Social Media Trends 2025

1. Content Experimentation Trends

The Creative Disruption Trend

Social teams ditch brand consistency to push creative boundaries

With new creative opportunities brought about by social platforms, we’re seeing more and more organizations loosen the reins, toss the traditional marketing playbooks aside, and prioritize entertainment on social media.

>60% of social content aims to entertain, educate, or inform with direct promotions for nearly half of organizations. 80-100% of social content is entertainment-driven for a quarter of organizations. Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey

What’s interesting about this new creative precedent is its implications on brand consistency — or rather, inconsistency.

Adventurous teams are testing out such distinct voices and personas on social that their content barely resembles their brand personality on other marketing channels. 

And these brands aren’t just getting away with it — they’re getting celebrated for it (and driving results). Social marketers who consistently post creative content are more likely to say they have a ‘very positive’ impact on the business than those who post creative content less frequently — a sign that their efforts are paying off.

After all, social media is the perfect playground for pushing creativity further, a place where even the most buttoned-up brands can have a little fun.

In 2025, more organizations will step outside their creative comfort zone and test content that pushes beyond their brand guidelines to capture and delight audiences. 

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The Outbound Engagement Trend

Brands drop in on creators’ comments to pick up new audiences

These days, you can scroll down to the comments section of almost any social post and find a brand or two chiming in on the conversation. 

These outbound engagements (brands commenting on other people’s posts) are picking up steam. But the smartest brands are strategically commenting on creator content, which helps them cultivate community while also putting their brand in front of new audiences.

41% of organizations have been testing out proactive engagements (Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey). 1.6x higher engagement when the original creator replies to a brand comment (Source: Social Element).

Popping off in the comments may seem simple, but it needs to be approached as strategically as everything else you do on social media. 

According to our partner, global social media agency Social Element, there are two critical factors that drive success for outbound engagements: timeliness and length. 

Engagements decrease dramatically if you comment on an original post that’s more than 24 hours old. As for comment length, keep it short — but not too short. Comments between 10 and 99 characters drive the most engagement; anything more or anything less, including emoji-only comments, are a total bust.

But beware: Outbound engagements as a marketing and social selling strategy are gaining momentum, so creators might get choosy with their replies, avoiding brands that could compromise their authenticity and credibility. 

In 2025, as more brands take a stab at proactive engagements, the most strategic ones will go beyond the comments section to foster genuine relationships with creators and their communities as a prerequisite to building successful outbound engagement strategies.

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2. Social Listening Trends

The Social Performance Trend

Listening launches social pros into their performance marketing era

Unlike performance marketing, which has a crystal clear connection to revenue, social media marketing has remained notoriously difficult to connect to ROI (a.k.a. the numbers that prove business success and win investment from leadership).

However, we’ve seen more social marketers reporting increased confidence in their ability to prove ROI — and it’s not from tracking “vanity metrics” such as likes, shares, and follows. This year, we saw that confidence reach its highest point among social pros who use one specific tactic: social listening.

Social listening lifts ROI confidence

Percentage of social listeners vs. non-listeners that feel confident in the ROI of each platform

Sample: 3,864 respondents
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey

With its continuous stream of real-time insights, social listening helps organizations better understand their audience, improve their strategies, uncover market gaps to guide product development, spot potential crises so they can quickly take control, even drive sales — and prove it. 

All of this gives social pros data that can be directly connected to ROI — something that used to exclusively belong in the performance marketing arena.

62% of social marketers use social listening tools (Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey). #2 highest priority on social media for organizations (Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey)

Listening has shown so much value that it’s now ranked by organizations as their second-highest priority on social media — outranked only by marketing to or engaging with their audience. 

And because social pros are the social listening experts within their orgs, they’re finally coming to be seen as revenue powerhouses on the same playing field as other performance marketers. 

In 2025, social teams that master social listening will earn more credibility and budget by delivering valuable insights, hard numbers, and even sales leads that drive growth and success across their organization.

The Micro-Virality Trend

Social listening refines the art of trendjacking

Remember when going viral was the be-all and end-all of social media success? These days, though, social marketers know better (for the most part). Chasing random and fleeting moments of virality is both ineffective and inauthentic — and nothing kills a trend faster than the inevitable dogpiling of brands. So it’s no shock that conversations around ‘going viral’ have become increasingly negative over the last year.

Attitudes towards ‘going viral’ have soured

Sentiment around viral marketing in 2024

Sample: 1,119,860 mentions
Source: Talkwalker

However there’s a big difference between ‘going viral’ and wisely tapping into the trends that make the internet go round. In fact, consumers like when brands get involved in cultural moments on social, according to our 2024 Social Media Consumer Report.

Social marketers who are chronically online (🙋‍♀️) have a nose for the hottest social media trends — a gift (curse?) that should be put to good use. But is it enough to simply know what’s trending?

Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey

Real-time data from social listening helps brands understand if a trend is resonating with their audience, what they’re saying, and how they feel about it — as well as if a trend has reached its peak, is tapering off, or still has some runway.

~1/3 of brands use social listening tools to stay up-to-date with current social media trends (Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey). 31% of social listeners say analyzing cultural trends is a primary objective for using social listening tools (Source: The Social Intelligence Lab)

Now that more organizations are turning to social listening for otherwise hard-to-come-by insights, they can make more informed decisions about which trends to embrace and which to avoid. More than a quarter of social marketers already switch up their content because of cultural opportunities like memes and trends.

So when all the stars align, the most strategic brands are ready to pounce. 

In 2025, brands will strive for smaller-scale, audience-focused virality to achieve goals more effectively. This means fewer organizations blindly piggybacking on mainstream social media trends, but more organizations tracking them for actionable insights. 

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3. AI Trends

The AI Content Trend

Generative AI is off probation and officially on the team

When we released last year’s report, social marketers were just starting to experiment with ChatGPT and a limited number of other AI tools — if their organization let them. At the same time, they were concerned about what AI could mean for their future as social media managers. 

Today, AI is considered a major asset. In fact, 69% of marketers now see AI as revolutionary technology that can create job opportunities. And social marketers are adopting countless generative AI tools to help with creativity and impact. 

Most notably, use of generative AI for social media content creation has shot way up.

Social marketers double down on generative AI in 2024

Percentage of social marketers that used AI applications for the following social media activities

Sample: 3,843 respondents (2025), 2,865 respondents (2024)
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey, Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2024 Survey

What’s fueled this growth? The insatiable social media machine and its constant need for content. 

In-depth research conducted by Hootsuite and Critical Truth indicates that brands should aim to make between 48 and 72 posts per week across platforms. That’s A LOT of work.

And where better to turn for help than generative AI?

Source: Hubspot

From writing captions and translating scripts to creating images and drafting influencer proposals, AI is now everybody’s favorite assistant.

And get this: Our survey shows that organizations in heavily regulated industries like government, finance, and healthcare are now using AI more than loosely regulated industries, which is surprising given their strict compliance rules and privacy policies. But this really says it all — AI for content creation has become standard practice in social. 

In 2025, using generative AI to create social content at scale will be table stakes as organizations continue to integrate AI extensively into their strategies and workflows — and those that don’t will get left in the dust. 

The AI Strategy Trend

Social media strategists get a new thought partner

We’ve already established that generative AI has reshaped the way social pros create content. But did you know how much AI use has made its way up to higher-level strategic roles?

More than three-quarters of those responsible for social strategy (mainly C-level execs and VPs, according to our survey) report using AI to assist with social media activities. 

And here’s the kicker: They’re already using it more than those responsible for execution.

Social media planners lean on AI the most

Percentage of social marketers that use AI for the following activities by role/responsibility

Sample: 3,864 respondents
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2025 Survey

We have the warp-speed adoption of AI features in strategy tools to thank for this. Now it’s easily accessible — if not expected — in analytics, campaign management, brand forecasting, and so much more. It can even provide executive summaries so you don’t have to attend a billion meetings (but you probably should).   

This shows that beyond efficiency, AI has become the thought partner social marketers never knew they needed (almost half of marketing leaders have invested in AI tools for their team, new Hubspot research shows).

So it got us wondering: What do the organizations and social teams moving the fastest to bring AI on board — as a tool not just for content creation, but for strategic thinking — have in common?

It turns out that among our survey respondents, these teams are also the ones who update their strategy most frequently.

Of course, there are a lot of reasons why an organization might make frequent updates to their strategy. Whatever the reason, one thing’s for sure: Organizations that prioritize agility in their strategies also prioritize AI use across their social teams.

In 2025, social teams that invest in building out their strategic AI capabilities alongside their tactical ones will drive efficiency and insights that enhance marketing effectiveness and open the door to new opportunities. 

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