MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Did you know that Meta has launched its first smart glasses with a display? Have you heard that Mastercard has harnessed the power of Natural Language Processing to create a Facebook Messenger bot that can decipher customer needs and automate payments? And, would you believe that Netflix has saved a staggering USD 1 billion in annual revenue by leveraging AI to enhance its personalized recommendation system?
“These are just some of the drastic changes that we’ve been seeing and they’re already happening around us, and you know there will be more in the years to come. 2024, I think, will be remarkable. If we thought 2023 was remarkable, we’d tell you, see what 2024 has in store,” Truelogic Managing Partner Berns San Juan said.
“So these stories are indicators of what massive developments still lie ahead of us, especially in AI and social media. And if you spot the trend and you adapt to it correctly, you may be able to ride the wave and drive positive results for your brands,” he added.
If you want your brand to be in the same light and make those profits, we keep an eye on the social media trends for 2024 and see how you can use them to your advantage.
Recap of 2023 Social Media Trends
- Aspirational, aesthetic-driven content declined in 2023. Instead, brands started using genuine, unfiltered content to showcase brand authenticity.
- Businesses focused more on reaching the right people rather than just reaching people.
- The importance of making the “audience” the hero was increasingly realized. Rather than making their products the star of the show, businesses began creating their social media strategy around their audience’s pain points.
- From posting regularly at the right time and reducing response time, marketers prioritized user behavior in their social media strategy. Robotic or overly polished content was replaced by a relevant, personal communication style for better engagement.
- 2023 was also about creating the most engaging, in-feed social content to build brand presence.
- Short-form video content continued to rise in popularity in 2023 as well. Marketers dedicated full-time effort to creating a solid video plan for their brand.
Significant Digital Marketing Trends for 2024
1. Brand authenticity will be the way to go
Authenticity has been a buzzword in branding for a few years, but it’s more relevant than ever in 2024. A study by Stackla found that 88% of consumers consider authenticity important when deciding which brands to support. “When I say authenticity, what I’ll usually mean to say is it is not product-centric, it is not brand-centric, it is audience-centric. Authentic content is engaging and human-centric. If your hero image is the facade of a building, that is not authenticity. If your insurance products are just numbers on a billboard, that’s not authenticity. Like brand authenticity is human-centric,” Berns explained.
2. The use of social media as shopping outlets will remain popular
In 2024, social media platforms are expected to continue becoming popular consumer shopping outlets. Furthermore, it’s projected that by 2026, global social commerce sales will reach a whopping $6 trillion, with the US having approximately 108 million social buyers by 2025.
A HubSpot survey shows that 22% of social media users purchased a product directly from Instagram, followed by 21% of consumers who used Facebook to buy products on social media.
3. Short-form video is still king
While this trend started in 2022 and took off in 2023, it shows no sign of slowing down even in 2024. TikTok, the pioneer of the short-form video content movement, has a massive 1.677 billion global users in 2023, with an average of 1.1 billion monthly active users. And there’s a good reason for it. Users are still hungry for bite-size, engaging, content.
4. Phasing out of third-party cookies
It’s projected that by 2024, we’ll start to see the end of third-party cookies. While third-party cookies allow brands to offer more personalized experiences to their audience, they’re facing backlash due to growing privacy concerns. Moreover, consumers are growing frustrated over this issue and are looking for an immediate solution.
“So what does this mean? This means you should not be, like for you as a brand, this means that you should not be relying on third-party data to be able to reach your customers. Instead, your Facebook page builds an audience. Optimize that experience. Your website creates experiences for your customers. Optimize that. So try to build out your proprietary database of your customers, your users, how they behave, what’s popular on your website, how they interact with you, versus having to rely on third-party providers,” Berns shared.
5. Sustainability and the environment will become more of a priority
Today’s consumers don’t want to listen to words like “sustainability” or “eco-friendly – they want to take action to make an impact. They expect brands to act on environmental issues, with 82% of consumers wanting companies to prioritize the two Ps – people and planet – instead of profit.
6. AI will continue to improve the way we reach our audience
2024 will be an even bigger year for AI. “There have been a lot of terrific improvements in terms of AI generation. I’ll give you guys two examples. Have you guys tried the image generation capabilities from MidJourney and Canva? Canva, with some pretty basic instructions, can design a website for you. Like, if you just give it some ideas, if you tell it what its color palette is, if you give it some basis, it can design it from its templates,” Berns enthused.
“MidJourney is the same. You’re able to design single-image posts directly from MidJourney. You just need to describe what you would like to see. It will give you a couple of iterations. You just have to prompt it to say, okay, give me three versions of this. Rate them from one to three, and so on,” he added.
7. The human touch will play a more prominent role
User-generated content made waves in 2022. This year, this trend is highly likely to become even bigger, with brands leveraging the power of the human touch to nurture authenticity and drum up engagement.
As brands become more interactive, we may also start seeing a more “relaxed” approach to audience engagement. For example, brands may start using more conversational tones or taking steps to make their image more relatable and accessible to their target audience, instead of the usual carefully curated image that audiences are used to seeing.
“If you aren’t yet telling a story, start telling a story. One of the reasons Truelogic has so much legitimacy in the market is because we’ve been telling a story for 12 years. If storytelling is not part of your arsenal, if it’s not if you’re still connecting with your customers by being the best priced, that’s sort of not the way you wanna run your business,” Berns underscored.
“If you wanna employ a blue ocean strategy, then you need to tell a story. So embrace the power of storytelling in your strategy. Experiment with the different channels, social, and own leased assets. Like, your website, email marketing, social media channels, and YouTube and see where your audiences resonate with you,” he concluded.
About Truelogic Inc
Truelogic Inc. is a digital marketing agency and a leader in the digital sphere providing flexible, scalable, results-driven digital marketing solutions to local and global clients from a range of industries. For ten years now, the company has invested heavily in research and development to complement and advance the expertise of its employees and benefit clients.
For PR information and exclusive interviews, email erma@truelogic.com.ph
