[Music] [Lia Haberman] Hey. How's it going? My name is Lia, and I'm excited to be here with Adobe Express talking about social trends, especially to creatives. I'm a words and ideas person, but images and video and graphics really create impact, which gives you all a tremendous amount of power and influence on social media. Now for anybody who doesn't know about Adobe Express, it is your superpower in the Creative Cloud toolkit to easily create social posts, videos, and even more. So today, you are going to learn about some key social trends coming down the pipeline that are going to affect us all. And then I'll also talk about how you can create amazing social content with Adobe Express.
As I said, my name is Lia Haberman. I'm a Creator Economy and Social Media Marketing expert. I teach at UCLA Extension. I consult for corporate brands. And among other things, I write a newsletter called ICYMI or In Case You Missed It. And that covers social updates, news, content trends, and goes out to about 30,000 marketers and creators every week. So I'm evaluating over 1,000 headlines, tips, press releases, along with scrolling social every week, trying to decide what makes it into my newsletter and what I'm going to recommend to my corporate clients. It's a lot and it's my job to stay on top of this stuff, as I'm sure it is for many of you.
Now social media, and especially I think since the advent of TikTok, has sped up the trend cycle and flattened the distinction between screens. So we used to have the big screen, the silver screen, then we had the small screen, then we had the second screen, which was a complimentary experience to the small screen. And now I think we just have screens. There's a TikToker called Carla Bezanson who summed up this phenomenon really well. In her video, she said, "Well, it's a weeknight, so I'll be doing screens. Probably, three is a treat. I like the big one, the medium one, and obviously, the little one. How about you?" And besides being painfully funny and I think accurate, it really points to the way that many of us and our potential customers are engaging on the Internet in 2024. There is no more specific screen, big screen, silver screen. There's just screens. We are in a multi-format, multi-platform, multi-screen world. Adobe described it in their 2024 creative trends report as multiple asset types and dimensions inhabiting a world in motion together.
As part of this, audiences expect to be immersed in this connected experience that travels with them from mobile to web, to email, to streaming, to out of home and back again.
Today, we're going to learn how important it is to take a social-first approach to content creation that honors these audience expectations to find brand content everywhere all at once. But it's not just about showing up on every platform. As part of a social-first approach, it's vital that brands will still prioritize the cues that audiences are sending them. In 2024, people want to be heard. Not only do they expect brands to reply to them in the comments, they want their feedback to be incorporated into the content, the social strategy, and even to improve products and services. They want to be collaborators in their online experience. And if you think about, duets, the way that platforms encourage people to collaborate together, stitches, and even UGC or user generated content, not only do people want to be collaborators in their experience, but they're also being invited to do that by the platforms, by brands. So today, you're going to learn about social trends that you need to have on your radar, looking at where people are showing up and the content formats that are driving the greatest impact. We are going to talk about the major force that is driving design, social strategy, and platform updates this year.
And then most importantly, I'm going to walk you through what it means to be a social-first brand and how to build a social-first playbook with online culture and community feedback at the center of everything.
But before we get started, I'm going to share one cheat code to make our lives a little bit easier. And this might be a hot take, but I think resizing and reposting is one of the few ways to stay sane in this industry, especially with video. Because people will ask me, isn't there just one platform or one content format that we can focus on this year? And it is really hard to give a definitive answer at this point. A couple of years ago, I might have said, "Sure, start a TikTok or produce short-form video." And now the answer isn't as easy. Online audiences really expect this interconnected brand experience. A brand should be everywhere at all times. And obviously, you need to respect how assets show up on each platform. It is not one-size-fits-all, but here's where Adobe Express comes in. You can build assets quickly and generate all the versions you need for all your social channels while ensuring consistency across the board, a little bit like I did here with my example, even creating one for my newsletter.
Of everything we talk about today, this is probably one of my favorite solutions, and it's going to come up again later when we talk about building your social-first playbook. I'll also point out anywhere where you can use Adobe Express to make creating content or social content easier, faster, and more efficiently.
So we're going to look at some of the top players and the trends that we are seeing to set a baseline. We know that short-form video seems to have taken over every platform, right? But where do we go from here? TikTok's undergone quite the shift this year from a focus on short-form video to encouraging photos, longer video, video longer than 60 seconds. TikTok shop their e-commerce effort. The question is, are audiences going to follow TikTok along for the journey? Now TikTok tells us that 50% of time on the platform is spent consuming long-form content. They've even come up with this cute name for it called more talk on the clock, but it's still too early to tell if long-form TikTok videos are the way forward. The good news is until we really figure out and get a handle on what the way forward is on TikTok, Adobe Express users can unlock new content ideas using TikTok's creative assistant integration. It'll help you develop standout video content quicker, easier, and more effectively. TikTok's creative assistant's an add-on in Adobe Express that helps you generate content ideas, scripts, edit videos, all with TikTok's best practices, trends, and hashtags and insights in mind so that every post can reach the right audience with greater impact.
YouTube is also enjoying some success with their own short-form videos. Shorts gets over 50 billion views per day. Yeah, 50 billion according to their CEO, Neal Mohan. But an even bigger emphasis has been placed on living room watching, being able to cast to your smart TV, which helps YouTube compete with the likes of other streamers like Netflix, for example. More than a billion hours of YouTube content is watched on TV sets every day. And according to Nielsen, YouTube was the leader in streaming watch time for the past year.
We do know that people love short-form video, but here's where that multi-screen, multi-format comes into play again. It is worth considering that in the US, people watch a lot of TV. I know I do. Americans spend almost 30% of their waking hours watching television, more than any other country in the world, according to data analysts, in a recent report from Electronics Hub. If the US is part of your market, it is important to explore how you evolve your content from short-form to long-form and even living-room friendly. My guidance to my clients and to you is that, yes, overall, we have seen an emphasis on going longer, somewhat on TikTok, definitely on YouTube. Of course, nobody can decide yet what constitutes long-form. One report even said that it was any video longer than 26 seconds. I think a good rule of thumb is that the video should be as long as it needs to be to tell the story you need to tell.
Now there are almost too many Instagram updates to list. They have been shipping all year. In the last few months alone, they increased carousels from 10 photos to 20, and they're testing a vertical grid or profile grid to align with the type of content they see people uploading. But what we do know is that the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has said Instagram is sticking with short-form video, which they define as less than 60 seconds. But it's also where people are consuming Reels that's really interesting to watch. DMs and close friends or stories are a priority for Meta. That is where short-form video gets shared and viewed. 3.5 billion Reels are shared across Instagram and Facebook daily, according to Meta. And Reels also continue to be a priority for Facebook. In fact, in the last year, it was the first time that video accounted for the majority of time spent on Meta properties. Make no mistake, Instagram and Facebook are now officially video platforms. But it's an email that I recently got from the Facebook PR team that speaks to the new direction we should all be focused on.
And no, despite what you see in The Daily Beast and other media sources, it's not hot Mark Zuckerberg.
Here we go. It was an email that said Facebook is attracting the most young adults ages 18 to 29 that the platform has seen in three years. The thread between most of the topics I'm touching on today and likely a lot of what you're going to be hearing about is Gen Z. The way they use social media is going to affect us all. Already, Facebook says that in order to keep winning young people over, it's focusing on three key elements to keep them engaged, improving Reels and feed ranking to deliver more relevant content to people, updating the video experience and the capacity to share clips with friends because that's the preferred way now, and improving monetization opportunities for creators.
I'm going to say it here, 2024 will go down as the year social media's roadmap is dictated by Gen Z. They are the largest generation at nearly two billion strong, and their influence on culture, shopping habits, and technology is unlike anything we've seen before. They are influencing the demographics above them. Previously, wisdom trickled down. Now we're seeing parents and grandparents make purchase decisions and adopt new technology based on what their Gen Z children and grandchildren are telling them. If you reach Gen Z, you're also reaching Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers. And this isn't just about chasing the next big demographic. I really think it's a cultural reset. The platforms built for previous generations are facing existential crisis, adapt to Gen Z, or potentially become irrelevant.
That means design, features, function, it is all getting a Gen Z overhaul. Their values, their priorities, their communication styles are going to reshape the digital landscape.
Now on Instagram, we've already seen new design and features specifically geared towards this audience. There has been a lot of criticism over the new sticker tray design. You might even be rolling your eyes and not like it yourself, but it is very clearly intended for Gen Z. I have seen their content style described as chaotic and messy, which tracks with this a little bit. Another Meta feature that's focused on teens is Instagram notes. So if anybody doesn't know what notes are, it's short text updates with a maximum length of 60 characters. Now Meta has said that notes over indexes with teens, and they create notes at 10 times the rate of non-teens. It's also become the second most popular form of sharing for teens on Instagram. There are notes on the feed, notes on the messenger page, birthday notes, video notes. The last time I checked, there were at least 12 notes related updates. If data suggests that something is popping off with Gen Z, that is going to put it at the top of the product leaderboard.
Pinterest is another platform that's interesting to look at. At 15 years old, they have grown up alongside the very audience that they want to serve. They're also one of the platforms repositioning themselves as the antisocial social media where there's less pressure to post, and it's about self-expression through curation, not necessarily content creation. And it is working. According to Pinterest, Gen Z is actually their fastest growing demographic and represents over 40% of the platform's global monthly active users. But this might not be the Pinterest that you're used to. In 2022, they launched a spin off app called Shuffles that allowed you to create collages using pins or images in your camera roll. Shuffles still exists, but since then, they've reincorporated elements of it back into Pinterest with a new type of pin called collages. And as they scaled collages, Pinterest noticed that 72% of collage creators were members of Gen Z. And Gen Z also saved collages at three times the rate of other pin types. I think this again provides some insight into the way Gen Z loves a chaotic content mashup, or you could call it a collage. And it's also a trend that you can tap into for any platform using Adobe Express's collage templates, and they help you create a blended and impactful visual experience mixing images together.
And then there's this interesting campaign from Snapchat, which they ran this year with the tagline less social media more Snapchat. And again, it encouraged young audiences to be in the moment and spend less time scrolling. This ties into what we know about these broader social habits, which is to spend more time in the DMs and private spaces talking to friends than posting to the feed.
Gen Z doesn't feel the need to perform for public consumption. Trading memes, videos, possibly your brand content in group chats and stories is more important than earning likes. And that puts a big emphasis on brand content, but especially shareable brand content. It is not just about whether people like your content, but how sharing your content or the brand content helps people relate to or connect with others around them. As somebody once said to me, "I don't tell my friends about your brand because I like your brand, but because I like my friends." So how do all these insights come together? Well, whether they're Gen Z or Alpha, Millennials, Gen X, or Boomers, your online audience is one of your greatest assets and should be at the core of a social-first strategy. You might have heard the term social-first. I've had a lot of clients asking me about it this year. For me, a social-first approach takes real time community engagement and online culture and gives it a co-creation credit in shaping storytelling, design, strategy, and sometimes even driving business priorities across the organization. But don't just take my word for it. I didn't make up this term social-first. It's part of a very real approach that companies are benefiting from. Earlier this year, Deloitte released a digital report on the impact of social-first brands. In the report, Deloitte defines social-first brands as those with high maturity in their approach to social media. So that means you're process based, you're resourced, and you're consistent with social media insights as a strategic driver of the organization.
Deloitte also found that taking a social-first approach can actually align with business goals, increasing revenue by an average of 10.2% year-over-year. And socially mature brands were more likely to exceed revenue goals compared to brands with low social maturity. All of this while differentiating your brand, connecting with your audience in real-time, and staying ahead of the cultural curve. If you were going to take a screenshot and share it with your boss to advocate for more social resources, I would say that this is the one.
Now first let's take a look at what could go wrong when a brand takes a decidedly unsocial approach. And I don't want to name and shame, but I think that this was really a no-brainer of a missed opportunity. Some of you may have heard about this story. It was a Chick-fil-A employee who reviewed the chain's food on her lunch breaks, and these were overwhelmingly positive reviews, pointing out new menu items, and getting millions of views. The TikToker, Miriam Webb, or MiritheSiren as she was known to her followers, was posting to her channel until management told her to stop making the videos, saying that she was breaking a rule in the Chick-fil-A employee handbook filming in uniform at the restaurant.
I do think that there's an entirely separate discussion we should probably have around companies revising or updating their employee handbooks to keep up with the evolution of social media, but that is clearly another session. The outcome of Miri shutting down her or shutting Miri down led to her leaving the company. She immediately started filming with Shake Shack and El Pollo Loco, two other restaurants who saw the benefits of reaching out to Miri and partnering with her. It also sparked a backlash that painted Chick-fil-A as out of touch with the value of employee advocacy on social media. We saw criticism on social, but also across traditional media outlets like Ad Age, for example. In short, Chick-fil-A's decision to silence a passionate employee turned a potential marketing opportunity into something of a PR nightmare.
Now let's talk about what a successful social-first approach looks like, and then I'll point out some of the brands that you can see implementing similar tactics across social media. I've listed the stages of being social-first one through five, but I want you to think of this playbook as a ladder or an evolution to social maturity. We're going to start with a baseline approach to social that's driven by best practices. This is followed by talking about conversation and culture driving social strategy.
Remember at the start when I mentioned prioritizing social cues that audiences are sending us? This is where that fits in. And then finally, we're going to look at letting online insights and brand advocates inform business priorities and drive growth.
So let's start with content that looks social-first. This is your standard operating procedure social. That means that everything a brand puts on social shows that they're optimizing and thinking really intentionally about the platform that they're on and the audience they're talking to. It has a lo-fi casual feel without sacrificing quality. Even casual social video can be well lit, have crisp audio, and be posted in high-res.
Content should be shot in 9:16 mobile style unless you're shooting long-form for YouTube, for example. Video should be shot at 30 frames per second. I mentioned this because traditional video or cinematic video like you see in a movie is shot at 24 frames per second. So if you're looking for more of that high def crisp type of content for social, you want to make sure you're shooting in 30 fps. It should have social features like text overlays, stickers, and sound effects that you can find in Adobe Express. And even when you have those things, you do need to respect the video safe zones, so not placing graphics, for example, over where the captions go or over the avatar. Now anybody who's on camera should be making eye contact and talking to the camera. It really should feel like a FaceTime video with a back and forth instead of a television broadcast. And then finally, the people in the video, brands should really feature creators, employees, consumers. People want to see themselves and others like them reflected in their experience.
All right, second step, audience feedback and online insights will drive brand strategy.
We are going to look at this Netflix example mostly because it's funny and I love it. In early June, they put out this tweet for a movie called Under Paris. Some of you might have seen it. Now based on some hilarious audience suggestions and feedback, they quickly commissioned additional assets to rerelease the movie's key art with new titles like Shark de Triomphe and Champs Élysées. They incorporated the ideas of fans and followers into the promotion for the movie. The original was posted June 5th and had about 7,000 likes and 800 reposts. The new version they rereleased June 12th that featured UGC or user generated content, except in this case, I guess it was user generated ideas, was almost three times as popular with 22,000 likes and 2.2 thousand reposts. Incorporating audience feedback into social content isn't meant to replace the in-house efforts. You still have to put the stuff out there. We still are creating brand assets, but it's simply building on what's already there or creating collaborative assets.
Now another example of this is creative directors tapping into popular culture through an audience lens. McDonalds seems to have done this here with this TikTok, with the Get Ready with Me or GRWM format. It's a popular TikTok content format. The joke here is that Ronald wakes up looking like this every morning, so the video essentially is him not changing at all in this Get Ready with Me video. Brands really do need to leverage social media trends. They have to make sense, of course, and you don't want to risk alienating your audience or doing something off-brand, but I think it's really important to tap into the conversations already happening. One of my favorite examples was a gaming company that had one of their virtual characters produce an ASMR video with sound effects. As brand creatives, it's really important not just to broadcast information or corporate messaging, but really participate in cultural conversations and trends already happening online. You get it and you're part of the conversation with your community. Step three, it is time to collaborate with creators on creative strategy and let them share some of the key messaging. Brains need to trust creators to translate the messages they want to share because creators tell stories in a way that actually reaches and engages audiences. It is up to you, obviously, as creatives just set brand guidelines and guardrails, but creative control needs to be shared with creators, especially in certain circumstances. Now we've seen Instagram, TikTok, and even Pinterest use this as part of their product marketing strategy in 2024. The example that I'm showing you here is Instagram launching their new frame sticker. This was where if you took a picture and sent it to somebody in stories, they had to shake the phone like a Polaroid picture to be able to see the image that you were sending. Instagram had a K-pop band called Le Sserafim use this in their stories at Coachella long before they ever officially announced it. So we're seeing new product announcement rollout first in action through creator posts, and then followed later by corporate releases. And data points to this creator content sometimes performing better than business as usual content.
Number four, brains listen, analyze, and react to make smarter business decisions. This one's really interesting. It's like social listening on steroids. Brands are monitoring online conversations and cultural movements to help their teams make better, faster decisions, and improve products or services. It's not just about developing new social assets or web features, this time they're using audience feedback to fuel smarter product development. The example here is a Korean skin care brand called Tirtir. They took a customer complaint seriously after a beauty creator named Darcei complained on TikTok about their limited shades of foundation. In March, the foundation came in just nine shades, and she released a video talking about that. So they responded by developing 11 new shades of foundation and launching those shades by sending them to her. She created another video. And then again in May-- Sorry, no in June, they expanded to 30 shades of foundation and sent them to her again. And she made another video. So far, her three videos and the company's reposts have a combined 60 million views. Fashion and beauty brands seem to be particularly good at doing this, taking customer feedback to improve their products, but it's not just about stopping there. They're taking that feedback, improving their products, and then incorporating those customer-driven insights into new marketing campaigns. So it's not just about listening to your online audience and making adjustments, you then want to turn around and post that or incorporate that into a campaign to let them know that you're listening very visibly.
And then the fifth and final, the advocacy piece of being social-first. This is where brands creatively empower their advocates as growth drivers, whether it's customers, creators, or employees. And some companies do struggle with this stage because it means passing the baton and giving up on the illusion of control. It's a shift from being the star of the show to becoming a partner in these experiences with people.
Coach is a really fantastic example of a brand creatively empowering its advocates as growth drivers. So along with their social channels and the content that they put out and their influencer campaigns and programs, they also encourage salespeople to post about the company to their own accounts, and then selectively repost employee content to the brand channel. At 265,000 followers, one of their employees, Brandon Nguyen, whose username is branbran1997, he has a fraction of Coach's around 900,000 followers, but his videos regularly get the same or more engagement than their owned and operated channels. And because he's not the official voice of Coach, sometimes he can have a little bit more fun with his videos in a way that in-house might not be comfortable doing themselves, like this brat meme that he used that took over social media this summer.
So by allowing employees to highlight new products, offer styling tips, all with their humorous or personable approach, you can help raise awareness, drive sales, and help the brand become relevant to all new audiences.
Now this playbook is meant to be a road map for achieving social media maturity and really thinking about online culture and your audience conversation or feedback to inform decisions. So to recap, in being social-first, design is high-res, but with a casual feel. People are really looking to each other for information more than highly polished and produced brand messaging. So the cue there is creatives do maintain the quality of brand content, but really take a page or a cue from the audience and deliver content in a more easily approachable and digestible way.
Second is borrowing audience feedback and cultural trends to impact strategy. In 2024, people expect brands to listen to them and incorporate that feedback, those insights and contributions into the content, strategy, and beyond. And then third, you maintain brand standards. That is very important even as you embrace collaboration with customers, creators, and employees. Your responsibility is to protect the company's story and brand identity. But look for opportunities to collaborate with brand advocates and give them the tools and resources they need to best represent the brand in their content.
I hope this was helpful in understanding which trends to pay attention to and how to take advantage of Adobe Express to produce social content that drives engagement and growth. Thank you so much for your time.
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