8 Social Media Trends of 2025
April 30, 2025 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek
Social media can be a great channel to connect with potential customers and grow your business. Since it’s always evolving, it’s important to stay aware of trends and implement the ones that make sense for your audience and your business. Here are a few social media trends of 2025 to help you stay current:
1. Social Platforms Becoming More Prominent Discovery Channels
Social media channels have always been important for branding and as ways to reach and connect with existing and potential customers. They have been growing as essential discovery channels for years. With digital marketing trends fracturing the search landscape led by AI chatbots with evolving search capabilities and AI-integrated everything, there are different channels available and channels that are shifting in prominence and priority.
More and more, people are using a variety of channels outside of traditional search engines for discovery and decision-making. With things like AI overviews, AI-enabled conversational search, and even more emerging features on the results pages, there are comparatively fewer clicks coming from traditional organic traffic channels than in previous years. Although organic search is still a valuable channel for a brand online, it is more difficult and competitive to get in front of the right people at the right time.
Social media channels can support SEO efforts on the organic side, help a business continue to connect with customers, and drive traffic to their website from the other platforms their customers are using. Defining your target audience, knowing which platforms they use the most, and understanding how they use those platforms can help you determine which social media platforms are right for your business.
2. Paid Social Continuing to Become More Necessary
As technology, channels, platforms, and features have evolved over the years, organic reach on social platforms has decreased overall. It’s not that it is less important; it’s just that it is a lot more competitive and harder to cut through the noise.
As platforms monetize and develop paid advertising options, they will prioritize those over non-paid organic reach. In order to reach your audience effectively, some sort of paid social strategy has only become more necessary.
With a lot of time, effort, and the right types of content, you can still have success without paid ads on social media. Even with tailoring your content for different social media platforms and getting it all right, you will still be reaching fewer people in your target audience if you rely on organic efforts alone. And, without paid, you’ll be missing out on those connections.
3. Customers Making More Purchases Within Platforms
Ecommerce and social media have been growing closer and more integrated for a while now. As social media trends continue to grow throughout 2025, we will only see social commerce continue to grow. Product announcements, tutorials, reviews, coupons, and more are all classic social media marketing ideas for ecommerce.
Customers are already used to shopping on social media; now, it’s just a matter of getting comfortable with finishing the transaction there, too. In several areas, they are starting to be able to complete the purchase on social media as well. This is an ecommerce trend that your brand cannot ignore if you sell products online.
Technology will continue to evolve and develop to allow customers to shop the products they like without needing to leave the platform to complete the purchase. There are plenty of details that still need to be worked out behind the scenes as options continue to evolve. But, the goal is still a seamless experience for the customer from product discovery through to purchase.
4. Using More Social Media For Customer Service
Social media has been a resource for customer service and has been integral in online reputation management. Using social media for customer service may not be right for your business. But, if your customers are using social media, they’re likely to connect with you and reach out to you with feedback.
In this case, it’s important for your business to figure out how to use social media for customer service effectively. If your customers are trying to connect and you’re not paying attention, then you’re not listening to your customers, potentially creating an online reputation management problem, and missing out on valuable insights from your target audience.
5. Collaborating With the Right Creators
Whether you love or hate the concept of influencers, this is one social media trend that isn’t going away. Although there is a bit of a backlash against out-of-touch, inauthentic “influencer culture,” collaborating with the right creators in ways that are authentic and make sense is still on-trend. Creators, or influencers, who have built a loyal and engaged following can be great resources for businesses.
When it comes to social media trends, collaborations with creators will continue. However, it will be focused more on niche creators with real, engaged audiences and on partnerships that make sense. Also, authenticity and relatability win out over influencers who have started to come off as out-of-touch or fake.
This could be product features or reviews, Instagram takeovers, live interviews, or actually collaborating to create a useful or fun piece of content, a content series, or a product that benefits both audiences. Partnering with the right influencers, micro-influencers, and niche creators can help you build your brand on Instagram.
6. Social Listening Continuing to Become Even More Important
With more real-time communication happening on social media and more customer service happening there too, it only makes social listening even more important. You can invest in software to help you do this. You can also start diving into social listening by simply tracking and receiving alerts for relevant hashtags, topic mentions, brand mentions, etc. that are associated with your business and the things your customers care about.
Social listening alone is not enough. It will give you valuable insights about your target audience and identify conversations happening about your business and relevant topics. But, it is up to you to do something with that information and connect with your customers in meaningful ways. Make sure you are engaging and communicating when needed as well. Only promoting and not proactively listening and engaging are common social media marketing mistakes to avoid.
7. Short-Form Content and Video Continuing to Gain Popularity
Video is one of the most engaging types of content to post on social media. And, when it comes to engagement on certain platforms, it’s hard to beat short-form content and live video. Also, there is still a place for long-form video content, provided it works for the topic and audience you’re targeting. The platforms offering live video often give them a boost of visibility, which can help you reach more people.
On top of that, live video is perfect for engaging with potential customers in real-time. You can host a Live yourself, include other hosts, add other participants to the call, and more. Additionally, you have the option to download the live video once it’s done.
Not only does this allow you to share it later, but you can also repurpose video content in a ton of different ways. Images of quotes or stats, roundups, supporting blog posts, short clips, and more are all ways you can make the most of a Live you did. This is a great way to create and personalize some follow-up short-form content for different platforms or audiences.
8. Using AI to Generate and Personalize Content
Whether you love or hate it, AI tools are being used to generate a good portion of the content you see on social media. Content creators and marketers are using AI tools to help generate and personalize captions, visuals, like images and infographics, short-form video content, and more.
Even if the content marketing tools and AI tools are not being used for the initial generation of the content itself, they are often being used to support other efforts, like editing, refining, ideation and brainstorming, and more. The trend is increasing for now as tools continue to develop and adoption becomes more widespread.
It’s likely that we will continue to see AI-generated content increase accordingly. Should quality suffer as quantity increases, we will likely see some sort of adjustment as algorithms and platforms catch up. But, you can bet that AI technology is here to stay in some way.
If you don’t already have one, it’s not a bad idea to create an AI policy for your business. This can help your brand define where, when, and how you use AI. It will also help you put some guidelines in place and communicate them effectively to employees to ensure any AI use is aligned with your brand values.
Are Your Social Media Efforts Helping You?
These are just a few social media trends of 2025 to help you stay current and inspire new elements of your social media strategy. One of the goals of social media is often to drive traffic to your website to help convert potential customers into leads or customers for your business.
If your website doesn’t offer a good experience or what they need, they’ll just leave. If your website is underperforming or it’s been a while since you’ve updated it, these could be signs you need a new website, or at least, that it’s time for an update. Contact us for a meeting of the MINDs. We can talk about your business goals and how to get your website updated and back on track to support them.
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