pandemic, the platform saw substantial growth from 2020 – 2021 and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. The platform grew.

Brands can use Discord to build a server specifically for their customers and offer members different perks. Discord is a great way to gather feedback, nurture customers and increase customer loyalty. While you can’t advertise natively on the platform, discord offers businesses a way to truly connect with their audience, something every brand should strive to do.

What are the top social media platforms for you and your business in 2022?

We hope this list of the best social media platforms for 2022 helped you make an informed decision. Choosing which social media platform to market on isn’t easy. You need to understand the audience of each one and develop content that will actually resonate with your potential buyers.