Welcome to Day 4 of The 2024 Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza!
Today, we’re diving into one of our favorite topics: social media trends.
What to Do:
Social media trends change rapidly! Reply to this thread with a trend you’re noticing—whether it’s gaining traction or fading away. Then, keep the conversation going by posting a follow-up question for others to weigh in. Let’s spark an insightful discussion and share ideas!
Today’s Prizes: Two participants will win a Blue Yeti Microphone, Conversations That Connect book and $50 Starbucks Gift Card—perfect for brainstorming and sharing your brilliant ideas!
Join the conversation, share your thoughts, and help us explore what’s shaping our industry. Let’s make Day 4 full of fresh insights and meaningful discussions!
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Welcome to Day 4 of The 2024 Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza!
Today, we’re diving into one of our favorite topics: social media trends.
What to Do:
Social media trends change rapidly! Reply to this thread with a trend you’re noticing—whether it’s gaining traction or fading away. Then, keep the conversation going by posting a follow-up question for others to weigh in. Let’s spark an insightful discussion and share ideas!
Today’s Prizes: Two participants will win a Blue Yeti Microphone, Conversations That Connect book and $50 Starbucks Gift Card—perfect for brainstorming and sharing your brilliant ideas!
Join the conversation, share your thoughts, and help us explore what’s shaping our industry. Let’s make Day 4 full of fresh insights and meaningful discussions!
How do we feel about the exodus from traditional platforms to fringe platforms? Are these healthy places to grow community?
I guess it depends on what you consider fringe? And depending on the audience, definitely. Now, there will be less tracking and analytics available, so you definitely have to have the resources available and trust that its working based on traffic, platform specific conversations, and platform specific landing pages etc.
3 trends I have been noticing:
First-person talking to the screen content.
LinkedIn is exploding! Great growth this year.
Funny, borderline irreverent content.
It’s challenging to jump on these trends, though, depending on your industry. I am in nonprofit marketing, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to do “talk to the camera” content for my organization. I also try to incorporate funny, but walk a line where I can’t be as edgy as a general brand can be.
LinkedIn is! I like how it has evolved and I’m getting ready to really participate actively again myself.
I have started to notice companies are starting to share more of what goes on behind the scenes. Since noticing this I recognized that before companies wouldn’t share the process or details that went into making a product, campaign, or what might be what they are selling/sharing. To see the work behind the scenes, I must say I am more prompt to visit the site and maybe give that company a try.
I have also started to notice companies, even employees, move away from the copy and paste jargon and start to use a bit of their own verbiage freedom. I’m not sure if this is because this is a way to reach a different audience, or if businesses are starting to be more open with language and just to simply have fun selling what you are passionate about.
Love behind the scenes content or the “poking” fun content if it makes sense for that brand.
I have seen a lot of social media posts use AI images instead of UGC and professional images. I am actually wondering if this is becoming a trend others are seeing as well. Could it be because of cost? Will end user lose trust in brands that use AI images?
I’ve noticed the same but I’m not sure it’s widely used yet. From a marketing perspective, I see an obvious AI image and sort of cringe at it, but maybe it’s driving results. I can’t say for certain since I haven’t played around with AB testing AI images.
Running social for a B2B company, LinkedIn is pretty much my “bread and butter,” and I’ve noticed that carousels seem to be the most engaging form of content on that platform (both as a user and as a poster - our engagement rates are typically higher for carousels rather than static images).
At the top of my Christmas list is having Sprout add a feature to post PDFs as carousels on LinkedIn!
Same here! The PDF carousels have been doing well for us. I’m also excited to see how their immersive video feed grows on LinkedIn and what types of videos perform the best.
So interesting you both have noticed this! When you say PDF carousel, are you posting these PDFs as multi-image posts?
I’ve been uploading them as documents and LinkedIn creates a carousel layout from the PDF file. It’s really cool!
Okay, learned something new today! Thanks, Emily
What I’ve noticed with our Instagram is that carousels are outperforming reels by a long shot. I’ve actually really enjoyed implementing more carousels into our Instagram strategy, especially a mix of photo and video, because (selfishly) it’s an easier lift for me but is also more of a scroll stopper for people. I think people enjoy the pause and swipe given how chaotic video content can be in the reels feed.
Have any of you made this shift in your strategy? How is it working with your audience?
Shorter, more authentic (read: less-produced) videos will continue leading the way in trends and on the algorithm.
Community Management! This is much more of a shift than a trend, but it’s been one of the biggest considerations as I adapt my social strategy for my current company.
I’m part of a small team, so for me, it’s a matter of shifting my day-to-day to accommodate more social monitoring and being attentive to my audience and the communities they inhabit daily. This is a contrast to that “blast socials daily with posts” mode from years past. It’s so much more about fewer, higher quality posts, then commenting and responding to dms significantly more.
For larger teams, I’m seeing Community Manager as a role much more often as teams realize they need someone keeping up with monitoring full time. It’s been nice to see the shift to specialized social teams overall, and I know I love being more involved.
What do you think about community management? Has it been an annoying thing to do more of? Do you even do more of it nowadays?
In my company, we have seen a major shift to raw, first-person content outperforming clean, curated content. We tend to be pretty graphic heavy, and more and more I am seeing those graphics have a steady decline in engagement.
I like this trend as it shows that authenticity wins out, but it is hard to get into the mindset of utilizing raw content when you are used to putting together a curated feed. However - having a tool like Sprout in our back pocket that gives us the data to back up those transitions is reassuring because, at the end of the day, data doesn’t lie.
Love this! We’ve been starting to do more of that at my company, but unfortunately, we have so many different locations across the US, so it’s difficult finding employee “characters” that represent the whole of the company without prioritizing certain operations/functions over others.
But, there’s clearly a demand for more raw, barely edited video, and I’m happy to provide!
A trend that’s taking TikTok by storm is the hilarious ‘camera flip’ trend! It’s all about delivering “advice” to a demographic, only to humorously expose yourself as the true target when the camera flips. From pets hilariously advocating for extra treats to celebrities like Joe Jonas poking fun at sibling dynamics, this trend is a masterclass in comedic timing and creativity.
What do you think makes trends like these catch fire so quickly? Is it the surprise element, the relatability, or something else entirely?
Interesting that you reference this trend so positively because I also referenced this trend in a post earlier and think it’s NOT hilarious. Maybe because too many people are using it without comedic timing? I agree the animal versions are funny but unless you’re going live, there’s clearly NO accident and this trend falls flat with me.
Social SEOis on my radar… I’ve been doing alt text on all images since I discovered Sprout’s ability to generate a speedy draft for me (thank you!) and now I’m going out of my way to rename image files to have a few key words before uploading I’m becoming a pro at closed captioning too. YouTube’s auto-generated captions get me mostly there, and then I clean up tech terms and our company’s name (they always get it wrong!) then I download the SRT file and use it across social.
Now I need to figure out if it’s having a measurable impact… welcome any ideas!
How are you optimizing your content for search discoverability?
Public beefs on LinkedIn between companies, especially B2B tech/SaaS – rising/ongoing more recent tho…
With greater platform influence comes….greater potential for drama. It’s been generally true on other platforms, so I’d think Linkedin isn’t immune either.
I completely agree that video content featuring employees will gain even more traction in the coming year! Audiences crave authenticity, and showcasing the “real people” behind a brand creates a relatable and humanized image. Too bad everyone in my office is reluctant to be filmed
I completely agree that video content featuring employees will gain even more traction in the coming year! Audiences crave authenticity, and showcasing the “real people” behind a brand creates a relatable and humanized image. Too bad everyone in my office is reluctant to be filmed
I really think the shift towards real people and imperfections is the fear/angst/annoyance against AI. Currently when people use AI they create “perfect” people, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when people start trying to create real people with AI and how imperfections will translate to a computer medium.
Social SEOis on my radar… I’ve been doing alt text on all images since I discovered Sprout’s ability to generate a speedy draft for me (thank you!) and now I’m going out of my way to rename image files to have a few key words before uploading I’m becoming a pro at closed captioning too. YouTube’s auto-generated captions get me mostly there, and then I clean up tech terms and our company’s name (they always get it wrong!) then I download the SRT file and use it across social.
Now I need to figure out if it’s having a measurable impact… welcome any ideas!
How are you optimizing your content for search discoverability?
Ugh renaming image files has been the bane of my existence, and I feel like I *should* be doing it. Right now, the nomenclature is very high level sans keywords. I would love to hear how it has been impactful for people.
I’m a very video based marketing worker. I’ve been making videos for over a decade and specialize in short form, so of course I’m all in on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. The camera flip trend is one I see having some solid longevity when it comes to use marketing wise. Something that, with the right creativity, can still hit after the flame of the trend fizzles out for casual users.
Something I don’t think is used enough by marketers, brands, any non-casual social media users is slides posts. The surprise element of it is so good, especially if you can weave some humor into a post and utilize that. The most successful seem to be two images, however analysis's really thrive in that format as well.
I’m seeing a shift away from slick graphics and videos from companies getting rewarded with engagement and shares. Company-wide, I’m seeing that first-person videos taken on-the-job, photos of people together at a work event (imagine that!), and text that sounds like a real person’s voice are taking the wins and getting significant response.
It’s definitely a win from my perspective as a creator and a user. However, trying to convince other folks within my company that this is what’s working vs. pretty graphics/animated videos is a bit of a mountain to climb.
This is SO interesting because the message TikTok is giving creators is high quality content … I think they mean high concept ideas but I’m concerned brands are going to jump on this and start producing overly polished content and advertising. I’m here for Lo-Fi!
I’m seeing a shift away from slick graphics and videos from companies getting rewarded with engagement and shares. Company-wide, I’m seeing that first-person videos taken on-the-job, photos of people together at a work event (imagine that!), and text that sounds like a real person’s voice are taking the wins and getting significant response.
It’s definitely a win from my perspective as a creator and a user. However, trying to convince other folks within my company that this is what’s working vs. pretty graphics/animated videos is a bit of a mountain to climb.
This is SO interesting because the message TikTok is giving creators is high quality content … I think they mean high concept ideas but I’m concerned brands are going to jump on this and start producing overly polished content and advertising. I’m here for Lo-Fi!
Here I was, about to say something similar regarding high-quality content because I just read about it in an email...and here is that email’s author! (Also here for the Lo-Fi content, polished doesn’t perform as well).
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I’ve been noticing a huge uptick in early 2000s trends coming back, almost like it was back in the 2000s with 80s trends. I’m just happy all of the stuff I still have in my closet can be worn again….
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I’m becoming a pro at closed captioning too. YouTube’s auto-generated captions get me mostly there, and then I clean up tech terms and our company’s name (they always get it wrong!) then I download the SRT file and use it across social. 
