Posted by Keith on Jul 3, 2025 in General

This visual-centric approach has made Instagram a favorite among younger demographics and content creators. McKinsey studied the purchasing decisions of 20,000 European consumers in 2013 and 2014. Respondents were asked if social media influenced their purchasing decisions significantly. The study also revealed that between 2013 and 2014, there was a 10 percent increase in consumer purchases related to product recommendations received on social media. These study results serve as a testament to how social media can affect consumers at any stage of the decision journey. McKinsey has pinpointed the four primary functions of social media for businesses—to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior.

Social Media Trends 2025

Using social media has become a substitute for a lot of your offline social interaction. Even if you’re out with friends, you still feel the need to constantly check social media, often driven by feelings that others may be having more fun than you. Even if you know that images you’re viewing on social media are manipulated, they can still make you feel insecure about how you look or what’s going on in your own life. Similarly, we’re all aware that other people tend to share just the highlights of their lives, rarely the low points that everyone experiences. But that doesn’t lessen those feelings of envy and dissatisfaction when you’re scrolling through a friend’s airbrushed photos of their tropical beach holiday or reading about their exciting new promotion at work.

How Social Media Is Used Today

These algorithms, like invisible guides, determine the content on our feeds. Let’s explore how social media algorithms function and how social teams can take advantage of it. Furthermore, there’s a growing number of new social media networks adding more users. The US social media penetration is calculated by the total number of active social network users versus the total population. According to recent estimates, the number of active social media users in the US is 253 million in 2025, meaning 73% of Americans are on social media.

• Popular social media networks include TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, among others.
• Gymshark frequently collaborates with fitness influencers to create authentic, lifestyle-focused content.
• It also now offers a paid verification option, which proves a user’s identity.
• In fact, social media is known to drive engagement through comments, likes, shares, reposts, and saves.

Platforms facilitate direct interaction with the audience through comments, reactions, and messaging, allowing for immediate feedback and conversation. This real-time engagement helps build a loyal community and enhances the overall user experience by making interactions more personal and immediate. There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses and creators to make social media work for them. For example, Buffer is a social media management tool that can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

X, with its emphasis on real-time updates and short-form content, has become a vital tool for news dissemination and public discourse. LinkedIn, on the other hand, focuses on professional networking, providing a platform for career development and business connections. Each https://techleash.com/ platform boasts over 100 million registered users, highlighting their widespread influence and utility. Before the use of social media for marketing, businesses relied on media such as newspapers, radio, and television.

For brands, partnering with influencers can be a game-changer, giving them access to engaged, targeted audiences. In today’s world, what constitutes social media includes leveraging the trust and reach of influencers to promote products and services. Social media platforms function as multifaceted tools for communication and interaction. They combine user-generated content with features that promote real-time engagement, creating a rich tapestry of digital communication that is both interactive and communal. This combination of features makes a social media platform a powerful medium for both personal and professional use.

While such cross-cultural variation is outside the scope of this particular paper, we believe it represents an area of future research with great theoretical and practical value. Social media can allow neurodiverse teens, for example, a way to connect socially with others that is manageable for them, thereby reducing feelings of loneliness (Sallafranque-St-Louis and Normand, 2017). Qualitative research among adolescents with autism spectrum disorder indicates that the removal of body language cues that can be difficult for people with autism to interpret make social media an enjoyable venue for them (Jedrzejewska and Dewey, 2022). One of the tasks of this report is to summarize the effect of social media on adolescents and children, including its influence on their education, social development, and family dynamics. Full understanding of these effects involves consideration not only of the harms of social media (the topic of much of the existing research presented in the next chapter), but to explore its potential benefits.

Less of a traditional social media platform, LiveJournal paved the way for the self-documenting side of social media. Launched in 1999, LiveJournal lets users create a personal blog, journal or diary and share these posts with their friends and community. Users can also list other members as “friends,” but this has limited functionality and doesn’t need to be reciprocated as on Facebook. Posts have a comment section, which encourages engagement between community members.

Social media has dramatically changed the way people interact and share information, redefining communication in a digitally connected world. One of the most notable shifts is the ability to connect instantly with anyone, anywhere. Social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have made global communication seamless, allowing users to share messages, photos, and videos in real-time.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis is conducted to identify research themes and discover keywords. It mainly examines the relationships between co-occurrence keywords in a wide variety of literature (74). In this approach, the idea is to explore the frequency of specific keywords being mentioned together. This may render the review missing articles that mentioned social media uses for health purposes only in the main text and not in the abstract.