Last year was pretty eventful for social media – Facebook remained the undisputed king, TikTok and Instagram grew bigger, Twitter was rebranded to đť•Ź, and Threads made its entrance! Amidst all these changes, we also saw plenty of social media trends come and go.
Needless to say, the social world is dynamic and there’s no saying what might happen in the future. However, we can surely predict what trends in social media are likely to dominate the digital landscape.
In this article, we will discuss the top 8 social media trends for 2024.
A social media trend refers to a certain ongoing content format, template, idea, or behavior that has gained widespread popularity.
With time, social media trends keep changing and bringing forward a barrage of content ideas that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy. As such, it becomes vital for all creators and marketers to stay on top of current social media trends and use them before they fade away.
Did you know that average time spent on social media in the US is 2 hours and 14 minutes? In this duration, your target consumer is scrolling past hundreds and thousands of posts.
Facebook alone gets more than 300 million photos per day! With such a high volume of content uploaded every day, using social media trends 2024 can help you spark interest and capture the audience’s attention.
Here are a few other reasons to use the latest social media trends in your content strategy:
Let’s check out the latest social media trends for 2024 that can superpower your content strategy!
Gone are the days when consumers would go to the lengths of finding a company’s contact information for any complaints or queries. Today, most people prefer reaching out via social media channels and 30% of them expect a reply within 24 hours.
In 2024, one way to win user trust is by using social media to actively interact with your consumers. For example: check how UPS acknowledges the complaint and invites the social media user to further elaborate in the inbox.
Remember how rapidly the social media world shifted to short-form videos in the last 3 years? Leaving all social media trends behind, people majorly focused on utilizing viral sound bits to create videos lasting less than 60 seconds.
In 2024, you can expect long-form videos to shine once again! Here, long-form doesn’t necessarily mean 10-15 minutes (unless you’re a YouTube creator) but ranges between 2 to 5 minutes. This change can be attributed to the fact that people are now starting to prefer social media over search engines to get answers to their queries.
Reels are the queen on Instagram – no doubt. But did you also notice that Meta is now bringing more and more static posts to your feed?
As such, one of the crucial social media trends of 2024 is striking the right balance between different content formats. Your content calendar must include a little bit of everything: carousels, short-form & long-form videos, and static image posts.
According to a survey conducted by HubSpot, 90% of digital marketers believe in the power of social media communities. A community is a group of like-minded people who actively share content and form an interactive space for any feedback or discussions.
Having a community can be highly beneficial for your brand in terms of word-of-mouth marketing and new product launches. It can help build a deeper connection with your customers, which in turn will improve your brand’s retention rate.
When it comes to community-driven marketing and growth, Duolingo is the go-to example. Duolingo’s community helps with course creation, user-generated content, and a lot more.
Watching a social media video while commuting to work, attending a class, or in an office meeting, is a guilty pleasure we all can’t seem to escape. Perhaps, that’s why 85% of all Facebook videos are watched without sound.
As such, video captions will be one of the winning social media trends for 2024. Not only do they make the content accessible for all, but also communicate the brand message.
According to Prabhakar Raghavan, senior VP at Google, 40% of youngsters now prefer to search IG or TikTok for simple queries like where to go for lunch. With social media actively replacing search engines, it is paramount to conduct detailed keyword research.
Use these keywords and search phrases in hashtags, captions, and content to rank above your competitors. Since the social media algorithms for separate platforms work differently, you also need to experiment with different ways of keyword integration in content.
With social media’s immense growth in the last decade, concerns about data privacy, political neutrality, content moderation, and censorship are at an all-time high. To overcome these issues and offer a bias-free social experience, decentralized networks have come into existence.
Built with blockchain technology, decentralized platforms emphasize user-centric experience and denounce single-party dominance. You can expect such networks to gain widespread popularity in 2024.
A few decentralized social media networks to keep an eye on are:
AI has spread a lot of hysteria in the digital marketing world. Creators and writers are left wondering if ChatGPT is coming for their job sooner or later. While the paranoia might not be entirely baseless, it is also not exactly legit.
The key to social media success in today’s world is using AI smartly. You can’t rely entirely on it to create content, but it can be used for idea generation and fine-tuning your work.
Head to Social Media Prompts for ChatGPT to learn how AI can help your social media strategy.
Social media trends change rapidly and if you don’t adapt to them fast enough, you miss out on a chance to go viral. In 2023, we saw several trends, most of them related to short-form videos and AI tools. In 2024, you can expect more AI usage with authenticity and long-form content to make a comeback.
Himanshu is an SEO Executive with 7 years of work experience and MBA in Marketing. His core expertise lies in crafting impactful SEO strategies for growing B2B organizations and bringing organic traffic to their social and web channels! He is also a fitness freak with a knack for athleticism and you'll often find him spending his off hours in a gym.