Our take on the 2024 social media trends – part one

Published - 23rd January 2024

By Sarah Cornes, senior social media manager

The quote reads: A key part of our role is to keep up with the latest trends and news in the social media world, so our clients don’t have to.

There’s an excitement about January – it’s a time for new beginnings, creating new habits and getting stuck into projects that you may not have had the energy for in December.

Like most businesses, we find January the perfect month to think about the coming year and start planning ahead.

As part of this, we have been researching and learning about the social media trends for 2024, so in this two part blog, we will cover our top ten trends!

Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI in social media refers to artificial intelligence tools and services that are designed to help users save time, increase engagement and stand out on social media platforms.

In early 2023 there was a boom in the adoption of third-party AI tools and towards the end of the year the social media platforms started investing heavily in their own AI with a big focus on supporting the creation of profiles and posts.

We expect to see this grow in 2024 on the platforms with more people starting to experiment with AI tools.

That said, AI can’t replace originality and there are valid concerns relating to plagiarism. We suggest thinking of AI as another tool in your tool belt for those times you hit a blank wall in your copywriting and to combine the AI suggested copy with your own original work.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions came in with a bang in 2023 with the first being X Premium (originally called Twitter Blue), which gave users an upgraded platform experience with additional features to the standard X offering such as the ability to edit posts, write posts over 280 characters, upload longer videos, create a community, become verified and more.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) quickly followed suit with a paid-for option that included verification, exclusive features, account protection and customer service support.

Both of these subscription options come with a cost and we will be keeping a watchful eye to see how many businesses subscribe.

Our take on X is that it has had a very unsettled time and is still going through changes, so we would recommend a ‘wait and see’ approach to investing in X Premium.

In terms of the construction industry and Meta’s offering, we think that businesses operating in the B2B sector would be better served by increasing their paid social marketing budgets to reach a wider audience across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and let B2C brands invest in subscribing to the ‘blue tick.’

Social search

In 2023, social search was predicted to be a major trend, and it shows no signs of slowing down in 2024. Surprisingly, approximately half of Gen Z individuals are utilising platforms such as TikTok and Instagram for their searches instead of relying on Google.

To ensure that your content is easily discoverable, more than ever before, it is crucial to optimise your posts with SEO in mind.

To do this, create a list of keywords you would like your business to rank for and regularly create your content around them. If you aren’t sure where to start, we have our own inhouse SEO and PPC expert with an understanding of the construction industry on hand to help with your keyword research.

Ref: Business Insider

Social commerce

Social commerce is the process of selling products and services directly through social media. It is becoming more and more popular as users begin to trust that their money is safe and protected by the social media platforms and that if they need customer service assistance it will be readily available.

In 2023, 98% of customers planned to buy something via social purchasing. This was up from 68% in 2022.

We predict that social media platforms will invest in ecommerce in 2024 to look to deliver on the potential growth in sales.