Are you ready with your social media strategy for 2024? Did you take all the upcoming social media trends into consideration while forming it?
You can’t avoid them!
Social media evolves at a breakneck speed. What worked for your social media presence in the previous year might not work in 2024 as well.
That’s why you need to stay updated with all the latest social media trends that will be taking off in the social media realm. Knowing the trends will help you create innovative campaigns that resonate with current user behaviors and preferences.
So, did you jot down all the emerging social media trends? Don’t worry!
We have done the hard work of finding every trend that will push your marketing ahead of the curve and help you make impactful new tactics and strategies, setting your clients apart.
Social Media Trend #1: Using AI With Authenticity
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that AI content generation is the current and future trend.
AI has become an indispensable tool for marketers, far beyond just a minor influence in their work. There is no doubt that AI usage for content generation is set to rise rapidly in 2024 as well.
But what about social media marketing?
Well, social media marketers have also embraced the power of AI and started implementing it to perform different activities of their daily grind. According to Hubspot, 31% of marketers use generative AI to make social media posts.
But there’s a catch!
While using AI-generated content takes away half of your workload, social media users still harbor reservations about machines conjuring up images and text out of thin air.
The Statista survey proves the point.
These concerns are entirely valid. Social media has seen its fair share of instances where AI technology was used to create deep fakes and spread false information.
The issue is not about trust only, it’s about being authentic and valuable with your content as well. Without the finesse of a real human touch, AI tends to craft generic content that anyone could create.
We can’t turn back the clock and return to the pre-AI era. AI has simplified things for us marketers, but it’s up to us to push the authenticity envelope further.
As long as your content feels authentic, human-like, and valuable, nobody will question who’s behind it. So, as you move forward in 2024, let’s ensure you maintain that delicate balance between AI assistance and authentic storytelling.
What can you do next to harness this trend?
- Create clear guidelines for AI content generation, covering aspects like brand voice, tone, and all the tasks that can be delegated to AI.
- Train your team to collaborate with AI creatively. AI can assist in generating content, but human creativity and expertise remain invaluable in adding unique perspectives and emotions.
- Assign a team responsible for reviewing AI-generated content. They should review and make necessary adjustments to ensure alignment with brand values and audience expectations.
Social Media Trend #2: Merging Education With Entertainment
As we navigate through the social media landscape, the fusion of education and entertainment—infotainment—stands as one of the biggest trends.
Audiences today seek more than just content; they yearn for an engaging experience. Infotainment has transformed brands’ approach to captivate their audience, blending learning with leisure to deliver content that sticks.
It’s not just about the message anymore; it’s about the delivery. Brands are tapping into storytelling, dynamic videos, and eye-catching graphics to inform and entertain.
And here’s the beauty of it – it doesn’t matter what niche your business belongs to. Whether you’re handling social media marketing for non-profits, healthcare, or education, you have the power to create content that’s not just informative but also a total blast.
Planned Parenthood cleverly uses a funny celebrity gif along with the trending POV approach to draw attention to the importance of regular checkups.
This trend empowers brands to craft narratives that resonate on a deeper level, positioning themselves as not only sources of valuable information but also as purveyors of delightful experiences. Infotainment is the key to unlocking a more profound and enjoyable connection with your audience.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Use Interactive features of social platforms to create quizzes, polls, and live Q&A sessions, making learning enjoyable and participatory.
- Leverage the power of trending audios, challenges, or contests to deliver valuable information in a fun and engaging manner.
- Use memes to add humor and relatability to your content to connect with your audience on a personal level.
- Share behind the scenes of your operations or company culture to show the personal side of your business.
Social Media Trend #3: The Reign of Short-form Videos
Vertical short-form videos have emerged as a dominant force on social. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and even YouTube, with its “Shorts,” teeming with these brief yet impactful videos, making them a brand go-to strategy.
Why are these types of videos so impactful?
Their brevity and mobile-friendly format are tailor-made for today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where swiftly grabbing the audience’s attention is paramount.
- 73% of consumers want to learn about a product or service through short-form videos.
- 59% of short-form videos are watched for 41-80% of their duration.
These short videos are a boon for brands, offering a compact yet effective way to convey their message. Whether showcasing products, giving a sneak peek behind the scenes, or sharing quick tips, these videos excel in engaging viewers. Their brevity doesn’t compromise their ability to drive engagement; instead, it enhances it.
Short-form video trends allow brands to craft content that captures attention and creates an emotional connection with the audience. Through storytelling that strikes a chord, brands can make a memorable impact, ensuring their message resonates long after the video ends.
If you haven’t integrated short-form videos into your social media strategy yet, start doing it from today onwards.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Start by choosing the platforms that align with your target audience and brand voice.
- Craft engaging, concise videos that tell compelling stories or showcase products effectively.
- Keep scrolling the “For You,” “Reels,” and “Shorts” pages to stay updated with the latest short-from video trends and features
- Experiment with new formats, challenges, and interactive elements to keep your content fresh and engaging.
- Use a social media calendar to develop a regular posting schedule for short-form videos.
Social Media Trend #4: The Blossoming Creator Economy
A report from Goldman Sachs forecasts that the creator economy will nearly double in value, reaching $480 billion by 2027, up from its current valuation of $250 billion.
We can agree that the creator’s economy is blossoming, transforming how people engage with brands on social media.
Audiences no longer fully trust or engage with everything brands post on their channels. They approach brand content with a healthy dose of skepticism.
That’s where influencers and content creators, known for their authenticity and relatability, come into the picture. Their unique ability to connect with followers makes them invaluable for brand promotions.
But what sets this social media trend apart?
Collaborating with creators empowers businesses to foster trust and connection with their audience. It’s not just about showcasing products; it’s about demonstrating expertise and engaging in meaningful ways.
A great example of this is the collaboration of food influencer Kylie Perrotti and Homiah Foods. This partnership effectively demonstrates how a brand can utilize a food blogger’s unique appeal and audience to enhance its product visibility and appeal.
By aligning with Kylie’s culinary expertise and engaging content style, Homiah Foods tapped into a new customer base, showcasing the power of targeted influencer marketing.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Identify micro-influencers and content creators who align with your brand values and target audience.
- Collaborate with creators not only for product promotion but also to showcase expertise and engage with the audience in meaningful ways.
- Ensure that the content created by influencers aligns with your objectives and resonates with the audience’s interests.
- Consider forging long-term partnerships with influencers who can consistently represent your brand authentically.
Social Media Trend #5: Engagement is Moving to DMs
With social media feeds getting busy with the constant stream of sponsored and brand-specific content, engagement has moved to the closed corners of the platfrom.
Another reason for this shift is that people feel more at ease sharing their opinions within specific groups rather than putting them out there for everyone to see.
We’ve all seen how political and topical discussions in open spaces can turn into fiery arguments, causing more trouble than they’re worth.
On Instagram, more and more people are connecting with others through closed stories or DMs.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, also agreed that people on Instagram now post many more stories and send many more DMs than they post to their main feed.
Taking note of the people’s love for private conversations, Instagram developed many DM-centered features, such as Notes and Broadcast channels. Meanwhile, TikTok allows users to receive messages from anyone on the platfrom they choose.
The engagement movement to DMs also solidifies social media as an important customer service channel.
The advent of chatbots, instant messaging, and AI-powered customer support has transformed the way consumers engage with brands.
Source: Khors
Businesses are now able to offer real-time responses to customer inquiries and concerns, turning these interactions into opportunities for building trust, loyalty, and satisfaction. The chat window on social media serves as an immediate bridge between brands and consumers, facilitating instant connection.
By providing prompt and effective responses, brands address immediate customer concerns and foster long-term relationships. This real-time engagement is crucial for retaining customers and generating positive word-of-mouth referrals, as satisfied customers often become brand advocates.
Focus on transforming their social media following into a genuine community, fostering personal connections through DMs, groups, or channels. This approach can lead to more meaningful engagement and stronger relationships with your audience.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Encourage the audience to connect with questions and feedback in DMs
- Get your social media team equipped with social inbox tools like SocialPilot to manage and quickly respond to DMs across platforms.
- Set up automated responses to quickly reply to frequently asked questions.
- Build relationships with influential creators who already have an established community on social channels
Social Media Trend #6: Redefining Sustainability Communication
Sustainability is no longer just a choice; it’s a necessity for modern brands.
Why?
In an era where environmental consciousness is paramount, brands that adopt sustainable practices resonate deeply with a growing eco-conscious consumer base.
As a matter of fact, 84% of customers claim that they would distance themselves from a brand or company with poor environmental practices.
Social media is a vital platform for these brands to share their sustainability initiatives, eco-friendly products, and corporate responsibility efforts.
But keep in mind that authenticity and transparency in these communications are key.
Brands that effectively communicate their sustainable practices and efforts to minimize environmental impact find a strong resonance with their audience.
Aligning brand values with those of eco-conscious consumers is not just about making a positive environmental impact; it’s also about building a loyal customer base.
This alignment helps brands thrive by simultaneously benefiting the planet and their business.
An interesting example?
Patagonia, an American retailer of outdoor recreation clothing, consistently showcases its commitment to environmental causes and sustainable practices through its social media channels.
The brand’s approach includes sharing stories about its eco-friendly products, conservation efforts, and initiatives to reduce environmental impact.
This transparent and authentic communication resonates with a growing audience concerned about sustainability, making Patagonia a leading example in this space.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Understand your target audience, including their eco-consciousness level, preferences, and values.
- Develop a social media strategy that highlights your sustainability initiatives, eco-friendly products, and corporate responsibility efforts.
- Craft authentic and transparent stories about your sustainability journey. Share real-life examples of environmental impact reduction and eco-friendly product development.
- Encourage engagement by inviting your audience to participate in eco-friendly challenges, contests, or discussions related to sustainability.
- Explore partnerships or collaborations with environmental organizations or influencers who align with your sustainability values.
Social Media Trend #7: Social Media are Becoming Search Engines
Search engines are no longer the only source of finding information. Social media has joined the race and has been evolving into a place where we go to discover news, products, and insights.
Don’t just take our word for it; read the words of Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees Google’s Knowledge & Information organization:
“In our research, we’ve found that nearly 40 percent of young people, when searching for a place to have lunch, no longer turn to Google Maps or Search. Instead, they head over to TikTok or Instagram.”
So, why the big change? Well, it’s all about convenience and relevance. People would rather trust the recommendations and insights coming from people with faces than believe in faceless websites.
To cater to the audience’s exploration demand, platform are also improving their search experience. For Instance, TikTok has started showing Google search results in its in-app results. Also, almost every social media platform, including TikTok, has introduced functionality that allows ads to appear as part of a user’s search results.
But don’t just stop all your Google search efforts. Genzers still turn to search engines to evaluate the product or brand after their initial exploration on social media.
Instead, start focusing on improving your social media SEO game. Start thinking of social media platforms as search engines.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Utilize relevant keywords and hashtags in captions and profiles to ensure you appear when your audience searches.
- Keep yourself updated with the best SEO practices of each platform:
- Craft content that aligns with keyword search intent.
- Strategize fresh content that provides entertaining answers to common niche-related questions.
- Enhance accessibility by adding alt text to your social media images.
Social Media Trend #8: Text Posts are Still Relevant
The advent of short-form videos and eye-popping visuals on social media platforms may have overshadowed text-based posts for a while.
However, they are not gone completely.
In fact, they are making a comeback, and some of the credit goes to the disruption that happened at X (previously Twitter). All the rapid changes and unpredictability on Twitter created an opening for other platforms to step up their game.
A few newcomers have quickly gained popularity. For instance, Mastodon boasts a monthly active user base of 1.8 million, while the invite-only apps BlueSky and Spill have garnered over 2 million and 200,000 users, respectively.
But the real event in the microblogging world was the launch of Instagram threads.
Initially termed as “Twitter Killer,” Instagram threads made the record of gaining 100 million users within just 5 days.
However, the fever didn’t last long, and the daily time spent and monthly active users plummeted from 49 million to 23.6 million within just days.
The silver lining? Instagram Threads still maintains a substantial number of monthly active users, making it a noteworthy text-based network.
Still, the best one is X. After the debacle, X has managed to rise to 666 million monthly active users.
Amidst this tug-of-war among text-based networks, one thing remains crystal clear: you can’t rule out the texts yet, as more and more people are flocking to these platforms to engage with text-based posts.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Explore the features and audience demographics of platforms like Mastodon, BlueSky, and Spill to understand their suitability for your brand.
- The Instagram thread is not a gone case. Monitor its user base and consider it as part of your text-based content distribution.
- Ensure that you have a strong presence on X. Optimize your content to align with its audience and trends.
- Multiple text-based platforms mean multiple opportunities to repurpose your text-only content.
Social Media Trend #9: Championing Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy has become a powerful tool in the social media marketing arsenal.
Why, though?
When employees share their experiences and insights, they humanize the brand, building trust and authenticity with their audience. This strategy is particularly effective in today’s digital world, where consumers seek genuine connections and credible information.
Brands that encourage their employees to become brand ambassadors are seeing significant benefits.
Employees’ personal networks often have a higher engagement rate than the brand’s official social media channels.
Employees can provide an authentic perspective that resonates with consumers by sharing company culture, achievements, and behind-the-scenes glimpses.
Moreover, employee advocacy is not just about sharing content; it’s about creating a culture where employees feel valued and connected to the brand’s mission. This sense of belonging and purpose can lead to more passionate and effective advocacy, further enhancing the brand’s reputation and reach.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Identify enthusiastic and engaged employees who are willing to become brand ambassadors.
- Offer training sessions or resources to educate employees about effective social media practices and the guidelines they have to follow.
- Make it easy for employees to share brand content by providing shareable assets like images, articles, videos, and relevant hashtags.
- Offer shoutouts, incentives, or gamification to motivate and appreciate their advocacy efforts.
The trick to successfully executing multi-location social media marketing is having a centralized place to manage all your location’s social media profiles across channels. SocialPilot’s multi-platform support makes this job easier for you.
Social Media Trend #10: Decentralized Platforms Will Gain More Traction
Decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon, BlueSky, Steemit, and Hive have already made quite a noise in the digital realm.
As their popularity continues to soar, it’s inevitable they will soon become a household name.
Well, a decentralized social media platform operates on various distributed and independent servers. Simply put, they are not owned by a single entity or restricted to a server like the traditional social media platforms.
The underlying unique technology is not the only reason why decentralized platforms are making the news.
With the growing restrictions and data privacy issues rising on the traditional platforms, people are more open to the idea of flocking to one of these decentralized platforms.
Although these platforms are nowhere close to the popularity of the big old social media platforms, they have still managed to carve out a space and audience for themselves.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Create accounts and explore the functionality of decentralized platforms to understand how they operate.
- Understand whether your target audiences are already present on these platforms or show interest in decentralized social media.
- Keep a close eye on developments in the decentralized space, such as platform growth, emerging competitors, and regulatory changes.
- Educate your stakeholders about the benefits and challenges of decentralized platforms, helping them make informed decisions about expanding their presence in this space.
Social Media Trend #11: The Rise of Social Commerce
Social commerce, the fusion of online shopping and social media, is revolutionizing internet shopping.
As per Statista, global social media sales are projected to reach $1.3 billion in 2023, with forecasts suggesting a potential surge to nearly $3 trillion by 2026.
What is the reason behind this gigantic growth?
For years, marketers have been using the reach of social media platforms to promote their products.
Now, the landscape has evolved with the integration of in-app shopping experiences, empowering users to seamlessly discover, research, and purchase products without ever exiting the platform.
Leading the way in social commerce, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook offer features like live shopping, shoppable videos, photos, ads, and product showcases.
As social media platforms evolve into vibrant marketplaces, you must prepare strategies to engage consumers where they are most active, offering a more immersive and streamlined shopping experience.
What Can You Do Next to Harness This Trend?
- Assess which platform—TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram—best suits you. Focus on channels where their audience is already engaging with product posts for more effective conversions.
- Focuses on creating engaging and immersive shopping experiences within the social media ecosystem. This may include shoppable videos, live shopping events, and interactive content.
- Collaborate with influencers who align with your brand and can help promote products effectively within their niche communities.
- Start advertising with Shoppable ads.
Are you Ready to Ride the Trends?
There you have it!
Social media is an ever-evolving place that continues to shape how businesses connect with their audiences. As a marketer, you must keep track of these social media trends and adapt to the changing landscape.
In this article, we have covered all the major social media trends. Now, it’s time for you to start implementing them into your strategy.
