Social Media Trends for 2024

Social networks and social media marketing tactics change and evolve often. It is a good idea to review what is trending each year to stay on top of the latest features and best practices. Here’s a summary of what’s shifting in social media for 2024 and what social media marketing experts are identifying as potential trends for the new year.

The Channels

Find your focus. When it comes to social media marketing channels, the main advice for 2024 is to focus most of your time and attention on the one social network where you are getting the most results. This doesn’t mean to ignore the other social networks or put posting to them on autopilot. It does mean tailoring content toward the top performing social network then trickling content out to the other ones you use. If you are purchasing social ads, you may want to put a larger portion of your ad spend on the social network where you are already getting the best results. Put your time, attention, and money where the action is.

Get personal on LinkedIn. While LinkedIn is still the social network geared toward company owners and work professionals, the last few years has seen a drastic shift toward posting more personal content, even posts unrelated to business. As you continue to look for ways to "humanize" your brand, strike a new balance on LinkedIn where you get a little more personal while still maintaining a professional image. This can be anything from acknowledging employee accomplishments in their personal lives to sharing personal reflections on company-related events and news.

More reels for Instagram (and Facebook). Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, continues to place more emphasis on Reels as the video format of choice. Learn more about creating for the Reels format to produce effective videos up to 90 seconds long.

X out, Threads in. As more and more brands leave X and are showing up on Threads, the writing may be on the wall this year for a platform shift for your company’s social media marketing. If X continues to help you reach your target market, adopting a new social network may not be necessary. But if you are finding the environment on X to be concerning or problematic, Threads is currently being touted for its more welcoming feeling. At press time, Threads did not yet have integration into Facebook’s advertising tools or into third party social media management systems such as Sprout Social, however, this may soon change.

Other Trends

Long-form content. The best practices on the lengths of posts or videos fluctuate year to year. This year, you could try pushing your content to extended forms - longer blog posts, longer captions, and longer videos. In some cases, the platform features may still limit character count or video length, but where you can expand your content, give it a try, then gauge the response.

Creative storytelling. While telling your company’s stories is an important part of creating valuable content that attracts attention, this year’s approach is to get more creative with the way you’re telling these stories. Tell a story in a non-linear way. Tell it from different perspectives such as through your employees or your customers. Even the way you edit your videos can add a twist or a fresh way to convey your stories.

Caption videos. Automatic captioning is a tool many social networks offer to embellish videos including Instagram and YouTube. These days, almost all videos in social media use captions as a feature, not an "add-on" or afterthought. These captions are more stylized than closed captioning. As you film, think about where captions could be placed without interfering with the main content of the videos. Experiment with different font sizes, colors, styles, and placement when adding captions to your video. If the social network you’re posting to doesn’t offer automatic captioning, there are third party tools that do such as Veed and Filmora. Double check captions before publishing as sometimes the tool gets the words wrong.

Premium content. While content publishers have had varying success with "pay-gated content" where people need to pay a subscription to gain access to additional content on a website, some are finding success with paid email subscriptions using tools such as Substack or through crowdfunding platforms such as Patreon where you offer "perks" to people who subscribe to your content.

Regardless of the year or the popular trends, the key to succeeding with social media marketing each year is to understand the platforms, tools, and channels you’re using as well as staying abreast of what’s new. More than anything, continue to learn about your audience and find ways to strengthen your relationship with them. No matter what year it is, you should be building trust through authenticity and transparency. Those things never go out of style.