Social Media Trends in 2024: Where We’ve Been & Where We’re Headed

Though an essential part of growing your brand, navigating the fast-paced and ever-changing social media landscape can be a challenge. From evolving platforms to frustrating algorithms, it can be hard to follow changes and adapt quickly. We’re outlining key trends we’ve observed in the first half of 2024, and a few changes to keep an eye on as we near the end of the year.

Choosing Your Hero Platform

Creating content takes time, and quality content takes even longer. Brands are increasingly choosing a hero platform to focus on, and going all in on making that content great. It’s a strategy we’ve long used for our clients – if Instagram is your priority, gearing your content toward what does well there is key. Then, we can adapt and adjust to make the storytelling work across Facebook, X, TikTok, or LinkedIn. For companies that have gone all in on TikTok, expect to see them bring that same energy to Instagram as TikTok navigates a potential ban in the United States.

Entertainment First

Prioritizing entertainment over selling a product or service has become a common refrain in social marketing, and it’s easy to understand why if you think about the primary goal of social algorithms. These algorithms aim to keep people on their sites as long as possible – therefore, they want people to watch your whole video, swipe through all the slides of your carousel, or generally take action to consume more in-app content. With this in mind, consider creating a consistent series on TikTok that can be compiled into a playlist, or using calls to action to guide users from one location to the next on Instagram, for deeper engagement with a specific topic. The algorithm will reward you for putting in that extra bit of effort.

Show the Process

Users want to see a behind-the-scenes perspective of the content you’re creating – and their interest can help grow your accounts. Give your followers an inside look at how a perfectly curated photo came to life, show the iterations that brought you to a final idea, or unveil early storyboards for what became the perfect commercial – these glimpses behind-the-scenes drive interest in both the process and the finished product!

Social SEO

Users are increasingly turning to social over search engines to find what they need. TikTok in particular has an excellent search function, allowing people to get the answers they’re seeking via digestible, compelling content. Instagram also made changes to its algorithm over the past year, so now the search bar loves specific keywords in your content. Think of it the way you used to think of hashtags – though in this case, it’s less about adding a #, but more about using those keywords, either in the caption or in a block of text at the end. Hashtagged or not, relevant keywords should be there.

A New Perspective on User-Generated Content

Brands are getting increasingly adept at social listening and being in tune with what trends are catching their audience’s attention. Instead of approaching user-generated content as a simple repost of a product, think of it as your followers helping create and guide your content. If you’re seeing a similar type of comment a lot, engage with it and use it as a jumping-off point for your own content creation. We do this often with our friends at Fuzzy Door, creating interactive postings like caption contests where we reshare fan comments, or episode selections, where fans pick favorite episodes to be included on a poll.

Collaboration

It’s been a while since Instagram began rolling out collaborative posting, and it’s only gotten more popular. There’s really no downside to sharing posts collaboratively – it increases visibility for your content while associating you with other relevant accounts.

Need help getting your social media strategy on track? Learn how our content team can help with one of our social media packages – email [email protected] for details.