What's Next For Social Media: 2024 vs 2030

Mainly if you intend to link up with new people in business, it does help to team up with an influencer since most people are on social media.

Today, 3.96 billion people use social media, and experts believe that the number could rise to 4.41 billion by 2025.

The Current State of Social Media (2024)

This was where social media had further developed, even more so a part of our daily lives in 2024. The key platforms owned the kind of arena, each serving its kind of niche and demographic.

In the Datareportal overview from January 2024, I've noticed that social media is still growing: Over half of the world is now on social media (62.3%).

There are now 5.04 billion people worldwide using social media, with 266 million new users joining in the past year. On average, people spend 2 hours and 23 minutes each day on social media.

Social media is changing the way businesses advertise and continues to gain more popularity, my latest 2024 research shows:

Different social networks prove to popularize among some groups of people and constantly change. According to the research by Global WebIndex, I mention in this article:

About 62.3% of the whole world uses social media.

On average, people spend 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media every day.

People are spending a little bit less time on social media platforms these days but only 4 to 5 minutes less. The number of social media users is growing excessively day by day. According to my recent survey, at least 94.2% of internet users are on social media.

Here's an overview of Social Media Use:

Image Source - Smart Insights

Platforms and Their Roles

TikTok

According to the latest research TikTok has over 1.9 billion users. And according to the 20% growth rate from the beginning to the end of 2024, TikTok is expected to reach expectedly 4.48 billion monthly active users by the end of 2030.

TikTok Users (2024)	TikTok Users (2030)
1.9 Billion Users	4.48 Billion Users

It remains undisputed in short-form video content, with a well-defined algorithm running user preferences and a hotbed for things that trend virally.

Instagram

Instagram has over 2 billion active monthly users and this number is excessively growing.
Continues to be popular for the mix of photos, stories, and increasingly, video content. A key platform for lifestyle influencers and those brands looking to share their message visually with consumers.

YouTube

According to my research YouTube has 2.7 billion active users and it is expected that 232.5 million users will be increased by the year 2024 to 2030 which is about 24.91% increase.

It remained the home of the long-form video content, with vloggers and educational channels here making a very, very big impact on their viewers.

Twitter

Twitter has 500 million active monthly users with over 200 million daily users. And Mark Zuckerberg predicts that twitter will have 5 billion users by the year of 2030.

Twitter is a pulse of what's happening, and a world of influencers connect with the most timely topics to ignite conversation and make your voice heard.

New entrants: Byte and Vero are two of a range of newly emerging entrants to the market with attempts to carve a unique niche by offering exceptional features such as less filtering of their algorithmic content and better privacy for their users.

Leading Influencers and Their Impact People like

• Charli D’Amelio
• MrBeast
• Huda Kattan

among many others, will continue reigning in their respective platforms because of what they post, which echoes most genuinely both trends and what their intended audience would like to view. They take over the spot of the entertainer, making a difference in the consumer's purchasing decision, hence having double power in the market and culture.

Key Metrics for Success

Followers:

The basic measure of an influencer’s reach.

Engagement Rate:

This becomes all the more crucial in measuring the active number of interactions (likes, comments, shares) an influencer gets by followers against the total of them.

Image Source - MrBeast

Mr Beast have 6,175,947 likes and 57.9 K comments. Like him influencers got highest engagement numbers.

The content reached: not only the number of people seeing the content but also the number of people far outside the immediate audience of the influencer to whom the content was spread to reach.

Brand Partnerships:

The quality and quantity of partnerships that influencers secure.

For instance, the social media personality @carlosdharrisjr. He had an advertisement deal with ECCO Shoes, and, of course, the brand was mentioned in his post. Each such mention of the brand in posts gives another opportunity for more people to learn about it and get interested to learn more

Image Souce - carlosdharrisjr

Finding Things on Social Media Rather Than Search Engines

A few days ago, i was looking for a graphic designer and I didn't google in the real sense, but what I did was that I asked my friends over Facebook by the name of who or which person could be an excellent graphic designer to take some new shots for my headshots. And they recommended me, and they gave me the name of an amazing designer, and really, his work was fantastic.

I'm not the only one who relies on social media for recommendations and reviews. More and more people are doing it too. Our report shows that 87% of social media marketers believe that instead of looking at search engines, people will start looking much more for brands on social media.

As a TechCrunch article put it, "Some Google executives are starting to come around to the view that apps like TikTok and Instagram are starting to feel more popular than Google Maps and Google Search, at least among young users."

Do you think why this is happening? because new generation is looking for pcitures and videos when they to try to find some guidance or products.

Why is this happening? Well, it looks like the new youth of today are really into looking at pictures and videos when they are trying to find new things.

TikTok, for example, is adding more search features because so many people are using it to find stuff. In August 2022, TikTok tested one of those features, which now has a new feature that allows tapping on keywords within the comments to be able to look at more related videos.

If traditional search engines don't keep pace with the things people are looking for, TikTok and other social media apps may well become the places we find them.

Another thing challenging search engines are AI chatbots like ChatGPT. You can ask ChatGPT questions, and it'll give you answers. We don't have exact numbers of users of ChatGPT instead of regular search engines, but it is pretty popular. Its website is visited by about 1 billion people monthly, while the number of active users is around 100 million.

Smooth Shopping Experience Across Social Media

31% of marketers would want to sell directly to customers from their social, 27% feel selling products on social media directly works better than sending people to the website.

Heck, even Instagram was one of the first places where it was just so easy to buy stuff while scrolling down posts, you know? Now, it's other social media sites doing the same thing.

Of course, in future social media platforms will have to allow purchasing within the app if they want to keep up. And that businesses will have to change how they sell stuff. Even though Instagram started the trend, 38% of marketers focus more on selling things through Facebook.

It seems like selling stuff on social media is sticking around and will keep changing how we use these apps.

Short Videos Will Be Even More Important

If we say that content is king, short videos are super-speedily becoming the next big thing. My research shows that 29% of marketers believe in the importance of short videos right now, and 57% of brands plan to include them more in their social media plans.

Short-form videos can be of everything, from ads to funny content, thematic explanation, etc. 24% of marketers believe that funny videos bring the greatest benefits to their business.

No wonder that, while even in some of the top places to share stuff, they also say Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, most marketers want more of their content to be short videos.

Just like TikTok, which is also huge, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram all have their versions of short-video features.

I'm pretty sure that there will be many people just like me who spend a lot of time just watching reels and short videos because short content videos are easy to watch, so i don't think this will be a surprising analysis for anyone that 71% of marketers think that investment in videos is really good.

Privacy and Data Protection on Social Media

Now social media seems to take a critical place in our lives. At the same time, there are issues related to how the platforms treat our personal information and our privacy.

In this section, these concerns are explored in some detail, and what future rules and features might be put in place to protect the user are discussed.

Growing Concerns

Imagine all of us every day going on social media and sharing our moments, thoughts, and information. But do you know who gets this data or who uses it? There are some big worries:

Data Sharing:

At times, some of these social media companies share specific user data with other companies for undefined use, from advertising and others, without explicit user authorization.

Privacy Settings:

The settings regarding privacy are usually very complex and may become even overwhelming when it comes to controlling the visibility of your postings and information.

Data Breaches:

Some hacks of access to information have been carried out in them, generating concerns of insecurity on these platforms.

Future Developments

Looking forward, some of these will be done for safety and privacy in social media. Here is what to expect:

Governments worldwide are set to tighten their grip on how social media firms take care of people's data. That is likely to mean new laws that require more robust security and more disclosure overuse.

By making privacy features more humanly friendly, social media companies could bring forth accessible and easy-to-understand privacy settings through which you could better control your data. Improved features could be standard, such as data encryption, to secure your information. In that regard, future updates may well include tools that provide the platforms' users an actual idea of what kind of data they hold and even provide control either to keep it there or delete it.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Becoming The Most Helpful Tool Day by Day

Social Media Trend research indicates that the majority of 73% marketers are already using the help of AI tools in creating things for social media. And most of them 81% say that AI has made their work easy.

But you know what is the best part? that AI don't just help us in writing and providing content but also it help users to generate pictures and videos customized to their needs. Even most of time i prefer to use AI tools for pictures and videos because i'm not such good in editing.

But, of course, AI is not perfect. It's constantly learning and changing. However, for all its flaws, most marketers 54% say AI helps them make content that people like.

And that's super key: Creating content people like. This is why many marketers—34%—focus on what their audience likes when they're planning out posts for social media.

The AI market is growing very fast and is expected to become worth investing in as of 2030. So, do not be amazed if you see it taking a lot of AI help in different things on social media sites in the coming times.

Conclusion

Social media is constantly changing, and it's pretty tricky to predict what exactly will be coming in the future. However, based on recent trends, here is an approximation of where it's headed:

And so, it would appear that short videos will just become more popular. People love watching quick clips, so the expectation is that we will see more of them showing up on our feeds.

The other trend worth noting is the rise of AI. More and more content creators are using AI tools in their work, and with the improved technology that gives them more access to such AI tools, it's a trend that seems only to go up.

In a nutshell, the future of social media looks promising, provided we keep pace with the very latest trends and developments in it.