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11 social media trends you need to know in 2024

Written by by Carly Hill

Published on  February 1, 2024

Reading time  11 minutes

You don’t need to be a fortune teller to guess which social media trends are poised to take off in 2024. All you need is data.

Combining performance and consumer preference data can create a vivid picture of the year ahead. We’re not talking about which TikTok sounds will blow up in a few months. We’re talking about what’s driving audience behavioral patterns and where your brand fits in the mix.

In this article, learn about current trends in social media driving the future of social, based on input from social media experts and the data behind the social space .

• Video is king…but with a long-form twist
• Playful content is the new “brand personality”
• The expansion of social commerce remains a trend to watch—and use
• SEO is important for social channels too—not just your site
• Behind-the-scenes content and reimagined transparency
• Authentic content resonates across platforms
• The evolution of social teams and titles
• The boom of the creator and influencer economy
• Personalized customer care is a consumer preference
• Marketing and customer care teams use AI regularly…and monitor it closely
• Social data is key—beyond the marketing team

Trend 1: Video is king…but with a long-form twist

The popularity of video, specifically short-form video, is bound to end up on a social media trends list every year.

We already know short-form video is one of the best ways to connect with your audience and reach new followers. In fact, most consumers say it’s the most engaging type of in-feed content .

But, plot twist: long-form video has seen a resurgence worth noting. TikTok has been pushing longer videos —starting with one-minute videos, then 10 and most recently, it started testing 30-minute uploads . It’s even starting to push horizontal videos a la YouTube.

And with the platform reporting that users spend over half of their time on TikTok watching videos that are a minute or longer, these long-form tests have reason behind them.

Brand takeaway: You still need short-form video as part of your day-to-day social media strategy. But think about how you can bring long-form storytelling into your content.

Trend 2: Playful content is the new “brand personality”

The “edgy” brand voice is taking a back seat to a new brand trend: experimenting with playful content.

Brands have consistently found creative ways to tap into meme culture and the voice of the Internet in a way that fits their voice. And we’ve seen more brands experimenting with their voice and visual content to do so.

Take LinkedIn’s Threads, which have a human voice and cover topics that range from relatable and hilarious, to inspirational and endearing.

And we love the way Auntie Anne’s pretzels has create a strategic, branded social media meme strategy. They create content that riffs on Internet culture, memes and trends while still staying true to their brand colors, tone and image.

Brand takeaway: Think about how your brand can get playful on social media. You don’t have to do this in a way that breaks your brand’s voice and tone. What trends and meme formats could you adapt to fit your brand’s content?

Trend 3: The expansion of social commerce remains a trend to watch—and use

We’ve all seen the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt trend…or bought something after seeing it on TikTok or another social platform ourselves.

But this is more than a fleeting trend—social commerce is a continuing trend to watch and consider for your strategy. And platforms like TikTok are pushing for it. TikTok Shop officially launched in the US in late 2023. And they’re already testing ways to make that in-app shopping even easier .

We talked to Social Strategy Director at Mekanism, Jeff MacDonald, about current social trends to watch. And this is one that he flagged. As he puts it, live streaming and interactive shopping experiences are only expected to expand, so this trend is likely here to stay. “Live shopping events, combining entertainment with instant purchasing options, offer an engaging way for brands to connect with consumers. This year will be a test to see if North American audiences will adopt live commerce streams like other audiences have.”

Brand takeaway: If you haven’t experimented with selling on social, now is a great time to test this out. There’s an eager, ready-to-buy audience on social. Give them another way to buy—look into whether opening up shop on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram is right for your brand.

Trend 4: SEO is important for social channels too—not just your site

Recently, I did research on a few places I want to travel and hike this coming summer. I didn’t turn to Google—I searched location hashtags on Instagram.

Don’t underestimate the power of social media platforms as search engines. In 2022, nearly 40% of Gen Z preferred TikTok over Google for searching for information.

This makes optimizing your content for discoverability—both in feed and via search—more important than ever before.

Brand takeaway: Just as you would optimize an article on your blog or a page on your site for SEO, take an optimized approach to your social content. Optimize your posts and profile for maximum discoverability by using the right keywords in your caption, the right hashtags and relevant keywords within your alt text, too.

Trend 5: Behind-the-scenes content and reimagined transparency

The rising audience desire for authentic content lends itself to the need for brands to be more transparent about their business practices on social.

But there’s been an interesting shift. A few years ago, we couldn’t talk about trends in social media without covering the importance of brands speaking up—or getting called out. But in 2023, only a quarter of consumers polled in the Index said the most memorable brands on social spoke out about causes and news aligned with their values.

The Index also found the second biggest thing consumers don’t see enough of from brands on social media is transparency about business practices and values.

I take this to mean that while brands speaking out used to set them apart, now it’s a regular expectation that brands demonstrate transparency and their values as a regular practice. We talked to Paula Perez, Social Engagement & Community Growth Specialist at Oatly, about current social trends. And as Perez puts it, “Consumers are more interested than ever in labor practices, diversity, investor relations, supply chain, company leadership, and environmental responsibility.”

For example, shoe brand Nisolo regularly creates and posts sustainability “report cards” for their products.

@nisoloshoes We all value people. We all value the planet. It’s time for our clothes to do the same. #SustainabilityFactsLabel #peopleandplanet ♬ original sound – Nisolo

Brand takeaway: Look for opportunities to provide more transparency about your business, products and practices. You can start as simple as creating behind-the-scenes content of your office, products being made, the people behind your products and your sustainability values. Make sure you have action or proof to back up your statements.

And if questions do arise that your brand should address, use the right tools to stay proactive. Social listening will help you identify rising conversation topics early, enabling you to understand and get ahead of an issue, and identify the changes you need to make.

Trend 6: Authentic content resonates across platforms

Authentic, non-promotional content is the number one thing consumers say they don’t see enough of from brands on social, according to The Sprout Social Index™. We’ve seen the way creator culture has skyrocketed in popularity—and brands featuring authentic voices, from creators to employees, shine against those that don’t.

And it’s crucial for brands to recognize that this trend is here to stay—it’s the new era of social media.

We talked to Flywire Social Media Manager Sam Mackowitz, who believes AI is only driving this desire for more authenticity. “I think people will be yearning for authentic experiences on social media. Don’t get me wrong, AI is fantastic and can help us get places faster, but…that personal aspect is so important and will continue to be in 2024.”

@flywire How would you describe in 3 emojis? Comment below! #InsideFlywire #polls #companyculture ♬ original sound – Flywire

Brand takeaway: Besides tapping into creators, create more authentic owned content, too. As Mackowitz explains, “At Flywire, the content that performs the best for us is always when it’s showcasing our employees. We’ve had great success showcasing the people behind the payments! Authenticity will soar in 2024.”

Think: playful posts and featuring fellow employees in video content who aren’t camera shy, or a “meet the team” series . Get creative!

An employee advocacy strategy is a stellar way to promote your brand authentically. Using a platform like Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social makes it easier for your employees to discover content and copy suggestions you curate for them to share.

Trend 7: The evolution of social teams and titles

Is your social team structure based on networks? Then you’re not alone—according to the Index, 64% of social teams are aligned to specific social platforms or networks.

But the reality is, your team structure is constantly running the risk of becoming outdated. As social media evolves, so do the teams and the skills needed to run it successfully. And the emergence of new platforms, like Threads , always brings back the same question: whose responsibility is a new platform when you’re divided by network?

New social media jobs and titles are emerging and evolving rapidly. We talked to Gabby Grahek, Strategic Services Consultant at Sprout and a social media thought leader, about current social trends. “I’m hoping and praying for social specialties on social teams. With organizations continuing to experiment with social, build a budget for these teams and elevate their maturity levels when you can.”

Brand takeaway: Gabby thinks “we’ll see niche social professions develop on corporate teams.” Evaluate your current team structure and identify gaps. This is a great opportunity to take additional ownership over your career path and pitch a new role that fits your skillset. Or, make the case to your manager that you need more headcount to accommodate a new role.

Trend 8: The boom of the creator and influencer economy

Today, it’s the creator and influencer’s world—we’re just posting in it.

In the era of authenticity, creators and influencers lend an authentic, human voice and experience to the social scroll. And their place on brand accounts is only going to become more important to connecting with audiences. In fact, in a Q3 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based marketers, 8 in 10 social marketers describe influencer marketing as essential to their social strategies.

As Jeff MacDonald mentioned, “The continued dominance of TikTok underscores the shift towards more authentic, unfiltered content. This trend is likely to grow, with users gravitating towards content that feels genuine and relatable. Brands will increasingly leverage creators and influencers who can craft compelling stories and connect with audiences on a personal level.”

Brand takeaway: The rise of creators and influencers and the authentic voice they provide will likely remain on the list of social media trends for years to come. So now is the time to kick off your creator and influencer marketing partnerships and program, if you haven’t already.

As Jeff put it, “Authenticity in content not only enhances engagement but also fosters trust and loyalty among consumers. This trend is very much in line with the human-centric approach to social media, where human creativity and connection are pivotal in crafting brand messages.”

Consider adopting a dedicated creator and influencer management platform, which over half of brands have done according to a Q3 Sprout Pulse Survey. Platforms like Tagger by Sprout Social make managing your influencer partnerships and their impact easier.

Trend 9: Personalized customer care is a consumer preference

The expectations for social media customer service have only gone up. Consumers no longer just want fast responses—70% of them expect personalized responses to their customer service needs, according to the Index.

And 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support—so companies who don’t do so inevitably fall behind.

Brand takeaway: Analyze your role in social customer care: how responsive are you being, and what can you do to scale your efforts?

Some 75% of businesses in the Index say that social customer care will be shared to some degree by marketing and customer service teams. If this is also the case for you, remember that solid customer care is about empowering all teams involved to collaborate and communicate. Ensure that both teams are aligned on social voice and tone, response best practices, canned response use, chat bot updates and more.

Features like Sprout’s Case Management enable teams to seamlessly work together to resolve customer issues, while integrations with platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce enable agents and social team members alike to get more context behind customer interactions, making personalization much easier.

Trend 10: Marketing and customer care teams use AI regularly…and monitor it closely

The use of AI to streamline workflows remains one of the current social media trends that will stretch into this year—and beyond.

According to The 2023 Social Index™, over 80% of marketers have already seen the positive impact of AI on their work. You yourself may be in that group. And beyond scaling content creation and customer care responses, AI will likely play an even larger role as a marketing and customer care tool.

As Jeff MacDonald tells us, “In 2024, we can expect a deeper integration of AI in personalizing user experiences. AI can analyze user data to provide highly tailored content recommendations, enhance customer service with more responsive chatbots, and drive more effective targeted advertising. This trend aligns with the increasing efficiency in content production, as AI tools become more adept at understanding and replicating human-like interactions and creativity.”

But this year, we forecast that this trend will look a little different. While there’s been a sustained use in AI, we’ve also seen a trend of increased conversations around AI ethics and using it safely.

As Gabby Grahek puts it, “Now that the shock of AI availability is wearing off, I expect companies that have been hesitant to adopt AI tools will develop (strict) adherence and governance policies to start taking advantage of the efficiencies available from the use of AI.”

Brand takeaway: Join the marketers who are using AI to scale their content creation and customer care efforts. But always use it carefully and ethically—create an AI use policy to safeguard your brand and team.

Trend 11: Social data is key—beyond the marketing team

One of the biggest social media myths is that social data is only relevant to social or marketing. On the contrary—social media data has the power to inform every area and team of your organization and improve your entire business, from product, to customer support to PR.

According to the Index, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s social insights inform other departments. And this trend is here to stay. Companies that don’t use social to inform their wider business will undoubtedly fall behind.

Not to mention, getting deep into the data is one of the best ways to identify trends in social media in your owned content.

As social teams become more sophisticated, so will their use of data beyond their team…as long as social teams know how to communicate that data with other departments.

Brand takeaway: You already know how valuable social data is—this year, demonstrate this to other teams. Download our 2024 Social Media Toolkit for six resources that will help you streamline your strategy and share its impact.

Use these social media trends to keep your strategy one step ahead

We can’t always know when a new platform, content format or trending TikTok sound will bubble up. In fact, they usually surprise us in a drop-everything-and-film-this-content way.

But we can look at the larger social media marketing trends now and use them to build a stronger strategy that sets us up for success. And that creates a solid foundation that not even the advent of a new platform can shake. (Well, maybe a little.)

Keep the trend forecasting going—for more data-backed trends in social media, download The Sprout Social Index™ to bolster your strategy with tips about sharing data with leadership, the metrics that matter most and more.

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13 social media research topics to explore in 2024

Last updated

15 January 2024

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

To help you choose a specific area to examine, here are some of the top social media research topics that are relevant in 2024.

• What makes a strong social media research topic?

Consider the factors below to ensure your topic is strong and compelling:

Clarity: regardless of the topic you investigate, clarity is essential. It ensures readers will be able to understand your work and any wider learnings. Your argument should be clear and your language unambiguous.

Trend relevancy: you need to know what’s currently happening in social media to draw relevant conclusions. Before choosing a topic, consider current popular platforms, trending content, and current use cases to ensure you understand social media as it is today.

New insights: if your research is to be new, innovative, and helpful for the wider population, it should cover areas that haven’t been studied before. Look into what’s already been thoroughly researched to help you uncover knowledge gaps that could be good focus areas.

• Tips for choosing social media research topics

When considering social media research questions, it’s also important to consider whether you’re the right person to conduct that area of study. Your skills, interests, and time allocated will all impact your suitability.

Consider your skillset: your specific expertise is highly valuable when conducting research. Choosing a topic that aligns with your skills will help ensure you can add a thorough analysis and your own learnings.

Align with your interests: if you’re deeply interested in a topic, you’re much more likely to enjoy the process and dedicate the time it needs for a thorough analysis.

Consider your resources: the time you have available to complete the research, your allocated funds, and access to resources should all impact the research topic you choose.

• 13 social media research paper topics

To help you choose the right area of research, we’ve rounded up some of the most compelling topics within the sector. These ideas may also help you come up with your own.

1. The influence of social media on mental health

It’s well-documented that social media can impact mental health. For example, a significant amount of research has highlighted the link between social media and conditions like anxiety, depression, and stress—but there’s still more to uncover in this area.

There are high rates of mental illness worldwide, so there’s continual interest in ways to understand and mitigate it. Studies could focus on the following areas:

The reasons why social media can impact mental health

How social media can impact specific mental health conditions (you might also look at different age groups here)

How to reduce social media’s impact on mental health

2. The effects of social media exposure on child development

There are many unknowns with social media. More research is needed to understand how it impacts children. As such, this is a very valuable research area.

You might explore the following topics:

How social media impacts children at different ages

The long-term effects of childhood social media use

The benefits of social media use in children

How social media use impacts childhood socialization, communication, and learning

3. The role of social media in political campaigning

Social media’s role in political campaigning is nothing new. The Cambridge Analytica Scandal, for example, involved data from millions of Facebook profiles being sold to a third party for political advertising. Many believe this could have impacted the 2016 US election results. Ultimately, Facebook had to pay a private class-action lawsuit of $725 million.

The role of social media in political campaigns is of global significance. Concerns are still high that social media can play a negative role in elections due to the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and the bandwagon effect.

Research in this area could look into the following topics:

How people are influenced by social media when it comes to voting

Ways to mitigate misinformation

Election interference and how this can be prevented

4. The role of social media in misinformation and disinformation

Misinformation and disinformation mean slightly different things. Misinformation is unintentionally sharing false or inaccurate information, while disinformation is sharing false information with the deliberate intent to mislead people.

Both can play a role not just in elections but throughout social media. This became particularly problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research into this area is important given the widespread risk that comes with spreading false information about health and safety-related topics.

Here are some potential research areas:

How misinformation and disinformation are spread via social media

The impact of false information (you could focus on how it impacts health, for example)

Strategies for mitigating the impact of false information and encouraging critical thinking

The avenues through which to hold technology companies accountable for spreading misinformation

5. The impact of AI and deepfakes on social media 

AI technology is expected to continue expanding in 2024. Some are concerned that this could impact social media. One concern is the potential for the widespread use of deepfake technology—a form of AI that uses deep learning to create fake images.

Fake images can be used to discredit, shame, and control others, so researchers need to deeply understand this area of technology. You might look into the following areas:

The potential impacts of deepfakes on businesses and their reputations

Deepfake identities on social media: privacy concerns and other risks

How deepfake images can be identified, controlled, and prevented

6. How social media can benefit communities

While there’s much research into the potential negative impacts of social media, it can also provide many benefits.

Social media can establish connections for those who might otherwise be isolated in the community. It can facilitate in-person gatherings and connect people who are physically separated, such as relatives who live in different countries. Social media can also provide critical information to communities quickly in the case of emergencies.

Research into the ways social media can provide these key benefits can make interesting topics. You could consider the following:

Which social media platforms offer the most benefits

How to better use social media to lean into these benefits

How new social platforms could connect us in more helpful ways

7. The psychology of social media

Social media psychology explores human behavior in relation to social media. There are a range of topics within social media psychology, including the following: 

The influence of social media on social comparison

Addiction and psychological dependence on social media

How social media increases the risk of cyberbullying

How social media use impacts people’s attention spans

Social interactions and the impact on socialization

Persuasion and influence on social media

8. How communication has evolved through social media

Social media has provided endless ways for humans to connect and interact, so the ways we do this have evolved.

Most obviously, social media has provided ways to connect instantaneously via real-time messaging and communicate using multimedia formats, including text, images, emojis, video content, and audio.

This has made communication more accessible and seamless, especially given many people now own smartphones that can connect to social media apps from anywhere.

You might consider researching the following topics:

How social media has changed the way people communicate

The impacts of being continuously connected, both positive and negative

How communication may evolve in the future due to social media

9. Social media platforms as primary news sources

As social media use has become more widespread, many are accessing news information primarily from their newsfeeds. This can be particularly problematic, given that newsfeeds are personalized providing content to people based on their data.

This can cause people to live in echo chambers, where they are constantly targeted with content that aligns with their beliefs. This can cause people to become more entrenched in their way of thinking and more unable or unwilling to see other people’s opinions and points of view.

Research in this area could consider the following:

The challenges that arise from using social media platforms as a primary news source

The pros and cons of social media: does it encourage “soloization” or diverse perspectives?

How to prevent social media echo chambers from occurring

The impact of social media echo chambers on journalistic integrity

10. How social media is impacting modern journalism

News platforms typically rely on an advertising model where more clicks and views increase revenue. Since sensationalist stories can attract more clicks and shares on social media, modern journalism is evolving.

Journalists are often rewarded for writing clickbait headlines and content that’s more emotionally triggering (and therefore shareable).

Your research could cover the following areas:

How journalism is evolving due to social media

How to mitigate social media’s impact on neutral reporting

The importance of journalistic standards in the age of social media

11. The impact of social media on traditional advertising

Digital advertising is growing in popularity. Worldwide, ad spending on social media was expected to reach $207.1 billion in 2023 . Experts estimate that ad spending on mobile alone will reach $255.8 billion by 2028 . This move continues to impact traditional advertising, which takes place via channels like print, TV, and radio.

Most organizations consider their social strategy a critical aspect of their advertising program. Many exclusively advertise on social media—especially those with limited budgets.

Here are some interesting research topics in this areaThe impact of different advertising methods

Which social media advertising channels provide the highest return on investment (ROI)

The societal impacts of social media advertising

12. Impacts of social media presence on corporate image

Social media presence can provide companies with an opportunity to be visible and increase brand awareness. Social media also provides a key way to interact with customers.

More and more customers now expect businesses to be online. Research shows that 63% of customers expect companies to offer customer service via their social media channels, while a whopping 90% have connected with a brand or business through social media.

Research in this area could focus on the following topics:

The advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing for businesses

How social media can impact a business’s corporate image

How social media can boost customer experience and loyalty

13. How social media impacts data privacy

Using social media platforms is free for the most part, but users have to provide their personal data for the privilege. This means data collection, tracking, the potential for third parties to access that data, psychological profiling, geolocation, and tracking are all potential risks for users.

Data security and privacy are of increasing interest globally. Research within this area will likely be in high demand in 2024.

Here are some of the research topics you might want to consider in this area:

Common privacy concerns with social media use

Why is social media privacy important?

What can individuals do to protect their data when using social media?

• The importance of social media research

As social media use continues to expand in the US and around the world, there’s continual interest in research on the topic. The research you conduct could positively impact many groups of people.

Topics can cover a broad range of areas. You might look at how social media can harm or benefit people, how social media can impact journalism, how platforms can impact young people, or the data privacy risks involved with social media use. The options are endless, and new research topics will present themselves as technology evolves.

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The 16 Most Important Social Media Trends for 2024

With social media trend cycles moving faster than ever, we’re asking ourselves: what’s worth paying attention to in 2024?

2024 social media trends

Welcome to social media in 2024, where trends change faster than Taylor Swift fan theories. There are hot new platforms, fresh ways to shop, and countless algorithm updates. It’s enough to make even the savviest heads spin.

But no need to spiral, friends, because we’ve done the digging for you. Take this blog post as permission to stop obsessively checking every app in search of the hottest new social media trends.

Get our 2024 Social Trends report, and dig into the juicy data that’ll help you reach your goals in 2024—which is shaping up to be social’s best year yet.

16 most important social media trends for 2024

1. text-only posts are the sleeper hit of the year (and x remains on top).

While the shakeup at X seems to have stabilized in recent months, the uncertainty at the platform did give plenty of other text-based apps an opportunity to eat up some market share in 2023.

Mastodon , for example, has 1.7 million monthly active users . The Jack Dorsey-funded Bluesky Social is invite-only (exclusive!) but boasts over 1 million active users.

And then there’s Meta’s Threads app. It exploded out of the gate in July 2023, reaching more than 44 million daily active users in record time.

Source: Inforgram

But don’t give up on X just yet. The platform formerly known as Twitter is still the most-used text-based social media app .

X says its user base exceeded 540 million in 2023 and will grow to over 650 million users over the next five years (though Statista reports slightly lower numbers, as well as a dip in users worldwide in 2023).

X platform usage remains high, even if those users aren’t quite sure what to call it:

Source: Hootsuite on LinkedIn

But the popularity of these new competitors has made one thing clear: the people are hungry for text, and not just on text-based platforms.

Over on Facebook, old-school text posts are still doing big numbers. Auntie Anne’s has been repurposing top-performing Tweets as Facebook posts for years now, and the engagement those posts earn is eye-popping.

Plus, we all know text-only posts on LinkedIn can take off:

The success of these posts, especially among marketers, makes a ton of sense. They require less time to create (especially if you use a tool like OwlyWriter AI ) and are way less likely to get stuck in your approval process .

What are we getting at? No matter what happens at X, text-based social apps aren’t going anywhere. And text-only posts, even on platforms that aren’t considered text-forward, are far from over.

To-do list:

• Secure your usernames on Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, even if you don’t have time to invest in them yet.
• Look for opportunities to repurpose your text-only content on other platforms (i.e., reposting your Tweets on Instagram).
• Don’t delete your X account yet or reduce the number of times you tweet each week (if you’re feeling fatigued, you can speed up Tweet writing with AI ).
• Polish your X marketing strategy and keep a close eye on whether your audience continues to engage on the platform with Hootsuite Analytics .

2. Social platforms will become the hottest new search engines

If you want real insights from real people, Google search results don’t always do the trick.

But you know where you can reliably find a wealth of advice from actual humans?

That’s right: social media. In 2024 and beyond, social media channels represent the biggest threat to traditional search engines .

TikTok is now integrating Google search results into its in-app results, and the platform has added robust search tools like Keyword Insights to its Creative Center.

Plus, recent surveys suggest that social media platforms are the second most popular way for Gen Z to research their shopping decisions. It looks like Google is right to worry about TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram encroaching on its territory.

We talked about social SEO as an important trend in 2022 — and tested our theories in our own experiments — but it’s an even bigger deal now.

Last year, the social SEO tactics we suggested focused mainly on keyword optimization in captions and profiles. Now, social strategies are evolving to address search intent while still producing content that entertains as it educates (edutainment, if you will).

As long as it’s still relevant, evergreen content can show up in social search basically forever. And the more engagement those posts have, the more likely they are to rise to the top of social search results pages.

Here’s an example of an SEO-optimized post created by the Hootsuite social team.

@hootsuite Ranking the captions our new AI instagram caption generator wrote to announce its own launch #copywriting #aiwritingassistant #instagramcaption #aiinstagramcaption ♬ I Think I Like When It Rains – WILLIS

Social search is still new, but as the platforms continue to improve and expand their search functions, we can see this particular social media trend continuing far into the future.

• Continue to use social SEO and keyword research to build out your content calendars. We’ve got tips for Instagram , TikTok , Facebook , YouTube , and X .
• Start creating content that answers common questions in your niche. Educational content is far more likely to show in search results, even months after posting.
• Incorporate social SEO as a component of your strategy, but don’t make it your primary focus.
• If you haven’t tried social SEO yet, watch the video below to get started.

3. Longer videos will make a big comeback

Since we’re still recovering from the whiplash of the short-form video takeover, it feels crazy to say this, but here goes: longer videos are about to be hot again .

When we say longer videos, we don’t mean long videos. Unless you’re in a long-form niche (YouTube video essays, for example), we’re talking a length of two to five minutes per video instead of less than a minute.

There are a few reasons why we expect the algos to reward meatier videos this year.

First, the big platforms keep increasing their max video lengths . Instagram Reels can now be as long as 15 minutes, and TikTok is reportedly testing that length as well. Plus, X (Twitter) rolled out its premium subscription, which allows paid users to upload videos of up to two hours long.

  Post by @mattnavarra View on Threads

Second, user behavior is changing. As we mentioned in trend #2, users now frequently turn to social networks to answer questions they might normally pose to Google or other web search engines . Content creators on social need to be able to answer questions in-depth in their videos, which takes more time.

Finally, people are heading to social media to kill time and be entertained more than ever before . (We’re guessing that’s why Paramount recently uploaded the entirety of Mean Girls to TikTok).

In short, social media is poised to earn an even bigger chunk of the Free Time Pie this year, if you can imagine that. And our brains love getting sucked into stuff, so bank on it: long(er) is the new short.

• Experiment with posting two- to three-minute Instagram Reels and TikToks (and download them without watermarks so you can easily cross-post them).
• Lean into your evergreen video strategy (more timeless, in-depth videos that feature original audio and answer your audience’s questions).
• Keep videos to one part unless absolutely necessary (i.e., don’t divide them into Part 1, Part 2, etc.).
• When posting longer videos, include timestamps in your captions or the video description so viewers can easily navigate through the content.
• Don’t post long videos just for the sake of it. Make sure they’re entertaining and valuable to your followers.

4. Engagement will move from feeds to DMs

These days, social media feeds are busy with news, memes, creator content, ads, organic marketing from brands — and arguments about whether the dress is black and blue or white and gold (Just kidding! 2015 called and asked if you were paying attention!).

The one thing you don’t see much of on social feeds anymore is organic, uncurated posts from friends and family.

There are many reasons for this shift. But the fact that personal updates don’t live in plain sight doesn’t mean they’ve completely disappeared from the social media landscape.

In August 2023, Business Insider interviewed a handful of Gen Z Instagram users for an article ominously titled “ Social media is dead .” 22-year-old content creator Tati Bruening said:

“There’s this very weird, unspoken social standard of what’s allowed on Instagram. I know that for my age group, it’s like you give up on it entirely, and then you just post only to your Close Friends or alternate accounts. There’s this sublayer of Instagram that’s much more true to what the app once was, but it is just not viewable to the general public.”

But Close Friends stories and finstas aren’t the only private places Instagram users share personal updates with friends. Even more engagement happens in DMs.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in a recent episode of the 20VC podcast : “Most of Instagram’s growth has been in stories and DMs.” He also admitted Meta was aware of messaging app Telegram growing into a potentially significant competitor, even though Instagram is “not a messaging app.”

Maybe this is why the team at Instagram has developed many new DM-centered features recently, including:

• Notes , the text-only status updates that live and can be answered in DMs
• Broadcast channels , a one-to-many messaging system inspired by Telegram
• Improved guardrails against unsolicited messages

So, what does this mean for social marketers?

First, tracking brand-related engagement is more difficult when it happens in the privacy of DMs — off-limits territory for social listening tools and traditional analytics. But that doesn’t mean it can’t yield significant business results (see our tips for tracking this type of dark social below).

Second, brands and organizations need to get comfortable with the fact that DMs are the preferred communication method for most social media users . This goes for B2C conversations too, which means that social media will become even more of a customer service channel in coming years.

• Encourage your audience to DM you with questions and feedback.
• Get your social team ready to handle customer service inquiries. Give them tools (like Hootsuite Inbox ) that will help them keep track of and easily answer social messages from all your accounts across networks.
• Set up automated responses for simple, frequently asked questions and the times of day when your team is offline.
• Use UTMs to track (at least some of) the traffic you get from DM shares.
• If your organization uses social media to share timely content, news, or important PSAs, consider starting an Instagram Broadcast Channel . ( Note : At the moment, the feature is only available to users with Creator accounts. Keep an eye on Adam Mosseri’s own Broadcast Channel for updates.)

Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.

5. Shares will matter more than likes, comments, or followers

Every social marketer wants to expand their reach, but if you’ve ever tried to buy followers or likes, you know the results can be… disappointing . Especially when your boss asks you to prove how those investments have paid off.

Comments, likes, and followers can all be faked. Views and impressions are easily inflated. But there’s one engagement signal that’s much harder to game: shares .

Unlike comments, likes, followers, or views, shares represent actual value. When someone shares your content in Stories, DMs, or off-platform, you know they’re willing to vouch for you to their own audience.

Don’t get us wrong: comments and likes are still valuable engagement signals. But if you design your content to be shared, the likes and comments will still follow. The reverse isn’t always true.

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X have either made share counts public or are testing doing just that — and if that’s not a nod to their importance, we don’t know what is.

Looks like @instagram has begun rolling out share/comment counts. UX wise, it looks sharp. Although, it does seems a little counterintuitive following the removal of like counts all those years ago. pic.twitter.com/fANF1rBCpV — Nick Alessi (@nckalessi) August 10, 2023

If you want to make sure your content gets shared more in 2024, start by looking at what’s already working. (Hint: Hootsuite Analytics makes this part pretty easy.) What has your audience responded well to in the past, and how can you make more of that?

Start free 30-day trial

Then, when you’re creating new content, try running it through social media consultant Rachel Karten’s shareability test before you hit Post.

But whatever you do, don’t buy shares (or likes, comments, or followers). At best, you’ll hear crickets. At worst, you’ll earn a platform suspension or a permanent ban.

• Get really clear on who you’re making content for and what they care about.
• Investigate your top-shared posts using a tool like Hootsuite Analytics. What made them so successful? How can you repeat those wins?
• Before you post new content, run it through a shareability test like Karten’s. If your target audience isn’t likely to share your post, what can you adjust to hook them?
• Start paying attention to shares in your regular marketing reports.

6. Telegram might become the next super app

You already know the group chat is the new Facebook status (see trend #4), which is why messaging apps like Telegram are in such a sweet position to skyrocket this year. The privacy-focused chat platform has over 800 million monthly active users and gets around 2.5 million new sign-ups per day. (Seeing the dollar signs yet?)

Although Telegram has been around since 2013, it didn’t become the full-fledged social media network it is today until much more recently. That’s thanks in part to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has consistently used the app to communicate during the war with Russia.

What was once an app for sending secure messages to friends now has many enticing social features. And the platform continues to add more, which is why we think it’s in a strong position to become one of the next super apps .

Some current Telegram features include:

• Group chats (up to 1,000 users), secret chats, and video chats
• Support for media, links, files, music, and voice in chats
• Stories that let you share photos and videos for a limited duration
• Broadcast channels for sending out messages to large audiences
• Payment bots to send money between buyers and sellers
• Telegram Passport for secure personal identification verification
• Sponsored messaging via the Telegram Ad Platform

The app added an advertising platform in 2021, which allows brands to send sponsored messages to channels with 1,000+ subscribers. Marketers might want to consider integrating Telegram into their paid strategies and striking while the iron is hot on this platform.

• Government agencies, in particular, might consider following Zelensky’s lead and creating broadcast channels on the app to keep citizens informed with less risk.
• Cross-promote your broadcast channel (with links) to your audience on your other social media networks.
• Sign up for the Telegram Ad Platform and experiment with sponsored messaging.

7. The fediverse is the future of social media (but it’s not here yet)

Mastodon. Hive. Bluesky. Threads. What do these social networks have in common?

Sure, each has been touted as Twitter/X’s heir apparent. But they’re also either current or future examples of decentralized social media networks, and they may be a sign of things to come.

But before we get too far into it, a refresher on “decentralized platforms” (because this stuff can get confusing).

Unlike traditional social networks, decentralized platforms use blockchain or peer-to-peer networks to distribute information across many servers.

That means your data isn’t confined to a single server, and no one entity controls it. If enough of these networks are connected, you can communicate seamlessly across them.

That’s exactly what the fediverse , or “federated universe,” is all about. Users on one network in the fediverse can follow, interact, and share content with users on another. The fediverse is big on privacy, independence, community and connection.

That said, the fediverse may not be our social reality just yet .

The team behind Threads certainly seems excited to move towards the decentralized model, but so far, Threads still operates a lot like other traditional social networks.

And while the shakeup at X this year had some social marketers questioning the concept of traditional, centralized networks, the platform formerly known as Twitter has managed to retain most of its users.

Plus, most existing decentralized networks are still too technically complex (see the many “How does Mastodon/Bluesky even work??” posts on X) for most regular users.

• If you haven’t already, secure accounts and start exploring platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. There’s no harm in preparing for the future.
• Start building out your community-oriented social strategy. It’ll be a big part of the decentralized future, but it’s just as relevant for the traditional networks.

8. Every grid post will be a photo dump

We first talked about photo dumps back in 2022, but at the time, they seemed like a passing fad.

Apologies: our crystal ball must have been malfunctioning that day.

Photo dumps, formerly known as carousels, are now the only way to post on Instagram — and since TikTok introduced photo mode , they’ve taken off on that platform too.

(And seriously, no one’s calling them carousels anymore.)

Source: Jess Val on TikTok

You’ve probably noticed that your friends are posting on Instagram less frequently these days. But do us a favor and check out their last few posts — they’re photo dumps, aren’t they?

Those friends aren’t alone, either. There are now more than 3.6M Instagram posts using the #photodump hashtag .

And while the name may imply a lack of curation or strategy, that’s definitely not the case.

The multi-photo format allows creators and brands to tell longer stories, participate in photo-specific trends, and connect with their audience in a way that feels authentic and unfiltered.

Source: TikTok

They’re also a great way to deliver a lot of information without investing in a costly, production-heavy video. On Instagram, you can share up to 10 photos or videos in a single post, and on TikTok, you’ve got up to 35 slides.

Plus, carousels, sorry, photo dumps, are still the top-performing format on Instagram , earning more reach and engagement than Reels or solo posts.

Better storytelling, more reach, and higher engagement for less money? Yeah, we’d call that a format worth investing in.

• Plan your photo dumps carefully — that first photo is key! Grab your audience with a hook that’ll have them scrolling all the way through.
• Watch for photo-specific trends, especially on TikTok. If you can come up with a take that makes sense for your brand, high engagement is almost guaranteed.
• If your first photo dump doesn’t take off, keep testing. Play around with different styles and lengths of carousels.
• Don’t try to get too sales-y. Photo dumps are the perfect fit for your educational or trending content.

9. LinkedIn will deprioritize personal content (and win more love from Gen Z)

We watched closely as COVID-19 turned LinkedIn from a place for professional updates, career advice, and work brags to a feed filled with personal anecdotes and weekend selfies.

But just as we were warming up to the professional platform getting personal, LinkedIn started giving some signals that it would be returning to its roots.

In fact, LinkedIn has already rolled out some algorithm changes that prioritize professionalism , including one that focuses on “knowledge and advice,” especially among subject matter experts and people within a user’s network.

That’s because, LinkedIn says, its users find content the most valuable when it’s rooted in knowledge, especially if it was posted by someone they know.

Subtext: if you want your posts to go viral on LinkedIn in 2024, you’ve got to work even harder on building out your personal network and followers.

Another indicator that things are skewing more professional is LinkedIn’s new Top Voice badge feature. The platform grants these badges to creators who “share valuable expertise through content that demonstrates their unique, original contributions to a topic.”

Source: Kaylee Edmondson on LinkedIn

The platform clearly wants to reward users who share content based on their professional expertise.

One more important trend to note for LinkedIn in 2024: Gen Z will gain a greater share of the platform’s user base. They’re its fastest-growing demographic, and they’re already outpacing their elders when it comes to adding connections on the platform.

And that’s not just because millions of Gen Z’ers age into the job market each year. It’s also because, as critics posit , younger internet users are seeking a place of earnest celebration (and one free of the overly curated, aspirational, and FOMO-inducing content on Instagram and TikTok).

• Scale back the personal posts in favor of professional content and posts that spotlight your expertise.
• But prioritize growing your personal network and follower base (on LinkedIn, users respond best to content posted by people they know in real life or are familiar with online).
• Reinforce yourself or your brand as a subject matter expert.
• Tidy up your LinkedIn strategy and stay active.
• Don’t ignore an emerging Gen Z audience on the platform (you can always use our LinkedIn post generator if you don’t speak Gen Z).

10. TikTok Shop will spark a re-emphasis on authenticity

We’ve been predicting the big TikTok ecommerce boom for a while, but it was still surprising to see just how fast the ForYouPage morphed into a shopping app with the release of TikTok Shop in the U.S. in September 2023.

Just a few months later, TikTok is at the center of the social shopping trend . The app’s in-house storefront and fulfillment service is fast becoming an influencer favorite. And if you’ve spent much time scrolling lately, you already know the algorithm seems to be rewarding users who promote it.

With TikTok handling the shipping and fulfillment, too, there’s less incentive for money-makers to take their sales and affiliate rewards outside of the app.

But it’s not all roses and dollar signs. TikTok users are already reporting scams and knock-offs and questioning creators’ sincerity . There has also been a steep rise in “deinfluencing” content, or content that helps users with overspending and impulse shopping .

@overcoming_overspending here for another ✨deinfluencing✨ moment #deinfluencing #deinfluencer #deinfluence #overspending #overspendingmoney #consciousconsumer #moneytok #moneycoachforwomen #savemoneytips #spendless #shoppingaddict #compulsiveshopping #compulsiveshopper #creditcarddebt #debtfree #impulsebuying #impulseshopping ♬ original sound – Paige-Overcoming Overspending

So, what does this mean for sellers? Besides the obvious — they need to get their products up on TikTok, like, yesterday — we predict that creators who promote their goods in a more authentic way will have the most success on TikTok Shop.

You may see influencers lean more heavily into product placement and detach from overt advertising tactics offered by TikTok Shop.

• If you’re eligible, put your products up on TikTok Shop.
• Promote your products in a way that still feels authentic and not sales-y (that’s what made TikTok so special to begin with).
• Keep a close eye on your TikTok analytics as you start to sell on TikTok. Note whether your promotional videos are doing better than the rest.
• Try sitcom-style product placement (casually including products in videos without calling them out explicitly).

11. You won’t need a BeReal strategy

Hands up, who else placed their bets on BeReal in 2023?

The real-time selfie app captured our hearts, minds, and marketing strategies last year, and why not? An endless feed of unfiltered, spontaneous updates felt like the perfect antidote to highly curated Instagram feeds.

But the app’s popularity came and went like the disappearing selfies that made it so enticing. Although BeReal amassed over 73 million active users at the height of its popularity, recent stats show that only a third of those users are still active on the platform.

Source: Appfigures.com

Sadly, we don’t have high hopes for BeReal’s resurgence — at least for brands , and here’s why: the app’s swift rise and fall shone a light on a broader, more salient social media trend. These days, users are quick to adopt shiny new trends, but they’re even quicker to abandon them.

The steady decline in BeReal’s monthly users proved that, once the novelty wears off, users — especially Gen Z users — are quick to uninstall.

• Don’t divest entirely from BeReal. Keep your username and keep an eye on trends. Some apps don’t appeal to mass audiences but still thrive among certain niches and demographics
• Note that BeReal will delete your account if it’s inactive for two years, so pop in from time to time and post a selfie or two
• Remember that platforms themselves can be micro-trends. Strike while the iron is hot, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket or expect them to deliver long-term

12. TikTok will continue to be the birthplace of video trends

You know those TikTok jokes about Reels being the place where trends go to die? No? Here’s an example:

@kassypoo27 no explanation needed ♬ What on earth is going on in the house of commons – zkrm

The idea is that social media trends start making rounds on Reels after they surface — and sometimes even get old — on TikTok.

But let’s be clear: Even if Reels are a bit behind on shiny new trends, they’re still a very relevant (and continuously growing) format, and your brand should definitely be making them.

That said, the TikTok to Reels trend pipeline is real.

TikTok’s demographic skews younger than Instagram’s, and the platform is always a couple of steps ahead of its Meta-owned rival in terms of editing features, filters, and audio clips. It’s also, by nature, more creative and “unhinged” (more on that in the next section) than Instagram.

All this means that, for now, TikTok is likely to remain the mothership of short video trends — and keeping an eye on it will help you stay ahead of your Instagram-focused competitors.

• Scroll! Your For You page is full of content trends waiting to be discovered.
• Take note of how brands are participating in trends and how their audiences are reacting to it.
• Fold the ideas that seem the most relevant to your business and social goals into your content calendar — and start testing!
• If you are in a highly regulated industry (or are not ready to start filming and posting quite yet), keep a burner account to stay informed, but don’t worry about posting.

13. The unhinged social media manager will calm down a little

You’ve probably noticed brands becoming more fun and daring with their online personas in the last few years. This social media trend not so coincidentally overlapped with TikTok’s rise to popularity as a B2C-friendly network. It’s an entertainment platform , after all, and businesses that can’t, well, entertain their TikTok audiences may be better off looking for success elsewhere.

That’s more or less how the unhinged social media manager persona was born. Social media managers fully embraced the language of the internet (niche memes, edgy humor, obscure Gen Z lingo, trending sounds, etc.) to create relatable, often chaotic, sometimes a bit shocking — and ultimately, engaging — content.

@scrubdaddy STANK!! 🤢. #scrubdaddy #smile #cleantok #cleaningtiktok #americasfavoritesponge ♬ ITS DA DOOO DOOO TRUCKL – Theyluv_MikeMike🩵🦅

Getting spicy and subverting expectations paid off for a few trailblazers (hi Duolingo , hello Scrub Daddy ), helping them go viral and inspiring others to follow suit. Before long, a pizza chain was posting about stuffed crustussy (?!?), a travel bag producer was telling their audience of “idiots” who didn’t know how to adjust straps to “shut up,” and every other brand account was complaining about their boss in the first person.

And then… it started getting old. The more brands leaned into the chaos, the less authentic the SMM-turned-comedian voice felt. With such widespread adoption, it lost the shock value and a lot of its original appeal. And let’s not forget the poor souls who accidentally took things a bit too far and ended up in hot water.

So, is there a happy medium? Does being funny and relatable outweigh the risk of reputational damage? Is the unhinged social media manager trope slowly dying?

The answer is: it’s complicated.

The unhinged SMM is the polar opposite of the social marketer limited by inflexible brand guidelines, complicated approval processes, and leaders who don’t understand social media. And most organizations would benefit from building a relatable online personality, learning to speak their audience’s language, and giving social media managers more creative freedom.

Those who decide to go a bit unhinged need to make sure that it’s part of a smart strategy (thorough audience research and clear goals) rather than just posting the team’s only chronically online Gen Z person’s jokes without approval.

• Build trust in your social media team within your organization. SMMs know social better than senior leaders — their judgment should always be taken seriously.
• Get everyone on the same page about what’s off-limits. Include non-negotiables in your social media policy (e.g., offensive language, explicit jokes). Be specific.
• Revise your social media approval workflows . Make sure that your process never gets in the way of creative and timely ideas.
• Take note of how people within your niche communicate. How casual are they? What jokes do they use? Consider how this style of communication aligns with your goals on social media. Then, rework your style guide to reflect your findings.
• If you operate in a highly regulated industry or your audience demographics skew older, don’t force it. Chaotic humor might not be for you — and that’s ok.

14. Social isn’t moving into the metaverse quite yet

2021 and 2022 were full of news about Mark Zuckerberg’s then-new project, the metaverse.

Since Meta is best known as a social media company (home of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and, as of 2023, Threads), social media managers everywhere rightfully wondered how the metaverse would change social — and their jobs.

But, in late 2023, we’re not hearing as much buzz about the metaverse  — at least not in the context of social media.

Since Zuckerberg dubbed 2023 “ the year of efficiency ,” engaging in several belt-tightening tactics, the expensive metaverse project has moved out of the spotlight — but it hasn’t been completely deprioritized. Meta continues to invest in it, but more for gaming than anything else. This aligns with independent predictions on how the metaverse will make money in the coming years:

So, what does the future hold for Meta’s metaverse? Time will tell. But for all we know, social media isn’t moving into virtual reality quite yet.

• Keep an eye on industry news to follow new developments.
• If you have a friend with a VR set, go play some mini golf with them — it’s fun!

15. Social media managers will become best friends with AI

Is ChatGPT coming for your job? Do you need to rebrand yourself as a prompt engineer ? Is AI-written content good enough, kind of ok, or absolute hot garbage?

The jury of LinkedIn thought leaders is still out, but we’ve got some answers.

The TL;DR of our take is: Generative AI is a super valuable tool for savvy marketers. It won’t take your job (unless you’re really bad at it — and we know that’s not true!). It will make it easier, and it will help you get better results faster.

And we have proof. Our team at Hootsuite ran an experiment where we tested a human writer against ChatGPT on X (formerly Twitter). The results were interesting — ChatGPT generated more engagement, but the human-written captions got more impressions. You probably see where we’re going with this: Humans and AI work great as a team.

AI can help you get words on the page faster, brainstorm ideas, and create many variants of a specific message for testing. But social media managers are still the brains behind it all.

Tools like ChatGPT will allow you to spend more time thinking about your goals, interacting with your social audience, testing new tactics, measuring your results, and so on.

Simply put, AI will help you become a more strategic social marketer .

• Spend some time playing with a free AI tool like ChatGPT . A small time investment now will save you tons of time in the future.
• Write new social media captions from scratch in a specific tone of voice
• Write posts based on a link (e.g., a blog post or a product page)
• Generate post ideas based on a keyword or topic (and then write posts expanding on the idea you like best)
• Identify and repurpose your top-performing posts
• Create relevant captions for upcoming holidays
• … and then easily schedule those posts to go live at the optimal times, across all your social profiles.

OwlyWriter AI instantly generates captions and content ideas for every social media network. It’s seriously easy.

Bonus: Here’s a bunch of free tools that will help you get started with AI.

16. You won’t ignore YouTube Shorts anymore

Remember when YouTube Shorts first launched in 2021? Many dismissed it as another “TikTok clone” and went back to creating content for the networks they were familiar with.

If we could, we’d go back to those not-too-distant days and give ourselves a good shake. Because YouTube Shorts is more than just a flash in the pan .

According to Google Trends, American interest in YouTube Shorts (generally a reliable indicator of business interest in the platform) has increased by more than 500% since 2021.

Source: Google Trends

This isn’t just a stateside phenomenon, either. In 2022, there were 1.5 billion monthly active users on YouTube Shorts. In 2023, that number rose another half billion.

Users who’ve stuck with the platform are seeing big gains. But if you’re not using Shorts yet, there’s still time to get on board.

On our own Hootsuite Labs channel, we only started posting Shorts regularly back in April 2023. We now earn thousands of views, hundreds of likes, and a respectable stream of new channel subscribers each week.

If you already have a YouTube channel, Shorts could be a huge opportunity to connect with a new audience. (And if you’re already making TikToks or Instagram Reels, you’ve got a library of short-form video content just waiting to be repurposed.)

Say hello to content links! 🩳 Edit any Short in Studio Desktop 🔗 Add a link to any related video, long, Short, or Live, public or private 🤳 Get a one-click, Remix-style button right on the Short 🤔 Use it to bridge Shorts to long-form, link multi-part Shorts, drive to live,… pic.twitter.com/tjmYqEWEdZ — YouTube Liaison (@YouTubeLiaison) August 10, 2023

You can even link your Shorts to any related YouTube video: long, Short, public or private. It’s a great tactic to drive up subscribers on the platform that’s already considered one of the most creator-friendly around .

In Short (sorry), if you’ve been waiting for a push to get on YouTube Shorts, consider this your official friendly shove.

• If you don’t already have one, secure your YouTube channel.
• Start watching YouTube Shorts so you can get a sense of what’s popular on the platform.
• Sketch out the basics of your Shorts marketing strategy.
• Repurpose your existing short-form videos (TikToks, Reels) that have performed well on other platforms.
• Use Hootsuite to schedule your Shorts in advance and analyze their performance.

We’ve compiled research from several different sources to bring you the most data-backed predictions:

• Social Trends in Government
• Social Trends in Healthcare
• Social Trends in Higher Education
• Social Trends in Financial Services
• Social Trends for Nonprofits
• Pew Research
• Google Trends

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Britny Kutuchief is the Senior SEO Copywriter at Hootsuite. She has a master's degree in creative writing. Before joining Hootsuite, she spent a decade working for digital marketing agencies as an SEO content writer. See more of her credentials on LinkedIn.

Based in Akron, Ohio, Britny spends her non-writing hours pursuing local infamy on Instagram and hiking with her Golden Retriever, Darwin.

Liz Stanton is an Inbound Marketing Strategist and associate editor of the Hootsuite blog. After years of freelance writing, she transitioned to a full-time marketing career in 2018. Before joining Hootsuite in 2022, Liz worked as a brand strategist, content editor, and digital campaign manager. She specialized in helping digital marketing agencies, B2C businesses, and SaaS startups build their brands and improve conversions through content marketing and social media.

Karolina Mikolajczyk is a Senior Inbound Marketing Strategist and associate editor of the Hootsuite blog. After completing her Master’s degree in English, Karolina launched her marketing career in 2014. Before joining Hootsuite in 2021, she worked with digital marketing agencies, SaaS startups, and international corporations, helping businesses and social media content creators grow their online presence and improve conversions through SEO and content marketing strategies.

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234 Social Media Research Topics & Ideas

18 January 2024

last updated

Social media research encompasses a broad range of different topics that delve into the ever-evolving digital landscape. People investigate the impact of social platforms on society, exploring subjects, such as online identity formation, self-presentation, the psychology of virtual interactions, and others. Additionally, studies examine the influence of social media on politics, activism, and public opinion, uncovering patterns of information dissemination and polarization. Privacy concerns, cyberbullying, and online safety are also explored in-depth, seeking strategies to mitigate the associated risks. In this article, people can find many social media research topics, ideas, and examples.

Hot Social Media Research Topics

• Impacts of Social Media and Internet Algorithms on User Experience
• The Rise of TikTok: A Socio-Cultural Analysis
• Dealing With Cyberbullying: Strategies and Solutions
• Understanding the Phenomenon of Social Media ‘Cancel Culture’
• NFTs and Social Media: The Future of Digital Art?
• Ethical Concerns in the Era of Influencer Marketing
• Social Media’s Role in Accelerating E-Commerce Growth
• Impacts of Internet and Social Media on Journalism and News Reporting
• Understanding the Psychology of Viral Challenges on Social Platforms
• Cryptocurrency and Social Media: The Intersection
• Mitigating Misinformation and ‘Fake News’ on Social Media
• Augmented Reality (AR) in Social Media: A Game Changer?
• Evaluating the Impact of Social Media on Political Campaigns
• Social Media’s Influence on Fashion and Beauty Trends
• Privacy, Safety, and Security Concerns in the Age of Social Networking
• Roles of Free Access and Social Media in Promoting Sustainable Practices
• Implications of Social Media Addiction on Mental Health
• Examining Social Media’s Role in Crisis Communication
• The Power of User-Generated Content in Branding
• Influence of Social Media on Food Culture and Dining Trends

Easy Social Media Research Topics

• Impacts of Online Videos and Social Media on Mental Health
• Influencer Marketing: Efficacy and Ethical Concerns
• Evolution of Privacy Policies Across Social Platforms
• Understanding Virality: What Makes Content Shareable?
• Cyberbullying: Prevalence and Prevention Strategies
• Social Media and Political Polarization: An In-Depth Study
• Role of Social Media in Modern Business Strategies
• Effect of Social Media on Interpersonal Relationships
• Social Platforms as Tools for Social Change
• Navigating Online Hate Speech: A Legal Perspective
• Emerging Trends in Social Media Advertising
• Online Identity Construction and Self-Presentation
• The Psychology of Social Media Addiction
• Social Media’s Role in Crisis Management and Communication
• Sentiment Analysis in Social Media and Its Implications
• Social Media Algorithms: Bias and Implications
• The Phenomenon of Cancel Culture on Social Platforms
• Cybersecurity Threats in the Era of Social Media
• Analyzing Adverse Impacts of Social Media on Consumer Behavior

Interesting Social Media Research Topics

• Evaluating the Effects of Social Media on Language and Communication
• Roles of Social Media in Fostering Political Engagement
• Misinformation and Propaganda Spread Through Social Platforms
• Analyzing the Shift From Traditional Media to Social Media
• Dark Patterns in Social Media: Hidden Manipulative Tactics
• Social Media and Digital Activism: Revolutionizing Advocacy
• Augmented Reality (AR) and Its Impact on Social Networking
• Exploring Cybersecurity Issues in Social Media Platforms
• Roles and Effects of Social Media and News in Mental Health Promotion
• Strategies for Effective Social Media Crisis Management
• The Power of Live Streaming for Brands and Influencers
• Using Social Media to Enhance Classroom Learning
• Analyzing the Influence of Memes on Internet Culture
• Impacts of Social Media Algorithms on User Behavior
• Assessing the Correlation Between Social Media and Loneliness
• Geotagging and Its Implications for Personal Privacy
• Social Media and E-commerce: A Cross-Industry Study
• The Ethics of Digital Advertising on Social Platforms
• Understanding the Psychology of Social Media Trolls
• The Cultural Shift Caused by Social Media Localization

Social Media Research Paper Topics for High School

• The Phenomenon of Cyberbullying: Prevention and Strategies
• How Does Social Media Influence Teen Body Image?
• Evaluating the Educational Potential of Social Media Platforms
• Impacts of Social Media on Adolescents’ Self-Esteem
• Roles of Free Connection and Social Media in Modern Political Activism
• Exploring the Concept of ‘Digital Citizenship’ Among Teenagers
• The Ethics of Social Media Privacy: User Rights and Responsibilities
• Social Media Addiction: Understanding Its Causes and Effects
• Influence of Social Media on Modern Communication Styles
• Analyzing Positive Roles of Social Media in Promoting Reading Culture
• Social Media and Mental Health: Correlation or Causation?
• The Role of Social Media in Global Environmental Awareness
• Examining Social Media’s Impact on Real-Life Social Skills
• Social Media Platforms: Tools for Personal Branding or Narcissism?
• Influence of Social Media Trends on Youth Fashion Choices
• Impacts of Social Media on Teenagers’ Sleep Patterns
• Online Safety: The Role of Parents and Schools in Social Media Usage
• How Does Social Media Influence Teenagers’ Views on Relationships?
• Social Media and Empathy: Does Online Interaction Decrease Compassion?

Social Media Research Paper Topics for College Students

• Evaluating the Impact of Social Media on Body Image and Self-Esteem
• The Influence of Social Media on Voting Patterns Among Young Adults
• Social Media as a Valid Tool for Social Change: A Case Study Approach
• Unveiling the Psychology of Social Media Addiction
• Social Media’s Role in Modern Journalism: Opportunities and Challenges
• Privacy Implications of Data Collection on Social Media Platforms
• Cyberbullying in the Age of Social Media: Scope and Solutions
• The Ethical Aspects of Social Media Influencer Marketing
• Roles and Effects of Social Media in Crisis Communication and Management
• Social Media and Its Effects on Interpersonal Communication Skills
• Analyzing Social Media Strategies of Successful Businesses
• Impacts of Internet Use and Social Media on Mental Health Among College Students
• The Roles That Social Media Has in Modern Political Campaigns
• Understanding the Social Media Algorithm: Bias and Implications
• Social Media and Consumer Behavior: The Power of Influencer Marketing
• Fake News, Authors, and Disinformation Spread Through Social Media Platforms
• Exploring Direct Links Between Social Media Use and Academic Performance
• Social Media’s Role in Promoting Sustainable Lifestyle Choices
• Regulation of Hate Speech and Offensive Content on Social Media
• The Power and Peril of Virality in the Age of Social Media

Social Media Research Paper Topics for University

• The Effect That Social Media Has on Global Politics
• The Ethics of Data Mining in Social Media
• Roles of Social Media in Business Marketing Strategies
• Social Media, Internet Use, and Their Impacts on Mental Health: A Systematic Review
• Algorithmic Bias in Social Media Platforms: Causes and Consequences
• The Influence of Colors and Social Media on Consumer Behavior
• Exploring Possible Relationships Between Social Media Use and Academic Performance
• Privacy, Morality, and Security Concerns in the Age of Social Media
• Social Media as a Platform for Digital Activism
• Impacts of Social Media on Interpersonal Communication and Relationships
• Cyberbullying on Social Media: Scope, Impact, and Preventive Measures
• The Role of Social Media in Spreading Health-Related Misinformation
• Analyzing the Effect of Social Media on Journalism Practices
• Understanding the Influence of Social Media on Body Image Perceptions
• Social Media’s Role in Crisis Management: Case Studies
• The Power and Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing on Social Media
• Fake News and Disinformation in the Social Media Age
• Regulatory Approaches to Hate Speech on Social Media Platforms
• The Economic Implications of Social Media: From Startups to Giants

Social Media Research Paper Topics for Masters

• Advanced Algorithms and Their Role in Shaping Social Media Interactions
• Evaluating the Impact of Social Media on Democratic Processes Globally
• The Intersection of Privacy, Data Mining, and Ethics in Social Media
• Quantitative Analysis of Social Media’s Impact on Consumer Buying Behavior
• Cybersecurity Threats in Social Media: Mitigation and Prevention Strategies
• Analyzing the Psychological Implications of Social Media Addiction
• Using Social Media Data to Predict Market Trends: An Econometric Approach
• Role of Social Media in Crisis Management: A Comparative Study
• The Sociolinguistic Impact of Social Media on Communication
• Machine Learning and AI in Social Media: An Examination of Emerging Trends
• Social Media as a Valid Tool for Public Health: Opportunities and Challenges
• Social Media’s Influence on Modern Journalism: A Critical Analysis
• Mapping Social Networks: A Graph Theory Approach
• Evaluating the Efficacy of Social Media Campaigns in Social Change Movements
• Analyzing the Role of Social Media in Corporate Reputation Management
• Data Privacy Laws and Social Media: A Comparative Study
• The Use of Small and Big Data Analytics in Social Media Marketing
• Social Media and Its Role in Strengthening Democracy: A Deep Dive
• The Impact of Social Media on Cultural Assimilation and Identity
• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Social Media Content Moderation

Social Media Research Paper Topics for Ph.D.

• Analyzing the Impact of Social Media Algorithms on User Behavior and Perceptions
• Deciphering the Influence of Social Media on Political Campaign Strategies
• Examining the Role of Social Media in Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives
• Social Media and Mental Health: A Comprehensive Analysis of Recent Studies
• Effects of Social Media and Internet Use on Consumer Buying Behavior: An Econometric Approach
• Social Media and Digital Diplomacy: A Critical Analysis
• Ethical Implications of Data Mining Techniques in Social Media Platforms
• Unpacking the Psychological Mechanisms of Social Media Addiction
• Role of Social Media in Contemporary Journalism: Opportunities and Challenges
• Social Media and Privacy: A Comparative Study of Data Protection Laws
• Machine Learning and AI in Social Media: Identifying Future Trends
• Social Media’s Possible Influence on People, Body Image, and Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis
• Analyzing the Role of Social Media in Crisis Management and Communication
• Impacts of Social Media on Different Language and Communication Styles
• Cybersecurity in Social Media: An Analysis of Current Threats and Mitigation Strategies
• Social Media as a Good Tool for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
• Effects of Social Media on Children and Their Parents: Social Skills and Interpersonal Relationships
• Roles of Social Media in Promoting Gender Equality and Women’s Rights
• Social Media and its Influence on Cultural Assimilation and Identity Formation

Social Media Research Topics for Argumentative Papers

• Impacts of Social Media on Social and Political Discourses: Enhancing or Hindering Democratic Engagement?
• Social Media and Mental Health: Exploring the Association Between Excessive Usage and Psychological Well-Being
• Fostering Online Activism and Social Movements: The Role of Social Media
• Balancing Personal Information Sharing and Data Protection: Social Media and Privacy
• Exploring the Effects of Social Media on Body Image and Self-Esteem
• Social Media and Political Polarization: Reinforcing Echo Chambers or Encouraging Diverse Perspectives?
• Youth Culture and Identity Formation: The Influence of Social Media
• Fake News and Misinformation: Combating Inaccurate Information in the Era of Social Media
• Social Media and Cyberbullying: Examining the Impact on Mental Health and Well-Being
• The Ethics of Social Media Research: Privacy, Informed Consent, and Ethical Considerations
• Relationships in the Digital Age: Exploring the Influence of Social Media Use
• The Influence of Internet, Technology, and Social Media on Consumer Behavior and Buying Decisions
• Analyzing the Role of Online Platforms in Elections: Social Media and Political Campaigns
• Social Media in Education: Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Integration in the Classroom
• Impacts of Social Media and Interface on News Consumption and Journalism Practices
• Body Politics in the Digital Space: Examining Representations of Gender, Race, and Body Image on Social Media
• Addressing Ethical and Security Concerns in the Digital Age: Social Media and Cybersecurity
• Shaping Consumer Behavior and Brand Perception: The Role of Social Media Influencers
• Civic Engagement in the Digital Era: Assessing the Role of Social Media Platforms
• The Influence of Social Media Algorithms on Information Consumption and Personalization

Social Media Research Topics for Persuasive Papers

• The Power of Social Media in Driving Social and Political Change
• Promoting Digital Literacy: Empowering Users to Navigate the Complexities of Social Media
• Social Media as a Catalyst for Social Justice Movements: Amplifying Marginalized Voices
• Countering Fake News and Misinformation on Social Media: Strategies for Critical Thinking
• Harnessing the Influence of Social Media for Environmental Activism and Sustainability
• The Dark Side of Social Media: Addressing Online Harassment and Cyberbullying
• Influencer Marketing: Ethical Considerations and Consumer Protection in the Digital Age
• Leveraging Social Media for Public Health Campaigns: Increasing Awareness and Behavioral Change
• Social Media and Mental Health: Promoting Well-Being in a Hyperconnected World
• Navigating the Privacy Paradox: Balancing Convenience and Personal Data Protection on Social Media
• Roles of Social Media and Internet in Fostering Civic Engagement and Democratic Participation
• Promoting Positive Body Image on Social Media: Redefining Beauty Standards and Empowering Individuals
• Enhancing Online Safety: Developing Policies and Regulations for Social Media Platforms
• Social Media and the Spread of Disinformation: Combating the Infodemic
• Roles of Social Media and Technology in Building and Sustaining Relationships: Connecting in a Digital Era
• Influencer Culture and Materialism: Examining the Impact on Consumer Behavior
• Social Media and Education: Maximizing Learning Opportunities and Bridging the Digital Divide
• The Power of Viral Hashtags: Exploring Social Movements and Online Activism
• Social Media and Political Polarization: Bridging Divides and Encouraging Constructive Dialogue

Social Media Topics for Pros and Cons Research Papers

• Examining the Social Effects of Digital Connectivity: Pros and Cons of Using Social Media
• Balancing Privacy Concerns in the Digital Age: Evaluating the Cons and Risks of Social Media Use
• Information Sharing in the Digital Era: Uncovering the Advantages of Social Media Platforms
• Building Online Communities: Analyzing the Strengths and Weaknesses of Social Media Interaction
• Navigating Political Discourse in the Digital Age: The Disadvantages of Social Media Engagement
• Mental Health in the Digital Sphere: Understanding the Benefits and Drawbacks of Social Media
• Combating Cyberbullying: Addressing the Negative Side of Online Social Interactions
• Personal Branding in the Digital Landscape: Empowerment vs. Self-Objectification on Social Media
• Establishing Meaningful Connections: Exploring the Pros and Cons of Social Media Relationships
• Leveraging the Educational Potential of Digital Platforms: Examining the Benefits of Social Media in Learning
• Body Image and Self-Esteem in the Age of Social Media: Weighing the Positives and Negatives
• From Digital Activism to Political Change: Assessing the Opportunities and Limitations of Social Media
• Unraveling the Influence: Social Media and Consumer Behavior in the Digital Marketplace
• Misinformation in the Digital Landscape: The Pros and Cons of Social Media in the Spread of Disinformation
• Crisis Communication in the Digital Age: Navigating the Benefits and Challenges of Social Media
• Tackling Fake News: Navigating Misinformation in the Era of Social Media
• Maximizing Business Opportunities: Evaluating the Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
• The Psychology of Social Media: Analyzing the Upsides and Downsides of Digital Engagement
• Exploring the Impact of Social Media on Socialization: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Implications
• Online Activism: The Power and Limitations of Social Media Movements

Social Media Topics for Cause and Effect Research Papers

• Enhancing Political Activism: Exploring the Relationship Between Social Media and Civic Engagement
• The Psychological Effects of Digital Connectivity: Investigating the Relationship Between Mental Health of People and Social Media Use
• Political Polarization in the Online Sphere: Understanding the Impact of Digital Networks
• Disrupted Sleep Patterns in the Digital Era: Exploring the Role of Online Platforms
• Digital Distractions and Academic Performance: Analyzing the Effects of Online Engagement
• Navigating Online Relationships: Understanding the Impacts of Digital Interactions
• The Digital Marketplace: Exploring Consumer Behavior in the Age of Online Platforms
• The Loneliness Epidemic: Investigating the Relationship Between Social Media Use and Social Isolation
• Redefining Political Participation: The Influence of Digital Networks on Democracy
• Unmasking Digital Identities: The Psychological Effects of Social Media Use
• News Consumption in the Digital Era: Exploring the Impacts of Online Platforms
• Cyberbullying in the Virtual World: Analyzing the Effects of Online Interactions
• The Digital Campaign Trail: Investigating the Influence of Online Platforms on Voter Behavior
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in the Digital Age: Exploring the Psychological Consequences
• Body Dissatisfaction in the Digital Sphere: Understanding the Impacts of Online Presence
• Information Overload: Coping With the Digital Deluge in the Information Age
• Privacy Concerns in the Online Landscape: Analyzing the Implications of Digital Footprints
• Unveiling the Dark Side: Exploring the Relationship Between Online Activities and Substance Abuse
• Bridging the Political Divide: The Impact of Digital Networks on Sociopolitical Polarization

To Learn More, Read Relevant Articles

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Social Media Trends 2024

The chase for ROI continues in 2024—but brands that lean into AI, entertainment, and their top-performing platforms close in on winning social media strategies.

What are the top social trends for 2024?

1. The AI Trend

2. The Platform Trend

3. the roi trend.

4. Industry Trends

1. The AI Trend AI forces brands to redefine authenticity

Generative AI created a seismic shift when it broke into the mainstream in 2022 and sparked a whole range of emotions typically reserved for fellow humans. Interest was so high that from 2022 to 2023, topics on learning about AI increased by 550%, according to an analysis we conducted of over 15,500 news articles and blogs. And social marketers have jumped on the bandwagon. Organizations report that they’re planning to double their use of AI across various activities—even tripling or quadrupling it in some cases.

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends 2024 Survey

Generative AI may be a source of hope for busy professionals like you, but it’s not without risks. Our survey revealed that audiences are not necessarily embracing AI and AI-generated content as much as social marketers are flocking to use it. 

AI for the ages

Thinking about social content generated by ai, rate your agreement with the following statements..

Sample: 4,420 respondents Source: Hootsuite Social Media Consumer 2024 Survey AI is inevitable on social, and scaling back on its use now would be like reverting from computers to typewriters. To thrive in this new environment, marketers and brands need to move beyond defining “real” and “authentic” based on whether something was created exclusively by a human.  In 2024, the most successful brands will redefine “authenticity.” It’s not about who (or what) creates your content anymore; it’s about the brand experience your content creates for the customer. Does it feel right? Does it reinforce the brand? Does it work? Get those right and you can dismiss questions about whether a bot made it with a shrug.


How to work smarter with AI

Know your audience and how they feel about AI It’s timeless advice for a reason. A deep understanding of your audience can help you gather insights on whether factors such as age, culture, geography, or interests have influence on their perception of AI.

Decide which tasks to keep on your plate, and which to delegate AI makes a great assistant—but you still have to run the show. It’s up to you to delegate which aspects of the job AI can support, and which aspects need a more delicate hand (and nuanced brain, tbh).

Create AI policies and best practices for social media Make sure your team and organization are aligned in how you use AI. If you have rules and regulations in place, potential nightmares like angry customers and unapproved posts can be avoided.  

Dig deeper into our AI data Get the full report →

Look into your industry’s future

Unveil new data and industry insights to skyrocket your social ROI in 2024.

01. Education Trends 02. Government Trends 03. Financial Services Trends 04. Healthcare Trends 05. Nonprofit Trends

Strategic brands commit to their champion social platforms

Be where your audience is, they said. But when your audience is everywhere, that’s a tall order—and the average social media user logs into about seven platforms each month. Seven. For brands, maintaining a presence on multiple networks is hard. In fact, it’s such a challenge for organizations, it’s emerged as the top ROI concern for social media.

Orgs fear the ROI impact of being on so many platforms

Which of the following issues do you think contribute to your organization’s concern about roi for social media activities.

Source: Demand Sage

Today, instead of trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once, and letting time, money, resources, and results fall by the wayside (the historical norm), organizations are actually doing something about it—using ROI to figure out their next moves. Take Twitter/X, for example. The majority (60%) of organizations have a presence there, but only a third of them feel strongly that it benefits their business—which might explain the 7% drop in brand use. So organizations are more willing than even to say buh-bye to platforms and strategies that aren’t meeting their definition of ROI. They’re finally prioritizing their own platform-by-platform ROI scores and making business decisions accordingly.

No value, no point: Brands leave some of the social platform giants

Change in platform use for businesses from 2022 to 2023.

In 2024, strategic organizations will push back against unjustified expectations to be on every platform. They’ll unlock their top-performing channels based on ROI, and focus their attention on those—and only those. If they’re really confident (and brave), they might even abandon one or two altogether.

Because mastering a few key platforms is surely better than being so-so at many.

How to decode (and declutter) your social platform mix

Run a social media audit for platform intel This will help you identify your hero platforms—and your duds—so you can make informed decisions about how to approach your social strategy moving forward. Get started with our Social Media Audit Guide .

Put your platforms in an ROI showdown Calculate the ROI of every platform you use and weigh them against each other. Find a channel that’s lagging behind? Even if it generates a positive ROI, it may not be worth the investment if there’s greater potential for growth with your other platforms.

Master the art of (proper) cross-posting We don’t recommend the copy-and-paste method of cross-posting, but there are ways to do it right. The top rule is to align your content with the norms, best practices, and formats of each platform. Check out this strategy guide for some cross-posting pro tips.

Brands like yours are making bold moves on social

See how they do it, and find all the advice (and confidence) you need to follow suit.

Entertainment fuels the social ROI engine

Before you quit reading, we get it. Entertainment can be an intimidating word, especially if you work in a “serious” organization (let alone a regulated industry). Can you even connect entertainment to something quantifiable, like ROI?  But consumers are saying it loud and clear. After staying in touch with family and friends, the top reason they use social media is to be entertained and to mentally unwind , according to our Social Trends 2024 Survey. You know what else they said? That they don’t like it when brands are too focused on self-promotion. 

Source: Hootsuite Social Media Consumer 2024 Survey

The problem is, brands seem to have other ideas: Almost half of marketers publish product or brand updates or news multiple times a week, according to our survey. That’s a huge disconnect between what brands are posting and what people really want to see.  And it gets worse. While organizations are yammering about themselves, they also use engagement as the top metric to demonstrate ROI.

How can you demonstrate ROI through engagement metrics when you’re giving the audience exactly what they don’t want to engage with?

It’s no surprise then that over two-thirds of social marketers report being concerned about the ROI of their social activities. When brands measure success in ways that don’t add up, ROI will be hard to come by.

Brands cling to engagement to demonstrate ROI

Which metrics does your organization most commonly use to demonstrate the return on investment of its social activities.

In 2024, brands that publish entertaining content on social will succeed in winning eyeballs, engagement, and (eventually) market share away from brands that keep on publishing the same old stuff.

You don’t need to overthink it either. “Entertainment” simply boils down to providing enjoyment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—that could be finding inspiration, getting excited, feeling moved, or learning something new.

Be your relatable person-self, not your super-serious-brand-self. After all, social media is not a place where you talk at someone. It’s an interactive space where the exchange of value is a two-way street.

This isn’t a strategy you can pivot to overnight (obvs). But if your old, promotion-heavy strategy isn’t working as well as it used to, it’s time to get back to the true strength of social media: building brand awareness, affinity, and long-term relationships with your audience through engaging, entertaining social content.


How entertainment helps you win social

When it comes to content, follow your audience’s lead Don’t assume you know what your followers want to see. Grab the opportunity to ask them what they want through polls and Q&As. You can also run experiments with new content types or tone of voice. Once you see results, start tweaking future posts and keep testing and iterating as you go.


Let social be the long game Don’t rush into “smashing those goals.” Social is best for building brand equity, which takes time. Don’t revert to your old, self-promotion-y ways either. No one likes a hard sell, and letting them flock to you will be so much more effective in the long run.

Make social relationships the foundation of your ROI Measure how far engagements go beyond social and across your larger business goals. This gives your social media efforts a higher purpose and makes them rooted in customer value and authentic relationships.

New industry insights, unveiled

Education trends.

Learn how to make your strategy too cool for school

Government Trends

Lay down the law for your 2024 social strategy

Financial Services Trends

Read the report for a strategy you can bank on

Healthcare Trends

Give your 2024 social strategy a boost(er)

Nonprofit Trends

Build a social strategy that keeps on giving

Get more insights… or FOMO. It’s your call.

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8 Social Media Trends for 2024

Explore long-term trends shaping your marketing strategy, from AI-driven content creation to the rise of social commerce. Stay ahead in 2024 with insights on video formats, authentic connections, influencer strategies, and ROI priorities.

Some aspects of social media trends can move quickly—for example, trending sounds or memes. Following these types of trends can help dictate the content you produce and post on a daily or weekly basis. Since they shift quickly, the best way to stay up-to-date on immediate trends is to become an active user on the platforms you’re managing and notice the recurring topics, audio, and formats that populate your feed.

Other types of social media trends are more long-term, and you can use these to inform your overarching social media marketing strategy and content calendar. These types of trends tend to have to do with shifts in user behaviors—like preferences for video over static images—and platform functionality—like social media companies introducing on-platform shopping features.

In this article, we’ll discuss the dominant social media trends for 2024 that you can use as you shape your marketing strategy :

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to create content and improve performance.

Short-form video rules, but long-form content may gain traction.

Consumer shopping habits are boosting social commerce.

Social media platforms are becoming viable search engines.

Followers are seeking authentic connections.

Content creators and influencers are core pieces of social media strategy.

Personalization is increasing in importance.

Brands will prioritize social platforms by return on investment (ROI).

To compile these current trends, we synthesized findings from several industry reports and studies from companies like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, HubSpot , and Gartner.

As you read through this list, remember that your social media strategy may not necessarily include every aspect of this list. It’s important to consider how well these trends align with your business goals. If you’d like to learn more about social media fundamentals, like identifying your target audience and choosing the right social media platforms for your business, start with the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate .

1. AI is being used to create content and improve performance.

Marketing professionals are using generative AI (GenAI) tools, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini , to improve their day-to-day processes and tasks. A 2023 report from Sprout Social found that 80 percent of marketers say that AI has positively impacted their work, with 78 percent reporting that they have more time for creativity and 73 percent reporting increased efficiency [ 1 ]. They also found that, in 2024, marketers plan on using AI for social media tasks including analyzing data, content creation, advertising campaign targeting, building chatbots, and more.

Using GenAI for content creation

A 2024 HubSpot survey found that marketers are already using GenAI throughout the content creation process. Of those using GenAI for content creation, 45 percent are using it to generate ideas, 31 percent are using it to outline content, and 18 percent are using it to draft content. What’s more, 56 percent of marketers who use GenAI say their AI-assisted content performs better than content created without‌ it. Overall, 63 percent of marketers predict that most content created in 2024 will be done in part using GenAI tools [ 2 ].

These numbers are encouraging, however, keep your audience and brand voice in mind as you incorporate AI into your social media posts. In a 2024 survey, Hootsuite found that 62 percent of consumers are less likely to engage with or trust AI-generated content—a sentiment that's particularly pronounced among older generations [ 3 ].

Advance your GenAI skills with Vanderbilt University’s Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT course. Here, you’ll learn techniques for communicating with GenAI tools to generate outputs that align with your goals.

Using AI for marketing analytics

Social media marketers have been using engagement metrics and similar data to inform their content calendar for quite some time. Now, you can use AI to enhance your analysis capabilities, producing more robust insights and reliable trend predictions. According to a 2023 report from The Work Innovation Lab, 30 percent of workers already use AI for data analysis, and 62 percent of workers want to use AI for data analysis [ 4 ].

There are a few ways you can start incorporating AI into your marketing analytics. Some common social media tools, like Sprout Social, offer AI-powered features within their interface, but you can also prompt ChatGPT to conduct a data analysis .

Advance your marketing analytics skills with the Meta Marketing Analytics Professional Certificate . You’ll learn how to analyze marketing data and turn your insights into actionable strategies.

2. Short-form video rules, but long-form content may gain traction.

Consumers primarily want brand social media accounts to focus on short-form videos, like those found on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, according to a report from Sprout Social [ 5 ]. This desire is generally aligned with what social media marketers are already doing, as HubSpot found that over half of marketers who include short-form video in their marketing strategy plan to increase their investment in it throughout 2024 [ 2 ].

However, it’s worth noting that TikTok has been testing the boundaries of social media users’ attention spans. In January 2024, TechCrunch reported that the app expanded their long-form upload limits to 30 minutes after previously testing 3-minute, 10-minute, and 15-minute limits [ 6 ].

Advance your TikTok skills with Aptly’s Marketing with TikTok Specialization .

3. Consumer shopping habits are boosting social commerce.

An increasing number of social media users are making purchases directly in their apps. According to Statista, in 2023, there were 106.8 million social buyers in the US. By 2027, they forecast that this figure will grow by over 10 percent to 118 million [ 7 ]. In another study, Statista reported that 37.4 percent of US TikTok users, 36 percent of US Facebook users, and 34.4 percent of US Instagram users made a purchase on the respective social media platform [ 8 ].

At the same time, social media companies are making it easier to shop on their platforms—take, for example, the introduction of the TikTok shop—which can help to encourage in-app consumer behaviors.

Learn more about e-commerce business practices with the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate .

4. Social media platforms are becoming viable search engines.

The social media landscape has expanded beyond the newsfeed. Now, more users are treating the platforms as search engines. Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said that the company estimates 40 percent of young people use TikTok or Instagram as search engines [ 9 ]. This user trend underscores the importance of understanding the search and discovery features on your social media channels and optimizing your content for them.

Advance your SEO skills with the University of California, Davis' Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization .

5. Followers are seeking authentic connections.

When you’re thinking about how to communicate with your social media audiences, authenticity should be top of mind. According to Sprout Social’s Index Report, here are the top five things consumers say they don’t see enough of from brands on social media [ 1 ]:

Authentic, non-promotional content

Transparency about business practices and values

Information about product sourcing and production

Educational content about the brand’s industry

User-generated content (UGC) and customer testimonials

What’s more, in their Content Benchmark Report, Sprout Social asked users who they want to see featured on brand social media platforms, and their responses largely skewed toward average people: front-line employees (48 percent), social media teams (42 percent), and real customers (42 percent). Meanwhile, executive leadership lagged in popularity, with only 15 percent of respondents expressing that desire [ 5 ]. Separately, a Hootsuite survey reports that 56 percent of consumers think brands should be more relatable on social media, which plays into one of the key reasons people turn to the platforms in the first place: to be entertained and to unwind [ 3 ].

As you think about how to maintain relevance on your brand's social media accounts, it’s worth considering how you can show up authentically and foster a genuine connection with your target audience.

Advance your online community-building skills with Northwestern University’s ​​Social Media Marketing Specialization .

6. Content creators and influencers are core pieces of social media strategy.

Speaking of authenticity, sometimes, it’s easier for audiences to believe something about your brand when the information comes from a third party. This is part of the reason why marketers continue to include content creators and influencers in their social media strategy. According to HubSpot, 50 percent of marketers who use influencer marketing plan to increase their investment in their strategy in 2024 [ 2 ].

However, it’s not just known influencers that social media marketers are turning toward, but also the average content creator. User-generated content (UGC) has emerged as a cost-effective way to promote brand awareness and products in a way that feels more natural than influencer partnerships can feel. A report from Gartner found that over 80 percent of consumers believe that UGC improves product discovery, brand trust, and experience [ 10 ].

Learn more about developing a well-rounded social media marketing strategy with the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate .

7. Personalization is increasing in importance.

According to Sprout Social, 51 percent of consumers say the most memorable brands on social media respond to customers, 76 percent value how quickly a brand responds to their needs, and 70 percent expect a personalized response to customer service needs [ 1 ].

To efficiently accommodate this high-touch service, social media teams are turning again to AI, using chatbots and automation tools that can respond to basic customer needs—and it seems to be working. HubSpot reports that 72 percent of marketers agree that these tools help them ‌personalize the customer experience, and 58 percent of marketers plan to increase their investments in AI and automation in 2024 [ 2 ].

Learn how to build chatbots with IBM’s Building AI Powered Chatbots Without Programming ​​course.

8. Brands will prioritize social platforms by ROI.

Brand leaders are thinking more strategically about the business value of their chosen platforms and prioritizing efforts on those that deliver the strongest ROI. This trend may be driven by two important points:

A decline in user trust stands to reshape the way people use social media, making it more important for brands to use social media wisely. Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 50 percent of consumers will significantly limit their social media usage due to their perception of platform quality [ 10 ]. 

According to Hootsuite, as social media teams increasingly feel overextended by the number of platforms they’re managing, they’re assessing which platforms are delivering the results they want to see and are dropping their use of those that aren’t [ 3 ].

Hootsuite breaks down the biggest platform usage changes from 2022 to 2023, with TikTok and LinkedIn seeing the greatest increases in use (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively), and WhatsApp, Pinterest, and X seeing the greatest decreases in use (18 percent, 11 percent, and 7 percent, respectively) [ 3 ]. Meanwhile, HubSpot reports that the platforms with the strongest ROI, according to marketers, are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok [ 2 ]. 

Learn more about key business metrics with the University of Virginia’s ​​ Marketing Analytics course.

Advance your social media marketing skills

Get a comprehensive understanding of social media marketing with the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate on Coursera. Over six courses, you’ll learn the skills you need to qualify for entry-level roles in social media.

Article sources

Sprout Social. “ The Sprout Social Index Edition XIX , https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/index-2023/.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

HubSpot. “ The State of Marketing 2024 , https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/2024%20State%20of%20Marketing%20Report/2024-State-of-Marketing-HubSpot-CXDstudio-FINAL.pdf.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

Hootsuite. “ Social Trends 2024 , https://hootsuite.widen.net/s/mgqjjznhsx/hootsuitesocialtrends2024_report_en.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

The Work Innovation Lab by Asana. “ The State of AI at Work , https://asana.com/work-innovation-lab/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/The-State-of-AI-at-Work.pdf.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

Sprout Social. “ 2024 Content Benchmarks Report , https://media.sproutsocial.com/uploads/2024/02/sprout-social-content-benchmarks-report_2024.pdf.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

TechCrunch. “ TikTok spotted testing 30-minute uploads as it continues to inch into YouTube’s territory , https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/tiktok-testing-30-minute-uploads-inch-into-youtubes-territory/.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

Statista. “ Number of social commerce buyers in the United States from 2021 to 2027 , https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120128/number-social-buyers-united-states/.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

Statista. “ Share of users purchasing on leading social media platforms in the United States in 2023 and 2027 , https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334118/us-social-commerce-buyer-share-by-platform/.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

Fortune. “ Brainstorm Tech 2022: Organizing The World’s Information , https://fortune.com/videos/watch/Brainstorm-Tech-2022-Organizing-The-Worlds-Information/934585a6-7fb6-41a5-8ef3-e497f8ca2986.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

Gartner. “ Gartner Marketing Predictions 2024 , https://emt.gartnerweb.com/ngw/globalassets/en/marketing/documents/marketing-predictions-for-2024.pdf.” Accessed April 10, 2024.

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, detecting the research structure and topic trends of social media using static and dynamic probabilistic topic models.

Aslib Journal of Information Management

ISSN : 2050-3806

Article publication date: 14 September 2022

Issue publication date: 23 March 2023

A huge volume of published research articles is available on social media which evolves because of the rapid scientific advances and this paper aims to investigate the research structure of social media.

Design/methodology/approach

This study employs an integrated topic modeling and text mining-based approach on 30381 Scopus index titles, abstracts, and keywords published between 2006 and 2021. It combines analytical analysis of top-cited reviews with topic modeling as means of semantic validation. The output sequences of the dynamic model are further analyzed using the statistical techniques that facilitate the extraction of topic clusters, communities, and potential inter-topic research directions.

This paper brings into vision the research structure of social media in terms of topics, temporal topic evolutions, topic trends, emerging, fading, and consistent topics of this domain. It also traces various shifts in topic themes. The hot research topics are the application of the machine or deep learning towards social media in general, alcohol consumption in different regions and its impact, Social engagement and media platforms. Moreover, the consistent topics in both models include food management in disaster, health study of diverse age groups, and emerging topics include drug violence, analysis of social media news for misinformation, and problems of Internet addiction.

Originality/value

This study extends the existing topic modeling-based studies that analyze the social media literature from a specific disciplinary viewpoint. It focuses on semantic validations of topic-modeling output and correlations among the topics and also provides a two-stage cluster analysis of the topics.

• Social media
• Topic models
• Latent dirichlet allocation
• Topic trends
• Temporal evolution

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the major project of philosophy and social science research in colleges and universities of Jiangsu Province “Research on the Construction of Selective Compulsory Courses of Ideological and Political Science in Higher vocational Colleges” (2022SJZDSZ011) and the Research Project of Nanjing Polytechnic Institute (2020SKYJo3).

Inaam ul haq, M. , Li, Q. , Hou, J. and Iftekhar, A. (2023), "Detecting the research structure and topic trends of social media using static and dynamic probabilistic topic models", Aslib Journal of Information Management , Vol. 75 No. 2, pp. 215-245. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-02-2022-0091

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43+ Latest Social Media Research Topics for College Students

• Post author By Ankit
• February 7, 2024

Did you know that over 4.5 billion people actively use social media worldwide? That’s like half of the entire world’s people! With billions logging on daily, social media has changed how we communicate. As college students living in this digital time, we must know how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram shape society. 

Studying social media isn’t just about oversharing selfies – it helps us learn about human behavior, marketing techniques, cyberbullying, privacy issues, and more. 

This blog shares the most exciting social media research topics for college students. 

Table of Contents

Latest Social Media Research Topics For College Students

Check out the latest social media research topics for college students in tabular form.

Social Impact

1. Mental Health Awareness: Explore how social media can help spread understanding about mental health among teens. Look into campaigns and posts that help reduce stigma and offer support.

2. Activism Movements: See how social media helps people organize for causes they believe in. Look at examples of successful campaigns and the challenges activists face online.

3. Political Opinions: Study how social media affects young people’s political opinions. Look at how people only hear opinions they agree with and how false information spreads.

4. Community Building: Learn how social media helps different groups connect. Look at how these online groups offer support and share ideas.

5. Self-Esteem & Body Image: How social media affects teenagers’ feelings about themselves and their bodies. Explore how seeing idealized images can make people feel bad about themselves.

Also Read: 211+ Sociology Research Topics for College Students [2024]

Technical & Algorithmic Aspects

6. Content Algorithms: Understand how social media decides what to show you. Learn about the things that affect how posts appear in your feed.

7. Data Privacy: Explore how social media keeps your information safe. See how your data is collected, stored, and used for ads.

8. Artificial Intelligence: Learn how computers moderate what’s posted online. Look into how they can find and remove harmful content.

9. Personalized Advertising: See how ads on social media are tailored to you. Learn about how ads are based on what you’re interested in.

10. Misinformation Detection: Understand how social media tries to stop fake news. Learn how sites check if something is true before letting it spread.

Specific Platforms & Communities

11. TikTok Trends: Explore what’s popular on TikTok and how it spreads. Learn about the dances, challenges, jokes that get shared and discover strategies to boost your TikTok views .

12. Instagram Creativity: See how people express themselves on Instagram. Learn about the filters, tags, and stories they use.

13. Twitter Discourse: Learn about the conversations happening on Twitter. See how topics become trending and how people share their thoughts.

14. Reddit Subcultures: Explore the different groups on Reddit. Learn how people share interests and vote on what they like.

15. Facebook Groups: See how people connect on Facebook. Learn how groups help people talk about shared interests and issues.

Privacy & Security

16. Data Protection Laws: Understand laws that protect your personal information online.

17. Online Safety Tips: Learn how to stay safe from scams and cyberbullying on social media.

18. Two-Factor Authentication: Explore adding extra security to your social media accounts.

19. Privacy Settings: Understand how to control who sees your posts and information on social media.

20. Identity Theft Awareness: Learn the risks of sharing too much personal information online.

Education & Learning

21. Online Courses: Explore how social media platforms offer educational content and courses.

22. Study Groups: See how students use social media to collaborate and study together.

23. Learning Communities: Join online communities focused on specific subjects or skills.

24. Educational Resources: Find and share educational resources and materials on social media.

25. Teacher Collaboration: Explore how teachers use social media to connect and share teaching strategies.

Entertainment & Media

26. Fan Communities: Explore online communities dedicated to fandoms and fan culture.

27. Content Creation: Learn how people create and share content on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

28. Livestreaming: Explore the world of live video streaming on platforms like Instagram Live and Facebook Live.

29. Viral Trends: Explore popular trends and challenges that go viral on social media.

30. Digital Art & Creativity: Discover how artists use social media to showcase their work and connect with fans.

Health & Wellness

31. Fitness Communities: Explore online communities focused on fitness and wellness.

32. Healthy Living Tips: Discover tips and advice for maintaining a healthy lifestyle shared on social media.

33. Mental Health Support: Find resources and communities that support mental health challenges.

34. Nutrition & Diet: Learn about nutrition and diet tips shared by health experts and influencers on social media.

35. Self-Care Practices: Explore self-care routines and practices individuals share on social media platforms.

Travel & Exploration

36. Travel Inspiration: Explore travel photos and stories travelers share on social media.

37. Travel Planning Tips: Discover tips and advice for planning trips shared by travel influencers.

38. Destination Guides: Find and share destination guides and recommendations on social media.

39. Solo Travel Communities: Connect with other solo travelers and share experiences and tips.

40. Adventure Activities: Discover adventure activities and experiences thrill-seekers share on social media.

Fashion & Style

41. Fashion Trends: Explore the latest fashion trends and styles showcased on social media platforms.

42. Style Tips: Discover styling tips and advice fashion influencers and bloggers share.

43. DIY Fashion: Learn how to create your fashion pieces through DIY tutorials shared on social media.

44. Fashion Communities: Connect with other fashion enthusiasts and share outfit ideas and inspirations.

45. Sustainable Fashion: Explore sustainable fashion practices and brands promoted on social media.

Career & Professional Development

46. Job Opportunities: Explore job postings and career opportunities shared on social media platforms like LinkedIn.

47. Networking Tips: Discover tips for networking and building professional connections on social media.

48. Resume Building: Learn how to create an effective resume and showcase your skills on social media profiles.

49. Interview Preparation: Find resources and advice for preparing for job interviews shared by career experts.

50. Freelancing Communities: Connect with other freelancers and share tips and advice for succeeding in the gig economy.

Hence, these are the trending Social Media Research Topics for College Students from which you can pick one.

Also Read: Top 11+ Career Benefits of Studying Abroad

How Do You Choose The Perfect Social Media Research Topics?

Social media is a significant aspect of our daily existence. There are so many exciting research topics for your college paper or project. Picking the right one can be tricky, but here is how to narrow it down.

1. Think About Your Interests

Start by brainstorming what social media platforms and topics interest you. Are you into Instagram trends? Facebook analytics? Snapchat filters? Knowing your interests will help you pick a topic you want to research and learn about.

2. Consider Current Events

Look at what’s happening right now in the social media world. Are people debating about privacy settings? Is a new platform getting popular? Current events and controversies make cool research topics.

3. Look for Gaps in Research

Search online to see what other studies have already been done. Then, you can find gaps where more research is needed. Filling those gaps by studying something new can lead to incredible discoveries.

4. Talk to Your Teacher

Your teacher will know good topics related to what you’re studying in class. See if they have suggestions based on what would work for the assignment. Their guidance can help narrow your choices.

5. Start Broad, Then Narrow Down

Begin with a broad subject like “Social Media and Culture,” then gradually narrow it down as you go. Add details about the specific platform, users, or effects you want to focus on for a defined topic.

6. Consider Your Research Method

Will you do surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments? Some topics work better with certain research methods. Think about how you’ll conduct the study when weighing your options.

7. Pick a Topic That’s Manageable

Make sure you pick a focused enough topic to research and reasonably write about within the time frame. A subject that’s too broad can be hard to tackle.

8. Write Down a List of Ideas

Keep a running list of all your potential topic ideas. Cross off the ones that don’t work. Circle your top choices. Taking notes helps to arrange your ideas.

9. Discuss Ideas with Classmates

Your classmates might have great suggestions you haven’t thought of. Or they can help you decide between topic options. Talking it through can give you a fresh perspective.

10. Don’t Forget About Your Passion!

Most importantly, choose a topic that you genuinely care about and excites you. Your enthusiasm will motivate you through the research process.

Hopefully, these tips will make it easier to pick the perfect social media research topic for your project. 

What Makes A Perfect Social Media Research Topic?

Take into account the following factors to make sure your topic is powerful and exciting:

First, your topic should be super easy to understand so people understand what you’re discussing. Choose something that’s not confusing or vague.

Trend Relevancy

Second, it should relate to what’s happening now with social media and not be about old platforms or trends no one cares about anymore. Look at what sites and apps are popular today to pick a topic that matters.

New Insights

Finally, your research should uncover stuff people don’t already know. If there’s already a ton of studies on the same thing, it won’t be that interesting. Look for gaps in our knowledge so your work teaches us something new.

Researching social media is so essential for students today. We practically live our lives on sites like Instagram and TikTok. We could learn much about how social media impacts society, relationships, and mental health. 

The possibilities are endless for research topics! Don’t be afraid to dive in and choose something you feel passionate about. Your research can create real change and impact. You have control over what happens next, so make it meaningful.

How does social media influence politics and democracy?

Social media enables the spread of misinformation, impacts voting, and polarizes political discourse.

How does social media affect body image and self-perception?

Social media imagery fosters unrealistic beauty standards, negative social comparisons, and poor body image.

What are the privacy risks of social media data mining?

User data collection raises issues around consent, transparency, profiling, and exploitation.

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Research trends in social media addiction and problematic social media use: A bibliometric analysis

Alfonso pellegrino.

1 Sasin School of Management, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

Alessandro Stasi

2 Business Administration Division, Mahidol University International College, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand

Veera Bhatiasevi

Associated data.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

Despite their increasing ubiquity in people's lives and incredible advantages in instantly interacting with others, social media's impact on subjective well-being is a source of concern worldwide and calls for up-to-date investigations of the role social media plays in mental health. Much research has discovered how habitual social media use may lead to addiction and negatively affect adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. The present study was conducted to review the extant literature in the domain of social media and analyze global research productivity during 2013–2022. Bibliometric analysis was conducted on 501 articles that were extracted from the Scopus database using the keywords social media addiction and problematic social media use. The data were then uploaded to VOSviewer software to analyze citations, co-citations, and keyword co-occurrences. Volume, growth trajectory, geographic distribution of the literature, influential authors, intellectual structure of the literature, and the most prolific publishing sources were analyzed. The bibliometric analysis presented in this paper shows that the US, the UK, and Turkey accounted for 47% of the publications in this field. Most of the studies used quantitative methods in analyzing data and therefore aimed at testing relationships between variables. In addition, the findings in this study show that most analysis were cross-sectional. Studies were performed on undergraduate students between the ages of 19–25 on the use of two social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram. Limitations as well as research directions for future studies are also discussed.

Introduction

Social media generally refers to third-party internet-based platforms that mainly focus on social interactions, community-based inputs, and content sharing among its community of users and only feature content created by their users and not that licensed from third parties ( 1 ). Social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are prominent examples of social media that allow people to stay connected in an online world regardless of geographical distance or other obstacles ( 2 , 3 ). Recent evidence suggests that social networking sites have become increasingly popular among adolescents following the strict policies implemented by many countries to counter the COVID-19 pandemic, including social distancing, “lockdowns,” and quarantine measures ( 4 ). In this new context, social media have become an essential part of everyday life, especially for children and adolescents ( 5 ). For them such media are a means of socialization that connect people together. Interestingly, social media are not only used for social communication and entertainment purposes but also for sharing opinions, learning new things, building business networks, and initiate collaborative projects ( 6 ).

Among the 7.91 billion people in the world as of 2022, 4.62 billion active social media users, and the average time individuals spent using the internet was 6 h 58 min per day with an average use of social media platforms of 2 h and 27 min ( 7 ). Despite their increasing ubiquity in people's lives and the incredible advantages they offer to instantly interact with people, an increasing number of studies have linked social media use to negative mental health consequences, such as suicidality, loneliness, and anxiety ( 8 ). Numerous sources have expressed widespread concern about the effects of social media on mental health. A 2011 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) identifies a phenomenon known as Facebook depression which may be triggered “when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic symptoms of depression” ( 9 ). Similarly, the UK's Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) claims that there is a clear evidence of the relationship between social media use and mental health issues based on a survey of nearly 1,500 people between the ages of 14–24 ( 10 ). According to some authors, the increase in usage frequency of social media significantly increases the risks of clinical disorders described (and diagnosed) as “Facebook depression,” “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and “social comparison orientation” (SCO) ( 11 ). Other risks include sexting ( 12 ), social media stalking ( 13 ), cyber-bullying ( 14 ), privacy breaches ( 15 ), and improper use of technology. Therefore, social media's impact on subjective well-being is a source of concern worldwide and calls for up-to-date investigations of the role social media plays with regard to mental health ( 8 ). Many studies have found that habitual social media use may lead to addiction and thus negatively affect adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships ( 16 – 18 ). As a result of addiction, the user becomes highly engaged with online activities motivated by an uncontrollable desire to browse through social media pages and “devoting so much time and effort to it that it impairs other important life areas” ( 19 ).

Given these considerations, the present study was conducted to review the extant literature in the domain of social media and analyze global research productivity during 2013–2022. The study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading trends with particular regard to “social media addiction” and “problematic social media use.” This is valuable as it allows for a comprehensive overview of the current state of this field of research, as well as identifies any patterns or trends that may be present. Additionally, it provides information on the geographical distribution and prolific authors in this area, which may help to inform future research endeavors.

In terms of bibliometric analysis of social media addiction research, few studies have attempted to review the existing literature in the domain extensively. Most previous bibliometric studies on social media addiction and problematic use have focused mainly on one type of screen time activity such as digital gaming or texting ( 20 ) and have been conducted with a focus on a single platform such as Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat ( 21 , 22 ). The present study adopts a more comprehensive approach by including all social media platforms and all types of screen time activities in its analysis.

Additionally, this review aims to highlight the major themes around which the research has evolved to date and draws some guidance for future research directions. In order to meet these objectives, this work is oriented toward answering the following research questions:

• (1) What is the current status of research focusing on social media addiction?
• (2) What are the key thematic areas in social media addiction and problematic use research?
• (3) What is the intellectual structure of social media addiction as represented in the academic literature?
• (4) What are the key findings of social media addiction and problematic social media research?
• (5) What possible future research gaps can be identified in the field of social media addiction?

These research questions will be answered using bibliometric analysis of the literature on social media addiction and problematic use. This will allow for an overview of the research that has been conducted in this area, including information on the most influential authors, journals, countries of publication, and subject areas of study. Part 2 of the study will provide an examination of the intellectual structure of the extant literature in social media addiction while Part 3 will discuss the research methodology of the paper. Part 4 will discuss the findings of the study followed by a discussion under Part 5 of the paper. Finally, in Part 7, gaps in current knowledge about this field of research will be identified.

Literature review

Social media addiction research context.

Previous studies on behavioral addictions have looked at a lot of different factors that affect social media addiction focusing on personality traits. Although there is some inconsistency in the literature, numerous studies have focused on three main personality traits that may be associated with social media addiction, namely anxiety, depression, and extraversion ( 23 , 24 ).

It has been found that extraversion scores are strongly associated with increased use of social media and addiction to it ( 25 , 26 ). People with social anxiety as well as people who have psychiatric disorders often find online interactions extremely appealing ( 27 ). The available literature also reveals that the use of social media is positively associated with being female, single, and having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), or anxiety ( 28 ).

In a study by Seidman ( 29 ), the Big Five personality traits were assessed using Saucier's ( 30 ) Mini-Markers Scale. Results indicated that neurotic individuals use social media as a safe place for expressing their personality and meet belongingness needs. People affected by neurosis tend to use online social media to stay in touch with other people and feel better about their social lives ( 31 ). Narcissism is another factor that has been examined extensively when it comes to social media, and it has been found that people who are narcissistic are more likely to become addicted to social media ( 32 ). In this case users want to be seen and get “likes” from lots of other users. Longstreet and Brooks ( 33 ) did a study on how life satisfaction depends on how much money people make. Life satisfaction was found to be negatively linked to social media addiction, according to the results. When social media addiction decreases, the level of life satisfaction rises. But results show that in lieu of true-life satisfaction people use social media as a substitute (for temporary pleasure vs. longer term happiness).

Researchers have discovered similar patterns in students who tend to rank high in shyness: they find it easier to express themselves online rather than in person ( 34 , 35 ). With the use of social media, shy individuals have the opportunity to foster better quality relationships since many of their anxiety-related concerns (e.g., social avoidance and fear of social devaluation) are significantly reduced ( 36 , 37 ).

Problematic use of social media

The amount of research on problematic use of social media has dramatically increased since the last decade. But using social media in an unhealthy manner may not be considered an addiction or a disorder as this behavior has not yet been formally categorized as such ( 38 ). Although research has shown that people who use social media in a negative way often report negative health-related conditions, most of the data that have led to such results and conclusions comprise self-reported data ( 39 ). The dimensions of excessive social media usage are not exactly known because there are not enough diagnostic criteria and not enough high-quality long-term studies available yet. This is what Zendle and Bowden-Jones ( 40 ) noted in their own research. And this is why terms like “problematic social media use” have been used to describe people who use social media in a negative way. Furthermore, if a lot of time is spent on social media, it can be hard to figure out just when it is being used in a harmful way. For instance, people easily compare their appearance to what they see on social media, and this might lead to low self-esteem if they feel they do not look as good as the people they are following. According to research in this domain, the extent to which an individual engages in photo-related activities (e.g., taking selfies, editing photos, checking other people's photos) on social media is associated with negative body image concerns. Through curated online images of peers, adolescents face challenges to their self-esteem and sense of self-worth and are increasingly isolated from face-to-face interaction.

To address this problem the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) has been used by some scholars ( 41 , 42 ). These scholars have used criteria from the DSM-V to describe one problematic social media use, internet gaming disorder, but such criteria could also be used to describe other types of social media disorders. Franchina et al. ( 43 ) and Scott and Woods ( 44 ), for example, focus their attention on individual-level factors (like fear of missing out) and family-level factors (like childhood abuse) that have been used to explain why people use social media in a harmful way. Friends-level factors have also been explored as a social well-being measurement to explain why people use social media in a malevolent way and demonstrated significant positive correlations with lower levels of friend support ( 45 ). Macro-level factors have also been suggested, such as the normalization of surveillance ( 46 ) and the ability to see what people are doing online ( 47 ). Gender and age seem to be highly associated to the ways people use social media negatively. Particularly among girls, social media use is consistently associated with mental health issues ( 41 , 48 , 49 ), an association more common among older girls than younger girls ( 46 , 48 ).

Most studies have looked at the connection between social media use and its effects (such as social media addiction) and a number of different psychosomatic disorders. In a recent study conducted by Vannucci and Ohannessian ( 50 ), the use of social media appears to have a variety of effects “on psychosocial adjustment during early adolescence, with high social media use being the most problematic.” It has been found that people who use social media in a harmful way are more likely to be depressed, anxious, have low self-esteem, be more socially isolated, have poorer sleep quality, and have more body image dissatisfaction. Furthermore, harmful social media use has been associated with unhealthy lifestyle patterns (for example, not getting enough exercise or having trouble managing daily obligations) as well as life threatening behaviors such as illicit drug use, excessive alcohol consumption and unsafe sexual practices ( 51 , 52 ).

A growing body of research investigating social media use has revealed that the extensive use of social media platforms is correlated with a reduced performance on cognitive tasks and in mental effort ( 53 ). Overall, it appears that individuals who have a problematic relationship with social media or those who use social media more frequently are more likely to develop negative health conditions.

Social media addiction and problematic use systematic reviews

Previous studies have revealed the detrimental impacts of social media addiction on users' health. A systematic review by Khan and Khan ( 20 ) has pointed out that social media addiction has a negative impact on users' mental health. For example, social media addiction can lead to stress levels rise, loneliness, and sadness ( 54 ). Anxiety is another common mental health problem associated with social media addiction. Studies have found that young adolescents who are addicted to social media are more likely to suffer from anxiety than people who are not addicted to social media ( 55 ). In addition, social media addiction can also lead to physical health problems, such as obesity and carpal tunnel syndrome a result of spending too much time on the computer ( 22 ).

Apart from the negative impacts of social media addiction on users' mental and physical health, social media addiction can also lead to other problems. For example, social media addiction can lead to financial problems. A study by Sharif and Yeoh ( 56 ) has found that people who are addicted to social media tend to spend more money than those who are not addicted to social media. In addition, social media addiction can also lead to a decline in academic performance. Students who are addicted to social media are more likely to have lower grades than those who are not addicted to social media ( 57 ).

Research methodology

Bibliometric analysis.

Merigo et al. ( 58 ) use bibliometric analysis to examine, organize, and analyze a large body of literature from a quantitative, objective perspective in order to assess patterns of research and emerging trends in a certain field. A bibliometric methodology is used to identify the current state of the academic literature, advance research. and find objective information ( 59 ). This technique allows the researchers to examine previous scientific work, comprehend advancements in prior knowledge, and identify future study opportunities.

To achieve this objective and identify the research trends in social media addiction and problematic social media use, this study employs two bibliometric methodologies: performance analysis and science mapping. Performance analysis uses a series of bibliometric indicators (e.g., number of annual publications, document type, source type, journal impact factor, languages, subject area, h-index, and countries) and aims at evaluating groups of scientific actors on a particular topic of research. VOSviewer software ( 60 ) was used to carry out the science mapping. The software is used to visualize a particular body of literature and map the bibliographic material using the co-occurrence analysis of author, index keywords, nations, and fields of publication ( 61 , 62 ).

Data collection

After picking keywords, designing the search strings, and building up a database, the authors conducted a bibliometric literature search. Scopus was utilized to gather exploration data since it is a widely used database that contains the most comprehensive view of the world's research output and provides one of the most effective search engines. If the research was to be performed using other database such as Web Of Science or Google Scholar the authors may have obtained larger number of articles however they may not have been all particularly relevant as Scopus is known to have the most widest and most relevant scholar search engine in marketing and social science. A keyword search for “social media addiction” OR “problematic social media use” yielded 553 papers, which were downloaded from Scopus. The information was gathered in March 2022, and because the Scopus database is updated on a regular basis, the results may change in the future. Next, the authors examined the titles and abstracts to see whether they were relevant to the topics treated. There were two common grounds for document exclusion. First, while several documents emphasized the negative effects of addiction in relation to the internet and digital media, they did not focus on social networking sites specifically. Similarly, addiction and problematic consumption habits were discussed in relation to social media in several studies, although only in broad terms. This left a total of 511 documents. Articles were then limited only to journal articles, conference papers, reviews, books, and only those published in English. This process excluded 10 additional documents. Then, the relevance of the remaining articles was finally checked by reading the titles, abstracts, and keywords. Documents were excluded if social networking sites were only mentioned as a background topic or very generally. This resulted in a final selection of 501 research papers, which were then subjected to bibliometric analysis (see Figure 1 ).

Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) flowchart showing the search procedures used in the review.

After identifying 501 Scopus files, bibliographic data related to these documents were imported into an Excel sheet where the authors' names, their affiliations, document titles, keywords, abstracts, and citation figures were analyzed. These were subsequently uploaded into VOSViewer software version 1.6.8 to begin the bibliometric review. Descriptive statistics were created to define the whole body of knowledge about social media addiction and problematic social media use. VOSViewer was used to analyze citation, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrences. According to Zupic and Cater ( 63 ), co-citation analysis measures the influence of documents, authors, and journals heavily cited and thus considered influential. Co-citation analysis has the objective of building similarities between authors, journals, and documents and is generally defined as the frequency with which two units are cited together within the reference list of a third article.

The implementation of social media addiction performance analysis was conducted according to the models recently introduced by Karjalainen et al. ( 64 ) and Pattnaik ( 65 ). Throughout the manuscript there are operational definitions of relevant terms and indicators following a standardized bibliometric approach. The cumulative academic impact (CAI) of the documents was measured by the number of times they have been cited in other scholarly works while the fine-grained academic impact (FIA) was computed according to the authors citation analysis and authors co-citation analysis within the reference lists of documents that have been specifically focused on social media addiction and problematic social media use.

Results of the study presented here include the findings on social media addiction and social media problematic use. The results are presented by the foci outlined in the study questions.

Volume, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of the literature

After performing the Scopus-based investigation of the current literature regarding social media addiction and problematic use of social media, the authors obtained a knowledge base consisting of 501 documents comprising 455 journal articles, 27 conference papers, 15 articles reviews, 3 books and 1 conference review. The included literature was very recent. As shown in Figure 2 , publication rates started very slowly in 2013 but really took off in 2018, after which publications dramatically increased each year until a peak was reached in 2021 with 195 publications. Analyzing the literature published during the past decade reveals an exponential increase in scholarly production on social addiction and its problematic use. This might be due to the increasingly widespread introduction of social media sites in everyday life and the ubiquitous diffusion of mobile devices that have fundamentally impacted human behavior. The dip in the number of publications in 2022 is explained by the fact that by the time the review was carried out the year was not finished yet and therefore there are many articles still in press.

Annual volume of social media addiction or social media problematic use ( n = 501).

The geographical distribution trends of scholarly publications on social media addiction or problematic use of social media are highlighted in Figure 3 . The articles were assigned to a certain country according to the nationality of the university with whom the first author was affiliated with. The figure shows that the most productive countries are the USA (92), the U.K. (79), and Turkey ( 63 ), which combined produced 236 articles, equal to 47% of the entire scholarly production examined in this bibliometric analysis. Turkey has slowly evolved in various ways with the growth of the internet and social media. Anglo-American scholarly publications on problematic social media consumer behavior represent the largest research output. Yet it is interesting to observe that social networking sites studies are attracting many researchers in Asian countries, particularly China. For many Chinese people, social networking sites are a valuable opportunity to involve people in political activism in addition to simply making purchases ( 66 ).

Global dispersion of social networking sites in relation to social media addiction or social media problematic use.

Analysis of influential authors

This section analyses the high-impact authors in the Scopus-indexed knowledge base on social networking sites in relation to social media addiction or problematic use of social media. It provides valuable insights for establishing patterns of knowledge generation and dissemination of literature about social networking sites relating to addiction and problematic use.

Table 1 acknowledges the top 10 most highly cited authors with the highest total citations in the database.

Highly cited authors on social media addiction and problematic use ( n = 501).

a Total link strength indicates the number of publications in which an author occurs.

Table 1 shows that MD Griffiths (sixty-five articles), CY Lin (twenty articles), and AH Pakpour (eighteen articles) are the most productive scholars according to the number of Scopus documents examined in the area of social media addiction and its problematic use . If the criteria are changed and authors ranked according to the overall number of citations received in order to determine high-impact authors, the same three authors turn out to be the most highly cited authors. It should be noted that these highly cited authors tend to enlist several disciplines in examining social media addiction and problematic use. Griffiths, for example, focuses on behavioral addiction stemming from not only digital media usage but also from gambling and video games. Lin, on the other hand, focuses on the negative effects that the internet and digital media can have on users' mental health, and Pakpour approaches the issue from a behavioral medicine perspective.

Intellectual structure of the literature

In this part of the paper, the authors illustrate the “intellectual structure” of the social media addiction and the problematic use of social media's literature. An author co-citation analysis (ACA) was performed which is displayed as a figure that depicts the relations between highly co-cited authors. The study of co-citation assumes that strongly co-cited authors carry some form of intellectual similarity ( 67 ). Figure 4 shows the author co-citation map. Nodes represent units of analysis (in this case scholars) and network ties represent similarity connections. Nodes are sized according to the number of co-citations received—the bigger the node, the more co-citations it has. Adjacent nodes are considered intellectually similar.

Two clusters, representing the intellectual structure of the social media and its problematic use literature.

Scholars belonging to the green cluster (Mental Health and Digital Media Addiction) have extensively published on medical analysis tools and how these can be used to heal users suffering from addiction to digital media, which can range from gambling, to internet, to videogame addictions. Scholars in this school of thought focus on the negative effects on users' mental health, such as depression, anxiety, and personality disturbances. Such studies focus also on the role of screen use in the development of mental health problems and the increasing use of medical treatments to address addiction to digital media. They argue that addiction to digital media should be considered a mental health disorder and treatment options should be made available to users.

In contrast, scholars within the red cluster (Social Media Effects on Well Being and Cyberpsychology) have focused their attention on the effects of social media toward users' well-being and how social media change users' behavior, focusing particular attention on the human-machine interaction and how methods and models can help protect users' well-being. Two hundred and two authors belong to this group, the top co-cited being Andreassen (667 co-citations), Pallasen (555 co-citations), and Valkenburg (215 co-citations). These authors have extensively studied the development of addiction to social media, problem gambling, and internet addiction. They have also focused on the measurement of addiction to social media, cyberbullying, and the dark side of social media.

Most influential source title in the field of social media addiction and its problematic use

To find the preferred periodicals in the field of social media addiction and its problematic use, the authors have selected 501 articles published in 263 journals. Table 2 gives a ranked list of the top 10 journals that constitute the core publishing sources in the field of social media addiction research. In doing so, the authors analyzed the journal's impact factor, Scopus Cite Score, h-index, quartile ranking, and number of publications per year.

Top 10 most cited and more frequently mentioned documents in the field of social media addiction.

The journal Addictive Behaviors topped the list, with 700 citations and 22 publications (4.3%), followed by Computers in Human Behaviors , with 577 citations and 13 publications (2.5%), Journal of Behavioral Addictions , with 562 citations and 17 publications (3.3%), and International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction , with 502 citations and 26 publications (5.1%). Five of the 10 most productive journals in the field of social media addiction research are published by Elsevier (all Q1 rankings) while Springer and Frontiers Media published one journal each.

Documents citation analysis identified the most influential and most frequently mentioned documents in a certain scientific field. Andreassen has received the most citations among the 10 most significant papers on social media addiction, with 405 ( Table 2 ). The main objective of this type of studies was to identify the associations and the roles of different variables as predictors of social media addiction (e.g., ( 19 , 68 , 69 )). According to general addiction models, the excessive and problematic use of digital technologies is described as “being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable motivation to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas” ( 27 , 70 ). Furthermore, the purpose of several highly cited studies ( 31 , 71 ) was to analyse the connections between young adults' sleep quality and psychological discomfort, depression, self-esteem, and life satisfaction and the severity of internet and problematic social media use, since the health of younger generations and teenagers is of great interest this may help explain the popularity of such papers. Despite being the most recent publication Lin et al.'s work garnered more citations annually. The desire to quantify social media addiction in individuals can also help explain the popularity of studies which try to develop measurement scales ( 42 , 72 ). Some of the highest-ranked publications are devoted to either the presentation of case studies or testing relationships among psychological constructs ( 73 ).

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

The research question, “What are the key thematic areas in social media addiction literature?” was answered using keyword co-occurrence analysis. Keyword co-occurrence analysis is conducted to identify research themes and discover keywords. It mainly examines the relationships between co-occurrence keywords in a wide variety of literature ( 74 ). In this approach, the idea is to explore the frequency of specific keywords being mentioned together.

Utilizing VOSviewer, the authors conducted a keyword co-occurrence analysis to characterize and review the developing trends in the field of social media addiction. The top 10 most frequent keywords are presented in Table 3 . The results indicate that “social media addiction” is the most frequent keyword (178 occurrences), followed by “problematic social media use” (74 occurrences), “internet addiction” (51 occurrences), and “depression” (46 occurrences). As shown in the co-occurrence network ( Figure 5 ), the keywords can be grouped into two major clusters. “Problematic social media use” can be identified as the core theme of the green cluster. In the red cluster, keywords mainly identify a specific aspect of problematic social media use: social media addiction.

Frequency of occurrence of top 10 keywords.

Keywords co-occurrence map. Threshold: 5 co-occurrences.

The results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis for journal articles provide valuable perspectives and tools for understanding concepts discussed in past studies of social media usage ( 75 ). More precisely, it can be noted that there has been a large body of research on social media addiction together with other types of technological addictions, such as compulsive web surfing, internet gaming disorder, video game addiction and compulsive online shopping ( 76 – 78 ). This field of research has mainly been directed toward teenagers, middle school students, and college students and university students in order to understand the relationship between social media addiction and mental health issues such as depression, disruptions in self-perceptions, impairment of social and emotional activity, anxiety, neuroticism, and stress ( 79 – 81 ).

The findings presented in this paper show that there has been an exponential increase in scholarly publications—from two publications in 2013 to 195 publications in 2021. There were 45 publications in 2022 at the time this study was conducted. It was interesting to observe that the US, the UK, and Turkey accounted for 47% of the publications in this field even though none of these countries are in the top 15 countries in terms of active social media penetration ( 82 ) although the US has the third highest number of social media users ( 83 ). Even though China and India have the highest number of social media users ( 83 ), first and second respectively, they rank fifth and tenth in terms of publications on social media addiction or problematic use of social media. In fact, the US has almost double the number of publications in this field compared to China and almost five times compared to India. Even though East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia make up the top three regions in terms of worldwide social media users ( 84 ), except for China and India there have been only a limited number of publications on social media addiction or problematic use. An explanation for that could be that there is still a lack of awareness on the negative consequences of the use of social media and the impact it has on the mental well-being of users. More research in these regions should perhaps be conducted in order to understand the problematic use and addiction of social media so preventive measures can be undertaken.

From the bibliometric analysis, it was found that most of the studies examined used quantitative methods in analyzing data and therefore aimed at testing relationships between variables. In addition, many studies were empirical, aimed at testing relationships based on direct or indirect observations of social media use. Very few studies used theories and for the most part if they did they used the technology acceptance model and social comparison theories. The findings presented in this paper show that none of the studies attempted to create or test new theories in this field, perhaps due to the lack of maturity of the literature. Moreover, neither have very many qualitative studies been conducted in this field. More qualitative research in this field should perhaps be conducted as it could explore the motivations and rationales from which certain users' behavior may arise.

The authors found that almost all the publications on social media addiction or problematic use relied on samples of undergraduate students between the ages of 19–25. The average daily time spent by users worldwide on social media applications was highest for users between the ages of 40–44, at 59.85 min per day, followed by those between the ages of 35–39, at 59.28 min per day, and those between the ages of 45–49, at 59.23 per day ( 85 ). Therefore, more studies should be conducted exploring different age groups, as users between the ages of 19–25 do not represent the entire population of social media users. Conducting studies on different age groups may yield interesting and valuable insights to the field of social media addiction. For example, it would be interesting to measure the impacts of social media use among older users aged 50 years or older who spend almost the same amount of time on social media as other groups of users (56.43 min per day) ( 85 ).

A majority of the studies tested social media addiction or problematic use based on only two social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram. Although Facebook and Instagram are ranked first and fourth in terms of most popular social networks by number of monthly users, it would be interesting to study other platforms such as YouTube, which is ranked second, and WhatsApp, which is ranked third ( 86 ). Furthermore, TikTok would also be an interesting platform to study as it has grown in popularity in recent years, evident from it being the most downloaded application in 2021, with 656 million downloads ( 87 ), and is ranked second in Q1 of 2022 ( 88 ). Moreover, most of the studies focused only on one social media platform. Comparing different social media platforms would yield interesting results because each platform is different in terms of features, algorithms, as well as recommendation engines. The purpose as well as the user behavior for using each platform is also different, therefore why users are addicted to these platforms could provide a meaningful insight into social media addiction and problematic social media use.

Lastly, most studies were cross-sectional, and not longitudinal, aiming at describing results over a certain point in time and not over a long period of time. A longitudinal study could better describe the long-term effects of social media use.

This study was conducted to review the extant literature in the field of social media and analyze the global research productivity during the period ranging from 2013 to 2022. The study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading trends with particular regard to “social media addiction” and “problematic social media use.” The authors applied science mapping to lay out a knowledge base on social media addiction and its problematic use. This represents the first large-scale analysis in this area of study.

A keyword search of “social media addiction” OR “problematic social media use” yielded 553 papers, which were downloaded from Scopus. After performing the Scopus-based investigation of the current literature regarding social media addiction and problematic use, the authors ended up with a knowledge base consisting of 501 documents comprising 455 journal articles, 27 conference papers, 15 articles reviews, 3 books, and 1 conference review.

The geographical distribution trends of scholarly publications on social media addiction or problematic use indicate that the most productive countries were the USA (92), the U.K. (79), and Turkey ( 63 ), which together produced 236 articles. Griffiths (sixty-five articles), Lin (twenty articles), and Pakpour (eighteen articles) were the most productive scholars according to the number of Scopus documents examined in the area of social media addiction and its problematic use. An author co-citation analysis (ACA) was conducted which generated a layout of social media effects on well-being and cyber psychology as well as mental health and digital media addiction in the form of two research literature clusters representing the intellectual structure of social media and its problematic use.

The preferred periodicals in the field of social media addiction and its problematic use were Addictive Behaviors , with 700 citations and 22 publications, followed by Computers in Human Behavior , with 577 citations and 13 publications, and Journal of Behavioral Addictions , with 562 citations and 17 publications. Keyword co-occurrence analysis was used to investigate the key thematic areas in the social media literature, as represented by the top three keyword phrases in terms of their frequency of occurrence, namely, “social media addiction,” “problematic social media use,” and “social media addiction.”

This research has a few limitations. The authors used science mapping to improve the comprehension of the literature base in this review. First and foremost, the authors want to emphasize that science mapping should not be utilized in place of established review procedures, but rather as a supplement. As a result, this review can be considered the initial stage, followed by substantive research syntheses that examine findings from recent research. Another constraint stems from how 'social media addiction' is defined. The authors overcame this limitation by inserting the phrase “social media addiction” OR “problematic social media use” in the search string. The exclusive focus on SCOPUS-indexed papers creates a third constraint. The SCOPUS database has a larger number of papers than does Web of Science although it does not contain all the publications in a given field.

Although the total body of literature on social media addiction is larger than what is covered in this review, the use of co-citation analyses helped to mitigate this limitation. This form of bibliometric study looks at all the publications listed in the reference list of the extracted SCOPUS database documents. As a result, a far larger dataset than the one extracted from SCOPUS initially has been analyzed.

The interpretation of co-citation maps should be mentioned as a last constraint. The reason is that the procedure is not always clear, so scholars must have a thorough comprehension of the knowledge base in order to make sense of the result of the analysis ( 63 ). This issue was addressed by the authors' expertise, but it remains somewhat subjective.

Implications

The findings of this study have implications mainly for government entities and parents. The need for regulation of social media addiction is evident when considering the various risks associated with habitual social media use. Social media addiction may lead to negative consequences for adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. In addition, social media addiction may also lead to other risks such as sexting, social media stalking, cyber-bullying, privacy breaches, and improper use of technology. Given the seriousness of these risks, it is important to have regulations in place to protect adolescents from the harms of social media addiction.

Regulation of social media platforms

One way that regulation could help protect adolescents from the harms of social media addiction is by limiting their access to certain websites or platforms. For example, governments could restrict adolescents' access to certain websites or platforms during specific hours of the day. This would help ensure that they are not spending too much time on social media and are instead focusing on their schoolwork or other important activities.

Another way that regulation could help protect adolescents from the harms of social media addiction is by requiring companies to put warning labels on their websites or apps. These labels would warn adolescents about the potential risks associated with excessive use of social media.

Finally, regulation could also require companies to provide information about how much time each day is recommended for using their website or app. This would help adolescents make informed decisions about how much time they want to spend on social media each day. These proposed regulations would help to protect children from the dangers of social media, while also ensuring that social media companies are more transparent and accountable to their users.

Parental involvement in adolescents' social media use

Parents should be involved in their children's social media use to ensure that they are using these platforms safely and responsibly. Parents can monitor their children's online activity, set time limits for social media use, and talk to their children about the risks associated with social media addiction.

Education on responsible social media use

Adolescents need to be educated about responsible social media use so that they can enjoy the benefits of these platforms while avoiding the risks associated with addiction. Education on responsible social media use could include topics such as cyber-bullying, sexting, and privacy breaches.

Research directions for future studies

A content analysis was conducted to answer the fifth research questions “What are the potential research directions for addressing social media addiction in the future?” The study reveals that there is a lack of screening instruments and diagnostic criteria to assess social media addiction. Validated DSM-V-based instruments could shed light on the factors behind social media use disorder. Diagnostic research may be useful in order to understand social media behavioral addiction and gain deeper insights into the factors responsible for psychological stress and psychiatric disorders. In addition to cross-sectional studies, researchers should also conduct longitudinal studies and experiments to assess changes in users' behavior over time ( 20 ).

Another important area to examine is the role of engagement-based ranking and recommendation algorithms in online habit formation. More research is required to ascertain how algorithms determine which content type generates higher user engagement. A clear understanding of the way social media platforms gather content from users and amplify their preferences would lead to the development of a standardized conceptualization of social media usage patterns ( 89 ). This may provide a clearer picture of the factors that lead to problematic social media use and addiction. It has been noted that “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent” in material reshared by users and promoted by social media algorithms ( 90 ).

Additionally, an understanding of engagement-based ranking models and recommendation algorithms is essential in order to implement appropriate public policy measures. To address the specific behavioral concerns created by social media, legislatures must craft appropriate statutes. Thus, future qualitative research to assess engagement based ranking frameworks is extremely necessary in order to provide a broader perspective on social media use and tackle key regulatory gaps. Particular emphasis must be placed on consumer awareness, algorithm bias, privacy issues, ethical platform design, and extraction and monetization of personal data ( 91 ).

From a geographical perspective, the authors have identified some main gaps in the existing knowledge base that uncover the need for further research in certain regions of the world. Accordingly, the authors suggest encouraging more studies on internet and social media addiction in underrepresented regions with high social media penetration rates such as Southeast Asia and South America. In order to draw more contributions from these countries, journals with high impact factors could also make specific calls. This would contribute to educating social media users about platform usage and implement policy changes that support the development of healthy social media practices.

The authors hope that the findings gathered here will serve to fuel interest in this topic and encourage other scholars to investigate social media addiction in other contexts on newer platforms and among wide ranges of sample populations. In light of the rising numbers of people experiencing mental health problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, food disorders, and substance addiction) in recent years, it is likely that the number of papers related to social media addiction and the range of countries covered will rise even further.

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

AP took care of bibliometric analysis and drafting the paper. VB took care of proofreading and adding value to the paper. AS took care of the interpretation of the findings. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• Open access
• Published: 15 February 2024

Emerging trends in social media marketing: a retrospective review using data mining and bibliometric analysis

• Abu Bashar 1 ,
• Mohammad Wasiq 2 ,
• Brighton Nyagadza   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7226-0635 3 , 4 &
• Eugine Tafadzwa Maziriri 5  

Future Business Journal volume  10 , Article number:  23 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Metrics details

The study conducts a comprehensive retrospective analysis of the social media marketing literature along with text mining and bibliometric analysis using data obtained from the Scopus database. The analysis is conducted for the literature published during 2007–2022 using VOSviewer application and Biblioshiny. The analysis revealed the publication trend and emerging themes in the research landscape of social media marketing. This study has pointed towards important theoretical and practical implications pertaining to the social media marketing. It contributes to the understanding of social media marketing research by identifying and listing the best journal, authors, country, documents, most occurred words, social and intellectual structure, and emerging research trends. The results revealed that social media marketing research is at the focal point of the researchers throughout the word. This study found that there are lack of studies from firm perspective especially small retailers; adoption of disruptive technologies such as AI, ML and block chain and its impact need more exploration.

Introduction

The term social media came in limelight in the early 1990s, and now, it became an inseparable entity of almost every individual having an estimated 2 billion + active users globally [ 24 ]. Social media is a dorm of computer-based programme that allows users to connect, create and share information and exchange views and ideas via specific virtual communities and groups (Aydin 2020). The advancement in technology especially mobile applications and cloud-based analytics had enabled firms to offer and connect to their customers in real time. The proliferation of e-commerce web and mobile applications gives rise to the tremendous growth of social media networks and has transformed the ways of communication between business and consumers who generally shares common interests and demographics [ 144 ]. Social media marketing can be regarded as a form of online marketing, and it has seen manifold growth in the recent past. The marketers are leveraging on social media platform to reach, interact, offer, and transact with their probable customers.

Many firms and brands are relying on the word-of-mouth marketing, and social media had played instrumental role in spreading word of mouth among their customers in a rapid manner that was never before. Additionally, the firms are leveraging social media network platform to expand globally [ 144 ]. Social media has influenced the way consumers were searching for information, evaluating them, and making purchase decision. Moreover, social media became an inseparable integral part of businesses to sustain in this digital disruptive world. The accessibility, ease of use, real-time bound activities and global reach have made social media as a unique marketing tool. Social media enables firm to create a virtual unique platform to mark their online presence, communicate with their target customers and engage with them to increase their revenue [ 90 ]. The increasing importance of social media as a marketing tool has attracted scholars especially researchers in the domain of online buying behaviour in the last decade. Therefore, existing literature on social media marketing is being continuously reviewed by scholars to understand the current trends and suggest the future directions. In recent years, researchers have studied the importance of social media in marketing from various aspects of its application. Few of the important bibliometric studies on social media marketing are mainly focussing on the social networks and platforms. Social media platforms and its role in the evolution and performance of social enterprise conducted by revealed that proper social media strategy is not only helping in increasing revenue and profitability, but also fostering confidence among the consumers. Similarly, bibliometric analysis on the pattern of co-creation , influencers , sentiments and stock market predictions and interactive digital marketing in the context of social media is conducted over the recent few years.

None of the current studies have focussed on the overall role, i.e. integrating and analysing studies focussed on behavioural intentions, impulse purchases, customer engagement, customer loyalty and recommender management of social media in the marketing landscape. The recent advancement in the mobile-based applications had forced the organizations to adopt marketing tools which are readily available to the consumers in real time [ 13 ]. This study is an attempt to gather quality articles pertaining to the marketing applications of social media and analyse its effectiveness as a marketing tool. This article will help the academicians to have a holistic idea about the research trends in social media marketing that will prove conducive to design marketing strategies for industry practitioners. To the best of our knowledge, such comprehensive review of social media as a marketing tool has never been conducted.

The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next section is based on the review of literature. The research methodology adopted for this study is described in section “ methods ”. Section “ Results ” is based on the data analysis and its interpretation, while limitations of this study and future research directions are presented in section “ Discussion ”. Conclusion is made in section “ Conclusions ”.

Review of literature

The current trends of the marketing research in the social media domain predicts that the traditional marketing is going to be entirely disrupted by the adoption of social media-based marketing. The marketing activities such as advertising, promotional programmes and branding seem to be entirely designed and applied using social media tools [ 144 ]. Social media adoption is on rise because of its wide presence in the masses and its easiness of access and operate. Therefore, social media became the first choice of the marketers to promote their products and services to reach to their target audience [ 39 ].

Social media is a specialized software application that connect people in an online environment, where they can interact with each other, share contents and their feedback in the relevant groups about their experiences with a brand or organization [ 137 ]. The marketers realized the importance of social media marketing and started using them as an integral part of their overall marketing strategies [ 89 ]. Social media platforms enable consumers to freely interact with their fellow users on these applications and discuss openly about the advantages or disadvantages of the products [ 20 , 80 ]. So, marketers look at social media as an opportunity to build their brand image and positively position their products in the mind of their target audience [ 123 ]. The word of mouth of the consumers is also of great concern for the firms, as it may harm the brand positioning if not managed in an appropriate manner [ 141 ].

Various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn are being used by companies based on their target audience and the products they promote. As noted by [ 74 ], Snapchat is more favourite among youths, LinkedIn is more useful for reaching to mature professionals, so the marketers are selecting the platforms that suits their marketing strategy. The literatures shows that social media users are reacting more on interactive advertising rather than informational one, and it promotes interactions and cultivates the in-group messaging among the users of a particular social media platform [ 11 ].

The synthesis of the recent literatures reveals that opinion leader is playing a crucial role around the online space, so the organizations need to select carefully their leaders who can foster confidence about the firm and positive image of the brands [ 25 ]. Moreover, content is the bone of the social media marketing, and marketers need to carefully select, design and present to their markets. The emotional appeals in the messaging and overall content have been found more influential as customers has responded more often as compared to any other appeals in the social media marketing space [ 92 , 109 ]. In a similar study, it has been found that consumers are finding live videos streaming more trustworthy and authentic as compared to pre-recorded videos [ 23 ].

Therefore, it can be concluded that social media marketing is having a greater impact on the firm, and it can bring variety of positive and negative outcomes. Studies have shown that social media marketing is having positive and substantial impact on the consumer behaviour and especially on consumer retention [ 52 ]. The social media marketing efforts also play an important role in shaping the positive purchase intentions [ 144 ], brand meaning [ 58 ], brand loyalty [ 128 ], brand sustainability (X. [ 142 , 143 ], hotels [ 76 ], luxury brands [ 10 ], educational institutions [ 83 ], brand equity [ 63 ], positive electronic word of mouth [ 87 ], intention to engage online[ 127 ], etc.

Previous review studies on social media marketing and its effectiveness highlighted important aspects of its applications in marketing processes. Review studies have either used a specific database like web of science/Scopus [ 7 , 93 ] or studied a specific relationship such as brand–consumer interaction [ 101 ] in the context of social media marketing. Moreover, previous review studies focussed on specific applications such as evolving trends in Facebook marketing [ 94 ], a comprehensive comparative review of social media and social networks [ 144 ] and rise of social media in sports [ 78 ]. Moreover, previous studies reviewed the influence and effectiveness of social media for a specific sector/industry such as medical [ 90 ], tourism [ 78 ], hospitality and business-to-business applications as a digital mediation [ 68 ]. There is a lack of studies which has comprehensively mapped the marketing applications of social media and measured its effectiveness using bibliometric analysis. This study is an attempt to holistically examine the applications and effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool using state-of-the-art bibliometric analysis.

The development and probable future trends of a field of study can be analysed using various review techniques that can fulfil the specific objective of research. A systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted to identify, analyse, evaluate and summarize the overall findings of research in a field; it focusses on the methodological approach, theoretical framework, etc. [ 95 ]. Meta-analysis is an empirical statistical technique which combines the results of multiple studies on a given problem and then estimate the overall effect and direction of the relationship (Hassan) [ 14 , 48 , 86 , 104 , 106 ]. While bibliometric technique is a computer-assisted methodology that helps in measuring performance by identifying the core theme, sub-themes, prolific authors, most influential country, intellectual and social structure of the research [ 6 , 48 ]. For current study, bibliometric research design is adopted to fulfil the objectives of the study which helps in identifying the major trends in social media marketing using network analysis techniques [ 135 ]. It is one of the most used research methods which enables analysis of large volume of data to statistically estimate and visualize the research trends in a particular field of study [ 103 ]. This method is widely employed by other researchers in analysis and predicting the future expansion of research in a particular domain of research [ 12 ], Hassan, [ 49 , 62 , 104 , 106 ].

This review is conducted in two steps; first, the descriptive analysis such as the trend of research publication, best authors and top journals of the social media research is presented and then co-citation and co-occurrence analysis are presented. For descriptive analysis, Biblioshiny applications of R is used; it allows researchers to explore their data and run descriptive analysis and present them in an intuitive tabular and graphic form [ 5 ]. While for co-citation and co-occurrence analysis, VOSviewer software application is employed, it is a tool which produce output in network form—the networks are the combinations of various clusters that enables researchers to find the trending themes and sub-themes in a given area of research [ 126 ].

Scopus database is used for searching and downloading articles based on the applications of social media in marketing. The TITLE-ABS-KEY was searched using most appropriate keywords pertaining to the application of social media in marketing. The keywords such as “Social media marketing”, “Social networking sites”, “Social media platforms”, “Facebook marketing”, “Social network advertising”, “Social media purchasing”, and “digital marketing using social media” were searched using variety of combinations of Boolean operators (AND/OR) syntax. The inclusion of articles is based on certain criteria such as span of publication during (2007–2022), written in English language, must be either research article or reviews, and most importantly, the main theme of the literature must be on the application of social media as a marketing tool.

First search results in 2753 research articles, which are then carefully investigated for the defined inclusion criteria, book chapters, conference papers, short notes, editorial notes, etc., were removed. Literatures published in languages other than English were removed. Then, the researchers looked at tittle and abstract of each article to make sure that the central idea of research is based on the aspects of social media as a marketing tool. The final sample consists of 1232 articles, which then exported in .CSV format for further processing and analysis.

The following table is a snapshot of the data used in this bibliometric analysis.

This dataset consists of 1232 articles out of which 1183 are research articles and 83 reviews articles as presented in Table  1 . There are 58,528 references cited in these studies and the average citations per documents stands at 23.23. These papers were published by 562 sources and written by 2953 authors. It is worth noting that 2994 authors have published on social media marketing, while only 173 documents are single-authored, and all other documents are multi-authored. Documents per author is 0.411, while 2.43 authors are there per document; it shows strong collaborations among authors and collaboration index stands at 2.71.

The following section presents the descriptive analysis of data that is conducted using the Biblioshiny application. The .CVS file of the final data was uploaded on web service provided by Biblioshiny called bibliometrix application for further analysis.

Annual publications

The trends of publication over the years are depicted in Fig.  1 ; it is obvious that this area of research started in the mid of 2000s that signifies the importance of adoption of social media tools for marketing activities. Since then, there have been an exponential increase in the number of publications. From 2015 onwards, there were substantial research for understanding the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool. As we see that there are already 65 articles published by November 2022—at the time of data extraction for this study. The trend shows that there will be continued research efforts to unveil the various aspects of social media marketing that can help marketers to understand consumer behaviour and make winning marketing strategies.

Annual publication trends in applications of social media in marketing

From thematic perspective, the trend can be further classified into themes which have been identified from the analysis. The early age (2000–2009) of social media marketing can be attributed to its application in advertising on social media platforms and network. This era also fuelled the development of customer groups and community where customers can interact and express their views about brands. Adoption of disruptive technologies defines trends from 2010 to 2017; during this period, smart recommendation systems, automatic feedback analysis and grievance redressal mechanisms introduced on social media. The human machine interaction signifies the trends from 2018 till date. The introduction of social robots, integration of augmented and virtual reality, real-time behavioural intelligence and super personalization can be treated as emerging themes.

Influential sources

Table  2 illustrates the most important journals publishing on the applications of social media in marketing. Top 20 journals based on total number of publications along with their total citations, and indices of h, g and m are presented.

The “Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing” is the most productive journal which has published 56 articles and been cited by 1841 times. This journal is the top-notch source in the production and dissemination of research based on interactive marketing. Few of the important themes of this journal over the years are social media influencers [ 131 ], personalization [ 97 ], adoption of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning for web personalization [ 50 ] and customer experience [ 4 ], brand–consumer interaction using social media [ 131 ].

The second influential journal publishing on social media marketing is “Journal of Business Research”. This journal published 25 quality articles and been cited 2207 times. This is interesting to note that it has published articles less than half of the “Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing” but cited more often than that. This journal has contributed in the comprehension of the phenomenon of social media marketing by publishing on important aspects such as fake news and social media marketing [ 30 ], social media and brand equity [ 145 ], customer engagement via social media [ 40 ] and use of social media for B2B marketing [ 122 ].

Sustainability (Switzerland) is the third most important source that publishes on social media marketing. It has published 20 articles and attracted only 197 citations since its starting publications. This journal is publishing important aspects of social media-based marketing such as implementation of green marketing using social media [ 85 ], impact of social media on environmental sustainability [ 27 ], digital co-creation [ 22 ] and role of social media in organizational sustainability [ 138 ].

The other journals in the list have also contributed immensely to the growth of social media marketing research and its implications for the businesses.

Most prolific authors

The most prolific authors researching and publishing on social media marketing are presented in Table  3 ; this selection is based on the number of papers published by an author over the period, and their total citations and h-index are also presented for a better comprehension. The first author in the list is Kumar V; he has published six quality articles on the applications of social media tools in marketing. Some of the most influential articles published are “Engaging luxury brand consumers on social media”, “Synergistic effects of social media and traditional marketing on brand sales: capturing the time-varying effects”, “Creating a measurable social media marketing strategy: Increasing the value and ROI of intangibles and tangibles for Hokey Pokey”, “Increasing the ROI of social media marketing” and “An evolutionary road map to winning with social media marketing”. All the above-mentioned articles are focussing on specific marketing applications of social media. The second author in the list is Dwivedi YK with four papers and 718 citations and with an h-index of 4. The important articles published are “Examining the impact of social commerce dimensions on customers’ value cocreation: The mediating effect of social trust”, “Measuring social media influencer index- insights from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram”, and “Social media marketing: Comparative effect of advertisement sources”. With four publications and 664 citations, Rana NP is the third most influential authors in the research domain of social media marketing. The most influential literature published by Rana NP is “Do Social Media Marketing Activities Improve Brand Loyalty? An Empirical Study on Luxury Fashion Brands”, “Social media marketing: Comparative effect of advertisement sources”, “social media in marketing: A review and analysis of the existing literature”. Rana NP has authored various articles in collaboration with Dwivedi YK as well.

Most important documents

Table 4 presents the top research papers published on the application of social media in marketing. These papers are listed based on their number of citations it has attracted over the years. The top document is written by Kozinets RV and focussed on the importance of the virtual online crowd, where consumers come together to discuss, share their opinion that results in collective innovation. Moreover, this paper emphasizes on the proliferation of networking technology that made online collaboration easy to access and interact; technologies help innovation to take new heights that ultimately impact the consumption patterns of the consumers. This paper has been cited 1077 times with an annual average of 83.

The second influential document found in this dataset is about social media marketing that was published in 2012 and cited 996 times by then. This paper has analysed the importance of social media in marketing from important aspects such as self-expression, socializing, brand interactions and the social communities that have substantial influence on the consumer purchasing intentions and purchasing behaviour. In addition, this paper also touches the importance of the impulsive buying activities on social media platforms; consumers are getting intimated with intuitive advertisements on social media platforms and landing to the e-commerce websites that instigate impulse shopping urges [ 13 ].

The paper published by Journal of Business Research and written by Kim AJ stands third in the list of most influential articles. This paper has investigated the role of social media in enhancing the customer equity with a special focus on luxury fashion brands. This paper was published in 2012 and attracted 904 citations by then. This paper explored the influence of social media marketing activities on customer perceived value, brand equity and customer equity. The findings favour the proposition that customer equity is highly enhanced by social media marketing activities.

The other documents in the list have also been contributed to the understanding and expansion of the area of social media marketing research. Few of the important themes discussed in these papers are measuring ROI of social media, creative social media marketing activities, online reviews, user-generated contents, influencer marketing, etc.

Most productive countries

The countries contributed most to the research stream of social media marketing are illustrated in Table  5 . The countries are selected based on the number of citations of their articles. The greatest number of research articles are contributed by USA; it has produced 222 research papers, and these papers have been cited 7065 times with an average article citation of 31.82. It indicates the adoption of social media as a marketing tool in the USA; the researchers are studying the underlying factors which are crucial to understand consumer behaviour in the space of social media marketing activities.

Moreover, it also indicates that countries having better networking facilities and high bandwidth internet can exploit the advantages of social media marketing more efficiently than the countries not at par in terms of internet and networking facilities. The other two important countries are UK and China with 3195 and 1674 citations, respectively. It can be noticed that there is huge disparity among top 3 countries in terms of publications and number of times it had been cited. Nevertheless, the trend is showing that the proliferation of internet technology and availability of high-quality internet will boost the adoption of social media among users and social media marketing among the business firms.

Citation analysis of the documents

Citation analysis is the method of assessing the quality and impact of an organization, author, source, etc., derived from the quantitative analysis of the citations to references [ 103 ]. VOSviewer application is employed for this purpose, and minimum number of citations of a document was kept 10. The network thus obtained contains four clusters based on the grouping of a specific theme in social media marketing (Fig. 2 ).

Citation analysis of documents

The largest cluster (red) of the network is made up of 134 documents and consists of large nodes which specifies the greater number of citations these documents received over the time. The important aspects of social media marketing in this cluster are mainly focussed on the information processing that can be further used to make strategies pertaining to the social media consumers [ 88 ]; analysis of the online conversation among users is of enormous importance because it is crucial in affecting the consumer behaviour either positively or negatively about the firm and its products [ 2 , 31 , 66 ]. B2B semantics is useful for understanding the deep inside thoughts of the firms and their leaders that ultimately shapes their behaviour [ 34 , 128 ]. In addition, the application of big data analytics tools is for processing and analysing the large amount of data to learn pattern of consumer interaction and activities on the social media network platforms [ 55 , 74 , 110 ]. Another important consideration in this cluster is about the use of sentiment analysis and opinion mining for managing the expectations of the consumers and offering them most customized products as per their unique needs.

The green cluster, second major in the network, is made of 93 documents. This cluster of this citation network is found to accumulate documents that addressed the research concerns of consumer behaviour from the perspective of social media marketing. The role of social media-based marketing in shaping the consumer intention to purchase [ 37 , 84 , 123 ], the impact of personalized content and its impact on consumer behaviour [ 19 , 140 ], consumer social media participation and its impact on overall profitability of the firm [ 26 , 29 ], persuasive advertisement and its impact on customer engagement [ 42 , 67 , 113 ].

Third cluster (blue) consists of 69 documents on various important aspects of the social media marketing from the perspective of customer engagement. The documents which have formed the basis of this cluster are essentially addressing the concepts of mutual sustainable relationship between customers and e-retailers are perceived value that a customer assessed about the product of services that meets their unique expectations [ 44 , 82 ]. The service quality on the shopping websites and applications is crucial to persuade customers to revisit and explore which ultimately increase the chances of customer engagement, while poor service quality demoralizes customers and decreases the level of engagement significantly [ 34 , 133 , 134 ]. In addition, customer experience that includes important factors such as personalization, tailoring of offers to match unique expectation of customers, are substantial in the course of customer engagement [ 116 , 123 ]. Customer engagement cannot be achieved if customer satisfaction is not central to a firm, and it must be the prime focus, and marketers needs to make all possible efforts to not only satisfy, but also delight their target customers [ 33 , 41 , 43 ].

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

The keyword co-occurrence analysis can be referred to as a method of analysing the similarities and proximity between knowledge structure that is based on the semantics of the words which are closely related but not exactly the same [ 13 ]. For this analysis, VOSviewer software is employed, and it is among the best tools for scientific data visualization and mapping of co-occurrence of similar keywords to discover the emerging trends in a specific area of research [ 12 ].

The criteria for a keyword to be included in the network was that a keyword must have a frequency of at least 15. The frequency of occurrence is set as 15, to make sure the inclusion of significant keywords that can help in visualizing the scientific landscape. The network thus obtained is based on 235 keywords out of 4061 and presented in Fig.  3 . This network is based on three specific clusters having combined keywords pertaining to a specific aspect of the social media marketing.

Keywords co-occurrence analysis

The largest cluster of the network is represented by red colour and consists of 110 keywords. This cluster is made up of keywords that signifies the importance of technology in social media marketing and social networks. This cluster also explains the importance and adoption of disruptive technologies in the application of social media in marketing activities. The role of artificial intelligence [ 57 , 73 , 130 ], machine learning [ 72 , 74 , 109 ], learning algorithms [ 9 , 31 , 121 ], sentiment analysis [ 109 ], learning systems [ 9 , 130 ], CRM tools [ 29 , 125 ], customer interactions [ 42 , 117 ], customer reviews [ 116 , 124 ] and recommender applications [ 98 , 112 ] has been studied over the period to implement them efficiently for better business outcome. Moreover, this cluster is having important implications for the designers, developers, and implementers of the social media marketing campaigns; it is crucial for the organizations to first collect the large amount of data resulting from the customer exploration of their web portals and process them to learn the trends and expectations of the consumers. This comprehension can further be used to design marketing efforts across the channels to reach to target markets, motivate them to interact over social media and engage into activities that can lead to profitable business transactions.

The second largest cluster (green) consists of 64 keywords; careful analysis of this cluster reveals that this cluster has combined the keyword which is centred around consumer behaviour on social media platforms. The important perspectives of consumer behaviour that can be visualized in this cluster are perceived value [ 79 , 129 ], purchase intentions [ 52 , 99 , 100 ], brand value [ 17 , 115 ], brand loyalty [ 10 , 133 ], brand image [ 107 , 114 ], ethics [ 28 , 91 ], green behaviour [ 10 , 130 ], sustainability aspects [ 99 , 130 ], millennials [ 10 , 34 , 35 ], generation [ 39 , 118 ], and customer engagement [ 99 , 107 , 140 ]. Therefore, it is quite evident that social media tools are being used in almost all facets of consumer behaviour; the above studies also concluded that the use of social media marketing tools has a positive and substantial impact on consumer behaviour.

The third and last cluster (blue) of this network is made of 51 items. This cluster has accumulated keywords which are focussed on the human aspects of social media marketing. As it is obvious from the network that the largest node in this cluster is “human” and “humans”, which specifies the interaction of machine, i.e. computers with human [ 36 , 58 , 139 ]. The human computer interface is a trending research stream in social media marketing, where efforts are made to understand the best practices to interact with computers in a more efficient manner [ 129 , 136 ]. The another important concept in this cluster is about psychology which is quite important for the marketers to understand the cognitive process of consumer when presented with marketing stimuli using social media marketing tools [ 59 , 117 ]. Few other keywords which dominated this cluster are health education and monitoring health using social media applications [ 28 ], young adults [ 81 , 130 ], selection of advertising topics [ 1 , 51 ], etc.

Trends in social media marketing

The network analysis helps in the identifications of emerging trends in the research of social media marketing. The social media networks allow users to interact and share their thoughts and experience with a brand which in turn helps in viral marketing [ 120 ]. The possibility of sharing podcast and video contents has fuelled the interactivity among users [ 15 ]. The reviews and feedback are of enormous importance for the marketers to listen the voice of the customers and adapt accordingly [ 54 ].

One of the major trends is about real-time personalization on the social networks; the recommender system is recommending most sought-after products to the customer in real-time web exploration. The personalization in real time is achieved using technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics that helps in gaining deeper insights into behavioural intentions [ 3 , 96 ].

The introduction of augmented reality and virtual reality is another latest trend that have revolutionized the way marketing was being carried out using social media networks. The augmented reality has enabled the customers to virtually look at desired aspects such as suitability, colour combinations, fittings and virtual trials [ 39 ]. It gives consumers the confidence to immediately decide to purchase and quick gratifications [ 119 ]. The impulse purchasing mechanism is also trending on social media platforms; the firms are appropriately designing and putting across their offerings that creates urge to buy impulsively [ 61 ].

Influencer marketing and brand endorsement are not a new trend, but it is one of the major trends that is going to stay for a while. The brands are associating with influencers who have huge followers and witnessed better results as good as running paid advertisement campaigns [ 39 ].

Live streaming has been adopted by various firms to reach to specific segments of their target markets using webinar or a platform showcase [ 18 ]. It gives them opportunity to socialize and interact with prospective customers and engage with them through Q & A sessions or collaborative contents [ 18 ].

Themes and sub-themes in social media marketing

The detailed analysis of the networks of citations and keyword co-occurrence analysis helps in identifying themes and sub-themes which are emerged from the clusters of the network. Table 6 is representing the main themes and sub-themes along with related studies.

Each research study is having certain limitations and so as this one. One of the major limitations is about citation bases analysis; the selection of articles is based on the number of citations it has received. There might be important studies on social media that may have not been included in the analysis because it did not receive many citations. Moreover, we selected research literature written in English language and either article or review paper; there might be quality articles that left behind.

As far as future direction of research is concerned, it is obvious that social media marketing is evolving at ever high pace and there is a need for deeper investigation into this phenomenon. Careful investigation of the networks unveils important areas of future research expansion. First, the adoption of social media among consumers, what are the factors that hinders the usage of social media and technological barriers that restricts the customers to use social media are needed to be explored further. Studies have shown that one of biggest barrier in the adoption of social networks and platforms is the availability of high speed affordable internet networks [ 132 ]. Therefore, TAM model needed to be revisited from social media perspective, and additional components can be added to understand the adoption of technology and social media applications. A versatile model could be developed that can be used in variety of technology adoption scenarios and can be generalized in various environments. There is a need of study to understand the firm capabilities required and preparedness to adopt social media marketing practices.

The second important area of research is from the firm perspective; still it is not very much clear that how disruptive digital transformation and technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, machine learning, deep learning, etc., can be implemented to get maximum ROI and that can persuade consumers to transact with them. Studies have focussed on artificial intelligence applications such as recommendation system which is positively influencing the consumer behaviour especially purchase intention [ 10 , 53 ]. The future studies can help in building a comprehensive model that could be used by the firm to evaluate their investment, ROI, perceived value to customer and overall consumer behaviour.

Thirdly, there is a lack of study on the influence of social media marketing on small retail firms. More studies are warranted to seek clarity about the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool for smaller firm, which social media tool and tactics will be more advantageous for these firms. Researchers are also encouraged to empirically explore the small retailer’s perspective of adopting social media tools for their marketing activities. There shall be a mechanism to gauge the outcome of social media marketing on their brand awareness, customer growth, sales, and overall profitability of smaller retailers.

Fourth important area of research could be the deliberations of the social content. Content is the core of social media platforms; studies have shown that consumers tend to get attracted and spend more time on the social network where they can create their own content in an easy manner. Content is also crucial in terms of its suitability across platforms and ethical implications.

Therefore, researchers can study and analyse the most appropriate content across the social media platforms, devices and for a specific business. Researchers can explore the critical aspects of social content such as most suitable content for C2C interaction, firm reaction on a specific customer content, content to combat competitions, etc.

Fifth area of future research could be the monitoring of social media, how a firm shall record and acknowledge complaints of the customers. The sub-themes in monitoring can be to find out the best listening mechanisms of consumer activities that can be further analysed using predictive analysis mechanism to develop strategies to engage customers in the way they might be looking for. Another investigation can be done to seek clarity about the mechanism of watching and listening customers, i.e. whether there should be a fully automated process or hybrid one. This is important for the firms to understand the probable capital investment in the implementation of monitoring and responding process. This subject can be further investigated from the CRM perspective. Research can be extended to understand the role of various social media platforms on customer engagement, and what should be the capability of the CRM to exploit maximum from customer created content.

Conclusions

Bibliometric analysis is performed to have a comprehensive understanding of the applications of social media for marketing activities. The aim of the research was to investigate the research trends and emerging themes using the Scopus database. The findings of the research reveal the most important journals, authors, documents, and their intellectual structure. Moreover, it is found that research in the application of social media as a marketing tool is growing at an ever-increasing rate. Scholars around the world are collaborating with each other to comprehend the phenomenon and suggest strategies that can help firms to exploit the power of social media platforms in their marketing tactics. The outcomes of the research shown that there are certain areas of social media marketing landscape which need more scholarly attention; current literature has not considered these essential factors in detail. The findings suggest that current extant literature can be expanded by appending research in the areas such as modelling social media marketing ROI, social content strategies, monitoring and responding social media activities, social media strategies for smaller retailers, etc. This study has enumerated important implications along with the analysis for the businesses. The outcomes would also be helpful for social media enthusiasts and prospective social media marketing researchers.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

Customer-to-customer

Customer relationship management

Return on investment

Technology acceptance model

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Acknowledgements

The researchers express unwavering gratitude to the authors of many sampled articles included in this current data mining and bibliometric analysis. Their invaluable efforts cannot be ignored.

Declaration of generative AI in scientific writing

The chapter was scientifically prepared without the writing assistance of any enhanced generative artificial intelligence (AI) software(s).

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the authors.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

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College of Administration and Financial Sciences, Saudi Electronic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Mohammad Wasiq

Department of Marketing, Marondera University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology (MUAST), Marondera, Zimbabwe

Brighton Nyagadza

Institute for the Future Knowledge (IFK), University of Johannesburg (UJ), Johannesburg, South Africa

Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, University of the Western Cape , Bellville, South Africa

Eugine Tafadzwa Maziriri

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Bashar, A., Wasiq, M., Nyagadza, B. et al. Emerging trends in social media marketing: a retrospective review using data mining and bibliometric analysis. Futur Bus J 10 , 23 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43093-024-00308-6

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s43093-024-00308-6

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• Social media marketing
• Bibliometrics
• Biblioshiny
• Social media networks
• Social media platforms
• Marketing tools

Social Media Trends

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April 23, 2024

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Staying on trend: Research dives into aligning social media skills development to industry expectations

by Adam Pope, University of Alabama at Birmingham

New research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Collat School of Business is revealing how college students grasp social media marketing concepts, and what industry leaders are looking for when they enter the workforce.

Teaching social media marketing presents unique challenges, according to lead author Nicole Beachum, Ph.D., assistant professor in the UAB Department of Marketing, Industrial Distribution and Economics. The field is ever-changing, demanding professors to keep pace with evolving platforms, algorithms and tools. Balancing class preparation, research and other job responsibilities adds to the complexity of effective teaching in this dynamic domain.

One challenge, Beachum says, is that social media courses may require frequent material updates each semester.

"The landscape itself changes so quickly that it's even hard for people who work full time in the industry to keep up," Beachum said. "From the emergence of new social media platforms to the numerous changes to each social media platform, change is one of the only constant aspects of digital marketing."

The study, published in the Journal of Marketing Education , found that meta skills are still incredibly important for students. The study also makes the case that client-based projects drastically enhance meta-skill acquisition among undergraduate students compared to simulations alone.

"Even if a person has technical experience in social media marketing, it is still essential that they are good communicators, have time management skills, enjoy learning, etc.," Beachum said. "As with many jobs, simply having the technical skills is not sufficient in being a part of a team and being able to communicate effectively with teammates, clients and customers."

Beachum says students are often more up to date on the actual new and upcoming social media platforms than their professors, which can be an interesting dynamic.

"A professor isn't going to just go in and teach 'what is Instagram' to students who are already completely familiar with the platform ," Beachum said. "Instead, they have to be able to explain—and understand themselves—how different marketing and advertising on Instagram for a company is compared to using it personally."

Beachum adds that the research indicates professors should understand and effectively explain the advertising dashboards, providing students with access to these tools and analytics within the classroom.

The study also utilized interviews from marketing managers to find out what they want from new social media marketing graduates. The goal was to understand the skills graduates need for the job market. Additionally, the study explored how classroom assessments are seen by hiring managers.

Among the feedback, it was recommended that students need guidance in articulating their learning experiences, especially from simulations, in resumes, portfolios and interviews, adding that encouraging the capture of simulation content and reflection papers can aid in communicating their skills and value effectively.

Other feedback included that video content creation and editing skills are increasingly essential in the job market. Basic knowledge of HTML, content management platforms and search engine optimization, or SEO, provides a competitive edge. Integrating these topics into the curriculum enhances students' marketability.

Provided by University of Alabama at Birmingham

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Apr-19-2024

The 2024 social media demographics guide

Khoros Staff

Editor's Note: This post was originally created in 2018 and has since been updated to reflect the latest data available.

According to Statista , 61.4% of the world’s population — a whopping 4.95 billion people — use social media.

That’s a lot of social media demographic research to sort through when you want to zero in on understanding audience characteristics of specific platforms — and we know the last thing a social media marketer has is time to spare. That’s why we’ve done all the heavy lifting for you.

Our updated 2024 Social Media Demographics Guide surfaces the demographic data you need to inform a smart strategy, like age, gender, and income — plus device usage and site behavior in one easy-to-read infographic.

View the 2024 Social Media Demographics Guide to discover more about what makes the audiences of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok unique or bookmark it now to reference anytime.

General social media demographics

Before we jump into platform-specific demographics, let’s cover some high-level insights about social media in general.

Social media usage over time

There are currently 4.95 billion social media users and 5.3 billion total internet users, meaning 93.4% of people who use the internet also use social media. What’s more astounding is the rate that social media usage has grown and is expected to continue growing. The number of social media users has grown by 79.1% since 2017 , when there were only 2.73 billion social media users. By the end of 2024, Statista predicts there will be 5.17 billion social media users which would be 5.7% growth compared to 2023. By 2027, the number of social media users is expected to reach 5.85 billion, with an annual growth rate between 3.7-5.7% each year until then.

(Source: Statista )

Social media usage by age

According to new data from eMarketer , most U.S. social media users are between the ages of 27 and 42 and fall under the Millennial generation. With 68.5 million Millennials using social media in the U.S., this group accounts for nearly one-third (30.3%) of all U.S. social media users. The next closest age group by usage is Gen Z (ages 11-26), with 56.4 million social media users, followed by Gen X (ages 43-58), with 51.8 million users. Baby Boomers between the ages of 59 and 77 are the age group with the lowest social media usage, with only 36.9 million users.

(Source: Oberlo )

Although Millennials are the age group that uses social media the most, eMarketer predicts their usage will remain relatively flat through 2027, while the number of Gen Z users is expected to grow significantly. The data also suggests that the number of Gen X and Baby Boomers who use social media will decrease over time.

(Source: eMarketer )

Daily time on social media

On average, people spend 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media each day. Combined, it’s estimated that users will have spent 4 trillion hours on social media in 2023. Not all social media platforms are equally engaging, as Statista found people spent more time on TikTok than anywhere else. On average, social media users in the U.S. spent 53.8 minutes on TikTok, with the next closest being YouTube at 48.7 minutes per day. After that, there was a steep drop off to 34.1 minutes for Twitter/X and other platforms before reaching last place, Reddit at only 24.1 minutes per day.

Despite TikTok having the most time on average per day, DataReportal found that YouTube has the highest average session duration at 7 minutes and 29 seconds. This could be because users are watching longer-form content on YouTube compared to the shorter content that TikTok is known for.

(Source: DataReportal via Exploding Topics )

Facebook demographics

Given that Facebook is the number one platform for adults , understanding its audience is crucial for devising the social media strategy for your business.

2024 Facebook demographics data

Active monthly users

Facebook has 3.03 billion active monthly users

Active daily users

Facebook has 2.085 billion daily active users

4.6% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 13-17

22.6% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 18-24

29.4% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 25-34

19.1% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 35-44

11.4% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 45-54

7.2% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 55-64

5.7% of Facebook’s users are 65+

43.7% of Facebook users are female

56.3% of Facebook users are male

On average, U.S. Facebook users spend 30.9 minutes a day on the platform

98.5% of users access Facebook via mobile devices

81.8% of users access Facebook via mobile devices only

16.7% of users access Facebook via mobile devices and computers

1.5% of users access Facebook via laptop or desktop only

Businesses and shopping

19% of U.S. users search for products on Facebook before shopping

The global advertising audience of Facebook is 2.249 billion

90% of social media marketers use Facebook to promote their business.

Most followed accounts

Cristiano Ronaldo: 163 million followers

Mr. Bean: 136 million followers

Shakira: 122 million followers

Instagram demographics

Instagram is the Meta-owned photo and video sharing app that continues to grow its user base, with 2 billion people using Instagram every month (up from 800 million in 2018).

2024 Instagram demographics data

Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users

Instagram has 500 million daily active users

8% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 13-17

30.8% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 18-24

30.3% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 25-34

15.7% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 35-44

8.4% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 45-54

4.3% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 55-64

2.6% of Instagram’s users are 65+

48.2% of Instagram users are female

51.8% of Instagram users are male

On average, U.S. Instagram users spend 33.1 minutes per day on the platform

90% of Instagram users follow a business

2 out of 3 people say Instagram enables interaction with brands

83% of Instagram users say they discover new products and services on Instagram

Cristiano Ronaldo: 613 million followers

Lionel Messi: 494 million followers

Selena Gomez: 429 million followers

Pinterest demographics

Pinterest is a visual search engine that pioneered online shopping through social media. On Pinterest, people are 90% more likely to say they’re ‘always shopping’ than on other platforms. Additionally, shoppers on Pinterest spend 80% more monthly than on other platforms. Why? Pinterest claims it’s because they take the best of shopping offline and bring it online, with strong visual connections between products and what users can do with those products. There’s a lot marketers can learn from the platform, but it all starts with gaining a better understanding of the audience.

2024 Pinterest demographics data

Pinterest has 465 million monthly active users

27% of Pinterest’s users are between the ages of 18-24

30.9% of Pinterest’s users are between the ages of 25-34

15.8% of Pinterest’s users are between the ages of 35-44

10.4% of Pinterest’s users are between the ages of 45-54

8.7% of Pinterest’s users are between the ages of 55-64

4.3% of Pinterest’s users are 65+

Pinterest is one of the most gendered social media channels, which may inform which brands target this audience and how they do so.

76.2% of Pinterest users are female

17.2% of Pinterest users are male

6.6% of Pinterest users did not specify their gender

On average, U.S. Pinterest users spend 14.2 minutes per day on the platform

85% of users access Pinterest via the mobile app

Business and Shopping

More than 25% of time spent on Pinterest is spent shopping

85% of users have bought something based on pins from brands

X (formerly Twitter) demographics

X (formerly known as Twitter) allows users to reach practically any person or business simply by tagging them in a Tweet. That’s why Twitter is such a popular platform for customer service — allowing users to air complaints in real time and for customer service teams to react quickly.

2024 X demographics data

X has 666 million monthly active users

X has 245 million monetizable daily active users

28.35% of X’s users are between the ages of 18-24

29.63% of X’s users are between the ages of 25-34

17.96% of X’s users are between the ages of 35-44

11.63% of X’s users are between the ages of 45-54

7.61% of X’s users are between the ages of 55-64

4.83% of X’s users are 65+

Like Pinterest, X is highly gendered, although this channel skews the other direction.

23.28% of X users are female

66.72% of X users are male

On average, U.S. X users spend 34.1 minutes per day on the platform

Elon Musk: 156.9 million followers

Barack Obama: 132 million followers

Justin Bieber: 111.7 million followers

Business and shopping

82% of B2B content marketers use X

79% of X users follow brands on the platform

X drives 40% higher ROI than other social media channels

LinkedIn demographics

LinkedIn is a professional networking site and the top social media platform for B2B marketing . As a result of its focus on business, it’s a great way for companies to drive leads, share news, and keep up with others in their industry.

2024 LinkedIn demographics data

LinkedIn has 310 million monthly active users

16.2% of LinkedIn’s users login to the platform daily

21.7% of LinkedIn’s users are between the ages of 18-24

60% of LinkedIn’s users are between the ages of 25-34

15.4% of LinkedIn’s users are between the ages of 35-54

2.9% of LinkedIn’s users are 55+

43.7% of LinkedIn users are female

56.3% of LinkedIn users are male

On average, LinkedIn users spend just over 7 minutes per day on the platform

58.5% of LinkedIn traffic is through desktop devices

41.5% of LinkedIn traffic is through mobile devices

More than 61 million companies are on LinkedIn

96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing

Marketers see up to 2x higher conversion rates on LinkedIn compared to other social media platforms

Most Followed Accounts

Bill Gates: 34.9 million followers

Richard Branson: 18.7 million followers

Jeff Weiner: 10.4 million followers

YouTube demographics

YouTube is as utilitarian (think “how to change a spare tire”) as it is entertaining (think funny pet videos). With 2.5 billion monthly active users, YouTube offers expansive opportunities for businesses to share and market information.

2024 YouTube demographics data

YouTube has 2.491 billion monthly active users

YouTube has 122 million daily active users

15.5% of YouTube users are between the ages of 18-24

21.3% of YouTube users are between the ages of 25-34

17.5% of YouTube users are between the ages of 35-44

12.5% of YouTube users are between the ages of 45-54

9.2% of YouTube users are between the ages of 55-64

9.2% of YouTube users are between the ages of 65+

45.6% of YouTube users are female

54.4% of YouTube users are male

On average, U.S. YouTube users spend 48.7 minutes per day on the platform

70% of viewers have made a purchase after seeing a brand on YouTube

54% of marketers use YouTube

T-Series: 254 million subscribers

MrBeast: 217 million subscribers

Cocomelon: 168 million subscribers

Snapchat Demographics

Snapchat has become popular among teens and young adults under 35, making it a great platform for marketers to reach Gen Z. Interestingly, Gen Z spends less time looking at content on Snapchat but shows higher advertising recall than other generations. After watching two seconds or less of an advertiser video, 59% of Gen Z was able to recall it. Outside of Gen Z Snapchat statistics, here’s some other information about the platform’s demographics.

2024 Snapchat demographics data

Snapchat has 750 million monthly active users

Snapchat has 406 million daily active users

19.7% of Snapchat users are between the ages of 13-17

38.1% of Snapchat users are between the ages of 18-24

23.4% of Snapchat users are between the ages of 25-34

14% of Snapchat users are between the ages of 35-49

3.8% of Snapchat users are 50+

51% of Snapchat users are female

48.2% of Snapchat users are male

On average, U.S. Snapchat users spend 30 minutes per day on the platform

Snapchat users hold $4.4 trillion in global spending power

Snapchat users are 2x more likely to share their purchases with their network

Kylie Jenner: 37 million followers

Kim Kardashian: 27.2 million followers

Khloe Kardashian: 15 million followers

TikTok demographics

TikTok’s explosive growth in recent years has marked its place as a major player in the social media world (even though it doesn’t call itself a social media platform ). Like Snapchat, younger audiences dominate TikTok’s user base with 37.3% of users being between 18-24. It’s also a great platform for brands, with spending reaching 2.5 billion globally. Here’s some other information about TikTok’s user demographics to bear in mind when creating marketing strategies.

2024 TikTok demographics data

TikTok has 1.218 billion monthly active users

TikTok has 45.1 million daily active users

37.3% of TikTok users are between the ages of 18-24

32.9% of TikTok users are between the ages of 25-34

15.7% of TikTok users are between the ages of 35-44

8.3% of TikTok users are between the ages of 45-54

5.8% of TikTok users are 55+

49.2% of TikTok users are female

50.8% of TikTok users are male

On average, U.S. TikTok users spend 53.8 minutes per day on the platform

Khabane lame: 162 million followers

Charli D’Amelio: 151.6 million followers

Bella Poarch: 93.6 million followers

Consumer spending on TikTok has surpassed $2.5 billion globally

58.2% of TikTok users said they used the platform for shopping inspiration

49% of TikTok users say the platform helped them make purchasing decisions

55% of TikTok users made a purchase after seeing a brand or product on the platform

Which social media networks should your business prioritize?

Of course, knowing who’s using each social media platform is one thing, and engaging those people is a completely different thing. If your business needs help organizing and managing your social media activity, request a demo of our social media management software to see how you can understand your audience and seamlessly manage efforts across social media channels.

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64% of Americans say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today

About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted July 13-19, 2020. Just one-in-ten Americans say social media sites have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going, and one-quarter say these platforms have a neither positive nor negative effect.

Those who have a negative view of the impact of social media mention, in particular, misinformation and the hate and harassment they see on social media. They also have concerns about users believing everything they see or read – or not being sure about what to believe. Additionally, they bemoan social media’s role in fomenting partisanship and polarization, the creation of echo chambers, and the perception that these platforms oppose President Donald Trump and conservatives.

This is part of a series of posts on Americans’ experiences with and attitudes about the role of social media in politics today. Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans think about the impact of social media on the way things are currently going in the country. To explore this, we surveyed 10,211 U.S. adults from July 13 to 19, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

The public’s views on the positive and negative effect of social media vary widely by political affiliation and ideology. Across parties, larger shares describe social media’s impact as mostly negative rather than mostly positive, but this belief is particularly widespread among Republicans.

Roughly half of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (53%) say social media have a largely negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, compared with 78% of Republicans and leaners who say the same. Democrats are about three times as likely as Republicans to say these sites have a mostly positive impact (14% vs. 5%) and twice as likely to say social media have neither a positive nor negative effect (32% vs. 16%).

Among Democrats, there are no differences in these views along ideological lines. Republicans, however, are slightly more divided by ideology. Conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate to liberal Republicans to say social media have a mostly negative effect (83% vs. 70%). Conversely, moderate to liberal Republicans are more likely than their conservative counterparts to say social media have a mostly positive (8% vs. 4%) or neutral impact (21% vs. 13%).

Younger adults are more likely to say social media have a positive impact on the way things are going in the country and are less likely to believe social media sites have a negative impact compared with older Americans. For instance, 15% of those ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today, while just 8% of those over age 30 say the same. Americans 18 to 29 are also less likely than those 30 and older to say social media have a mostly negative impact (54% vs. 67%).

However, views among younger adults vary widely by partisanship. For example, 43% of Democrats ages 18 to 29 say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going, compared with about three-quarters (76%) of Republicans in the same age group. In addition, these youngest Democrats are more likely than their Republican counterparts to say social media platforms have a mostly positive (20% vs. 6%) or neither a positive nor negative effect (35% vs. 18%) on the way things are going in the country today. This partisan division persists among those 30 and older, but most of the gaps are smaller than those seen within the younger cohort.

Views on the negative impact of social media vary only slightly between social media users (63%) and non-users (69%), with non-users being slightly more likely to say these sites have a negative impact. However, among social media users, those who say some or a lot of what they see on social media is related to politics are more likely than those who say a little or none of what they see on these sites is related to politics to think social media platforms have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today (65% vs. 50%).

Past Pew Research Center studies have drawn attention to the complicated relationships Americans have with social media. In 2019, a Center survey found that 72% of U.S. adults reported using at least one social media site. And while these platforms have been used for political and social activism and engagement , they also raise concerns among portions of the population. Some think political ads on these sites are unacceptable, and many object to the way social media platforms have been weaponized to spread made-up news and engender online harassment . At the same time, a share of users credit something they saw on social media with changing their views about a political or social issue. And growing shares of Americans who use these sites also report feeling worn out by political posts and discussions on social media.

Those who say social media have negative impact cite concerns about misinformation, hate, censorship; those who see positive impact cite being informed

When asked to elaborate on the main reason why they think social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country today, roughly three-in-ten (28%) respondents who hold that view mention the spreading of misinformation and made-up news. Smaller shares reference examples of hate, harassment, conflict and extremism (16%) as a main reason, and 11% mention a perceived lack of critical thinking skills among many users – voicing concern about people who use these sites believing everything they see or read or being unsure about what to believe.

In written responses that mention misinformation or made-up news, a portion of adults often include references to the spread, speed and amount of false information available on these platforms. (Responses are lightly edited for spelling, style and readability.) For example:

“They allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.” –Man, 36

“False information is spread at lightning speed – and false information never seems to go away.” –Woman, 71

“Social media is rampant with misinformation both about the coronavirus and political and social issues, and the social media organizations do not do enough to combat this.” –Woman, 26

“Too much misinformation and lies are promoted from unsubstantiated sources that lead people to disregard vetted and expert information.” –Woman, 64

People’s responses that centered around hate, harassment, conflict or extremism in some way often mention concerns that social media contributes to incivility online tied to anonymity, the spreading of hate-filled ideas or conspiracies, or the incitement of violence.

“People say incendiary, stupid and thoughtless things online with the perception of anonymity that they would never say to someone else in person.” –Man, 53

“Promotes hate and extreme views and in some cases violence.” –Man, 69

“People don’t respect others’ opinions. They take it personally and try to fight with the other group. You can’t share your own thoughts on controversial topics without fearing someone will try to hurt you or your family.” –Woman, 65

“Social media is where people go to say some of the most hateful things they can imagine.” –Man, 46

About one-in-ten responses talk about how people on social media can be easily confused and believe everything they see or read or are not sure about what to believe.

“People believe everything they see and don’t verify its accuracy.” –Man, 75

“Many people can’t distinguish between real and fake news and information and share it without doing proper research …” –Man, 32

“You don’t know what’s fake or real.” –Man, 49

“It is hard to discern truth.” –Woman, 80

“People cannot distinguish fact from opinion, nor can they critically evaluate sources. They tend to believe everything they read, and when they see contradictory information (particularly propaganda), they shut down and don’t appear to trust any information.” –Man, 42

Smaller shares complain that the platforms censor content or allow material that is biased (9%), too negative (7%) or too steeped in partisanship and division (6%).

“Social media is censoring views that are different than theirs. There is no longer freedom of speech.” –Woman, 42

“It creates more divide between people with different viewpoints.” –Man, 37

“Focus is on negativity and encouraging angry behavior rather than doing something to help people and make the world better.” –Woman, 66

Far fewer Americans – 10% – say they believe social media has a mostly positive effect on the way things are going in the country today. When those who hold these positive views were asked about the main reason why they thought this, one-quarter say these sites help people stay informed and aware (25%) and about one-in-ten say they allow for communication, connection and community-building (12%).

“We are now aware of what’s happening around the world due to the social media outlet.” –Woman, 28

“It brings awareness to important issues that affect all Americans.” –Man, 60

“It brings people together; folks can see that there are others who share the same/similar experience, which is really important, especially when so many of us are isolated.” –Woman, 36

“Helps people stay connected and share experiences. I also get advice and recommendations via social media.” –Man, 32

“It keeps people connected who might feel lonely and alone if there did not have social media …” – Man, 65

Smaller shares tout social media as a place where marginalized people and groups have a voice (8%) and as a venue for activism and social movements (7%).

“Spreading activism and info and inspiring participation in Black Lives Matter.” –Woman, 31

“It gives average people an opportunity to voice and share their opinions.” –Man, 67

“Visibility – it has democratized access and provided platforms for voices who have been and continue to be oppressed.” –Woman, 27

Note: This is part of a series of blog posts leading up to the 2020 presidential election that explores the role of social media in politics today. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Other posts in this series:

• 23% of users in U.S. say social media led them to change views on an issue; some cite Black Lives Matter
• 54% of Americans say social media companies shouldn’t allow any political ads
• 55% of U.S. social media users say they are ‘worn out’ by political posts and discussions
• Americans think social media can help build movements, but can also be a distraction
• Misinformation
• Misinformation Online
• National Conditions
• Political Discourse
• Politics Online
• Social Media

Brooke Auxier is a former research associate focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center

Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy

­most americans favor restrictions on false information, violent content online, as ai spreads, experts predict the best and worst changes in digital life by 2035, social media seen as mostly good for democracy across many nations, but u.s. is a major outlier, the role of alternative social media in the news and information environment, most popular.

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