Social media in 2025 doesn’t feel like a landscape anymore. It feels like weather—shifting systems of moods, technologies, and unexpected storms that marketers must learn to forecast.
We are at the halfway point of the year, and the social media trends now visible are instructive. AI is no mere experiment; it’s a permanent fixture. TikTok is evolving into an everything‑app. Brands are realizing that personality often matters more than consistency.
This isn’t another round of vague predictions—it’s a halfway insights check‑in on social media trends that are proving durable, shifting the ground beneath marketers, and reshaping how audiences connect. Much of this perspective draws from the excellent Hootsuite Social Media Trends report, which continues to track these shifts in real time.
AI in Social Media Trends: A Permanent Part of the Landscape
AI generates captions, suggests post ideas, replies to customer questions, and designs full content packages. That’s no longer sci‑fi—it’s an everyday workflow.
What has changed in 2025 is transparency. The stigma around admitting to AI use has collapsed. Now, brands earn credibility by revealing their prompts in public, teaching their communities how they use automation as augmentation. Social media trends consistently show that those who master prompt‑craft gain creative advantages.
Social Marketing = Performance Marketing
For years, “engagement” metrics trapped social teams in the vanity bucket. In 2025, one of the most important social media trends is that engagement now ladders directly into measurable ROI.
By linking listening tools and CRMs, brands can tie a tweet, TikTok, or LinkedIn carousel to real conversions. An airline might turn a trending complaint into a same‑day campaign—showing that social can do what PPC once claimed exclusively: drive revenue.
Trendjacking vs. Trend Detox
The brat summer cycle proved the volatility of internet culture. Old instincts told marketers to jump into everything. But smarter social media trends reveal the opposite: restraint has become a virtue.
Brands now allow space for “trend detox”—moments when they opt out of chasing micro‑memes in favor of producing original, values‑driven content. The winners are those who choose strategically which viral waves to ride and which to ignore.
Building Community in the Comments
Comment sections are no longer ignorable. They are ad space, cultural currency, and connection points.
Dove has made comments on TikTok central to its community strategy, reinforcing body positivity in threads where customers already talk. This shift shows how social media trends are pushing marketers to treat comments as real estate worth strategizing around.
Personality in Social Media Trends: More than Consistency
Consistency in branding once reigned supreme. But if the halfway point of 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that today’s social media trends prize personality.
Threads and X are behaving like Playgrounds, where brands shed “corporate tone” and experiment with humor, honesty, or even alter‑ego personas. This doesn’t erode trust—it deepens it. Audiences reward humanity.
Reddit Joins the Frontline of Social Media Trends
For years, Reddit was ignored because it felt unruly. But one of the quieter social media trends of 2025 is its rise as a serious marketing channel.
Brands from skincare to SaaS now host AMAs, answer questions, and meet customers where Google increasingly directs them: into Reddit threads. Authentic participation, not ads, is the key to surviving here.
TikTok’s Everything-App Moment in Social Media Trends
TikTok no longer competes only with Instagram—it competes with Google and Amazon. Its Shops, search functions, and entertainment feed blend seamlessly.
One survey even found restaurant searches among Gen Z happen more on TikTok than search engines. As a result, social media trends now see TikTok SEO—captions, on‑screen text, hashtags—treated with the same strategic precision as traditional web SEO.
Gen Z as the Cultural Engine of Social Media Trends
Gen Z has been described as consumers of content, but in reality, they’re architects of it. They remix, parody, and co‑create.
What separates them? Their production fluency. They don’t expect—or even want—overly polished campaigns. The heart of social media trends now lies in cocreation with Gen Z.
Short-Form Video in Social Media Trends: Long-Term Wins
Three years ago, short‑form was the side hustle of video. Now, in social media trends, Shorts and Reels are being treated like weekly programming.
This forces brands to reimagine their production lines: not $100,000 films once a quarter but 30 micro‑videos every month. Scrappy beats slick. Short beats long.
Social Media Trends as the New Prime-Time Show
Appointment viewing is alive—it just moved platforms. Audiences expect regular programming: live Q&As, Friday drops, serialized TikTok content.
This is why major social media trends point toward treating feeds like channels, complete with calendars, shows, and recurring themes.
SEO and AI Overviews in Social Media Trends
When people search, AI now summarizes social chatter in “overviews.” TikTok results, meanwhile, demand proper keywords in captions and copy.
In 2025, a critical social media trend is optimizing your posts not for likes, but for discoverability across AI‑driven summaries and search‑first feeds.
DM Shares and Social Media Trends Metrics That Matter
Algorithms reward shares more than likes. A DM shared to a friend has become the holy grail of relevance.
The meaningful social media trend here is that virality shrinks in importance. What matters is building content that travels privately—memes, templates, guides, and video snippets worth sending quietly.
LinkedIn Joins Mainstream Social Media Trends
LinkedIn has loosened up: memes circulate, carousels thrive, and posts resemble personal essays as much as résumés.
This evolution makes LinkedIn part of mainstream social media trends, where entertainment and credibility finally coexist.
UGC Creators and Social Media Trends in Influence
Influencers with millions once dominated. But in today’s social media trends, UGC creators with smaller followings are prized for their content craftsmanship.
Brands increasingly buy usage rights to creator‑made videos, then run them as ads—an efficient, authentic approach to scaling campaigns.
Niche Platforms as Breakout Social Media Trends
As feeds fragment, Discord servers, newsletters, and micro‑communities flourish. The overlooked but clear social media trend is deeper loyalty inside smaller spaces.
Instead of playing the reach game, brands focus on cultivating intimacy—a strategy far more defensible than chasing TikTok fame.
Final Thought
The throughline across these 15 halfway‑point insights? Social media trends aren’t about “going viral” anymore. They’re about specificity, measurability, and humanity.
A strategist told me recently: “It’s 2025. You’re either training AI or training culture. The worst strategy is pretending you’re doing neither.”
And for smaller brands worried about competing in this environment: remember, you don’t need to look small. Check out my guide on how small businesses can look big online with proven content strategies for 2025.