Social Media Trends For Your 2024 Marketing Strategy
December 25, 2023
Navigating the world of digital marketing is like keeping pace with a rapidly changing landscape. As new platforms pop up, algorithms shift, and social media users change their behavior every year, keeping up with trends is key for businesses and marketers. Whether you’re a business leader, PR specialist, or a freelancer, recognizing the patterns that dictate how individuals engage, network, and market on social media is crucial.
This is where the Social Media Trends 2024 report, conducted by Hootsuite, comes in to help. Based on insights from over 4200 marketers and 4500 consumers, the 41-page report highlights some of the key concerns and opportunities on the rise for 2024. We have summarized the main points of the report for you, so you can incorporate them into your social media strategy for the following year. Let’s dig in!
AI Forces Brands to Redefine Authenticity
With the introduction of AI, people across various sectors have found it to be a helpful asset in their work. According to the Hootsuite report, organizations are planning to increase significantly the use of AI for social media, recognizing its effectiveness in reducing staff workload. In the coming year, we can expect to see the biggest increase in AI use for revising text, editing images, and providing customer service.
However, a noteworthy 62% of consumers say they are less likely to engage with content created by AI. This means that such content might alienate your audience. While AI indeed makes the life of social marketers easier, it is not advisable to post content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Certain responsibilities are better handled personally, including:
- Creating a content strategy for social;
- Editing and refining captions;
- Ensuring images and posts are up to brand standards;
- Interacting in the comments section.
On the other hand, you can delegate the following tasks to an AI assistant:
- Brainstorming ideas;
- Organizing your thoughts;
- Giving content suggestions;
- Writing first drafts for captions;
- Suggesting images.
Maintaining a healthy balance between technology and authenticity is key.
Strategic Brands Commit to Their Champion Platforms
Did you know that the average social media user logs into seven platforms each month? Organizations find maintaining a presence on multiple social platforms to be the most challenging thing aspect of their work. Cross-posting no longer works, as each post must be tailored for individual platforms due to differences in audiences, hashtags, algorithms, and updates.
To save yourself a lot of time and make your posts effectively work for you, it is crucial to prioritize your presence on social media platforms according to the return on investment (ROI). While many brands are confident that such platforms as LinkedIn, Instagram, and WhatsApp deliver the most positive return on investment, it may vary for each company. According to the Hootsuite survey, in 2024, strategic organizations will unlock their top-performing channels based on ROU and focus their attention only on those.
In order to identify what works best for you, run a social media audit and calculate ROI for each platform you use. It will uncover your most engaging posts, your highest-performing content formats, and other patterns that will help you decide how to approach your social strategy moving forward. Once you know your hero platforms, pour all your efforts into them – research, experiment with content, invest time and money, and engage with your audience.
Entertainment Fuels the Social ROI Engine
The Social Media Trends 2024 report showed that there is a significant gap between what social users want to see and what the organizations actually post. While 48% of marketers publish product updates or news multiple times a week, audiences prefer to engage with entertainment content.
Many companies, especially “serious” organizations do not even consider creating entertainment content consequently losing engagements. But entertaining doesn`t always mean humor. You can think of content that inspires, gets excited, makes people feel moved, or teaches something new. By creating meaningful interactions, you will win your audience`s trust and eventually, their desire to become loyal customers.
In 2024, brands that publish entertaining content on social will succeed in winning eyeballs, engagement, and, as a result, market share away from brands that keep on publishing the same old stuff.
Read the full Social Media Trends 2024 report by Hootsuite here.