- TikTok’s Unstoppable Growth and Influence
As per Statista, in 2024, TikTok caters to more than 1.5 billion monthly active users of social networks. The growth of the platform demonstrates no sign of decreasing as it becomes one of the critical channels that are crucial for brands that target younger generations. And for companies that aim at reaching Gen Z and millennials, the platform is not a mere recommendation – it has become obligatory to have an account on TikTok. From its humble origin in short-form content generation, TikTok is now diversifying the format of content that is allowed on the platform. Besides the short silly clips, TikTok is quickly becoming more of a platform for videos in length: the possibilities range up to 30 minutes.
- Video Content Reigns Supreme — With an Evolving Edge
Video content continues to hold the crown as the most influential and engaging form of digital media, but there’s a significant twist: the landscape has now started diversifying in a way it had not before. This effectively means that despite short demand for short-form videos as a means to startle awake one’s intended audiences, there has been growing demand for the consumption of content in diverse formats. Currently, the audience expects to receive both short and long videos, while other types of content, such as texts and images, are expected as well. It is a significant shift which new opens avenues for brands to play around with and engage with the audiences in new ways.
- Augmented reality will go mainstream
Facebook Augmented Reality or Face AR is positioned to go mainstream and change the social media as a whole where brands and consumers meet. Like its sibling Virtual Reality (VR) which is still part of the early adopter stage AR on the other hand is making impressive progress, easily assimilating into platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat to change the way users and brands interact. Snapchat has always set a top example in using AR technology; now users are hooked on various cute filters changing one’s appearance, for example, turning into an animal, putting on makeup, or wearing sunglasses. It is because of such entertaining and engaging images that making AR a part of everyone’s everyday life online has been made possible.
- Influencer Marketing
And that’s where influencer marketing comes in: even if it is not a new concept, it is undoubtedly one that is more essential now than ever before. With the current market having products, brands and campaigns influenced by social media trends more often than not, this year’s consumers are going back to basics and choosing accordingly: influencer marketing. This has led to the continued increase of influencer in recent years with a special focus on nano and micro influencers who are those who have a small but very active audience base. Due to those elements, such creators are considered more believable and therefore, are great partners for brands who like to focus on sincerity.
- Social Media as a Treasure Trove for Data for Businesses
Social networks are full of important consumer information, and more and more conscious companies are beginning to tap into such a resource. With the help of SMM, companies can listen in on the consumer world, do better in analysing, identify talks, trends and sentiments. In a nutshell, social media listening seeks to move from the basic level of monitoring the consumer activity to being able to understand how they feel towards brands, campaigns and specific messages. The difference between social monitoring and social listening needs to be distinguished first. Social monitoring is more about monitoring certain statistics and reacting to comments or mentions – it can be seen as the Engagement Real-Time view, as it were. While the former is broader, focusing on broad mentioning volume and improving it, social listening goes further in terms of looking at sentiment and effects of brands’ actions. It offers deeper and useful information about perceived images of brands, customers’ choices, and the targeted advertising appeals. As brand playfulness and brand relatability grow into an essential part of the overall marketing communication strategy, real-time respondent reactions enable campaigns to be delivered and received exactly as planned, and branding to be reinforcing. There are several ways through which firms that want to use social listening for the first time can use it in measuring the success of their campaign.
6. Social Audio Continues to Rise in Popularity
It is not a new phenomenon to be used audio content but its use in the social media realm is becoming a phenomenon and revolutionising the way information is shared. Different from other media used in social networks, social audio implies people’s voice and common people as the receivers, which can be used hands-free and on the go. This has created other platforms through which one can interact as well as use in obtaining content that they desire in the form of audio instead of videos or articles.From the perspective of social audio, this is the best chance that brands have to try to speak directly to consumers instead of at them.
7. The Continued Rise of AI in Content Creation
2023 can be said to be one of the biggest advancement years for AI technology, and this trend is seen to progress more in 2024. As the number of companies generating social media content grows, popular AI content generation tools such as ChatGPT, Copy AI, and Jasper are being demanded to reduce the time and effort needed to write posts. Recent development in the field of AI in the past year have made these tools even smarter and they are no longer limited to only text. Now, companies don’t just employ the use of AI to only write content copy, but also to create both audio and video content to prepare the future of more diverse and engaging content marketing. There is no doubt that AI has played a role in content creation. As highlighted by Hootsuite in their report, the use of AI for image creation is set to increase to 54% in 2024, a improvement from 15% in 2023. Furthermore, no less than 86% of firms plan to leverage AI to perform various text revisions that also underlines the increasing significance of the technology in improving written language.