Time spent building community, is time spent building your bottom line
Simply showing up in a user’s feed with a trendy piece of content is no longer enough. Brands experiencing sustained success on social media invest time and effort in cultivating a community.
While followers are passive, community members are active and engaged — creating mutual value. Brands that understand this dynamic have unlocked new results, proving that a community-centric strategy not only supercharges brand engagement but also drives conversions.
Formerly Dash Hudson's Global Digital Insights report, the Social Media Trends Report draws upon a wealth of social analytics data. Leveraging insights from top global brands, this report provides a data-driven analysis of the evolving trends from the past year. In the following report, we unpack those insights to help you put them to work.
Discover current trends on social media to drive your strategy forward.
Social Media TREND #1
Community in Action:
The Brands Setting the Standard
As the act of following continues to lose its significance, building a social media community has become increasingly challenging. The brands successfully tapping into their communities are seeing meaningful benefits — from increased engagement to major upticks in positive sentiment.
Summer Fridays' focus on community engagement resulted in an Instagram Engagement Rate +100% higher than the Beauty industry benchmark.
Coterie grew its positive sentiment on Instagram by +700% by listening and interacting with its audience in real-time.
Top Brand Marketing Trends on Building Community
1
Embrace authenticity in content
UGC earns significantly higher Engagement Rates than content from brands.
2
Foster a community of advocates on social
Influencer collaboration, answering comments, sharing UGC and using content as a sounding board to encourage followers to have conversations.
3
Make data-backed decisions
Going viral is not a strategy; content optimization allows brands to tap into consumer behavior trends and consistently perform well in the algorithm.
Social Media TREND #2
Unlocking Successful Creator-Brand Partnerships
To understand its key benefits, Dash Hudson analyzed nearly 1,000 creator partnerships using data from its Relationships tool. 97% of the time, creators experience a higher Engagement Rate when they post in collaboration with a brand, as opposed to the Engagement Rate a brand receives natively.
16x
higher engagement when partnering with a creator
Brand Native Eng. Rate 0.3%
Creator Eng. Rate 4.8%
Engagement Rate by Follower Size
Nano
Under 10K followers
9.3%
Micro
10K-100K followers
3.8%
Macro
100K+ followers
3.0%
Creator Stats Based on Follower Size
Partnering with creators of all follower sizes results in an increased Engagement Rate. Data from Dash Hudson also uncovered the unique benefit of partnering with each creator type.
Social Media TREND #3
Predicting Sales Success of Social Entertainment
Successful brands understand their audience and what will resonate. Dash Hudson partnered with NielsenIQ to assess how higher Entertainment Scores and Engagement Rates positively impact sales. The Entertainment Score, a proprietary Dash Hudson metric, measures user entertainment levels, while Engagement Rate quantifies user interactions with a video.
The Impact of Entertainment Scores and Engagement Rates on Sales
The brands that scored the highest Entertainment Scores and Engagement Rates in our recent Cross-Channel Benchmark Reports experienced an average of 100% growth in sales.
Top performing brands that all showed increased sales growth:
100%
growth
in sales
Social Media TREND #4
Amplifying Content Impact With Hashtags and Captions
Social media has become a search engine, and brands that excel at discoverability are gaining traction and activating communities. Successful brands have reignited their content optimization strategies for the new era of social by reinforcing hashtags, keywords and captions. Dash Hudson analyzed more than 100,000 Instagram posts to understand the impact of hashtags and captions.
Optimizing Instagram for Search
1
What’s the benefit of using hashtags?
Reels with at least one hashtag obtained 30% higher Reach than Reels without a hashtag.
2
What’s the optimal number of hashtags?
Data from Dash Hudson suggests 2-4 hashtags offer the highest Reach.
3
How long should captions be on Instagram?
Images with more than 1,000 characters and videos with fewer than 100 characters showed the highest Reach.
Download the Full Report
Dash Hudson’s latest report connects the dots between community and social media performance, designed to help you propel your strategy forward.
Methodology
The data utilized in this report was sourced from Dash Hudson's social media management platform. The dataset is comprised of content from global brands who are customers and non-customers across various social media platforms. The timeframe for data collection encompassed the years 2022 and 2023. This period was chosen to capture the most recent and current social media trends.