2025 Social Media Trends, Predictions, and Research
Which platform is easiest to grow on?
Ready to see what’s in store for social media this year? Today, I'm breaking down a large 2024 social media study so you don't have to read the whole thing!
Prefer to watch or listen rather than read this article?
In the study I’m going over today, over 1.3 million accounts and over 21 million posts across various social media platforms were analyzed. The study was done by Metricool, a social media management tool. They’re not a sponsor—I just find their studies really interesting and wanted to bring this data to you, but I’ll absolutely link the full study at the bottom of this post so you can check it out.
I’m going to be talking about the trends that this study saw in terms of reach, engagement, and growth. I also want to talk about building your social media community and the best platforms to do that, so I’ll cover the best places for reach, interaction, and engagement, as well as clicks and then overall trends and predictions for 2025. I'm mostly going to focus on some of the heavy hitters in terms of popularity with my own community—which are Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube—as well as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Breaking Down the Growth Game: Which Platforms Are Winning
LinkedIn’s Big Breakout
In terms of the biggest growth, LinkedIn saw a huge 99% increase in interactions compared to the year prior! This definitely checks out with what I've been seeing in that LinkedIn has been growing in popularity as a content creation type of platform. A lot of people are turning to LinkedIn to build their network but also to share storytelling types of posts— the kinds with a beginning, middle, and end—that tend to do well on LinkedIn.
Pinterest Power
Now, moving on to Pinterest, which saw a 55% increase in clicks. This makes sense because it’s more of a search engine versus a social media platform, so they're really driving traffic to websites in every single post. But it’s really good to know that the Pinterest community is active and clicking, which is what we want whenever we're using social media for marketing, right? We want to nurture and engage and build our community, but we also want sales and driving traffic to our email list.
X Marks the Spot?
This one surprised me, but X (PKA Twitter) saw a 50% increase in impressions. I was under the impression (pun not intended) that X was on its way out and lowering in popularity, so a 50% increase definitely surprised me. A lot of people in my community—including myself—removed the app this year and stopped using it, but it looks like an increase is still happening over there in some aspects of the platform.
Instagram: Hit and Miss
Instagram saw a 21% increase in reach for regular posts, however, it saw a negative 20% reach for reels, which doesn't surprise me. I definitely saw a dip in my own reels’ reach last year, and a lot of others mentioned the same as well. This report still showed that there are more interactions on reels despite reach being down, so it's still a really good way to interact and engage your audience. It makes sense because video content tends to be more powerful when it comes to building that trust factor with your audience, and we're seeing shares go up a lot too.
Facebook: Is it Still Worth It?
On the other side of the report, Facebook saw a 41% decrease in post reach, which doesn't surprise me either. It's been a lot more pay-to-play there for quite some time now. They did see a 133% increase in reels reach, though, so if you’re posting reels to Instagram, it might well be worth it to repost them to Facebook reels as well. You might even get more reach than on Instagram.
TikTok Time
When it comes to TikTok, they saw an increase of 71% average watch time, so people are watching more and more. And reach was up 70% with a 20% increase in content sharing, showing that’s really where social media is going right now. It's a place to share content that you find funny or inspiring or educational in some way, so a focus on making content that is sharable just makes sense.
Building a Loyal Community Without Burning Out
Now, when it comes to growing your social media community, this study found that it can actually be easier when you have a lower number of followers who are engaged with you, which definitely aligns with what I'm currently seeing in my community and the platforms that I teach people how to use, like Instagram and TikTok.
I'm someone who always recommends just focusing on a couple of platforms—obviously, you want to diversify in the case that one platform was to go down. Having an email list is another marketing method as well, but if you’re someone who wants to add another platform to your current base, I do think either YouTube or LinkedIn would be a really good strategy to think about trying. Maybe start with one and then add another one if you have the bandwidth to do so.
From Followers to Fans: Getting Engaged
Next up is interaction and engagement. If you have less than 2,000 followers, the best spots for interaction are YouTube (with 43 interactions per follower), TikTok (with 13 per follower), and then LinkedIn and Instagram reels, which were both at 5 interactions per follower.
To me, this just shows that the focus on growing a following is actually kind of changing, and I think it's now more about making sharable content that is going to reach both followers and non-followers. I've seen people are following less, they're liking posts less, but they're sharing content more, so our feeds are now curated to what we like. It's less critical now to have a following and more critical to create engaging and sharable content.
*If you're interested in how to reach more non-followers, this YouTube episode I created is a full tutorial on Instagram’s Trial Reels.
Clicks, Conversions, and Cash: Where Social Media Drives the Most Traffic
The next category is so important because social media is so much more than just getting likes and comments. We really want to get clicks and conversions. We want sales. We want people on our email list. We want to grow outside of social media as well.
The top place for clicks per post last year was LinkedIn. Now this makes sense because a lot of platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, don't actually allow links in their posts, and those two are two of the biggest heavy hitters, meaning they can't even be in this category. But don’t worry! There are other ways to drive traffic on platforms like Instagram and TikTok since we can't put clickable links in our bios.
What’s Next for Social Media in 2025?
I didn't really see any new platforms on this study, like Bluesky or Threads or one of the many other social media platforms that are popping up and gaining popularity, but perhaps we'll see in next year's study a new platform that really came into the game and attracted a lot of users quickly.
Social media is always changing, and it's important that we adapt and stay up to date on some of this data. You don't need to know every single thing, which is why I broke this down for you and gave you what I feel is most helpful for you to know. If you want more updates like this, I try to post them pretty regularly here and on my YouTube channel @marketingbyshelby.
I hope you got some valuable information from this post, and have a great rest of your day. I'll see you next time!
If you want more support and the ability to ask me marketing questions and get feedback on your content, then I definitely recommend joining The Creative’s Content Club.
Check out the full Metricool study if you’re interested in all the data. There's a lot of good stuff in there!