Five Digital Marketing Trends to Watch for 2025

The constant changes in the social media landscape mean that brands cannot afford to be complacent if they want their social marketing efforts to succeed. Strategies that worked one or two years ago may already be obsolete. This article dives into the five key social marketing trends for 2025 that businesses need to consider as they develop social marketing strategies: (1) social search (2) short and long form video content, (3) competition between social media platforms, (4) a shift from organic to paid strategies, and (5) experiments with proactive brand engagement.

Trend 1: The Rise of Social Search

One of the biggest social media trends for 2025 is the rise of social search alongside traditional SEO. This rise goes hand in hand with a relative decline in Google search and traditional SEO; although Google search remains important, many users, especially younger ones, are exploring alternatives, from looking for videos on social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, to asking Large Language Model Tools like Claude and ChatGPT to search for them.

For younger users researching products, social media has become especially important. A large proportion of younger users look for reviews on social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. These users may distrust branded corporate content, but will consider apparently authentic appeals made by online influencers. Social search is also important for users who may prefer watching videos to reading written content or simply enjoy regularly viewing videos on topics of interest.

In the past, Google search outperformed the search functionality offered by social media platforms, but that may no longer be the case, and the search landscape is currently in flux. TikTok already offers robust and personalized search capabilities, and they recently announced “TikTok Search Ads Campaign”, which will display brand ads alongside TikTok search results, allowing TikTok to compete more directly for business with Google search. Meanwhile, in April 2025, the head of Instagram indicated that the company was working to improve Instagram search capabilities and search suggestions in order to emulate TikTok.

Trend 2: Video Continues to Dominate the Social Media Landscape

Video content has become an essential part of the social marketing landscape. Brands that neglect video content may be failing to connect with a substantial part of their potential audience, and risk falling behind their competitors.

Currently, short form videos continue to gain popularity on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. These videos, which are typically around thirty seconds long, cater to short attention spans, are easily consumed on mobile devices by users on the go, and are favored by social media algorithms. This last point is crucial, because due to algorithm changes on Facebook and Instagram short form videos now present the best opportunity for organic audience growth. Given the ease of producing short form video, and the demand for constant content in this format, brands should prioritize authenticity over slickness, and adopt a short form strategy that allows topical videos to be produced quickly in response to current events and emerging trends. Brands that produce long form content may also consider repurposing that content to create short, entertaining clips.

For brands that are willing to commit more resources to video marketing, the production of long form video content on YouTube can be a great option. Long form videos are popular with all age groups, and unlike short form TikTok videos, “evergreen” long form videos retain value over time, and sometimes even become increasingly popular. Finally, YouTube videos come up in Google searches, and can be optimized just like web pages in order to attract visitors organically.

Trend 3: Competition Between Social Media Platforms Intensifies Social media competition

The social media landscape has become increasingly competitive in recent years, and this is likely to continue in the near future. For younger users, TikTok has become the dominant platform, but its future in the US is still not certain, although Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have all expressed interest in buying it. Meanwhile, controversy surrounding X has caused some users to leave the platform; some anecdotal evidence suggests that a substantial number of these users may be migrating to LinkedIn. Although its popularity seems to have plateaued, Threads is another potential destination for brands migrating from X, with some brands reporting that its short threaded format can be good for engaging with customers in niche content areas. Finally, social platforms like Bluesky are still young and may experience further growth, and new contenders may still emerge to further alter the social media space.

Given this uncertainty, it’s crucial to develop agile social marketing strategies so that emerging opportunities aren’t missed. As things change, brands must be prepared to respond to trends and to engage with users across multiple platforms. In order to achieve optimum results, brands should also be prepared to adjust content and messaging across platforms. For those with the resources, it’s worth experimenting on emerging platforms; savvy marketers may discover untapped opportunities to create organic content that has the potential to go viral.

Trend 4: Brands Are Moving to Paid Social Ads to Offset Reduced Organic Reach

In recent years, changes to algorithms on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X, have significantly decreased the organic reach of posts by brand accounts on these platforms. Along with proactive brand engagement (see below), most brands have responded by shifting resources to paid strategies on these platforms. Despite the associated increase in costs, paid ads do have some potential advantages in terms of return on investment.

First of all, paid social ads can be optimized for specific outcomes such as product sales, newsletter sign ups, or web page visits. Second, many platforms offer a variety of formats and options for ad campaigns, and brands can choose the formats which best align with their marketing goals. For example, on LinkedIn, there are options for Single Image Ads, Carousel Image Ads, Video Ads, Text Ads, Dynamic Ads, and Sponsored Messages.

Finally, social ad campaigns offer extremely powerful tools for audience segmentation. Existing tools allow advertisers to segment audiences based on categories such as location, demographics, interests, or similarity to existing audiences. The ability to focus campaigns on particular audience segments can lead to much stronger results compared to creating content for a general audience.

Trend 5: Proactive Brand Engagement on Social Platforms

These days, brands aren't just sitting around waiting for people to interact with their content. Recently, brands have begun to proactively comment on user content, with some brands engaging once or twice per day.

A well known recent example of proactive brand engagement involves Wendy’s and pop singer Katy Perry on the X social media platform. After returning from an all-female journey to space, Wendy’s responded to a post by the Pop Crave account: “Katy Perry has returned from space” with “Can we send her back.”

The controversy generated by this tweet was widely reported in major newspapers, including papers outside of the US. We can speculate that the post represented a calculated gamble by Wendy’s, as they weighed the value of free media exposure against the possibility of alienating customers. Indeed, not long after the initial controversy, Wendy’s released a statement suggesting an awareness of the balance they were trying to strike between “spice” and “respect”: “We always bring a little spice to our socials, but Wendy’s has a ton of respect for Katy Perry and her out-of-this-world-talent.”

For brands that want to pursue a proactive engagement strategy, there are a couple of important considerations. First, brands should keep comments under 100 characters and respond within 24 hours of the original post. Second, brands should think carefully about whether the engagement fits with the brand, and what kind of impact it will have. Brands should focus on building long term relationships with creators and communities, and on interacting with the community in ways that provide value and meet needs.