Why social media influencers are going to have a very big 2025

As 2024 rolls into 2025, big changes are potentially afoot in the world of social media. TikTok is potentially weeks away from closure in the United States. X (the app formerly known as Twitter) continues to deviate from the mainstream under its ownership by Elon Musk. And in its place, the sun is shining on Bluesky.

But there are other, deeper changes to social media that may be worth tracking in the 12 months to come, according to experts.

Just as the rise of TikTok personalized, content graph-driven algorithm, and Bluesky’s choose-your-own algorithm approach means there’s no one single trend that captures the online zeitgeist, so the smaller trends that we do encounter in our own niches are likely to be fleeting. “The lifespan of trends has dramatically shortened,” Itamar Leopold, creative director at Motion Array, a video and filmmakers’ platform, told Artlist Business for its 2025 trends report. “What’s viral today may be forgotten tomorrow.”

While trends are getting shorter, the content that launches those trends is getting longer. TikTok is testing 30- and 60-minute video uploads on its app (which will have to survive the threat to ban it in the United States in order to make a meaningful difference there), while Snap and YouTube have both extended the maximum length of content users can create in-app to three minutes. We’re likely to see that extend even further in 2025 as longform content becomes stronger.

Within that fly-by-night world, there will still be plenty of opportunity to make money, which will ensure social media remains at the forefront, says Ray Grady, CEO of Worksuite, a freelance workforce management platform. “We’ve seen our customers work with more influencers than ever before, tapping into these members driving the creator economy at record rates,” he says. The agency and client marketing teams that use his workforce management platform have seen a 300% year-on-year increase in the number of influencers they work with.

Those numbers enable Grady to make a bold prediction: “Influencers will be the fastest-growing freelance category next year because they are tapped by so many different industries—marketing, advertising, entertainment, retail, public interest groups, and even politics,” he says. “It’s not going to stop there. There is no limit to the various ways hiring them can benefit a brand, cause, or event.”

That points to further professionalization of the creator class, reckons influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. “Creators are emerging as the new media moguls,” the company says in its 2025 outlook. “They’re launching their own production houses, and turning social-first formats into popular, high-quality, entertainment that rivals traditional media channels such as TV.” Billion Dollar Boy’s key takeaway for what 2025 holds on social media: A further blurring of the boundary between creators and brands, where the former becomes the latter.

One area that is less hopeful and positive is the rise of further risks of scams waged through social media. “AI-generated social engineering attacks will evolve far beyond LinkedIn scams in 2025,” says Steve Cobb, chief information security officer at SecurityScorecard, a cyber risk and monitoring platform.

The use of large language model-powered bots has been prevalent on X as well as LinkedIn—with the latter being used to engage in real-time chat with users to try and hoodwink them. But with a shift toward large multimodal models, which include audio and video as well as text outputs, there’s a risk that we see more advanced ways of tricking people on social media, from video messages on Snapchat and Instagram to real-time calls on video conferencing systems.

“As threat actors leverage more sophisticated AI, expect to see realistic AI-generated Zoom meetings used to deceive and exploit targets,” says Cobb. “These immersive attacks will bypass traditional security controls, creating a new wave of trust-based breaches.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91248045/why-social-media-influencers-are-going-to-have-a-very-big-2025?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss