Top 10 social media trends in 2024 you need to know

An important social media trend to take advantage of in 2024 is offering customer support through social media. Your clients won’t need to contact you by filling out a form or writing an email. Instead, they can reach out to your company’s customer service team via platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Customer service via social media not only enables more direct contact and exchange with your customers, but it can also positively impact your visibility online. Other social media users will see how quickly you respond to your clients and how you react to questions or problems in general. Moreover, it can help to strengthen customer loyalty and your chances of gaining even more customers. Offering customer support directly via social media channels especially appeals to younger consumers.

There are many ways to offer customer support on social media. Some companies, such as the music streaming company Spotify, even go so far as to create their own social media account(s) for their customer support:

Selling products on and via social networks, also referred to as social commerce, has been growing in popularity and will continue to be a major social media trend in 2024. Linking one’s online shop and other landing pages with social media channels is an important marketing tool. Companies can also take advantage of popular platform-specific features such as Instagram Shopping and Facebook Shops. One of the newest additions is Pinterest Shopping, which enables users to save product pins and discover similar items.

Interactive content such as surveys, competitions and interactive infographics continues to be a current social media trend. But it’s not just a social media trend: interactive content has proven so successful that it’s also become an email marketing trend.

An example of interactive content on social media is poll stickers, which can be used on Instagram Stories. They allow you to add a question with multiple answer options that your followers can choose from. Such an interactive element is eye-catching and encourages people to pause and engage with your content by voting. The results can then be collected and shared. Beyond sharing the results through social media channels, you can also consider publishing them in a blog post on your website to extend your reach.

The photo-sharing app BeReal has brought about another social media trend that is becoming more and more popular. Founded in France in 2020, BeReal has distinguished itself from similar apps like Facebook or Instagram by taking a different approach to how photos are shared.

On BeReal, you don’t have the option to post whenever you like. You can only post when the app sends a notification to your phone. This notification can come at any time of the day. Once you receive it, you only have two minutes to upload a photo. And not just any photo: The point of BeReal, as the name suggests, is to be real and to share exactly what you are doing at that moment. The app uses both your front and back cameras, so you can post what you are currently doing as well as your reaction to the task at hand.

You can still, of course, post a photo after the two-minute window has passed, but your friends will know that you were late. Users can also choose if they want their post to be seen by all BeReal users or just their friends.

At the moment, BeReal doesn’t offer a lot for companies, but that might change down the road. Nevertheless, the social media trend BeReal appears to be a welcome alternative to TikTok as the quest for authentic moments and content amongst social media users continues.

Since we mostly consume social media on our phones, content needs to be vertical. The optimal format for content on phones is 9:16, meaning that the height of the content is greater than its width. This is especially important for video content, otherwise users might need to turn their phone on the side to watch videos that don’t fit their screens.

A big reason for the rise in popularity of the 9:16 content is of course TikTok. Due to the wide-spread use of the video app, many companies are now creating videos on the platform. The new, narrower format might pose some difficulties at first, but its better user experience makes it a worthwhile content investment for companies. The format offers a lot of possibilities to showcase products in all their glory, especially products that have an elongated shape.

A social media trend that keeps on going strong year after year is the use of memes. And there is no stopping it either as using memes is an integral part of today’s pop culture. So essential, in fact, that using and creating memes and GIFs is a crucial part of the social media strategy of many companies.

Using memes, like the ones featuring Kermit the Frog, can showcase that a company has its finger on the pulse of what is currently trending. And being in tune with current trends in society is important on social media.

Remember the days when you used to have your own restaurant or farm on Facebook? Well, those times aren’t gone yet. In fact, social games or playing online games on social networks is one of the social media trends of 2024. Facebook and Facebook alternatives still offer a lot of games that can be played online, either individually or with friends.

Below is a list of some popular games on Facebook:

• BINGO Blitz
• Angry Birds Friends
• Candy Crush Saga
• FarmVille 2

Last but not least, micro-communities, i.e., online communities with fewer than 30 members, have also emerged as a social media trend of 2024. Following the trend of authentic content, people prefer to connect with like-minded people in smaller circles. This enables closer ties and more regular exchanges, which in a group of hundreds or thousands of members would be otherwise impossible.

One suitable social media platform for establishing micro-communities is Reddit. Registered users can set-up their own communities and determine specifications for them. These could include, for example, whether the community is open to all or private. It’s also possible to set-up communities where members need to be at least 18 years of age.