Everyone is involved in some kind of social media channel. According to the Pew Research Center, 88% of people between 18 and 29 use social media. Well, where audience hangout marketers reach there. They plan to allocate around 63% of media spending to digital channels, seeing the ROI using digital platforms.
Spending on social media offers a great return on investment because 92.7% of all Internet users use social media. With the help of a social media strategy, your brand can reach 4.5 billion people overnight, which seems impossible through traditional marketing methods.
Yes, a great social media strategy can enhance your business visibility and revenue. Give your precious time to our detailed blog about creating a social media strategy, which also discusses critical trends. Ready to make a successful marketing plan for your business in 2025?
So, let’s get started.
Key Trends to Follow for Social Media Strategy
People spend an average of 2 hours and 28 minutes daily on social media, and when they see something trendy, their watch time may increase. Trends occur not only in videos but also in the process of creating them. Our researched content below can help you dig deeper into this.
Here are the key trends to consider when creating a social media strategy in 2025.
- AI for Productivity:
Prioritizing AI for customer service can help you generate 25% higher revenue. AI speeds up the steps of content creation, whether for social media, YouTube, or Google search engines. By leveraging the power of AI, marketers can eliminate common mistakes and repetitive tasks.
Nowadays, AI tools are available for every step of creating social media content; you only have to focus on implementation and optimization. More than 42% of businesses use AI (Global AI Adoption Index). And, this percentage is going to increase in the future.
- Platform Shifts:
As we said in the introduction, “Where audience hangouts, marketers reach there.” First, audiences start using a new platform, and then marketers follow them. Nowadays, headlines in many media channels talk about TikTok’s ban. Whenever a platform is banned or people get bored, they go elsewhere. So, this is also a hot trend to keep in mind if you want to be a successful social media marketer.
Monthly active users on the top social media platforms in April 2024.
- Playful Content:
Why do people use social media? They want to enjoy themselves and pass the time. So, they always look for playful content that feels satisfying. Marketers now focus on creating content that entertains, educates, and engages. Some common types of playful content are showing behind the scenes, typing out thoughts, silent review trends, or showing a day in the life of an engineer, influencer, or others.
- SEO for Social Channels:
Do you also think SEO is only for text-based content? If yes, you are missing out on something. SEO is done on all the social channels. This trend is not about keyword stuffing or basic link building. Social media SEO is about shares, likes, comments, views, followers, and overall engagement on the post and video.
Social media SEO boosts your business’s online presence and attracts more views. It helps drive organic traffic to your posts and website.
- User Generated Content:
It is a popular trend on social media to check user-generated content (UGC) before making any purchase. They check reviews, comments, and other people’s experiences with the product and service. Since people trust real people more than a business or company, UGC works effectively to attract more customers.
More than 80% of potential customers prefer peer recommendation over other forms of advertising. Nowadays, UGC marketing is trending and becoming more popular, leaving influencer marketing in the background. 90% of people trust word of mouth and UGC.
- Social Media Becoming Search Engine:
Yes, you read it right. People used to search on Google to find products before finding them on social media. Now, they directly search for products on a social channel, so social platforms have evolved beyond communication. This changing user behavior introduces new trends in the world of social media. Now, people want to see products directly without reading about them in long-form blogs.
Well, Google is still a dominating search platform, with around 82% of the market share. However, Gen Z has broken the marketing funnel. For them, social media is for everything: a learning platform, news source, entertainment center, and social hub (Vogue Business).
- Rise of Social Commerce:
The top four social media platforms are YouTube (2.5 billion users), Instagram (2 billion users), and Facebook (3 billion users). So, the staggering user base is leading to the rise of social commerce. Many companies put a [Shop Now] button on their Facebook page beneath the post.
You must have seen this type of commercial button on Instagram as well. Besides that, when you scroll through TikTok, you notice a shop now, learn more, or “site link” button. Marketers know where their audience is and what they are surfing, so they reduce the number of steps to bring them to the site.
Best Practices to Create a Successful Social Media Strategy
So, enough knowing about the trends, now we are moving ahead to learn about techniques to create a successful social media strategy. Follow the best practices below, and you will be ready with a successful social media strategy. These points are the core of social media strategy.
- Be Clear About Your Goals:
Why do you need a social media strategy? What do you want to achieve from it? You can get answers to these questions when you are clear about your marketing goals. Although this is the first best practice in creating a social media strategy, it affects all the other practices. So you can’t go wrong with your first move. Set meaningful and achievable social media goals so you don’t deviate from what you want to achieve and measure your success.
Some popular social media marketing goals:
- Generate leads
- Drive website traffic
- Increase engagement
- Brand awareness
- Increase conversion rate
- Understand Your Audience:
Find out what your audience likes and dislikes, what type of products they use, what content they consume, and what time they are highly active on social media. With the help of customer and data analytics, you can understand your target audience. Once you have understood who the users are, create a user persona according to your target audience.
User persona example for the customer of a retail business:
Name: Mia Rodriguez
Age: 27
Occupation: Graphic Designer
Location: San Diego, CA
Goals
- Discover new trends in fashion and lifestyle.
- Engage with brands
- Find unique products
Social Media Behavior
- Platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok.
- Content Preference: Visual content, tutorials, behind-the-scenes stories.
- Engagement: Values user-generated content and responsive brands.
Shopping Habits
- Prefers direct shopping through social media links.
- Look for promotions and discounts.
- Analyze Your Competitors:
When creating a winning social media strategy, how can you forget your competitors? You have to do better than them. Make a list of your business’s direct and indirect competitors. Examine their social media presence, follower counts, and post frequency. Analyze the type of content they post, such as videos or images.
How to conduct a competitive analysis?
- Take the help of AI for increased efficiency
- Segment types of competitors
- Check social media engagement
- Perform SWOT analysis
- Identify the Purpose of Social Channels:
You can’t use Instagram posts on Linkedin or Pinterest; for them, you have to customize the entire post, including content. This means that every social platform has a purpose. Do not copy and paste Facebook content into Twitter (X). You can post it but modify the content slightly to match the platform’s style. So, to succeed on social platforms, you need a clear understanding of how your audience communicates.
- Be Specific and Relevant:
Don’t beat around the bush; keep the social posts specific and relevant. Show that you value your audience’s time by clearly communicating your message. Understand your audience’s preferences and interests and create a user persona so that you can create personalized posts for them. Use the language of your audience and avoid using jargon. Use content from news and trends that resonate with your audience.
- Work Smarter with AI:
We are living in the era of AI dominance. Here, you can find an AI app for every problem. But people don’t like communicating with robots. If they find out that content is AI-generated, they could reject it straight away. People are less likely to trust content if they learn that an AI tool generated it (Huitsuite social media report).
So, you have to work smarter with AI.
Use it to generate ideas, edit posts, analyze the content, make the content impressive, eliminate repetitive tasks, and enhance productivity. When you know how to use AI, you can be ahead of your competition with more followers.
Data about how people are using AI:
- Learning how to do things- 32%
- Content Analysis- 45%
- To create content- 45%
- To conduct research- 48%
- Optimize and Adjust:
Whatever strategy marketers finalize can’t work forever. They have to optimize and adjust according to trends and user behavior. Try to keep up with the speed of marketing and trends so that you can modify your content. It will help you create fresh, updated, engaging content that resonates with your target audience and business. Tools can help speed up the optimization process.
Moreover, you can repurpose excellently performing content. This will save you time and effort compared to creating content from scratch. Start by establishing clear and measurable goals, so you don’t get overwhelmed and confused. This will narrow your approach to adjusting content as needed.
Conclusion
Social media is not just about sharing; it’s about connecting. You need to create a strategy that resonates with your audience’s interests and drives traffic to your site. Focus on what is trending in social media marketing, like platform shift, playful content, social commerce, social SEO, and UGC. You can effectively leverage trends to create successful social media marketing strategies. Begin by asking yourself, “Why create a social media strategy?” “What is your marketing goal?”. It will clarify creating content according to your business needs and attract more leads to your site.
We hope these practices will help you create an effective social media marketing strategy for your next marketing campaign.
