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Regardless of the impact of social media in the Middle East, consumer behavior has certainly evolved from leveraging the platforms as a channel through which they bulk upload photo albums to becoming a space where they shop, communicate, create and consume content, and even live virtual lives.
During that time, brand-consumer relationships in the Middle East have had to adapt and grow as more platforms were created and new features introduced, like live streaming, stories, reels, and tools that enable brand-influencer collaborations.
However, with social media being a relatively new channel in the Middle East, some brands have focused solely on isolated metrics such as likes, followers, reach, and so on. Some brands have seen social media as a new sales channel – simply a front where they display their merchandise and hope for the best.
On the consumers’ side, social media served multiple purposes. For example, it provided a public arena where consumers raised issues and complained about a brand’s service or product. Second, social media gave Middle East consumers the tools to showcase their unique tastes and personality, especially if we’re talking about consumer packaged goods, clothing, or beauty products.
Lastly, because of the way social media is built, consumers gradually developed a new sense of time and have grown to expect brands to deliver a consistent and immediate reaction to their requests.
Initially, neither brands nor consumers saw the opportunity posed by social media to create a long-term relationship based on trust. Instead, the relationship was largely short-lived and focused on one-time transactions.
Luckily, as the industry evolved, more Middle East social media experts started relying on data and consumer feedback to improve their strategies and grow their communities. Online community managers suddenly became a hot commodity, people who have the technical skills to analyze data, create content, talk to people, and everything in between. Social media has turned from just a broadcast channel to become a gateway through which brands could win the hearts and minds of consumers for the long term.
At this point, values like trust, authenticity, genuineness, and transparency have become imperative for a business to stand out and differentiate itself from the competition. Brands realized that social media is a golden opportunity to understand consumer sentiment and priorities at scale and in real time. The next challenge was understanding how said data could be turned into actionable strategies that deliver tangible business results.
Download the Social Media Trends 2023 report
Looking at data in a vacuum is just that, data. Turning data into insights and, eventually, actions is the tricky part because it requires you to look at things within context.
Now, if anyone had previously worked with data, they know that the probability of things going wrong is far higher than going right. Downloading Excel sheets from various software, cleaning the data, making assumptions, and understanding correlations and causations, all while attempting to make sense of it all. In a nutshell, things can get tricky really quickly.
Having spoken to several market and consumer researchers I realize the issue is not in accessing the data in its raw format – in fact, it’s turning it into a comprehensible story that is capable of impacting not only marketing departments, but also sales, and product.
When Talkwalker first started as a company, we were only providing a robust social listening tool that relied on scraping technology – essentially scouring the Internet for any text mentions you want. That served the market’s needs for a while, however as the technology developed and business needs grew, brands wanted even more. Brands nowadays want real-time consumer intelligence to stay ahead of the competition curve and to get closer to the consumer.
With the implementation of our proprietary AI-powered consumer intelligence platform, brands from all industries are now benefiting from real-time data collection and visualization as well as more accurate sentiment analysis. In real terms, this saved time, effort, and, most importantly, money.
Even more, Talkwalker has recently launched its industry-leading predictive analytics feature enabling marketing teams to foresee a campaign’s performance 90 days into the future.
See Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence in action
The next logical evolution for data and insights is turning them from numbers on a screen into action with an impact. What this means is that brands can now take these dashboards and create better marketing campaigns, establish more genuine relationships with customers, and stand out from a sea of sameness.
With that in mind, Talkwalker recently inked a strategic partnership with the customer engagement platform Khoros. The strategic partnership aims to combine the power of AI-powered consumer intelligence with a robust customer experience platform that culminates the journey from insight to action.
By leveraging real-time consumer sentiment analysis combined with forward-looking predictive analytics, brands are more capable of designing memorable customer experiences. Proactive marketing helps brands get closer to their customers, anticipate their behavior across an omnichannel experience, and identify CX issues and opportunities as they occur.
In the future, marketers and CX experts are going to look back and wonder how things worked ‘in the old days’. Tomorrow’s businesses will leverage customer data lakes composed of various sources to predict customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the likelihood of upselling. Metrics like a predictive customer score will become the norm, where CX experts would be better able to predict and understand what’s influencing loyal customers’ satisfaction and buying behavior, as well as pinpointing specific interactions in the customer journey.
Welcome to the new age of brand relationships.
Screenshot of Talkwalker's predictive analytics feature, enabling marketers foresee how the keyword 'Metaverse' is going to trends 90 days in the future
See predictive analytics in action
The flagship ‘Social Media Trends 2023: How to disrupt a disruptive consumer’ report marks the first collaboration between Talkwalker and Khoros. The report offers a wealth of insights and anecdotes highlighting how consumers will lead brands to embrace change in 2023 and beyond.
The report’s tagline ‘how to disrupt a disruptive consumer’ is particularly interesting. The past few years have seen a tremendous shift in the brand-consumer relationship due to a number of reasons.
However, what we’re seeing now is that consumers themselves have become the source of disruption, and this is especially true as consumers realize the power they have in driving a brand forward. They have the power to make or break the brand, and it is up to the latter to listen and act on their signals in real time.
The report is backed by consumer intelligence data, cutting-edge predictive analytics, and insights from global industry experts at YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and more. Plus, the report gives practical examples of how some brands are acting on those insights and how you can prepare for next year.
Below I unravel two of the top ten trends that illustrate the evolution of how brands will use social media in the years to come.
Download the report to see all the trends
In the process of writing the report our team reached out to over 80 industry professionals from around the world to ask for their input and predictions for 2023 – based on current trends and data. Each expert adds a new perspective to the report and validates the assumptions and predictions made.
The trend that struck most with the Middle East market is that social media platforms will need to adjust to a new standard, one that fosters trust and reliability with consumers. With the increasing proliferation of fake news, deep fakes, and AI-generated art, the borderline between what’s true and what’s not is becoming increasingly blurred.
Consumers in the region will hold social media platforms responsible for not taking action to protect them. And consumers will hold them to a higher standard not only on the technical side but also on the policy and security side.
Next year will be an inflection point of how social media platforms create digital products designed to create a safer and more enjoyable social media experience.
“Our top priority is to protect YouTube's community from harmful content while preserving the positive power of an open platform. This includes misinformation, hate-speech and deep-fakes. Transparency, which is a core value at Google & YouTube, is integral to our content moderation efforts.
Our community demands it and we see it as an important part of being trustworthy and accountable to them, which is why we release a quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement Report that gives insights into the volume of flags and actions we take on content that violates our policies, and the impact that technology has in aiding that enforcement.”
-Tarek Amin, Director of YouTube in the Middle East & North Africa
“Authenticity has become the differentiating marker in the new age of social communication. Economic uncertainty and huge changes in the world of work have made it necessary for content creators to own their voice and demonstrate a deeper understanding of their audiences in order to build a resilient digital presence.
As the world’s largest and most trusted professional network, our members are leveraging LinkedIn to share knowledge and join conversations more than ever before: we have seen a 25% increase in public conversations on the platform just over the last year alone. LinkedIn is the place to be for professionals looking to exchange knowledge and connect with their networks.”
-Ali Matar, Head of LinkedIn EMEA Venture Markets
“Twitter has always been home to diverse voices, perspectives and ideas and our purpose is to serve the public conversation. As a result, we continue to invest in our approach and educate audiences on available tools that help tackle platform abuse, misinformation and spammy behaviors.
Fighting spam isn't one dimensional - as spam is not simply defined as human/non-human. The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. For context, we typically remove half a million spam accounts each day and lock millions of suspected spam accounts each week. We use a combination of machine learning-based automation and human review to enforce our policies.”
-Antoine Caironi, Interim Regional Director Twitter MENA
Customer experience (CX) is often misunderstood and measured by how reliable or efficient the interface of a product or service is. The key part of that formula is the customer and how their problem is being solved. It is the customer’s feedback that gives you that signal that your CX is on the right track, not how many clicks that button got or how long it took for them to perform that purchase.
Social media is only one piece of the CX puzzle - but it’s by far the most important. Why? Because it’s where customers live, buy, and consume. Your platform can have the nicest web design, best delivery service, and even the coolest music on hold, if you are not willing to offer real-time support through social media you could be missing out on a lot of gains.
“Never has a smooth collaboration between Social Media and Customer Experience teams been more important. Workflows between customer support agents, social media managers and CX experts need to be 100% defined and adhered to - otherwise unhappy users will pile up and make themselves heard, leading to deteriorating brand perception.
The same applies the other way around: brand promoters who are not being treated the way they deserve, or who are not being given any air time, are a lost opportunity for any brand to shine in moments when it matters most.”
-Daniel Nuss, Marketing Director at Aramex
One way that Aramex has managed to optimize its customer experience is by offering a social media chatbot, allowing you to enquire, book, and track your shipments in real time.
We heard and we've listened! It's now easier than ever to reach our team with our new brand social media chatbot
Slide into our DMs and find out all you want to know about your shipments, our branches and more! #Aramex #AramexGlobal #CustomerService #ChatBot pic.twitter.com/O4WPk1IdMb
— Aramex (@Aramex) September 29, 2022
"Volkswagen is famously 'the people’s car' so putting our customers first drives our marketing strategy and even more so on social media.
Social media for us is a two way street, yes it’s an important channel in terms of advertising but it has to be more than just advertising, it’s also a channel where our customers can engage with us as a brand – whether this includes making it easy to book a test drive through chat functionalities, highlighting existing customers through UGC or showcasing the potential lifestyle customers can unlock when they are behind the wheel of a Volkswagen."
-Anja Petrovski, Marketing and PR Director at Volkswagen
For Volkswagen Middle East, they’ve taken a different approach to that of Aramex. Launching a TikTok campaign titled “We Care Too Much” to promote its after sales services. The campaign was so successful that it generated over 2 million in reach, with over 35 million impressions and 13 million video views from May to August.
"In all areas of the world, the influencer economy is taking precedence as the premier form of communication with customers.
We are seeing long-format content productions taking a back seat to the vast number of short-form content creators who are captivating audiences for longer periods of time, and this means a major shift in relationships between brands and audiences.
Simply put, eyeballs are now squarely pointed in the direction of social media channels, and the trend continues to accelerate post 2021 when TikTok became the most widely downloaded mobile application on Earth.
This means that brands everywhere are wise to incorporate social media channels and short-form content as a primary customer experience - especially at acquisition and retention touchpoints."
-Dennis Wakabayashi, Global Voice of CX
For more expert insights, download the report
Brand awareness, authenticity, and trust remain the key pillars of a strong and sustainable brand-consumer relationship. But brands must realize that consumers are nowadays driven by additional motives. Think of it for a second, why did you buy your iPhone? Is it because you are a 30-something-year-old expat living in Dubai making an average salary, or is it because an iPhone represents a rite of passage to a community of doers and creative individuals?
iPhone holders are a consumer community, just as much as Real Madrid CF fans are one – they all have a common purpose and sense of belonging – this brand-community relationship requires constant nurturing until it becomes self-sustaining. It might look easy from an outside perspective, however, it is a science and an art.
Consumer community manager job listings are increasing in popularity for a good reason. To be a successful community manager you can’t just play the admin role, instead, you have to organically be part of the conversation and understand that community’s goals, triggers, and pains.
We often see this in online communities on platforms like Discord, Reddit, and Quora. Our report mentions that ‘66% of brand communities say that their community has led to increased loyalty’. Will brands finally realize that community management is not just about posting memes and polls on social media?
"Communities have been there for a while now and we’ve seen brands adopt them to their marketing and conversation strategies. In 2023, brands will have to rethink strategies to not only build engaging communities but also to actively involve their communities by inviting them to share their experiences about the brand. Brands will also involve the community members a chance to share their ideas, feedback and what they expect of the product or service."
-Janet Machuka, Cofounder at Africa Tweet Chat and digital marketing strategist
For more expert insights, download the report
I hope it’s clear now that 2023 consumers will be calling the shots and that brands should continuously leverage insights to get closer and win their hearts. Below are a few guiding points that should set you in the right direction for the next year:
Be prepared for next year, download the report
Social media standards and best practices will continue to evolve for as long as consumers change their habits. Brands need to develop sustainable frameworks in order to meet consumer expectations and to always follow their promises. Transforming insights into action will be a game-changer and now is the time to prepare.