2024 Social Media Trends: What’s In and What’s Out?

Andréa Jones (00:01):
I love a good trend. I really do. And trends kind of come and go as the years come and go. So today I want to talk about 2024 trends, what's in and what's out. Stay tuned.

(00:13):
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(00:58):
Hi. Hello. For those of you who are new here, this is the Savvy Social Podcast where we talk about social media and community building. I'm your host, Andrea Jones, and before I dive into talking about trends, I gotta stand on my strategies versus trends soapbox. If you've been hanging out with me for a while and y'all, this podcast has been, we're in our sixth year. So if you've been an OG, I love to draw a line in the sand when it comes to the distinction between strategies and trends. Okay, so strategies are your overarching concepts for your business, for your marketing. So one of my marketing strategies is video. I love producing video. I love creating video. And so video is a key part of my strategy. A trend or a tactic that I could use to leverage video is to focus on creating Instagram reels that are three seconds long and that encourage replays, okay, that's a tactic tactic.

(01:56):
I think oftentimes as business owners, we focus so much on tactics that I got to address the elephant in the room. You got to have some overarching trends first. So I'm going to talk through six of the things that I think are out, what's coming in in 2024, but know that if this doesn't apply to you fast forward or just don't apply it to your business. Okay? Not all of these are for everybody. Alright? The first trend that makes me kind of sad is the one that I've been noticing on Instagram. So if you're on Instagram, you know, get one link in your Instagram bio. It's been like that for years. Well, last year in 2023, Instagram then allowed us to add in five links. So you now get five links in your Instagram bio, but you still can't hyperlink in a post. So if you want to create a call to action and encourage action in your post, the consensus that we've all just unanimously agreed upon is we say, go click the link in our bio or click the link in our profile.

(02:56):
And we've been saying that for years. But what I'm noticing as a trend is that instead of saying go click link in the bio or go tap my bio, a lot of people are now using comment keywords. So saying link in bio is going out and saying comment, this keyword is coming in. And this is specifically an Instagram trend, and this trend is not new. It's something I've been seeing for several years now, but it's growing a popularity. And one of the easiest ways to do this is using a tool called ManyChat. Okay? ManyChat, ManyChat. And I'll put my link in the show notes as well as a YouTube video where I show you the absolute easiest way to use ManyChat. And it's something we're exploring with a select group of our clients right now. After some testing, we'll probably expand it to all of our clients in our agency, but it's an interesting way to encourage a call to action.

(03:53):
What's interesting about it is it leans on user behavior. So when we think about how we scroll through Instagram, we don't typically tap on someone's bio, then tap on the link. Think about the last time you did that, when's the last time you tapped on someone's profile and then tap the link in their profile and then signed up for something. But we comment all the time, we like all the time, we DM all the time. And this kind of combines all of those things together. And you can get super complicated with ManyChat as well and add in so much automation to make the user experience a lot easier and to start building out a sort of CRM database. So Lincoln Bio, it's fading out and it makes me really sad because from an agency perspective, it's a lot easier than ManyChat. I'm going to say that right now.

(04:41):
ManyChat is complicated and it's a lot to keep track of. If you have a lot of funnels, have a lot of lead magnets like we do in online d, dry eye, I just have so many entry points, but you can also get way more complex with tagging and with mass broadcasting and things. So it's going to be interesting, but that's an Instagram specific one. I'm also seeing people use it on other platforms. So I saw someone do this the other day on LinkedIn. They commented or they wrote their post and said, comment if you want this resource. And then anyone who commented, they manually went in and said, Hey, I'm going to DM you the link right now. And they sent them a direct message, I assume with the link to that resource, which I think is also kind of brilliant. It helps people raise their hand and say, yeah, I'm curious.

(05:29):
I will say the downside of this trend is that if you want to be Snoopy, which is one of my favorite activities, I love to just see what other people are doing. Sometimes I don't want to comment on a competitor's post, but I'll go click the link in their bio and I'll find the link that way. However, if they don't have any links, I'm commenting. And there is also this social construct as well. I saw someone do this on Facebook recently where they said, I'm thinking about creating this product, comment, this keyword if you wanted something that I created to create. And I commented, but by the time I commented, there was 150 people who commented. And so it felt like this mob mentality of we're all commenting this, and she went through and manually responded to everybody. I was like, good for you. There was no man chat on that post.

(06:19):
It was on her personal page. So yeah, I think there is interesting things happening with this commenting strategy, and I'd love to see it develop further as a trend. I also think it's a great opportunity for those of us who do like to add a lot of high touch personal elements to our brand to do so. We don't need ManyChat automation to do this. Alright, second thing that's out is something that I've been talking about for years, but I'm just now seeing a ton of other people talk about it. And I will say in preparation for this episode, so typically I do a 2024 predictions episode that came out in November and I recorded it in October. So not to brag or anything, or maybe I am bragging, but I'm usually one of the first people to release a predictions episode for the next year.

(07:07):
So there are no inputs, but what I'm seeing data wise with my clients, with my members, with my students, and in my own business and observing and reading reports and things from prior years and making predictions. So my predictions episode, y'all is usually like me pulling it out. And that's why I feel very clairvoyant and that episode because a lot of my stuff comes true. And this is one of those things that came out in the predictions episode, but before I share it, I also want to say after the episode, I go listen to all the predictions podcasts. So I listen to everybody else's podcasts, all the marketers out there. I keep seeing all these posts from other marketers about what's in, what's out, what they're personally leaving behind in 2023 and taking it in 2024 or their own predictions for the years. So I've been consuming a lot of this and I keep seeing people say this.

(07:57):
So what is out for 2024 Insta Perfect? Y'all know when we are on Instagram circa 2015, everything was Insta Perfect from 2015 to 20 18, 19. You had to have the professional shoot. The influencers who were getting booked had the studio, the lights, the perfect hair, the makeup, the outfits. And I'm an Old Navy girl. I love just a plain T-shirt, yoga pants, that's my outfit, right? My glasses, I talk about them a lot, but they cost me, I think 60 bucks. They're not designer glasses, okay? So for me, Insta Perfect doesn't work. It never has. So I've just kind of floated in this space outside of being Insta Perfect, and I've tried to do the photo shoots and everything, I'm just too goofy. It just comes across goofy and I'm just leaning into it. That's who I am. I'm glad that trend is out. What's in is this combination of low quality content that is high effort, so low quality content, but takes a high effort.

(09:03):
And I was talking to Diodi, my operations manager in our meeting this week, and she said, it's kind of like social media doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be good. It kind of has to be good. It doesn't have to be perfect though. And I think that definition is spot on. It's spot on. When I see the TikTok videos that are going viral, the Instagram videos, the posts that are going viral, the posts itself, if you start to break it down, it's not the graphic design, it's not the video editing style, it's not the perfect lighting, it's the quality of the content that's good. And actually, if you have quality content that's too perfect, it's almost unapproachable for a lot of people and it feels like you're trying too hard and nobody wants a try hard. Or maybe some people do, but my people don't.

(09:55):
If you're listening to this, you probably don't want to try hard. A great example of this is some of the Savannah Bananas content on TikTok, and I've talked about them before. They're a baseball team based out of Savannah, Georgia. And their content takes a lot of effort and at first glance, it looks very low quality in the sense that it's not overly produced, overly done. And then if you start thinking about the effort that goes into these videos, it's a lot of effort. There's a cameraman running alongside the baseball player, they're running together and it's so much effort that they're putting into it, but it's not high quality. There was a script, it's not high quality, it was produced in a studio. It's not high quality. They did this on a day where they weren't actually performing the baseball game. This was something that they captured in the moment.

(10:49):
And yes, they used trends and things like that, but it feels very high effort. They put a lot of effort into it, low quality. Another example of this is videos that my husband keeps sending to me of this lawyer on TikTok who kind of reminds me of Better Call Saul and he's having his moment. There's another one I'm thinking of right now who's a plastic surgeon. They're having their moments, it's not high quality stuff, but they are being relatable. They're creating content that's aligned with trends. They're speaking the language of their audience, but it's very clearly recorded on an iPhone. It's very clearly like someone pointed out at the camera at them and they started talking, okay, so quality Low, it's not a lot of scripting planning, it doesn't feel like it was overly orchestrated, but the effort behind it, if you start thinking about it, is high.

(11:40):
The last example I think of when I think of low quality, high effort is these day in the life videos that are trending right now. That's what I love about B-roll videos as well, is that you don't need to have studio and you can just record your day-to-Day life. And there's a little bit of a high effort behind it because if you think about these day in the life videos, I saw one where someone was like, come to Target with me, and they got out of their car and they went into Target and they filmed the whole thing and I started to break down the shot list in my head just watching it. I was like, oh, they're walking into Target. But as a marketer, I'm like, okay. So they put their car in reverse, put their camera there, then drove past it, then reverse, and then picked up their camera again.

(12:24):
Or they went into Target, put their tripod, walked out to Target, and then walked back in. So you could see them walking into Target. The amount of effort that goes into this stuff. Sometimes I'm like, this is a lot of work, but as a consumer it's really enjoyable. It feels relatable. We like going to Target, we like shopping, we want to go along for the journey with this person. So that's one of the things that is trending this year, 2024. Alright, next thing that's going out for 2024 is going viral. Y'all don't want to hear this, but going viral is out. And I consider viral videos that get over a million views, and I'm calling this out for my business owner friends out there. Now I'm not saying you don't have to go viral, that's not what I'm saying. Going viral is great, it's lovely, but it's like viral chasing is totally out because in order to go viral million plus views, oftentimes you're speaking to very general audience, the masses if you will.

(13:24):
And what we've noticed for our clients, the difference between 2022 and 2023 is that the videos that went viral in 2022 went viral because there was less content to compete with. By the time 2023 came around, there's so much content to being produced that going viral was much more challenging. And the videos that were going viral were very much along the lines of this could be anybody. It's not even a business, it's just influencer marketing. And I know y'all listening to this, you're business owners. So going viral out, what's in is micro success, micro success. And a lot of y'all still call this viral, and I know it's a little bit of a technicality, but I don't consider something going viral unless it has a million views. Okay? That's my personal benchmark. Benchmark a lot of marketers use. However, if you have a video that takes off and gets 500,000 views, that's amazing.

(14:21):
That's your moment, that's your micro success moment. And I think smaller niche down groups of people, but with massive success is going to be the thing that's trending for the year. And it's what a lot of people are going to start talking about. And I hope we move away from this word viral or we define it, right? Because viral could mean multiple things to multiple people. I think about in this example, my client Linda, so Linda Taliaferro, she is on Instagram, look her up. She is an executive coach for black and brown women in corporate America, and she had a video that took off this year, not viral, however, it got over 90,000 views. So for an account that has just around 2000 followers, getting over 90,000 views is a massive win. It's huge. It's huge for my clients, right? When you're looking at that scale, it's a micro success moment. That's amazing. And it had a massive impact on her engagement, driving traffic to her podcast, her LinkedIn, her YouTube channel. And so when we think about these moments, they're the ones that actually have way more impact that are going to be important this year. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then I have three more trends that I want to talk about when we come back.

(15:35):
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(16:41):
And we're back. So this next one is the one that I have seen the most on the interwebs right now amongst marketers, and I tried to look up who said it first, but honestly, it seems like everyone's literally copying everyone's posts. So I don't know who to believe, but it is something that I've been talking about for a little while now. So who knows where it came from, but something that is going out is how to content, okay? How to, here are three ways how to make a quesadilla. Okay, that was a really weird example. I only can think of one way, but there you go. That's out the how to content. Instead, what's in is how I content, how I content. And this definitely leans into the earlier trend of this low quality, high effort posting or what I used to call the Kim Kardashian effect or the makeup list Makeup look, which is we want to be taken along for the journey.

(17:38):
We want to still feel like a completed thing, a completed video, a completed thought, a completed project, but we don't really want it to look like somebody got too much work done. So this is where how I content comes into play and how I content really focuses on the speaker's journey experiences. It allows for more opportunities to embed storytelling and all of those things. But when we think about how I content as well, the how I content really displaces that need of lecturing. And I see this a lot because we work with thought leaders in my agency, the type of coaches, speakers, authorities in their space. Sometimes when we say, here's how to do this, it feels a little bit like eat your vegetables, and nobody wants to hear that, right? So when we move away from eat your vegetables, here's one way how I hid zucchini in pasta last night so that my husband and my daughter would eat it.

(18:45):
That's a very real example that happened in real life. I just shred it up and put it into the ice cheese grater, but whatever, put it into the lasagna and away we go or the spaghetti and away we go, and they are none the wiser. Just make sure, cook it down to the sauce too. The zucchini can be quite watery. Anyways, that's how I do something, and I probably saw it from a TikTok video somewhere, but how I content feels more relatable instead of here are tan ways to hide veggies in your pasta dishes. Okay? So I'm not saying we're getting rid of how-to content completely. I just see consumer behavior is moving away from the how-to content as consumers, we are tired of being told and lectured on what we should be doing. We kind of want someone real to tell us the real deal.

(19:38):
We don't necessarily want to be like, eat your vegetables. Okay, next thing that's out really breaks my heart. And I'm saying this is a trend that's out for 2024, but I imagine it's going to fully lose favor by the end of the year. So if you hear this and you panic, don't panic, you have months and months to plan around this one. But something that's going out is hashtags, our beloved hashtags. I've been seeing this trend happen slowly in 2023 and it kind of sped up at the end of the year, and I think it's going to speed up even more throughout the year. I really hope I'm wrong about this one, but I've seen other people say it too. So now I'm like, Ooh, this isn't just an Andrea theory anymore. Hashtags are out. And I think it's because of how we've started using them as marketers.

(20:29):
Marketers ruin everything as you know. So when we think about how marketers ruin hashtags, nobody's reading them, they're literally crammed into an Instagram post as a pss with literally every single keyword we can possibly think of. I've even seen people starting to use actual keywords at the end of the Instagram post as well, hoping that their post is ranked. And yes, it does help, and the data shows that hashtags still help. Okay? Hashtags still help you get found, especially if you have an account less than 10,000 followers. Okay? So if you have an account more than 10,000 followers on any platform, skip the hashtags, the algorithm's going to forever be in your favor. Now because you've reached the minimum threshold, you're fine. Most of the people I work with, especially my students in the school, less than 10K followers, you listening to this, you may have less than 10 K followers, hashtags still have a pretty significant impact on the reach of your post.

(21:26):
So we've tested it out using no hashtags and using hashtags, no hashtags makes less of a difference the more followers you have, but the less followers you have, the more those hashtags make a difference. But never fear there is something that's going to replace hashtags and threads is already doing this. So threads, which is the little baby platform that was birthed by Instagram about six months ago, it started using keyword tags. I believe they just called them tags and y'all, they still use the hashtag symbol, but you're allowed one per post. Oh no, that's it. Just one per post. And it has to be very specific to that post. And the idea is that it's integrated into the copy or the caption of that post. I absolutely love this alternative to hashtags because it forces us to focus in on one main thing instead of saying hashtag local business, hashtag Fort Erie business, hashtag Ridgeway business hashtag Crystal Beach business.

(22:29):
We could list all the hashtags for is us to get super focused and pick the key thing that's important for that post and highlight that thing. It also makes the user experience much better because no one, and I am, yes, I am being dramatic here. No one likes hashtags, no one's reading them, and they can be very unsightly sometimes. So this keyword great if you're not on threads yet, I encourage you to just kind of look over there, scroll through the feed, see how threads is using keywords in their content. It helps kind of categorize the post, which I still think we need. And then we look at platforms like TikTok, they're leaning heavily into keywords and not just keyword dumping, it's not about keyword stuffing, it's about the actual content of the video. So the words that you're saying, they're transcribing that and helping people find your videos, what you wrote in the captions, what people are commenting is even all part of that search experience.

(23:31):
And I think what TikTok is doing with categorizing videos makes a hell of a lot of sense when it comes to user experience because yes, there is an algorithmic artificial intelligence behind the scenes trying to guess and match and categorize your content. But the clearer you can be as a creator of that content about what it is about in the actual video, the easier it is for that video to be categorized. And we're not just stuffing in a bunch of hashtags that we the creator think go with the video. Instead, it's relying on consumers determining if the hashtag aligns or not and it makes for a better consumer experience. I'm probably going to make a whole nother video slash podcast about TikTok and my thoughts there because making some changes where I'm like, I don't really like that, but I still think they have a great algorithm. I think they're focused on search makes sense and not hashtags. And I think more platforms are going to do that in 2024.

(24:28):
Last but not least, what is out is being overly strategic, strategizing to the gods, if you will. And again, I think this is another thing where marketers, we love to strategize. We love to look at the data, we love to predict and go, this is going to work, but we are looking at the past when we do this, okay, we are not creating something new. We're only analyzing what has been done already. So the downside of that and what we're experiencing with things like ChatGPT is when it's relying on things that it already knows and only the things that it knows, it cannot, literally cannot create new things. The new things it creates are always based on things that have already been done. And so what happens is if we're always creating content around things that only have already been done before, then it starts to kind of feel the same thing, right?

(25:22):
It's like we've seen the same thing over and over again. And so I think what's out for 2024 is being overly strategic in this way where every post feels like something that we've seen before or every video follows a formula. And while that does work for a lot of people, the content that I'm seeing rise to the top is actually the content that comes from the heart. It falls in line with how I content versus how to content. It falls in line with this low quality, high effort content in that it feels impassioned, it feels inspired, and it feels fresh. And in order to have fresh content as marketers, we got to step away from reviewing the data and the benchmarks and look at it at everything that we've seen and everything that's been done before. And look it with fresh eyes. So if you're sitting there like, Andrea, how do we do this?

(26:20):
I don't understand how I even start looking outside of your industry. So if you're, let's say you're an educator for teachers and you're constantly studying education models. You follow a lot of people in the online education space. Maybe you download these printables from Etsy or Creative Market and you're deep into that world and you're looking for something fresh, I want you to step out of that and look at what a health coach is doing. I want to step out of that and look at what this doctor is doing. Step out of that and look at what this therapy group practice is doing. Start looking at the world around you. Watch TV shows and look for inspiration there. Look at big brands, look for inspiration there. Review some trends that are outside of your bubble and this will bring in that fresh breath of air that we need and have that content feel more inspired.

(27:20):
I'm seeing big brands do this really well. I was just studying Stanley Cup for a project that I'm working on for my pro mentorship program. And Stanley Cup did something really interesting that I thought felt really fresh, even though it was clearly a marketing thing. So there was this lady on TikTok whose car burnt to crisp, but her Stanley Cup still was fresh in the car with ice in it. She shook it. You could hear the ice. Okay, this video went fricking viral. Stanley Cup looked at this and said, people are paying attention to our product in a whole different way. And Stanley Cup already had a really interesting rebrand away from construction workers towards middle class women. It's just wild, their journey. But they looked at this opportunity and they said, we're going to capitalize on it and we're going to bring more attention to our amazing product.

(28:19):
I feel like I don't have a Stanley Cup. I don't know. I don't know what it's like. I don't know what that life is. However, their marketing was interesting because they went to, this individual bought, I think it was her, bought her a car and probably gave her a bunch of swag and stuff too. And they made a video about it and she's now got a new car, and that video went viral as well. So it's an interesting thing that they responded to what's happening in the world around them. And the video itself announcing it was really just like a camera pointed at, I believe the CEO just saying, here's what we're going to do. And I think that kind of content is going to do really well this year. Unfortunately, it is hard to manufacture that. Okay? Now, agencies like the one that my company runs and what we do for our clients, we're constantly literally being thought partners with our clients and manufacturing those moments and capitalizing on the trends.

(29:23):
So we're constantly looking out for it. But even if you run your own business, I want you to think about how you can respond more to the world around you instead of strategizing with post this today, this tomorrow, this Wednesday. You know what I mean? It's too calculated. And scroll past that content on social. We just don't like the overly calculated, eat your vegetables kind of content. We want to feel things, we want to experience things, right? So those are my ins and outs for the year. I'd love to hear from you though. Send me a direct message on Instagram and let me know what is out for you this year, 2024, and what's in. I love to continue the conversation there.

(30:08):
Next week we have the amazing Hillary Weiss on the show. I'm excited to dive into that conversation, so I'll see you then. In the meantime, make sure to leave this a five star review on Apple Podcasts, and in Spotify, we're in Spotify too. Y'all help support the show. We constantly remain in the top 100 podcasts, and last year we actually won an award best in business for the Canadian Podcast awards, which is so cool. I'm very excited about that. And that's all because of your listenership. All you got to do is listen to the show and share it out. I'll see you next week. That's all for today. Bye for now.