Social Media Trends to Watch in 2024: Insights from Metricool Study of 29 million posts!

Andréa Jones (00:00):
I love data. And in today's episode, we're going to dive into some recent social media studies done by Metrical to talk about what's working and what's not here in 2024. Let's get into it. This is the Mindful Marketing Podcast.

(00:25):
Before we get into it, this episode is sponsored by Riverside, which is the all-in-one podcasting tool we now use for our show. And y'all, they feel super luxurious. Riverside is the All-in-one podcasting and video recording tool that gives you studio quality recordings and lightning fast editing right inside your browser and y'all, it's super intuitive and easy to use. Once your recording is done, you'll be able to automatically download separate audio and video tracks and edit it all within a few clicks. It's really very easy, easy, so head over to Riverside and you'll get 15% off. That's one 5% off using my code Drea, DREA at checkout. But y'all, it's free to get started. So click the link in the show notes and get started today.

(01:11):
Hello, this is my first episode that I'm recording back after having a baby. There will be episodes after this that I prerecorded just the way the schedule worked out, but this is my first official episode that I've recorded in present time, which just feels good right now.

(01:29):
The time of recording this currently six weeks postpartum, loving every second. If you want to get all of the BTS details, I posted some updates to my Instagram at onlinedrea, come follow me over there. I also posted my stories a lot about what this is like and I've been loving threads. The conversation around motherhood and parenting and running a business has been a lot of fun over there, so come hang out with me. But in this episode today we're talking about social media trends for 2024. Every time I start a conversation on trends, I do have to say there are strategies and there are trends, and there are very two different things. Strategies are the underlining approaches that you take to marketing. So whether you're marketing for yourself or your clients, when we're looking at strategies, these are foundational components to how we approach marketing.

(02:25):
What message are we sharing with our communities? How are we going to attract the right people? Who do we want to attract? How do we want to nurture relationships with them and help them make purchasing decisions? How do we want to make sure that they're informed and updated? How do we want to communicate with them? And then how do we want to give them the tools they need to be able to become advocates for our brands and share it with the people that they love and trust? That's strategies. Trends are simply tactics. These are things that help you deploy the strategies. So are we going to use or Instagram reels? Are we going to focus on long form videos on YouTube or are we going to do a live stream on LinkedIn? Those are tactical decisions that you make based on your overall strategy, and I think it's helpful to have both.

(03:13):
It's very helpful to have both. I know sometimes the conversation can skew one way or the other, and even as a marketer, I'm very aware of how sometimes I come across as anti hustle or anti trend, and I'm not anti trend or anti hustle, but I'm not hustle all the time, trends all the time. Either there's this beautiful middle ground that's a marrying of the two ideas, and so they have to work together. And in this episode we're talking about trends and tactics and things that are working right now. I'm going to go by platform, but before we dive in this study particularly Biometrical looks at a few different things. The first thing is that they're looking at analysis of nine different social media networks, Instagram, Facebook X, formerly known as Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Business Profiles, YouTube, and Twitch. For this podcast episode, I'm going to ignore Twitch and I may not talk a lot about Google business profile, but we'll touch on all of those.

(04:14):
And then in this particular study, they looked at almost a million accounts, specifically 978,000 accounts, and they looked at over 29 million posts. So a lot of data was gathered for this study. Now they do this annually. So this particular study ended in December, 2023, and a lot of the comparisons made in it are made to 2022 in their previous iteration of that study. Also, in this particular study I love and that I can geek out about how they grouped these accounts together. So specifically, they grouped tiny, small, medium, big and huge accounts together so that they can get accurate data based on the size of the account. So they consider a tiny account, one that has less than 500 followers. Small accounts are 500 to 2K, medium accounts are 2000 to 10,000. Big accounts are 10,000 to 50,000, and huge accounts are 50,000 plus up to 55 million, which I think is the most followed account anyways.

(05:17):
So that's how they group them together. And what I love about this grouping as well is that it gives you a better understanding of what's working for your brand. So one of the tactics that I've been talking a lot about lately is posting less, posting less frequently, but in this particular study that posting less frequently only works up to a certain size account. Once you start looking at big and huge brands, specifically huge brands with over 50,000 followers, increasing your posting frequency actually helps you more than it hurts you. But up until 50,000 followers posting more frequently actually hurts your reach, impressions and engagement. So that's one of the examples of the data points in the study I find so fascinating that I love to talk about. But let's start with Facebook. So with this particular study analyzing over 280,000 Facebook accounts, what they notice is that there is a decline in Facebook usage for brands.

(06:16):
So across the board, more and more brands are using Facebook less in 2023 versus in 2022. I think this is a pretty accurate representation of how businesses are viewing Facebook. It's like a battlefield out there to try to get seen on the platform. It looks like big and huge accounts still get the most interactions on average. So they're still seeing some traction on Facebook, but tiny and small and medium accounts really aren't seeing that much engagement. So if you have less than 10,000 followers on Facebook, you're not going to see a lot of engagement. That's pretty standard across the board. On average, we're seeing about 50 engagements per 1000 posts, 50 engagements per 1000 posts. That's for a small brand on Facebook, so significantly lower than in 2022, and that was about 548 interactions per post. So significant 90% decrease this year for small accounts.

(07:22):
The huge accounts saw the lease impact on this, so they saw a 43% decrease, and actually big accounts actually sell the lease at 24%. So big and huge accounts sell the least decrease in interaction. So again, if you have an account that's over 50,000 followers, then you're probably still seeing some traction, but you are seeing a decrease. So if you feel like engagement is down, it's down across the board. That being said, this was the year for reels. Facebook reels have really taken off this year, and actually engagement has increased across the board by an average of 33% with Facebook reel. So if you're going to post a Facebook, post a reel, and anecdotally I've been seeing this with my clients, we actually had three clients go viral with over million views on Facebook reels this year in 2024, and we're only what, five months into the year.

(08:18):
So if you're going to post a Facebook post a reel, and this is because Facebook's prioritizing that content placement for discovery. So I talked about this in a previous episode on micro video content, but when we think about the types of content pieces that are working really well across social right now, there are micro video content pieces because of their design to be discovered. So looking at the data on the engagement, the medium, small and tiny accounts, so if you have less than 50,000 followers saw the largest increase in engagement this year. So again, lots of engagement there. And when we compare posts versus reels, the engagement is saying that users are more drawn to reels. So they want to see the reels, they want to engage with the reels. You don't need to post as much though on Facebook. A lot of brands are reducing their frequency of publishing posts while increasing their frequency of publishing reels.

(09:22):
So they're also seeing that data and making that change with just the frequency publishing frequency skyrocketing for small brands up to 500%. So five times more I believe is the stat there of posting reels. All right, so that is Facebook in a nutshell. Let's move on to X, formerly known as Twitter. Twitter saw the most significant drop in impressions across all accounts. I think this is also reflected in their advertising dollars. When we look at where advertisers are choosing to spend, they're also not spending there. Elon Musk has, in my opinion, single handedly destroyed the platform. There is a opportunity for it to rebound of course, but I just don't see that happening when users aren't there and advertisers aren't there. Now that being said, there's still some positive growth in some areas, which I'll cover, but it's mostly downward trends. Alright, so across the board, brands are posting less on X, formerly noticed Twitter with the largest difference coming in from tiny accounts.

(10:31):
So tiny accounts, less than 500 followers, about 35% less, though that number is across the board. It looks like the medium brands are at 25%. So between 20, 35% less across the board, but some engagement has increased for some folks here on X, formerly known as Twitter, it seems like the people who are left, they're engaging, especially if you have a tiny or a small brand. So less than 2K followers, you may see some increase in engagement and you may see people who interact more, but that in my opinion is just the people who are left are those power users. Everyone else is gone. We've moved on. Alright, decrease in impressions across the board for all brands, all size brands as well, as much as a thousand percent, a thousand percent decrease in impressions for tiny brands, but even huge brands are seeing over a hundred percent big brands, over 200% medium brands over 300% decrease in impressions.

(11:37):
So fewer and fewer people are seeing the posts on Twitter X, formerly known as Twitter. Alright, let's move on to LinkedIn. So in LinkedIn we did see a decrease in impressions in some accounts, larger engagements, there are more posts there. This particular report focuses on pages because LinkedIn doesn't give us a lot of data for profiles, but my theory and based on my manual reporting that I do for my clients is that personal profiles have seen increases in engagement impressions across the board. This year, a lot of people moving away from Facebook and especially Twitter over to LinkedIn. And so we're going to see LinkedIn particularly is doing some interesting things that we'll see in the coming years. Now, the opportunity to go viral has increased on LinkedIn because of this. They're working on their algorithm. It's a little bit different than your meta Facebook, Instagram, or even X, what they do with their algorithm.

(12:43):
LinkedIn is a little bit different in that their posts actually live in the feed a lot longer, and so the chance of being viral has increased significantly for huge brands. It's up to over a thousand percent increase. And this particular study looks at shares for this number. So how many people are sharing the posts have increased over a thousand percent in 2023. But even if you have a tiny small medium page, we're looking at increases of a thousand, 2800% here. So lots of interesting opportunities for brands on LinkedIn. People are actually posting a little bit more on LinkedIn if you're a medium to huge size brands, but tiny and small brands. So less than 2000 followers aren't posting as much on their page. And again, I do believe that is because of the profiles on LinkedIn being the key here. That being said, engagement has increased across the board. So whether you're posting less frequently or more frequently, we're seeing engagement from anywhere from 11% increases to 22% increases across the board when we compare engagement in 2022 versus 2023 on LinkedIn. So yeah, if you haven't considered LinkedIn, I highly, highly recommend it. We're going to take a quick break when we get back, we're going to talk more about the data that is exciting for 2024 trends.

(14:19):
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(14:59):
And we're back. Let's dive into the Pinterest data. So we're looking at metro cool's latest report on social media networks at what's working right here now and today. And Pinterest is an interesting one because I consider Pinterest and YouTube searched based social platforms. I'm kind of making that term up, but essentially it means that these platforms heavily rely on search engines even though there's a lot of social components to the platform. So there's comment sections, there's ability to like and share, but a lot of the ways that the platform works is based on search. So you want to make sure that what you're posting, these platforms have keywords and that they're optimized for search. Now this year in 2023, engagement increase in Pinterest by 32%. So we're seeing a lot of increases there. Pinterest did some interesting things with amalgamating idea pins into their regular pins.

(15:59):
So prior to this year they had their regular standard pin, and then they also had idea pins, which were essentially your TikTok videos, your reels videos, but they kind of renamed everything. Everything's a pin. So whether you're posting a video, whether you're posting an image, whether you're posting a GIF, they're all pins. And I think that really actually helped with the user experience because when I was scrolling through Pinterest and I look an I idea pin, my natural instinct is to tap on the pin to visit the website on the other side. And as business owners, that's kind of what we want people to do. However, when you're looking at a video, tapping on it is a pause and play option, so they're kind of making it easier for the user experience in my opinion. I think Pinterest is doing well there. But yeah, 32% increase in engagement on Pinterest.

(16:50):
Also, an average link clicks went from half a percent to over 1%, so 1.2%. So more people are clicking links because of the changes that Pinterest is making as well. As a business owner, that's kind of what we want. We want people to click links and visit our website. Then when we look at clicking on the pins themselves, so typically they click on the pin to read the description or the comment section. That has gone down a little bit. So in 2022 we saw about 26% clicks, and in 2023 we're looking at 19 ish percent. So that has gone down a little bit as well, but in my opinion, if we're clicking over to the website, we're getting it done. Engagement rate has increased as well, used to be about 3% engagement rate. Now it's a bit over 4% engagement rate on those pins, which is just lovely to see and lots more interactions, just 17.4% growth in content interaction.

(17:51):
That's everything from clicking on links to saving content, which is how most people use it. And so it feels like there's more action happening on that platform. Pinterest itself is really all kind of rebranding themselves as a social network for direct purchase. And I personally see a lot of people use it in the research phase of their customer journey. So they're thinking about buying something, they go to Pinterest, they start saving ideas. So if your business falls in line with that, you should absolutely be on Pinterest. They have some interesting things here on Twitch. Now, Twitch isn't a large platform when compared to the other platforms specifically because it is really focused on live streaming and kind of made a name for itself in the gaming arena. But we're seeing kind of that explode in this year. We saw almost a hundred percent increase in the number of accounts on Twitch and the number of streams on Twitch from 2022 to 2023.

(18:54):
So the amount of weekly streams, like the frequency of them have gone up. And there are a lot of changes, especially when we look at the tiny to medium sized brands. Now, the big to huge brands actually are seeing a decrease in creating content over time. But overall, there's just more streams happening in general on the platform. And I won't spend a lot of time here because not a lot of people who listen to this podcast are on Twitch. But I think it's important to note because it could be a little bit of a rising star, especially if you're a live streamer and with the pending TikTok band, there may be opportunities for live streamers on TikTok to move over to Twitch. So I see more people moving to YouTube as a natural choice there. Alright, let's talk about Instagram. Instagram is by far for my community, one of the most popular platforms.

(19:49):
So if you've purchased a product from me, if you're in my membership, you're probably interested in Instagram. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably waiting for the Instagram part because Instagram is where a lot of my business owners really spend the most time. And one of the things I wish this report had was threads as well, but it's not even a year old at the time of recording this. So hopefully we'll get that data coming out soon. But Instagram is where it's at. So we saw some interesting things in Instagram this year. If you're feeling the pain, if you're feeling like engagement isn't there or followers aren't there, this report will give you some insights into that. Now, generally speaking, people are posting less on Instagram. So when look at Instagram posts specifically, we're looking at between 30 to 70% decrease in a percentage of posts per account.

(20:42):
So with the highest being huge accounts went down by 70%. And then we also see big accounts going down by 31% as far as frequency of posting goes. Now when it comes to reels, so we're talking about posts and reels totally separately inside of Instagram, by the way, they're also, they have separate delegations. I don't know where I'm trying to look for their, but their insights are in totally separate places. It's actually annoying. But when we look at Instagram reels, it's a mixed bag with mostly increases. Unless you're a tiny account, less than 500 followers, most accounts increase by 35 to 40% when it comes to posting reels. So whether you're a small, medium, big, huge, we're seeing an increase in reels on Instagram reels, posts. Now when we look at engagement though, engagement per post and per reel has gone down across the board.

(21:41):
So engagement per post, engagement per real has gone down across the board. When we look at interactions, whether that's likes, comments, saves or shares, it's gone down. Okay? So while everyone's posting less is because engagement has gone down, even though it's kind of like we shifted focus away from posts towards reels. Now the interesting thing though is stories that has gone up almost across the board for everyone, but particularly with tiny and huge accounts. So we're looking at impressions and reach for stories. So if you're looking to increase impressions or increase reach for Instagram stories, that's the way to go post to your stories, share your post to your stories, share your reels to your stories. That has increased across the board. Lastly, let's take a look at TikTok. Now, TikTok does have this looming ban over its head. This isn't the first time there's been a threat of a ban, however, this has been the most serious and the farthest the ban has gotten.

(22:43):
Basically TikTok has a get it together by the end of this year. That being said, from 2022 to 2023, there's a drastic increase in not only accounts but posts. Okay? So more and more people creating accounts, way more people posting. In 2022, the number of people that had posted in this study was 171,000. By 2023, it was 810,000. So quite a large increase in the number of people posting. Now when we look at engagement, that has gone down across the board for almost every category except for huge accounts. Okay? So very similar to Facebook. TikTok has seen engagement go up for huge accounts by 27%, but if you have a tiny, small, medium or big account, we're seeing decreases range from 4.5% all the way up to almost 20% decrease in engagement. So engagement has gone down bit on TikTok. When we look at engagement rate.

(23:49):
Now, when we look at average interactions as well, we're seeing those numbers reflect as well. Average interactions for tiny accounts having the biggest impact down by 88% down by 88%. If you have a small or huge brand, those are the least impacted, but medium and big brands still pretty impacted by drastic number of interactions. Drop average video length is 55 seconds on TikTok right now with this study. But the weekly posting frequency, most small, medium, tiny brands are about two to three times a week with huge brands going up to six times a week. So when people say post every day three times a day on TikTok, that's not really what people are doing. Most people are doing about two to three times a week with larger, big and huge companies. I'm assuming they just have more budget for posting. So they are seeing an increased publication rate on the platform.

(24:57):
There you go. There you have it. So one of my toxic traits is saying, oh, and the last thing and then saying 15 more things, my husband can attest to that, and I actually posted that on TikTok recently, but that was not the last thing. I want to talk about YouTube as well for the purpose of this podcast episode. So YouTube is seeing some interesting things right now and 27% increase in publication across the board. And I think it's the platform that stills to beat. Someone asked me the other day, if my business got erased and I had to start all over again, what would I do? And I feel like I'd have a focus on YouTube. It's just knowing what I know now. It's been the steadiest social platform, least amount of changes, least amount of algorithm changes, very long-term content play. I don't know what the future is going to bring, but with the, again, pending doom of TikTok ending and the rise of video content creation, I think YouTube is here to stay.

(26:03):
Alright, so posting frequency on YouTube has increased across the board for every single brand. So every single brand in this study, it has increased with huge brands increasing by 21%. And I like to look at huge brands. Not to say that if you don't have at least 50 K followers, you're nothing. But I like to look at huge brands because typically huge brands have huge teams, and that means they have more data points, they have more access to analyze what's working and what's not, and so they make a change, like posting 21% more on YouTube, I'm paying attention and I'm going, that's interesting, right? But every single brand across the board in this study has seen increases in posting and most people posting about 3.5 times a week, which is very interesting. I'm not sure if this study includes shorts. Oh yeah, it does includes shorts as well.

(27:01):
So about 3.5 times a week, and most brands increasing posting by 5% all the way up to 30% or yeah, 30% abouts. I'm rounding up for that one. That being said, there has been a decrease in engagement across the board for most accounts except tiny accounts, tiny accounts. So less than 500 subscribers are still seeing an increase in engagement at 14% if you have a tiny account. But the rest of us in decreases in engagement across the board with medium accounts being the least impacted at 3.9% and huge accounts being the most impacted at 41%. So even though they're posting more, they're seeing 41% decrease in interactions. Now as far as subscriber growth goes, that is going up for most brands. Tiny brands not as much. So they actually saw a decrease of 12%, but everyone else saw increases. Medium brands at the lowest at 4%.

(28:05):
Huge brands the highest at 70% increase across the board. So here's some takeaways from all of this data and all of these studies. Number one, the algorithms are getting better. So even though we're seeing a decrease across the board, I think that the attention that people are placing on the content is getting better. And even though people, as business owners, we complain about the algorithm, the studies still show that people are spending more time on social media than ever in history. We're spending more time on our phones than ever in history. There's more content to consume than ever in history. And so there's more for the algorithms to sift through, and that means the algorithms are getting more accurate and they're doing a more efficient job of matching people to the content that they want to consume. Your job as a content creator, business owner marketer is to figure out what people want to consume and how you can get your content in front of them.

(29:09):
That means the second takeaway from this is focusing on quality content versus quantity. Almost every single platform people are decreasing besides YouTube, where people are increasing posting frequency. So generally that means that we want to focus in on quality content. So how can we make content that actually resonates? This does not mean it has to be super polished and perfect. In fact, what I'm seeing in studies with my client list and with my marketers that I work with is that content feels low effort. So low production quality is doing really well, even though the effort behind the scenes still can be significant. People don't want to feel like you're trying too hard, but they also don't want to feel like you didn't try it all. So it's finding that middle ground video is on the rise. So third conclusion from this report is that video formats, reels, stories, lives, YouTube videos.

(30:10):
It's a content placement to beat people love that video placement. So even if you're not a video person, I try to find ways that you can create video content so that you can adapt to the algorithm and the platform changes and get that reward of increased engagement. So we're seeing the platforms that have the increased engagement rates tend to be towards video and tend to have a posting frequency that matches the size of their account. For this full study, go to metricool.com/social network study. You can also Google it Metricool Social Network Study. Find it there. This is not sponsored by them. I just love the study and wanted to bring it to you here on the podcast. But that's all for today. I'll be back soon with another episode. Bye for now.