The social media trends worth acting on before January

It is the time of year when every marketing account starts publishing predictions for next year. Most are written to be published rather than acted on, and by March nobody goes back to check.

We wrote the backward-looking version of this a few weeks ago, on what actually changed this year and what did not. This is the other half: the few things with a real consequence between now and January, and how to tell the difference when the next list arrives.

Long-form is coming back, sideways

Instagram began testing a ninety-minute horizontal format in late October. We wrote about it separately, because the detail matters considerably more than the headline does.

The consequence for a local business is small but specific: stop deleting long recordings. Talks, webinars, long customer conversations, training sessions. The platforms are building tools to cut short clips out of long sources and link back to them. Your archive is quietly becoming raw material.

Search keeps moving into the apps

People increasingly look for local recommendations inside Instagram and TikTok rather than starting at a search engine. This has been true for a while and it is still the item on any list with the best effort-to-payoff ratio.

It costs nothing to act on. Write captions as though someone might search them. Say the suburb out loud. Name the service in plain words. Put the place in the on-screen text and not only in the footage.

Fewer platforms, finished properly

The clearest thing we see on calls is owners pulling back from trying to be everywhere. That is the right instinct, and it is worth finishing the job before January rather than drifting into next year with four half-dead profiles.

An abandoned profile with three posts from 2024 does more damage than no profile at all, because a careful customer will find it and draw a conclusion from it.

How to tell a real trend from a repackaged one

This is the useful part, because the lists will keep coming and most of them will be confident.

• Ask who confirmed it. Platform changes get announced by platforms. If a claim about an algorithm traces back to a marketing blog citing another marketing blog, it is a rumour with good formatting.
• Ask what it changes on Monday. If a trend does not alter one thing you would actually do, it is an observation, not a trend.
• Ask whether it survives being boring. Real shifts stay true for years and make dull reading. “Post consistently” is duller than anything on any prediction list and it beats all of them.
• Ask who benefits from you believing it. A surprising amount of trend content exists to sell the tool that solves the trend.

Something that passes all four is worth half a day of your time. Most do not pass the first.

What we would do before January

Not predictions. Four jobs, roughly an afternoon each.

• Decide the two platforms you are actually running next year, and say out loud that the others are finished.
• Read your last twenty captions and rewrite any that would not be found by someone searching for what you do.
• Put your long recordings somewhere you can find them again.
• Write down the slots you will post in each week. Not the ideas, the slots. Planning is what fails in February, not inspiration.

None of that will appear on a trends list, because none of it is new. It is still the thing that separates the accounts that work from the accounts quietly abandoned in March.