The social media trends that will shape 2025

Happy New Year, everyone! Today I'm excited to share my very first blog post for 2025 with you.

For me January is one of the best months of the year. It’s a peaceful time, following the recent Christmas holidays, with many people still enjoying some well deserved time off with family. This makes it the perfect moment to plan for the year ahead—setting clear goals for both your personal and professional growth. It’s also a great opportunity to assess how your social media channels are performing.

As we enter 2025, the topic of social media trends is more relevant than ever. As a social media expert, I make it a priority to stay on top of the latest trends, ensuring that I provide my clients with the best advisory services possible. Every year, I take time to carefully research the most reliable sources on emerging trends in content creation and digital communication. This year, I’ve decided to focus on digital communication trends because I believe social media will continue to lead the way, though in a slightly different way than it used to.

In today’s digital landscape, attention has become one of the most valuable currencies. So, here’s a comprehensive list of the strongest social media trends that will shape 2025—and help you capture more of that coveted attention.

Artificial Intelligence

I have purposely written the whole expression as to remind ourselves about the word “artificial” - something made up. In this context, the primary role of AI is to assist people with repetitive tasks within their workload, ultimately freeing up more time for them to focus on other endeavors. For now, I’ll leave aside any further speculation about the broader role AI might play in our everyday lives.

From a social media perspective, AI tools have already been integrated into the marketing industry. In 2024, we witnessed the emergence of AI-driven influencer bots designed to replicate a personalized experience. The primary objective was to offload certain aspects of a creator's workflow—specifically responding to fans via direct messages—by utilizing AI chatbots to handle these interactions. There was already a similar attempt on behalf of Meta to make a chatbot back in 2015. The experiment ended up rather quickly as it proved to be too resource demanding.

The most valuable outcome of this experiment was that people made it clear: it will be authenticity that will win their attention in 2025.

I personally think that we will likely see increased AI adoption for the purpose of content creation among smaller brands or companies that offer products for immediate consumption. Conversely, organizations with a strong offline presence or those operating on a local level may come to recognize that highly authentic, original content is key to capturing and maintaining their audience's attention.

Video

After years of experiments with various formats of snackable content I think we finally reach the right one – video. But what type of video? In 2025 it will largely depend on the platform you choose. As such, meticulous scenario planning will be crucial, as what works on YouTube may not be effective for your Instagram strategy.

What about storytelling? Longer story lines across all platforms will perform much better. Some experts even talk about this trend as a “long-form renaissance”, mentioning also “resurgence in serialized content”. And by longer, I mean stories with clear structure – a beginning, middle part and ending, not just a mere series of fun active scenes. The narrative should prioritise authenticity and focus on evoking emotions rather than conveying thoughts or driving direct actions.

Creators will gain recognition

I think the times when people used a sarcastic notion when mentioning the word “influencer” are behind us. In my opinion, in 2025 digital creator is steadily gaining recognition as more and more organisations worldwide are starting to acknowledge the value they bring when it comes to audience connection and engagement.

In my view 2025 will be the year when social media will mature and adopt a more serious, professional approach. This shift will also extend to the various professions out there related to digital communications – digital marketers, communicators, strategists and analysts. If up until last year it was enough for organisations to find out “what is happening” with their social media and digital communications. From now on it will be about “why this is happening” and “what we can improve next time”. 2025 will be remembered as the year social media matures.

Exciting times lie ahead of us and I can’t wait to see what trends and changes 2025 will bring to social media and digital communications 😊