As we move into 2024, the social media landscape is proving to be stronger than ever. With over 4.9 billion users worldwide consuming content across social media channels, we have seen a direct shift in how we consume news, information, and exposure to products and services through digital channels. Influencer marketing is an industry that continues to grow, develop, and expand with explosive economic impact. Brands are continuing to invest marketing dollars into the industry and creators are finding new ways to execute branded campaigns with new social platforms and technology entering the digital landscape.
How Big Is The Influencer Marketing Industry in 2024?
With substantial growth over the past years, influencer marketing and the creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027. In 2022, an estimated $4.99 billion was generated within the creator economy and influencer marketing space. Fast forward to 2023, that figure grew 23.4% to $6.16 billion. By the end of 2024, the creator economy and influencer marketing industry are expected to generate $7.14B.
How To Find Social Media Trends in 2024
Social media trends continue to change by the day. From new songs, formats, styles, and filters gaining traction on TikTok to new dance style videos that are replicated across Instagram, staying up with the trends is a full-time job. If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of influencer markeitng for brands, being on top of all trends is a must do. In order to keep up with trends, it is important to be active on all of the main social media platforms: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Meta (Facebook). If you are looking for tips and tricks about trends, look no further than our blog here for more updates on a weekly basis.
The Top Influencer Marketing, Creator Economy, and Social Media Trends and Predictions for 2024:
Without any further ado, here are the top influencer marketing trends to look forward to in 2024.
1. Creators will promote their authentic lifestyles, revolving around activities.
Creators and influencers are going to embrace activity and sports much more in 2024. With sports like Pickleball gaining massive popularity, tennis continuing to grow, and active lifestyles continuing to shine on social media, the active lifestyle and health + wellness sector will grow tremendously.
According to Pinterest’s 2023 trend report, sports like badminton were searched significantly higher in 2023 than 2022. We’re expecting that these stats continue to rise.
With more and more creators showing their authentic self on social media, Instagram fitness influencers will have a breakout year and the promotion of all body types will see more engagement, attention, and appreciation.
As for brands, activewear brands are going to continue to climb in ranking of popularity amongst others. fashion sectors. Brands like LuluLemon and Alo yoga have had extraordinary years of growth and will continue to soar throughout 2024. Kim Kardashian had a breakout year with her SKIMS line (even signing with the NBA) and driving hundreds of millions in sales through social media channels. This further proves that consumer patterns are leaning towards buying activewear from brands that they share affinity with. See Kim’s NBA collaboration below:
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2. Gen-Z Will Continue To Love Self-Care in 2024
Brands in the self care and beauty space will continue to rise. Gen-Z is focused a lot more on themselves and having a good life than previous generations were at that age, and that shows in consumer behaviors and social media trends. Searches for “Body skin care routine” were up 1,025% this year, with “bodycare” up 845%. Creators are continuing to show off the brands that they align most with. These are typically brands that share similar values to them such as being eco-friendly, emission consciousness, cruelty free, and smaller businesses compared to purchasing from larger retailers.
There is no doubt that Gen-Z influencers are going to continue down the path of self care and authentic lifestyles. In addition to self-care, Gen-Z is focused on doing their own thing and being comfortable in the environment around them. Pushing back on cultural norms, traditional work-life balance rituals, and fast metropolitan lifestyles, Gen-Z takes to social media to show their true authentic selves. Emma Chamberlain was deemed Forbes’ #8 top creator of 2023. This post perfectly exemplifies Gen-Z’s approach to self-care and a cozy lifestyle as Emma posts to her 15+ million followers from the comfort of her own bed:
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3. Content Creators will Continue to Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2024
AI will continue to grow in popularity on social media and with content creation. With platforms like OpenAI (owner of ChatPT) surpassing 180 million users and their growth with both written AI and visual AI (through their image generator Dall-E), creators can leverage AI to create captions, write prompts, create branded imagery, and even create video content from their laptop. This will make its way into social media much more in 2024 and the influencer marketing industry will start to open their arms to accepting it more.
We are expecting to see more AI-generated content coming out from influencers in 2024, as well as a rise in AI generated creators themselves. We predict that agencies are going to be leveraging AI image, video, voice, and animation technology to build and grow social media personalities and personas that are completely AI created.
Check out the trends that rose to popularity amongst influencers, creators, and social media users this year. Then, think about how fast we’ll be able to continue building and ideating on AI based ideas with new technologies emerging in space by the day.
@glew.ee AI has become one of the most helpful tools when it comes to content creation. Which is why AI has completely taken over social media in 2023. Here are some of the top AI trends that we saw on social media this year. Did you participate in any? #ai #aitrend #aiyearbook #chatgpt #aistreamer #pinkydoll #pixar #socialmediatrends ♬ original sound – Glewee – Paid Brand Deals
4. TikTok will Continue to Win Screen Time and Ad Dollars in 2024($1.3 Billion)
With TikTok continuing to own screen time, marketers will be spending more in the TikTok ad suite as well as on TikTok creators. With the company coming out with new e-commerce features such as live shopping, users have integrated TikTok into more than just their content consumption habits. Rather, now they’re transacting directly with sellers through TikTok.
From a business perspective, we predict that TikTok will spend a bulk of 2024 trying to take on selling platforms such as Amazon and Douyin.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, users are spending over double the amount of time on TikTok as they are on Instagram per session. This means that more eyeballs are on TikTok, meaning that the ad dollars will continue to flow there as well. In 2022, an estimated $800 million was spent on TikTok influencer marketing. In 2024, that figure is expected to exceed $1.3B.
5. Short-Form Video Content Will Be The Most Popular Content Type on Social Media in 2024
Years ago, long-form YouTube videos were the most popular form of content circulated on social media. With the rise of TikTok and the subsequent immersion of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts short-form video features, the industry is moving towards videos that are 60s or less. Longer form YouTube videos have been mainly replaced with real-time longer form live streams (with platforms like Twitch and Kick dominating that space this year).
Creators that are growing their following the fastest are the ones prioritizing short form content. Because it is less time consuming to produce, creators are able to make more content and deploy that same piece of short-form video content across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Meta, X, and Snapchat all at the same time. By doing this, creators are able to maximize their total possible reach and grow their audience across all of the social media platforms.
Here is a quick video of social media guru GarryVee talking about the science behind short-form content:
6. Creators and Influencers Will Become More Specialized and Niche in 2024
Influencers will become more specialized in content creation this year. With a larger pool of influencers on social media, the need to carve out a unique niche and value proposition is something that is of high value for many influencers. The more that a creator can stand out to a brand, the higher the probability that they will work together on a paid campaign that performs well on social media, and in-term create a longer term partnership with.
There are over 50 million users on social media that consider themselves influencers. But, the average income per influencer is under $1,000. With these stats in mind, creators are going to become more specialized in their niche field or content creation style in 2024.
Creator crew Colin and Samir are amongst the most specialized influencers in the space right now. With a strong importance on high quality content in a variety of forms, they deliver value to their audiences and viewers keep coming back to watch their content across all their different social media channels. Check out the video below to understand them talk about their story and how they became specialized in their field:
7. Brand and Creator ‘Collab Posts’ Will Gain Popularity on Instagram in 2024
In order to maximize reach, follower growth, and impression count – we are going to start seeing more “collab” posts between sets of users on Instagram in 2024. As we’ve seen across the Meta suite, features like “shared posts” are now available for creators to post content together and share it with both of their audiences, increasing their engagement and overall reach which grows their follower count. Brands and creators are going to be leveraging this a lot more in 2024. To spot these collaborative posts, look at the username of the person posting this content below. You’ll see that there are two usernames appearing here as the account(s) who posted the content, one is the brand Ugg and one is creator Rickey Thompson.
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Another good example of the shared post feature is from the most recent trending social media campaign between McDonald’s and New York City fashion creator Kerwin Frost. During the launch of their collaboration, they rolled it out on Instagram using the “shared post” collaboration feature, pushing the post to both the McDonald’s audience and Kerwin Frost’s audience, increasing the total number of possible users that will see the single post.
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8. Nano and Micro Creators Will See More Collaborations than Ever Before in 2024
Micro-Creators will continue to bring a lot of impact to brands. SMB companies are going to be focusing a lot more on working with micro-creators in order to maximize their limited budgets on social media. By working with micro creators (show the pyramid), brands are able to get more content, display their brand to more niche and micro communities, and create a deeper impact with consumers through influencer marketing.
Nano influencers are creators who have between 1,000 – 10,000 followers on social media. Their audience trusts them because of their deeper, more personal connection. With less followers, audiences and followers feel more connected with these influencers. Products that are promoted by nano influencers feel more like friendly reviews than mass attraction advertisements.
Micro influencers are social media users with a following between 10,000 – 50,000 followers on social media. These followers are engaged, connected to, and interested in the lifestyle that these influencers display on their social media pages. Brands like Evian have done a great job working with micro influencers to drive brand awareness on Instagram and TikTok this year.
The data from 2023 shows that there was a strong importance on brands’ usage of nano and micro-creators and these trends are predicted to continue growing throughout the influencer marketing space in 2024.
9. User-Generated Content (UGC) will Outperform Traditional Advertisements for Brands
User Generated Contnet (UGC) will play a big role in marketing material for brands. With a move towards User Generated Content taking rise in 2023, brands have been able to repurpose this content in their marketing material across their website, their social media posts, their newsletters, and their storefront pages on digital.
As social media users are very accustomed to seeing paid ads in their feed, they are also quick to scroll past them. That is why brand marketers are looking for ways to stand out amongst the noise. A great way that has proven to do so is by working with UGC creators to create authentic and organic looking pieces of content using the product or service that the brand offers. From there, the brand can publish that as an ad and put their advertising dollars behind that to get it in front of their ideal audiences on social media. But, because this looks and feels like a video that just another creator made, it doesn’t come across as an advertisement.
Brands that are looking to get more content for their social media page will look towards UGC a lot more in 2024. As getting UGC from creators is substantially more cost effective than working directly with a content creation or advertising agency, this content will be in higher demand for small businesses looking to do influencer marketing in 2024.
See this video from glasses brand Warby Parker below, created as a piece of UGC by creator Katie Jane Hughes. The content feels real, but it’s really an ad for Warby Parker’s new frame.
@warbyparker Celebrity makeup artist @Katie Jane Hughes shows us her five favorite holiday makeup looks and frames. Shop her #warbyhometryon ♬ original sound – Warby Parker
10. Influencer Content Will Make its Way into Traditional Advertising in 2024
Influencer generated content is going to be a large part of traditional media. With brands that are digital first growing into more retail spaces, the need for traditional marketing will continue to rise. In order to bridge social and traditional media, the use of influencers and influencer generated content will continue to rise in omni and traditional media.
Brands like Dunkin’ Donuts and American Eagle have leaned into this throughout 2023 as they’ve collaborated with creators like Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and musician Ice Spice in order to create unique product lines for the followers of these celebrity status creators.
Ben Affleck and Ice Spice appeared in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial which was displayed across social media and traditional media channels in Q4 of 2023. This sets the stage for all brands that are running traditional advertising that want to create the bridge between traditional and digital approaches to audiences.
Stay on Top of The Trends by Working with Influencers in 2024
As you continue to build out a content strategy, marketing plan, and social media posts for 2024, don’t forget to include Creators and Influencers! On Glewee, thousands of businesses and brands create and launch campaigns, work with influencers, and drive success through social media. In order to get started, head to Glewee and create a free account.
To read more about our trend predictions, check out our recent update on Yahoo Business here.
