5 social media tips & trends for 2024

It only takes a cursory scroll of your social feeds to realise what a fierce battle ground these channels have become for brands and marketers. Ads pepper every nook and cranny of app real estate, with stories, in-feed assets, reels, carousels, branded hashtags, filters and more all vying for our eyeballs. 

This has made brands’ overarching social media strategy for 2024 more important than ever. Without a coherent plan and sharp, culturally-relevant creative, branded social content will ultimately be ignored by ad-weary consumers. 

Here are five social media strategies that will be key to ensuring cut-through and high performance in 2024. 

Lo-fi visual creative

The first rule of branded social content? Don’t look like branded social content. More often than not, TVC cutdowns and contrived product photography will be shunned by everyday users as they are instantly identifiable as ‘ads’. And people don’t use social for ads; they use it to enjoy content from real people.

That’s why brands should imitate the creative styles of everyday users and creators if they really want to produce our old friend, ‘socially native’ content. This doesn’t mean posting low quality photos and videos with ill-fitting trending tracks, but it does mean embracing imperfections and shunning an over-polished aesthetic. 

“It’s democratised, it’s raw, it’s sometimes even ugly. But it works,” says Susie Walker, former Head of Awards at Cannes Lions. “This new ‘DIY’ aesthetic feels more relatable to younger audiences and sits more comfortably in their social feeds.”

Personality-first 

It simply wouldn’t be an industry analysis without a mention of AI, would it? But don’t worry, this isn’t just another ‘time to embrace AI’ moment. As we know, that horse has bolted. So much so that the key for brands is now ensuring that they have the personality and point of view to distinguish their content in a sea of AI-influenced output. 

According to Hootsuite, there is a 260% increase in how much organisations plan to use AI for editing images in 2024, and a 318% increase in how much they plan to use the technology for customer support activities. But at the same time, 62% of consumers say they are less likely to engage with and trust content if they know it was created by an AI application. 

It’s time to double down on brand identity so you can build a presence on social that’s real and human. A generic tone of voice and scattergun visuals churned out by AI simply won’t resonate with people. So whether it’s the personality of your community manager, behind the scenes action from your business, or best of all, varied yet consistent creative that’s rooted in a brand point of view, channelling what makes your brand unique is the most important thing. 

Adapting to search 

According to market research from Tint, 76% of consumers have used social channels to search for or discover new products and brands, while 67% of consumers have made a purchase based on something they saw on social media. Yes, social channels in 2024 are both a search engine and a shop window.

Perhaps even more telling is that Google’s internal data shows that 40% of Gen-Z prefers using TikTok and Instagram for search over Google itself, so this kind of user behaviour is only likely to grow. 

As such, instilling some core SEO principles into your social channels can help gain a competitive advantage. This may involve adding keywords to your company’s profile, hashtags and video subtitles on Instagram, creating a vanity URL on Facebook including a target keyword, or using TikTok’s search bar and trending topics as SEO inspiration for future content.

But as social algorithms become increasingly aware of the more cynical SEO tactics, the best thing brands can do is create content that is genuinely useful for their target audience. Considering a ‘utility’ content pillar is a good way to go about it, so your social team consistently makes posts that are practical as well as entertaining. The more helpful the content, the better the chances of visibility and engagement. 

Less is more

When you see rival brands posting on social every day, it’s easy to panic into increasing volumes on your own channels simply to keep pace. But the sheer volume of content being pumped onto feeds is overwhelming for consumers, and those guilty of over-sharing risk being unfollowed altogether. 

If your ‘always-on’ social strategy is failing to draw significant engagement, consider downsizing or scrapping it. Shorter, sharper campaign bursts when there is something new to show or say are far more likely to deliver a return on investment. 

Shrewd use of paid media makes all the difference too. Two or three carefully considered posts – with clear objectives and backed by spend – will be more effective than a dozen organic posts splurged out for the sake of it. Those in charge of the purse-strings will be grateful, and your followers will be too. 

Purpose over promotion

Sure, your brand’s social accounts are likely to feature your brand, but being too inward-facing will see interest and engagement suffer. A crucial strategy in 2024 is ensuring an audience-first approach to content creation, which draws on people’s passions and relevant sub-cultures, so users are actually entertained by what you’re doing. 

Data from Hootsuite is instructive. According to their recent survey, 56% of consumers think that brands should be more relatable on social media and 34% say that too much “self-promotion” is a major turn-off in how they view a brand overall. 

Turn the mirror outwards and see what your target audience is interested in. If a brand can find an authentic and credible link to a certain community or culture, building content around this will draw a lot more engagement than shiny photos of a product. 



Find this interesting? Click here to learn about the Top 5 Upcoming Design Trends for 2024.