Augmented reality (AR) is becoming more widely available on social platforms. It’s mainly been a tool for entertainment and brand awareness, but the pandemic is pushing marketers to explore new use cases.

Social network ad spending has substantially rebounded since the early days of the pandemic. In 2021, the biggest issues social media marketers will face are in the areas of brand safety, ethics, and privacy.

Many people turned to social media in recent months to stay connected with friends and loved ones and to share information. But the pandemic didn’t increase the number of people using social networks or messaging apps.

eMarketer principal analysts Mark Dolliver and Nicole Perrin, junior forecasting analyst Nazmul Islam and senior forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence Oscar Orozco discuss what the coronavirus pandemic has and hasn't done to print media. They then talk about racial diversity in ads, millennials in decision-making roles, and American teens' favorite social media platforms.

Well into the pandemic, consumers still say they are spending more time with social media. Activities like live streaming, video chatting and gaming are drawing some of them in.

eMarketer junior analyst Blake Droesch and principal analysts at Insider Intelligence Debra Aho Williamson, Mark Dolliver, and Jeremy Goldman discuss how social media might change as a result of the continued spread of misinformation on the platforms and general negative sentiment surrounding them. They then talk about the best way to use Stories, influencer ad disclosure, and which consumer group has increased its social media usage the most during the pandemic.

eMarketer senior forecasting analyst Peter Newman and junior analyst at Insider Intelligence Blake Droesch discuss how the pandemic affected Americans' social networking behavior and where the major platforms now rank. Then, Blake talks about Facebook allowing cross platform messaging between Messenger and Instagram, shopping on Reels and IGTV, and a Delta Air Lines social media post.

Amid disinformation campaigns over the coronavirus pandemic and the upcoming presidential election, most US buy-side decision-makers are concerned about their ads potentially running up against controversial content on social media.

As with every other aspect of our lives, COVID-19 is impacting social media usage and advertising. Some of those changes, along with other important ad product launches, will continue to affect advertisers once the pandemic ends.

As more people cut the cord, viewers are increasingly tuning in to live digital video services.

Seventy-two percent of US and UK consumers who follow influencers said they were spending more time on social media since the outbreak.

When US consumers started spending more time at home during the pandemic, they also started using social media more, providing an unexpected boost to engagement on these platforms.

The coronavirus pandemic boosted social media usage around the world, as many people stayed home for weeks or months. In 2020, there will be nearly 150 million more social network users worldwide than we expected before the pandemic—more than the entire population of Russia. That will lift the total to 3.23 billion, well ahead of our predictions in November 2019 and June 2020. As a result, nearly 81% of internet users worldwide will be social network users.

The pandemic has fueled greater social media usage worldwide and prompted revisions to our earlier forecasts. We now expect the total number of social network users to rise 8.1% in 2020, to 3.23 billion—equivalent to 80.7% of all internet users.

The pandemic has sparked new use cases for social listening, an underutilized tool in marketers' work belts. But some brands, like Johnsonville Sausage, were already well-acquainted with the concept. Stephanie Dlugopolski, the company's senior manager of PR and social media, said her team has utilized social listening for nearly a decade. It has allowed them to not only monitor conversations about the brand, but also see how consumers react to larger issues.

As with other social networks, Twitter’s user base grew unexpectedly this year as pandemic-driven stay-at-home orders drove up social media usage overall.

The pandemic has brought an influx of new users for subscription OTT, live videos, and video games in 2020, but other activities such as social networking, mobile messaging, and digital video haven’t seen the same bump.

With many retail stores temporarily closed during the pandemic, and more consumers turning online to buy goods, major social networks have taken steps to improve their ecommerce offerings.

TikTok’s growth in 2020 has been, in a word, extraordinary. While the pandemic helped stoke user gains for all the major social platforms, it lit a particularly large fire under TikTok.

Social listening is helping businesses take the pulse of their consumers and make faster marketing decisions during the pandemic. It’s still not a perfect analytics tool, but right now the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The unprecedented social and economic disruptions that affected all areas of life in the US in 2020 also skewed many of our pre-pandemic forecasts. Valuable insights can be gleaned by examining the difference between what we thought would happen as of February 2020 versus what we now project for this year and the coming years.