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Curious about incorporating upcoming trends into your social media marketing strategy? Our social team are here to provide their insights into the year ahead.
The good old days of jumping on bandwagons and trying to tap into trends seems to be running out of steam in 2024. As social media platforms continue to create new tools, features and copious amounts of algorithm updates (thank you, Meta…), we’re learning to ignore the noise and approach this year with a new level of precision and efficiency. Let’s take a look at the top 3 social media trends for 2024.
After breaking into the mainstream in 2022, AI started gaining more traction in 2023, especially on social media, and this will continue to rise throughout 2024. According to the Hootsuite Social Trends 2024 Survey, there will be a 318% increase in how much organisations plan to use AI for customer support activities. Plus! A 260% increase in how much organisations plan to use AI for editing photos in 2024. AI can now also generate post captions in some scheduling platforms such as Hootsuite. To thrive in this new AI environment, marketers and brands will need to redefine ‘’authenticity’’. It’s no longer about who or what creates the content, it’s about the brand experience this content is bringing to the customer.
According to Demand Sage, the average social media user logs into about seven social media platforms each month. Seven! For brands to be active and engaging on so many platforms, it does take a lot of time and energy to maintain. Content needs to be tailored to the unique audiences of each platform including lingo, trends, hashtags, word counts (this is still a thing in 2024?!) and that’s only the half of it. In 2024, instead of trying to do everything everywhere, and using up a lot of time and resources in the process, social media marketers are using ROI to figure out their next move. For example, 60% of businesses have X (Twitter) but only a third of them feel it strongly benefits their business. If there is no value, there is simply no point.
After using social media to stay in touch with family and friends, the top reason people use social media is to be entertained and to unwind, according to Hootsuite’s Social Trends 2024 Survey. Social media users don’t like when brands overly focus on self-promotion and instead engage mostly with what they find entertaining. 56% of social media consumers think that brands should be more relatable on social media. In 2024, brands that publish entertaining content will win customer loyalty and steal market share from competitors publishing the same old stuff. Don’t overthink it. Entertainment just boils down to providing enjoyment to your followers.