Top Social Media Trends of 2025

How much time did you spend on social media yesterday?

If you’re like me or the average person, you probably scrolled Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit or X (FKA Twitter) for at least two hours!

And during those two hours, besides memes and videos and updates from your friends, you must also have seen extremely relevant ads. 

You might even have clicked on some of them, shared some of them with your friends and family!

That’s the power of social media marketing, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this blog.

What makes social media marketing tick? What are the top social media trends of 2025? How can you use them to market your products and services?

Let’s find out…

Why Should You Use Social Media for Marketing in 2025?

Before we explore the latest social media trends, let’s briefly examine why social media marketing is critical to selling in 2025…

1. Brand Equity

At any given point in time, only 5% of our customers are in the market. Marketing is all about reaching not just to those 5% with active intent, but the 95% with a passive desire!

And the best way to do that is by creating brand equity.

Think of brand equity as the social perception of our brand. It’s why we pay $100 for Nike Air Jordans compared to any other shoe or brand. 

Brand equity allows us to retain users and charge a premium for our products.

And the best way to build brand equity is to use social media. It’s where our customers hang out and will come across our products in the course of their day.

Think about it: by the time you’re searching for something on Google, you’ve probably already made up your mind on which brand you want to choose. 

Our goal, through social selling, is to cultivate that desire and impression in the first place.

2. Bypassing AI

Has AI overviews killed your website traffic? Believe me, you’re not alone! Even the most popular and mainstream websites have lost traffic due to AI overviews. 

So, what can we do till things settle down and we’re able to understand how AI is visualizing and processing information?

Personally, I think it’s time to pivot to social media marketing. 

First, it helps us supplement existing SEO-generated traffic. But, more importantly, it’s a way of bypassing AI overviews and creating a direct channel with our customers!

3. More Qualified Traffic

Did you know that several people, including a huge chunk of Gen Z, use social media as their primary search engine?

That means that they might be doing product research through social media reviews, or getting recommendations from influencers.

In short, gone are the days when social media offered us only latent leads. Today, it offers us qualified traffic, with purchasing power and buying intent.

All we need to do is get out there, and tap into the market!

4. Gen Z Lives Social Media

By 2030, Gen Z will command more than a trillion dollars in purchasing power. And social media is where they live!

They consume video content for more than 2 hours/day and scroll for an even greater amount of time! That’s two hours we have to market our products by cutting out our competitors from the view entirely…

In short, if you want to cultivate the next generation of your consumers, you need to meet them where they hang out: on social media!

Top 10 Social Media Trends of 2025

After looking at a lot of surveys and studies, here are the top 10 social media trends of 2025 that stood out to me:

1. AI Is Mainstream

2024 was the year of AI. Google introduced its AI overviews, and promptly killed the traffic of many of the largest websites in the world.

Believe me, I was as hurt as you. But, I think there’s a lot of upside to this. More specifically, I think there are two upsides.

First, AI is objectively better technology. We might hate it in the short term as sellers, but we’ll benefit in the long term as both sellers and consumers! Think about it: even if consumers rely on AI to do product research, the AI will have to cite a website as the source. 

Our goal? To be that source. And once we’ve convinced AI of that expertise, it’s going to help us solidify our position in the viewers’ eyes. From this perspective: nothing has changed. We just need to convince a little more sophisticated AI compared to Google’s crawlers!

Second, we can relax our SEO efforts and redirect the resources to social selling. After all, SEO was anyway too competitive, and we might be better off pushing our products and services where users organically spend the biggest chunk of their time: social media.

So, while everyone is out there, trying to think outside the box in SEO terms, we should occupy the box which is empty: social media!

2. Short Videos Work the Best

Short videos: we see them, love them and share them. And it doesn’t matter where we live, how old we are or what we like. Short videos are everywhere, and they’re the dominant form of social media marketing.

Look at it this way: Gen Z already consumes a lot of video content. So, short video ads are the best way to approach them. But, they work equally well with adults and older internet users!

After all, they may lack tech expertise, but they can definitely hit play and watch a video!

So, whether you want to show your prospects how your marketing services work or your B2B clients the latest features of your SaaS products, short videos will help you break the sound barrier!

Plus, research shows that more people learn visually than textually. Well, if that’s true, then it’s also true that we learn even faster through audio-visual media! In fact, more than 70% of all consumers prefer short videos to search for products!

So, it’s not surprising that more than 95% of organizations are using short videos to market themselves. And if you’re not doing it, you should, too!

3. LinkedIn is Now a Social Hub

LinkedIn: the official app of B2B communication where billions of decision-makers make millions of connections every day.

And if you’ve visited LinkedIn recently, you might have noticed that it doesn’t feel like the LinkedIn of old. It’s no longer a cold, “officy” platform with serious posts and professional updates!

Not at all: it’s a social hub for professionals and executives. It’s where we share the latest insights and tell stories about interesting business trends. And LinkedIn has gone all in on its diversification: it now lets us post Instagram-style videos and picture stories!

If you’re operating a B2B enterprise or selling a SaaS offering, I highly recommend that you revisit your LinkedIn strategy. The new LinkedIn offers you a new way of doing business. So, whether you’re into Account-Based Marketing or lead generation, it’s the place you need to be!

4. TikTok is Driving Sales

Did you know that TikTok generated over $23 billion in sales in 2024? And that number is only going to rise in 2025. The influence of TikTok is such that even President Trump doesn’t want to shut it down!

And with a dedicated Shop page, TikTok is doing everything it can to make itself the leading social selling platform!

I believe that now is the right time to pivot to TikTok selling! Whether you’re selling pet food or shipping services, you can post short videos of people using your products and services.

This will establish your brand as a Gen Z-friendly enterprise, willing to adapt to new trends and venture into a new marketplace.

And if you’re into influencer marketing, there’s no better way to partner with them than on TikTok!

5. Micro Influencers are Mega Sellers

If you spend even a limited amount of time on social media, you must have heard of a new class of marketers, influencers. Influencer marketing is an evolution of the tried and tested affiliate marketing.

The idea is this: you partner with trendsetters in your industry to push your products and services. They have a dedicated following of thousands of users, who look to the influencers for advice, reviews and recommendations!

Now, you might be thinking that it’s very easy to work with influencers in the consumer goods segment. What about services? What about products that aren’t fashion items? 

Well, in that case, I suggest that you rebrand your affiliates as influencers. 

Think about it: if you’re running a moving company, working with real-estate agents as influencers is one of the best ways of overcoming the challenges of mover marketing! Similarly, if you’re selling SaaS products, you can work with thought leaders and industry experts to market your products!
In both these cases, I suggest posting short videos on your social media platforms featuring your influencers to increase visibility and establish consumer confidence!

6. User-Generated Content is the Next Big Thing

If you’re iffy on influencers, think they cost too much, or just want another way of building trust with your users, I’ve got just the thing for you.

It’s called User-Generated Content (UGC). If you’ve seen people posting pictures holding a can of Coke or Red Bull, you know what this looks like.

It’s the strategy of using content that is generated by your users through viral trends and hashtags. It helps you show prospective customers that existing customers are using and enjoying your products and services!

The best part? Once your strategy is in place, the users will post pictures and other content with your products and services on their own! That is, your trend will gain organic traction!

It helps you gain your customers’ trust and create content without paying for it!

7. Experiential Marketing is On the Rise

What do you do before buying a car? You take it for a test drive! Well, if you’ve ever done this, you already know what experiential marketing looks like.

It gives you a taste of the product and then asks you if you’re interested in buying it.

So, whether you’re selling a SaaS product or any other consumer good, a free trial or a test product is a great way of creating customers!

But what does all that have to do with social media?

Well, there are products and services that customers can’t test before buying. Consider shipping services as an example. We can’t expect our customers to test our moving services before they hire them, right?

Well, that’s where social media comes in!

You can use the power of social selling to deliver unique marketing experiences based on user-generated content. This includes:

• Sharing customer testimonials
• Asking customers what problems they’re facing through public forms
• Posting vlogs of customers using your products and services

In other words, you show prospective customers how current users are experiencing your products or services! Plus, experiential marketing is capturing Gen Z’s attention like no other strategy!

8. SEO, But Make It Social

2024 was the year that SEO died. Well, it didn’t die, but it did receive a huge blow. AI Overviews led to tanking traffic on several popular and mainstream websites.

Personally, I think it’s a good thing! Especially if you’re an up and coming business. After all, SEO is a crowded field, where standing out is hard, and remaining on top is even harder.

But social media offers you a great alternative. You can create a community of dedicated followers and cultivate existing ones through creative content.

But there’s a catch: how can you get noticed on social media? The answer is social media SEO! It includes:

In short, now is the time to go all-in on social media SEO to create even more direct traffic compared to conventional SEO.

9. Forums Are More Important Than Ever

Where do you go when you need to fix a problem on your iPhone? Chances are you put your question to Google and see what pops up. And chances are that the top hit leads to an Apple-operated forum.

And if not, it’s not the Apple forum, then you’ll probably end up on a forum like Quora or Reddit.

So, if you want to retain loyal customers, forum marketing is now more important than ever. Google has even dedicated an entire section of its SERP to forum-based answers!

In short, if you’re not on Reddit or Quora, you need to make a profile right away. I also suggest that you should create forum accounts through your employees to deliver credibility and inspire trust in your services!

10. Creating Trends > Chasing Trends

Often, our social media marketing strategy is reactive. So, we wait for organic trends to develop, and then quickly position ourselves to benefit from it.

Now, this strategy can work well if you’re operating with a huge marketing team and an equally big budget. But, it also means that you’ll have to spend time and resources chasing trends, and then even more time creating content to match it.

And there’s another problem: once the trend is over, your content is not reusable!

To avoid this problem, I suggest that you should diversify your strategy. Simply put, you should dedicate time, content, and creative resources to creating organic trends yourself! This includes creating content around a central theme, and using multiple hashtags to make it popular.

In my time in social media marketing, I’ve come across several strategies focused on creating trends. Two such strategies include Warby Parker’s influencer marketing campaign and Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke Campaign.

#ShareACoke debuted in 2011, and it’s still going strong!

Launch Your Social Media Strategy Today!

Social media is the future of marketing. It’s the future of search. In short, it’s the future of business. Until now, business and personal life were separate on the internet. We used Google to search for solutions to our problems, and then picked a company whose offerings we liked.

But in the last five years, the marketing landscape has changed. Social media has brought business and personal life together.

In my opinion, that’s a good thing! After all, modern consumers are demanding personalization as long as privacy is respected…

But creating a winning social media marketing strategy is a huge challenge!

You need to collect and analyze data, create content, and deploy our strategy on the most effective platforms.

That’s where we come in!

At Lean Summits, we’ve leveraged our experience as growth marketers to develop social media marketing strategies for a wide range of industries! 

And we’re ready to deliver for you, too!

Connect with us for a commitment-free consultation and we’ll help you brainstorm a future-proof social media marketing strategy for your business!

Social Media Trends of 2025: FAQs

1. What are the latest social media trends of 2025?

The latest social media trends of 2025 include:

• Short videos
• LinkedIn marketing
• Micro-influencer selling
• Experiential marketing
• User-Generated Content
• Forum marketing
• Social SEO

2. What are the best social media platforms for marketing products?

The best social media marketing platforms of 2025 include:

• LinkedIn for B2B and SaaS selling
• TikTok and Instagram for consumer products & services through short videos
• Reddit and Quora for forum marketing via long-tail keywords

3. Is Social Media Marketing worth it in 2025?

Yes! Social media marketing can be a high-ROI marketing strategy for 2025. It offers us a direct channel to our customers, a less competitive field compared to SERP and a creative way of reaching out to target audiences.

4. What is the Instagram Strategy for 2025?

The Instagram strategy for 2025 should include:

• Influencer partnerships
• Creatively curating social profiles
• Planned and scheduled posts
• Creating organic trends through hashtags
• Posting pictures and videos through the join-posting feature

5. Are hashtags relevant in 2025?

Yes, Hashtags are definitely relevant in 2025. They’ll help you gain more visibility through different trends. It’ll also help you create a cluster of keywords for all your content. I suggest using all 30 hashtags that Instagram allows us to include in one post.