Social Media Predictions 2024

2023 was a whirlwind of a year in the social media world. 2024 isn't going to be any slower. Here are 5 specific predictions for the major social platforms next year, and how AI will fit into their plans. Plus, a bonus prediction on social video!

✨Meta will once again delay taking a cut of creators' revenue.

Next year will mark the beginning of the “creator era” of media, marketing, and commerce. With its ad revenues back on track - largely thanks to AI - Meta won’t want or need to make any moves that could drive away creators. So no, Kim Kardashian isn’t getting kicked off Instagram, for those of you who saw the recent Reuters piece.

Instead, Meta will focus on improving its genAI content creation tools to continue driving engagement (and ad revenue) on Facebook and Instagram. It will also work to better integrate genAI into its virtual reality and metaverse ambitions, and use its Meta AI chatbot to help build business messaging into a viable alternative revenue stream.

✨ Snap will reach its internal goal of $500 million in non-ad revenue.

Snapchat+ now has 7 million subscribers, giving it annual run rate of roughly $335 million. That means Snap only needs to add and retain about 3.5 million more subscribers to reach its goal. Access to pre-release or subscriber-only genAI features, including My AI, have been a big driver of subscription sign ups, and new tools will likely fuel more engagement and subscription revenue next year.

On the ad revenue side, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has said that My AI isn’t yet a “daily use case” among users, limiting its usefulness for advertising both in the chatbot and across the app. Snap’s internal “stretch goal” of 20% ad revenue growth will be tougher to hit next year: Insider Intelligence is currently estimating 12.3% WW ad revenue growth for Snap in 2024.

✨ Next year will be make it or break it for Threads.

Meta has the resources and the execution power to make Threads stick. But social media moves fast, and the company's priorities could shift: In 2024, Meta will also have to contend with election misinformation and serious allegations that that Instagram is harmful to young people, both of which are problems that will be exacerbated by AI.

Without a large, engaged-enough user base to start monetizing soon, Meta could fold Threads into Instagram.

✨The election cycle won’t save X.

Without a real alternative, engagement on X will likely spike as it has in previous news-heavy periods, including after Elon Musk’s takeover. But the brand safety risks won’t be worth the reward for most big advertisers who pay X’s bills—and X’s efforts to court small and political advertisers won’t fill the void. 

Musk is nothing if not unpredictable, and I’m loving reading all of the smart takes on what will happen to X this year. That includes Alex Kantrowitz ’s prediction that Musk will sell X after the election, and Jack Appleby 's prediction that X will officially go back to being “Twitter.”

I don’t think X will be renamed Twitter unless it has a new owner. I agree that Musk wants to sell, but I’m not yet convinced it will happen in 2024.

✨ TikTok will make a big push for search.

People will continue to treat the social platforms like search engines, looking up products, services, and information. As Amazon’s nascent partnerships with Meta, Snap, and Pinterest start packing a punch next year, TikTok will venture further into search to drive more sales from TikTok Shop.

TikTok has been quieter on the AI front - and for good reason. Reports suggest that parent company ByteDance is building a developer platform for AI chatbots, that could put it into competition with OpenAI. If brands can customize those bots around their products and services, that could be a strong value add to TikTok's commerce ambitions.

It's not clear if the platform will be available in the US, but if it is, it's not likely to sit well with some lawmakers and Republican presidential candidates, who remain concerned about TikTok's data practices or have vowed to ban the app, respectively.

FWIW, I expect TikTok will evade a US ban again next year.

Bonus: ✨ Videos will remain closer to 15-second than the 15-minute mark.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the future of social video since I published a post about how the platforms are now prioritizing longer video. TLDR; Short-video isn’t going away, and longer-form doesn’t mean “long.”

We’re not going to go back to the age of Facebook Watch, meaning formulaic, TV-like content with a set video length. Instead, video lengths will become more varied, giving brands and creators more opportunities to tell original stories and lessening the pressure to jump on every viable TikTok trend.

That said, I do expect creators to lean into more “episodic” content on social media, furthering heightening the competition for entertainment audiences, ad dollars, and subscription revenues.