TikTok just predicted the three biggest trends of 2023

By 12/15/2022
TikTok just predicted the three biggest trends of 2023

TikTok‘s latest trends forecast is here, and for 2023, it’s predicting users will dig three things: “actionable entertainment,” “making space for joy,” and “community-built ideals.”

This is TikTok’s third trends report—an annual tool “designed to help marketers understand how consumers’ wants and needs will change in the upcoming year and what that will mean for their strategies, both on and off TikTok,” according to the platform.

TikTok’s three predicted trends for 2023 are based on overall user activity from 2022.

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“2022 was the year people realized they didn’t have to live their lives as they always have done—with different points of view and ideas transcending cultures on TikTok,” Sofia Hernandez, TikTok’s global head of business marketing, said in a statement. “Next year we’re going to see more of this—as our communities get more confident and inspire positive change together.”

Hernandez added that TikTok thinks 2023’s trends will be affected by the increasing cost of living, and that marketers will see users coming to TikTok “seeking new ways to achieve success, happiness and wellbeing.”

With all that being said, TikTok also provided some stats and case studies to back up the three tenets it forecasted for next year.

Actionable entertainment

With “actionable entertainment,” it pointed out that according to the recent TikTok Marketing Science Global Entertaining Ads Study (conducted by MarketCast), four in five users find TikTok content “very or extremely entertaining.”

That means brands should ensure their marketing is “delivered like an ad, but loved like entertainment,” TikTok says.

It pointed to a marketing campaign from e.l.f. Cosmetics where e.l.f. focused on creating in-feed ads that felt “native to the TikTok community.” e.l.f. ended up doubling spending on that campaign while simultaneously dropping “acquisition costs for their add-to-cart strategy by 56%,” TikTok says.

Making space for joy

With “making space for joy,” TikTok says it’s noticed users are seeking “meaningful self-care amidst an endless cycle of public health issues, burnout at work and personal hardships.”

It pitches itself as a source for that self-care, citing a 2022 MarketCast study about users’ buying habits that found 90% of users who took an off-platform action (e.g. buying a product from an ad they saw on TikTok) said the platform “makes them happy and never gets boring.”

Marketers should respond to this by embracing users’ pursuit of joy and being open to levity in their ads, TikTok says. It points to a campaign from BMW where the car maker worked with K-pop musician Henry Lau to make a custom song for a TikTok ad campaign. The song was made from DIY-y BMW sounds, like drumming on the dash and honking the horn.

The song went on to bring in 45 million views on videos from 3,400 different users.

Community-built ideals

And last up, with “community-build ideals,” TikTok took a bit of a shot at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, both of whom are very fond of insisting that Twitter and Facebook, respectively, are the town halls of the internet.

“TikTok is not a town hall meeting. It’s a collection of tiny clubs where people can find new ideas on how to explore their passions and live their lives,” TikTok wrote.

MarketCast’s study on entertaining ads found that TikTok is 1.8 times more likely than “traditional social media platforms” to introduce people to new topics. (We’re not sure exactly which social media platforms are counted as “traditional,” but we’re guessing Twitter and Facebook are in there.)

The case study for this tenet was eBay, which partnered with TikTok to sell to shoeheads in the #SneakerTok community. It introduced a marketing campaign called #SneakerShowdown that got 1.2 million users to participate and pushed comments on participating videos up by 54% compared to usual comment rates, TikTok says.

You can see TikTok’s full 2023 trends report here.

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