Top social media trends for 2025

Advice has always been the same: find the platforms that best meet your needs and invest in social media. But in 2024, for the first time, along with many others, we suggested divesting from socials, or at least considering a move away from traditional social media platforms.

 

But the landscape of social media proved a little more complex. Despite critics alluding to an exodus from traditional platforms, particularly Facebook and the platform formerly known as Twitter, we instead found a surprising degree of continuity. People stayed put, mostly. Few organisations actually left, despite myriad problems, despite many controversies.

 

But, despite controversies, despite layoffs, despite concerns around data sharing, people remain committed to the big social platforms. The past year has demonstrated the staying power of Instagram, Facebook, and X – a power that is likely to continue into 2025 and beyond.

 

The world of traditional social media is not over, not even close. The world of socials is simply evolving, with new and more specialist platforms arriving and old platforms adapting. So, with the above in mind, we explore five social media trends set to dominate 2025.

 

Skip to: The rising tide of misinformation on social media

Skip to: The ever-increasing importance of authenticity

Skip to: The evolving role of artificial intelligence

Skip to: The improvements in short-form video content

Skip to: The next big and the next best social media platforms

 

 

The rising tide of misinformation on social media

 

Misinformation has long existed. But we’ve seen the speed and scale increase in recent years, with bot attacks undermining elections, whistleblowing around Cambridge Analytica, “fake news” surrounding COVID-19 vaccinations, and the proliferation of climate denial based on incorrect or fabricated reports. The list continues – and social media plays a huge part in spreading that false information.

 

Several reasons dictate that trend. The first is the impact of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which soon became X. The platform previously safeguarded users against misinformation at a large scale, but following Musk’s acquisition, its approach changed. X decided to remove – or replace – some of the safeguards that prevented the spread of misinformation. The platform reinstated banned accounts, for example, and removed blue ticks from “authoritative” sources, affording anyone the right to buy engagement and authority on the platform. That meant ostensibly credible accounts could effectively spread misinformation for a small monthly fee.

 

On top of that, the platform has laid off plenty of staff, including an entire team dedicated to content moderation. And Musk himself has engaged with misleading content and accounts spreading misinformation, including around COVID-19, vaccine safety, and the US presidential campaign.

 

And other platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, followed X’s lead: introducing paid verification, revising content moderation, laying-off staff responsible for moderation, and so on. As Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, claims: “The deluge of fake, hateful, and violent content on social media platforms is about to go from very bad to worse…Big tech executives Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have made reckless decisions to maximize their profits and minimize their accountability.”

 

The rise of generative AI complicates matters further. Generative AI, despite its many benefits, makes misinformation easy. It allows the creation of deepfakes: highly realistic images, videos, and audio clips that are used to fabricate events or impersonate individuals. Deepfakes are spread on social media – and people believe them. One famous example is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy asking his army to cease fighting was shared across social media.

 

AI-dependent bot networks can be used to spread misinformation. They post, like, share, and comment on false posts, amplifying the reach and manipulating social consumers. We’ve already seen plenty of examples of election interference – a phenomenon that seems likely to get worse as generative AI grows more sophisticated.

 

At the time of writing in August 2024, we are seeing misinformation contribute to widespread violent disorder. Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University comments: “I’s the sort of thing that happens all the time as the result of online misinformation. But this is obviously very close to home, and it’s the kind of thing that we haven’t seen to this extent, not with this intensity and rapidity in the UK.

 

Misinformation will continue to spread, and more must be done to prevent it in 2025. Every organisation, indeed, every person operating on social media, has an increasing obligation to become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. That means directly challenging misinformation and taking steps, both as organisations and individuals, to prevent its spread.

 

 

The ever-increasing importance of authenticity on social media

 

A trend that follows from above, one that we noticed emerging in 2024 is the importance of authenticity. With the proliferation of false information, with the large-scale generation of non-human content, people are desperate for the real thing. So it is no surprise that 2025 will see a backlash to the AI-generated and witness more authentic, human-made social media content.

 

BeReal was a success story of 2022 and 2023. But it made huge strides throughout 2024. As of April 2024, for example, BeReal has been downloaded worldwide more than 100 million times. That’s a big jump from August 2022, when it had been downloaded 28 million times. BeReal’s popularity stems from the fact that it does everything differently: fails to incentivise constant use, inverts notions of the ideal self, undermines projection. The platform serves to remind people of the varied world of social media, that not all platforms have to follow the same playbook.

 

The success of TikTok also stemmed from the embrace of the authentic, encouraged by the speed with which people post short-form content and the fact that TikTok content is often filmed on phones with filters, no edits, no bells and whistles. The authentic adds personality, allows people to interact with the “real” version of other users and posters, rather than the projected version.

 

BeReal and TikTok are symptoms of changing perspectives of social media, a new pluralism that caters to a wider crowd, that provides for generational divergences. The over-reliance of filters and the ability to edit and airbrush perpetuates dangerous social norms, lower self-esteem, and can have profoundly damaging consequences on users. The age of authenticity, therefore, should be welcomed: it’s a trend that we hope long continues.

 

Users want to see the authentic brands, not manufactured ideals. So how do you become part of that trend? Consider user-generated content, putting your customers, service users, employees, or volunteers centre stage. Embrace livestreaming and other immediate forms of content creation, rather than manufactured and overengineered forms.

 

And just being yourself will prove beguiling in a marketplace saturated with AI-generated content that, while supposedly hyperreal, while apparently mimicking the real, still feels profoundly unreal.

 

 

The evolving role of artificial intelligence on social media

 

AI evidently dominates the conversation right now. It features, for example, in both of the above trends, even though the trends would not usually concern AI. It seems impossible to ignore. It may well revolutionise the future. It may be completely overhyped. It may change the way we consume social media, the way we post and share, or it may have little more impact than we’re currently experiencing. It may undermine social media platforms entirely. It may not.

 

The future of AI is unwritten. We know only that it’s a constantly evolving form of tech, one that has changed faster than any tech in living memory. The advance of AI means it plays a perpetually evolving role – particularly in the realm of social media.

 

AI is certainly not new to the social space. AI recommender systems have long determined what you see on timelines, what comes next on YouTube, the pop-ups you get on X, the people you might want to follow on almost every platform. Facebook uses AI to power core features, including news feed, ad targeting, and image recognition – consider, for example, Facebook’s DeepFace AI system. X still uses AI to recommend trending topics to users. And Instagram uses AI to recommend photos and videos to users, and to identify objects and people in photos.

 

The difference with generative AI is that users are now implementing the tech. And the generative element of AI is changing so quickly that its impact on consumption seems stark. People on social media are currently using generative AI to generate content, monitor their social media, target their ads, generate images and videos to sit alongside the written content, and so on.

 

And, in 2025, AI will play an even more significant role. We may see the much-talked-about-but-never-realised integration of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), with platforms offering more immersive online experiences. Meta’s lack of success with the Metaverse seems to have stemmed from overambition, rather than no appetite for AR and VR. 2025 may well see AI-dependent AR and VR employed on socials, albeit on a smaller scale to the Metaverse.

 

AI video content will likely become much more popular, as AI-driven creation, curation, and editing of videos becomes easier – and the appetite for short-form video content, as we’ll explore in greater detail below, continues to grow. It is likely that AI-generated content will clash with the drive to the more authentic. Indeed, we may see the saturation of AI-generated video content leading to a further push towards the authentic. That will depend on the general reception to the improved video content – and the risks, and opportunities, that AI video provides.

 

Unlike other trends in this article, predictions of AI futures may be ill-advised, as the tech evolves so quickly and seems to constantly surprise us with capabilities. It seems likely, though, that people will streamline the tried-and-tested forms of generative AI – largely text and audio generation – and move onto the more difficult terrains of video and image consumption, along with opportunities for immersive interaction. But, as previously said, that may well prove wrong.

 

 

The rise of short-form video content on social media

 

Imitation is an art form for social media platforms. Snapchat offers Spotlight, which looks a lot like Instagram Reels, which itself mimics general functionality on TikTok. All major platforms have news feeds, disappearing posts, private messaging, live broadcasting, video options, and so on. We accept – and even come to expect – the similarities. That’s why social media trends often traverse individual platforms: they are more widely applicable, at least to the traditional platforms.

 

Despite growth and concerns around sensitive data, TikTok remained popular in 2024, rising to become the fifth most-used social media network in the world, with more than 1.58 billion users. TikTok boasts the most engagement time per users, with the average TikTok user spending 95 minutes on the platform each day – far exceeding Instagram in second place, with 62 minutes.

 

TikTok has become the go-to platform to imitate. It consolidated the foundations of short-form video content, boosting overall engagement by reducing video time, pursuing a tactic of microvlogging: similar to Twitter’s approach to written content, microblogging, nearly two decades ago. And the short form continues to evolve, on TikTok and elsewhere, with new interactive features such as shoppable videos, real-time reactions, minor AR and VR integrations.

 

The benefits of short-form video are obvious. In an era of declining attention spans, short-form videos grab and hold the viewer’s attention. Almost three-quarters of users prefer to watch short-form video to learn about a product or service. Short-form videos are easily shared. They do not demand much from audiences – they are easily digestible – but quickly start essential conversations and raise awareness. And, because a lot of them are off-the-cuff, short-form video content generally takes advantage to the abovementioned trend of authenticity.

 

Cost is a huge benefit of video content. Short-form videos are quick to make and require very little equipment. Users record most social media video content on smart phones, with no expenditure on specialist lighting, actors, camera equipment, or anything else. Users are able to press record and create shareable content, packed to the brim with information, that succeed on socials.

 

And, as mentioned above, two approaches are set to dominate short-form content. Authenticity has become popular, with low budgets and little required editing. But so has the high-tech and the interactive: essentially the AI-generated. These approaches may compete: oversaturation of one may lead to a higher appetite for the other. But your organisation’s values will likely nod towards the best approach and, if not, service user’s preferences will certainly tell you.

 

It is no surprise that social media is awash with short-form video content. The trend of short-form video content will likely dominate 2025 – and no doubt 2026, and 2027, and so on.

 

 

The next big and the next best social media platforms

 

The long-standing platforms are not going anywhere. But space exists for myriad other platforms – and that space is carved by various factors: growing global population, growing population with access to social media, and an increasing amount of time spent on social media every day. Consider that, as of April 2024, 62.3% of the world population uses social media. That’s more than 5.07 billion people – with more than 259 million users coming online within the past year.

 

According to Statista, in 2014, people spent an average of 104 minutes on social media. That number has grown to 143 minutes. That’s a 39-minute increase, every day, for more than five billion users: an astronomical amount of time. So while traditional social media platforms continue to dominate, plenty of alternative social media platforms are carving out space.

 

But many hyped new platforms, supposedly destined for greatness, tend to fail or at least flail. Several platforms were poised to boom in 2023, largely as a reaction to X: Mastodon, BlueSky, Counter.Social, T2. Mastodon proved too complex; Bluesky too exclusive; Counter.Social lacked ease of navigation; and T2, or Pebble, felt like a perpetual work in progress. Only one platform provided a serious alternative to X and Threads was an almost direct copy of X.

 

In 2024, we mentioned many of the upcoming social media platforms, many of which had a speciality, geared towards more narrow interests: Partify, Peanut, Dispo, WattPad, and Crunchyroll. These were recommended online, often pushed by social media experts. It’s interesting that few of them feature in articles suggesting platforms for 2025. That shows how platforms often have a short shelf-life – and how many fail to capture the attention of the wider audiences.

 

That’s not to say the platforms failed. Specialist platforms and platforms aimed at specific audiences are the ones that best meet specific user needs. By virtue of that specificity, by aiming at specific audiences, platforms naturally sacrifice universality. The same will likely prove true in 2025. Some of the platforms to watch out for, and their specific functions and audiences, are noted below:

• Noplace: A platform specifically aimed at GenZ, allowing customised profiles and friends recognised based on common interests
• Ten Ten: Jumping on the rise of voice notes, the app is designed for teens to send audio messages to their close friends, modelled on the idea of a walkie-talkie
• Yik Yak: Aimed at students in higher education, allows location-specific sharing to reach people within a five-mile radius
• Lapse: The app turns your phone into a disposable camera, making users wait one to three hours for photos to develop, before they are shared with friends or added to journals
• Supernova: An environmentally conscious app that aims to provide a safe and positive space to interact with text and images, with money from ads going directly to charity

These platforms may not prove the biggest in 2025, but they will demand more attention from specific groups. It is likely that social media will increasingly fragment, with people still using core platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, but spending time away from them, delving into more specific interests or fulfilling specific needs.

 

For organisations, meeting people in specialised online spaces provides a huge opportunity, with the ability to find precise – and coveted – demographics, with specific wants. That could result, with the right strategy, in a huge return on investment.