3 Social Media Trends to Watch in 2025

As one year ends and a new one begins, it is a good time to assess your current social media marketing tools and tactics. It is also the perfect time look ahead at changes in technology and social networks that could affect how you’ve been marketing.

Staying on top of trending memes, sounds, and music can help you stay fresh and relevant on social media. Make sure that the trends you choose to follow are in line with your brand and appropriate for your target audience.

Here are some trends that experts predict will be important in the new year and how you can leverage them.

Elevating authenticity and transparency through other people’s content

As always, trust is a major issue with social media as more fake accounts, photos, and videos as well as misinformation and propaganda infiltrate social network feeds. Moving into the new year, authenticity and transparency will become even more important to gain that trust.

In marketing, third party endorsements tend to feel more genuine and engender more trust than slickly produced commercials. In social media, this means leveraging content from others to communicate your message.

One way to tap into more authentic content is to showcase actual customers sharing their experiences with your company, products, or services. This type of messaging is called User-Generated Content or UGC.

There are both informal and formal ways of leveraging UGC. Informally, you can share positive comments, reviews, or upload photos or videos about your products or services. This does not require asking permission, but it is a good idea to reach out anyway to establish a connection or to establish a mutually beneficial relationship.

You could go the extra step of asking permission in order use the content on your website or in a graphic that you post to your social media accounts. If your budget permits, you can take a more formal approach and offer an incentive or compensation to customers -or the general public-asking them to test out your product or service and provide a video review, for example. In this case, you need to be transparent if there is any exchange of goods, services, or money when posting that UGC. Note that some sites, such as Yelp, do not allow compensated reviews.

You could seek out content partners who have loyal followings and are brand appropriate to establish a promotional relationship. For example, if you find a local dog trainer who has a robust following online and you produce healthy dog food, you could look for ways to work with them to generate helpful content for dog owners.

This type of content and promotional relationship can provide value for your audience while also introducing your products to their audience - a win-win. Again, you should disclose any formal relationship to be transparent.

Regularly Using Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence or AI is getting a lot of media attention, but is it worth using for your social media marketing? Experts say yes. AI’s robust computation power can be applied to a variety of tech-driven activities.

Some of the areas where AI can be useful include:

Summarizing information. If you’re researching or gathering large amounts of content or are simply conducting Google searches, AI can rapidly provide a summary. Tools such as Grammarly and Perplexity.ai can save you time by summarizing content you’ve gathered.

Crafting content. Whether you’re facing writer’s block or aren’t really a writer and need to craft content, AI-driven tools help you get started. Chat GPT and Copy.ai offer help writing and rewriting content.

Creating images. AI tools that help you create photographs and graphics can be useful when you don’t have, or can’t find, an image that is exactly what you need.

Producing videos. Not skilled in video editing? No problem! AI tools like Veed can provide and pull all the elements of a video together for you including scriptwriting, people, animals, or objects to be featured, and audio narration and captions.

Analyze data. If you need to generate a report such as outlining the progress and results of your social media marketing, AI-powered tools can generate concise summaries and produce charts and graphs to visually illustrate the information. Some data analyzing tools include Tableau and Domo.

Remember to be vigilant when using AI tools, looking for potential errors as many of them are still in the beta or an experimental stage.

Pushing the envelope and experimenting

Speaking of experimenting, the new year is the perfect time to try out new social media tools, tactics, and techniques. Consider rethinking your branding, your messaging, and how you’re using your social networks.

Pushing the envelope could include:

1. Identifying a new target audience and adopting a new social network or new messaging approach to attract and engage them.
2. Trying a different content form that you haven’t used in the past such as short-form video, animation, memes, or podcasting, as long as it is on brand, and you have the resources.
3. Refreshing your company’s brand identity and overhauling your social media accounts to reflect the new brand including a different messaging tone.
4. Adopting new tools to create a more distinctive look for your social media posts, such as a custom social media sticker generator like Giphy or a photo filter app like VSCO to dramatically enhance your images.

When experimenting with new tools or tactics, make sure to keep track of the responses you get to the changes including the feedback and engagement.

Not every trend is meant for your company. Be prepared to quickly phase out the ones that aren’t working or to put more resources toward the ones that work well.