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The Diary Of A Digital Marketing Apprentice: Three of the Biggest Social Media Trends and Features in 2024

Every time we turn into a new year, there’s a lot of speculation from content creators, digital marketers and anyone in-between about what will really take off next year or keep on growing rapidly. In this update, our Digital Marketing Apprentice, Ed, gives us his take on what’s hot in 2024.

Hello and I am Ed, Destination Digital’s newest hire and working through a Digital Marketing Apprenticeship here in Bakewell. As part of learning the ropes on content creation, I wrote my first blog about being newly exposed to the world of SEO, and followed it up with a piece on TikTok and Instagram. In this update, I walk you through what I think the main social media trends for 2024 will be.

Taking a look backwards in order to look forwards

In 2023 there were many different trends on social media that broke through, and others that maintained their ranks. Some well-known examples of trends you might recognise include, the continuous growth of short form content (especially the rapid growth of Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts) as well as many others such as the rise of social commerce, which especially has been developed much more rapidly recently by TikTok, and who now dominate a good part of this space with TikTok shop.

Today I will be talking about three social media trends that will be the biggest for the coming year. These are what will have the largest impact on content creators, social media managers, digital marketers and many more social media consumers in 2024. So, sit back, relax and soak this information in as it may do wonders for your social media and brand exposure if applied correctly. Now, let’s get into our list!

 

Social Media Trend for 2024 #1

First on the list, and I am sure will not come as a shock to you as it has been dominating social media for the last few years, but the continued growth of short-form content such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

One of the many reasons it continues to dominate is due to the easy shareability of this content. It’s no secret that most consumers of content on social media have an extremely short attention span. This market of short attention span social media users is absolutely tailor made for platforms like TikTok to dominate.

If we are being honest, who watches all the videos they get spammed with by their friends and family? I sure know I don’t, (sorry if you are reading this!) so the fact TikTok is very short form, allows people to share it with their friends and family with ease, which inevitably leads to the increase of popularity.

Engagement is a key driver in how well a video will do on TikTok. Engagement means likes, shares, saves and comments. So getting a hook into a video early on is key to grab people’s attention from an entertainment point of view. The more entertaining a video is, the more likely it is that someone will share it onto their friends. Something to bear in mind if you want to get into TikTok.

Tiktok’s algorithm favours the length of time people watch your video, whereas Reels favour the number of times people watch on repeat, and so when it comes to short-form, the shorter the better! There are a number of circular sounds on both platforms where creators stitch the video on a loop that doesn’t make it immediately obvious to the viewer where the end is. This plays into repeated views for Instagram and length of viewing for TikTok beautifully.

It is never too late to get involved with this type of content, there is still so much reach and engagement that you can access by posting engaging short form content, in fact TikTok had over 1.65 billion Active users just last month, just picture the immense exposure you could access by utilising short-form content!

Social Media Trend for 2024 #2

This next one may come as a bit more of a shock to you if you haven’t every really jumped into social media with both feet, and I wouldn’t blame you for being surprised, as it is a rather discreet part of social media that challenges SEOs and content creators like bloggers.

The second largest social media trend in 2024 will be the competition of search results between traditional search engines such as Google and non-traditional platforms; social media such as Instagram and TikTok.

A great number of people who are on social media these days retrieve their information from these platforms. This is really not making Google too happy, as they are losing consumers to the easily readable apps like TikTok.

If you take a look through your feed on Instagram or TikTok, you’ll find plenty of entertainment out there. Silly videos, funny, niche interests such as mountain biking, vintage cars or gaming. However you will also find a huge cohort of people ‘helping out their followers’ by posting information about their niche interests.

One of our clients is Mr Fothergill’s and there is a big audience in the gardening community that follow gardening media influencers who share tips and tricks to help educate their audiences. These people are also leaning into features such as Instagram’s Broadcast channels, where there is the promise of ‘behind the scenes’ or exclusive content for subscribers. It’s a bit like a huge Whatsapp group if you were to try and thing about how Broadcast channels work. They happen ‘in your DMs’ and have features such as polls or Q&As to help influencers use this feature to get information from their audience or to create engagement they can’t get on their public grid.

Obviously, Google is still first amongst Gen Z consumers for research of products. However, with just 48% of interactions, social media platforms are catching up rapidly with just 4% less at 44%!

Even more shockingly, more than half of social media users from ages 16-24 use social media to research brands oppose to the more traditional platforms such as Google. People aren’t ‘googling it’ any more, they are ‘Tiktoking it’!

So have a think about what you, as a content creator or social media manager can do to improve your ‘SEO ranking’ on these platforms to try and plug this gap before it becomes a problem!

 

Social Media Trend for 2024 #3

The last trend I believe will dominate in 2024 is the idea that shares will become more prominent and a more important feature in engagement. For as long as anyone can remember on social media, followers, likes and saves have been the most important interactions on social platforms. This however is likely to change in 2024, as a share is an interaction proving that someone likes your content so much that they are willing to share your content to their own audience and friends. This is so valuable and proves to the algorithm that the content is worthy to be pushed out.

Many social media platforms are already hinting at the importance of these shares, the likes of Instagram and X [Formerly known as Twitter] have begun rolling out public share counts on posts.

A lot of the features related to sharing videos onto your own timelines on TikTok are driven by a need for the platform to get all this sharing ‘out in the open’ and not hidden with a tiny audience just in DMs. Instagram have also revamped their sharing tools for posts and Reels, where you can ‘remix’ a Reel from someone else’s timeline onto your own if the sharing permissions allow for that.

Green-screen ‘react’ videos are now really common on both platforms. Content creators give their own spin on content they’ve found, either by reviewing it, or lampooning it to appeal to their own audiences tastes.

So there is a move to democratise all content on these platforms to help content reach further and further. 👍 Great news if you love to be entertained online. 👎Not such great news if you are a content creator that sweats the copyright and intellectual property laws related to your content.

Thank you guys for reading my blog, and I have more content in the pipeline, so keep your eyes peeled for new blogs coming soon!

 

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If you’d like to talk to us about this news, about Ed, or about anything in the digital marketing sphere, then please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.

 

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