Influencer marketing remained one of the fastest-growing marketing channels in 2024, and it’s on track to see even bigger investments this year. 

The influencer marketing industry grew to an estimated $24 billion value in 2024, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, up from roughly $21.1 billion in 2023. And EMarketer projects influencer marketing spending will soar 14.2%—outpacing the anticipated growth rates for social and digital ad spending—and hit an estimated $9.29 billion by the end of 2025. 

“Almost every [client] has double-digit growth” in their influencer marketing budgets for 2025, Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously, told Ad Age. “Across the board, everyone is doing more than they did last year. They’re seeing the results, and they’re really investing more,” with some boosting their influencer budgets by as much as 30%.

Ad Age asked over 30 influencer marketers, social media executives and content creators about the biggest trends they predict will shape the social media and influencer marketing landscape over the next 12 months. Below are nine of the trends that popped up most frequently, from a resurgence of longer-form, serialized social content to a renewed focus on collaborating with brand communities rather than massive social media stars.

Long-form influencer content grows

Short, disconnected videos have largely dominated social media since the rise of TikTok, but experts told Ad Age the pendulum will likely swing back in the direction of longer-form content in 2025. Creators have been steadily extending the length of their video content over the past several months—even on TikTok, where users now spend 50% of their time on the app watching videos longer than one minute. 

“Very short form [content], like the 15-second type, is out,” said Vi Luong, a lifestyle and beauty creator. “The way I look at it in terms of strategy, I would only use short-form videos now to bring attention to a longer video I'm doing. I wouldn't use it as a standalone.”

Many creators, including Luong, plan to prioritize serialized content over one-off videos in 2025. Luong pointed to Reesa Teesa’s viral 50-part “Who TF Did I Marry?” TikTok series as an example of the type of content consumers are craving.

The increased appetite for more substantive social content—or a “return to craft and quality content”—in 2025 is partially a reaction to last year’s explosion of “brain rot” content, said Jamie Falkowski, chief creative officer at Day One Agency. While the short and often bizarre videos associated with “brain rot” trends do typically generate views and engagement, “it’s hard to say what it might actually be doing [in terms of] driving real connection and relevancy to the people that you’re trying to reach,” he said.

Also read: Why brain rot surged in 2024

Aditi Rajvanshi, head of strategy at digital content company Portal A, also anticipates a “real departure from the ‘TikTokification’ of social [content]” and a shift among creators away from homogenized content that “suits the algorithm.” 

Social media production studios such as Fallen Media, Gymnasium and Mad Realities are also likely to continue growing their existing creator-led series—such as Gymnasium’s “Boy Room” or Fallen Media’s “Street Hearts”—and expanding their programming in 2025, several experts said. 

As studios and independent creators prioritize serialized content, advertisers will increasingly integrate sponsorships into creators’ existing series rather than paying creators for standalone sponsored videos, said Ellyn Briggs, brands analyst at Morning Consult. Consumers are “feeling extremely fatigued” in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, according to Morning Consult research, and the “levity” that creators bring to series such as Mad Realities’ “Shop Cats” “is going to be the overarching tone that we’ll see brands try to tap into across all channels to kind of counteract that” over the next several months, she said.

“More brands will try to buy up existing creator-produced shows like that or become exclusive sponsors of them rather than producing some of their own right now,” Briggs said, pointing to Amazon Prime’s sponsorship of the second season of “Boy Room” as an example. Luong has already worked with several brands to insert their products into her existing video series, where roughly 60% of the episode is “personal and still tied to the series” and the other 40% is dedicated to highlighting a brand or product, she said.

See also: Inside Amazon Prime's sponsorship of ‘Boy Room’

Digital media company Doing Things noticed an uptick in interest among advertisers in sponsoring social video series in the second half of 2024, said Reid Hailey, its co-founder and CEO. In response, the company launched a video series called “Dad Takes” on its “Rad Dad” Instagram meme account, and Hailey plans to lean into serialized video content across the company’s other social media brands this year, too, he said.

In addition to partnering with creators on their social media series, Falkowski anticipates more brands will produce their own serialized video content. Day One Agency is already exploring opportunities to launch social series (inspired by Gymnasium and its co-founder Adam Faze) with clients, he said.

Jasmine Enberg, VP and principal analyst at EMarketer, pointed to the frustration many creators and marketers felt last summer with the flood of social and marketing content mindlessly echoing beauty creator Jools Lebron’s “very demure, very mindful” catchphrase. Enberg described this moment as a “tipping point” in the shift toward prioritizing “consistent, original content rather than jumping on trends.”

The expansion of serialized creator content (and the brands sponsoring it) likely won’t be limited to social media, and “we will see more creator IP expanding on other platforms to engage with audiences,” said James DeJulio, CEO of creator platform Tongal. MrBeast’s Prime Video series “Beast Games” became the streaming platform’s “#1 unscripted series launch” and topped Prime Video charts in over 50 countries when it premiered last month, according to X posts from the popular creator whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson. 

YouTube becomes influencer marketing priority

While Instagram and TikTok are expected to hold onto their status as the top two platforms for influencer partnerships in 2025—should TikTok not be banned in the U.S.—advertisers are making YouTube a larger piece of their influencer marketing strategies this year, experts told Ad Age.

As of September, 26% of marketers globally were leveraging YouTube in their influencer strategies, according to an Influencer Marketing Hub report. And just under two-thirds (65%) of marketers surveyed said they plan to increase their YouTube spend in 2025. 

YouTube’s massive reach, coupled with its growing popularity as a connected TV platform, is beginning to fuel a “bigger appetite for creative integrations” into creator content on the platform rather than just pre-roll or mid-roll ads, said Jamie Gutfreund, founder of consultancy Creator Vision. 

YouTube “started to make a bigger effort with agencies” last year, she said, and much of the surging interest she’s seen from clients in working with YouTube creators is stemming from “media agencies who are more willing to dig deeper into the YouTube ecosystem, and brands that are trying to replace their large linear [TV] audiences in more impactful ways.”

YouTube is by far the most popular social platform among U.S. adults—83% reported using the platform in a Pew Research Center survey, while 47% said they use Instagram and 33% reported using TikTok. It’s also become the top streaming platform in the U.S., comprising nearly 11% of all TV viewing, according to a November report from Nielsen. Netflix, meanwhile, makes up just under 8% of TV viewing activity, per the report. 

“In past years, when we thought about social media campaigns, the focus was on Instagram and TikTok,” said Nya-Gabriella Parchment, VP of brand partnerships at UTA-owned influencer management firm Digital Brand Architects, in an email. But “legacy platforms,” which include Snapchat and Pinterest in addition to YouTube, are now playing a larger role in influencer strategies, she said. 

James Nord, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Fohr, also anticipates “more platforms will gain influence and the influencer marketing landscape will diversify” this year, he said in an email. But while “both new and old platforms like Substack and YouTube are gaining importance in brand strategies,” the dominance of TikTok and Instagram in influencer strategies “isn’t going anywhere soon,” he added. 

Also read: How marketers are preparing for potential TikTok ban

Brands prioritize communities over social celebrities

This year, many brands are planning to center their creator marketing strategies on building relationships with loyal members of their brand communities rather than social media stars. 

Backlash against the extravagance of influencer culture reached new highs in 2024, said Maggie Walsh, head of strategy at digital marketing and social media agency Glow, from the #Blockout2024 movement to the rejection of the overconsumption associated with influencers in the form of the “underconsumption” trend. 

Several brands began pivoting their influencer strategies last year in response to so-called “influencer fatigue.” Tarte Cosmetics, for instance, hosted ordinary consumers on several of its influencer trips in the second half of 2024, after the brand repeatedly faced criticism for spending exorbitant amounts of money on elite mega-influencers. And the era of luxurious influencer trips will largely come to an end this year, as “lavish spending on wealthy influencers feels tone-deaf in the current climate,” Nord said.

Instead, many brands are “starting to tap in directly to the community” with events aimed at brand fans rather than massive influencers, said Giselle Huasipoma, senior coordinator of global influence at Calvin Klein. She pointed to H&M’s surprise Charli XCX concert in New York’s Times Square to celebrate the re-opening of its flagship store in November and beauty brand Refy’s “community trip” to Mallorca last July with brand fans rather than high-profile influencers. Huasipoma and her team are also planning to make community building “a really big pillar” of Calvin Klein’s creator strategy this year, she said. 

“Creator and community [is] all becoming one big gray area, because we have so many people that we engage with on a daily basis who, whether they have 100 followers or 100 million followers, are able to drive outsized conversation,” said Soyoung Kang, chief marketing officer at Eos. 

Last month, when the brand launched its new line of body washes at Texas supermarket chain H-E-B, Eos flew Emily Meyers (a beauty creator with 112,000 TikTok followers) and a handful of other influencers to Houston to try the new products themselves and capture social content at the supermarket—all after Meyers jokingly commented, “Let me fly out to Texas really quick.” 

“Whenever [Meyers] talks about our product launches, she does tend to get an outsized level of reach, and so she’s just been a really great ambassador to our brand,” Kang said. “Cutting through to a smaller subset of people is better than becoming white noise to a vast audience.”

Marketers enlist creators as consultants and long-term collaborators

Several experts agreed that a larger number of brands and agencies will be looking to creators and their audience insights to help inform their broader social and brand marketing strategies in 2025, rather than simply leveraging them as brand mouthpieces. 

“Transactional relationships are done, in my opinion,” said Brian Salzman, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency RQ. “We're still seeing brands do it, but it’s very archaic, and you’re leaving so much on the table. When you have these real relationships, creators want to give you information” about their audiences and the types of content or trends resonating with them, he said. 

“Influencer marketing is way more than a social media tool—it’s a brand tool, meaning creators will drive value on social media, yes, but they’ll also drive value on experiential [marketing] and help us as brands figure out where to show up and how to show up,” Salzman added. “They’ll be giving insights for our creatives in real-time—insights on what’s happening now in the community that [the brand] wants to be in.”

Also read: Creator and influencer trends for brand marketers

Lia Haberman, a consultant and social media and influencer marketing instructor at UCLA Extension, agrees that “the definition of influencer—someone who as credibility, clout and an online audience—will continue to evolve” beyond internet celebrities parroting brand talking points this year. Instead, “we’re seeing the rise of the employee-influencer hybrid,” which can range from brands and agencies hiring in-house creators to brands tapping into the social media audiences built by their employees who are also part-time creators, such as Southwest Airlines pilot Matthew Madorin, or “Captain MattyMo,” Haberman said.

Agencies and brands are also increasingly setting up networks of creator partners who are effectively on standby to quickly produce social content tied to the latest trends. Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously, has helped several clients build out creator networks over the past year, she said. That model can boost engagement on Instagram content by upwards of 20% compared to one-off influencer partnerships, she said.

Marketers prioritize influencer performance

While many brands have already begun scrutinizing the value of their growing investment in influencer marketing more closely, performance will be a key focus for more marketers than ever in 2025. 

“This is going to be the year when we’re going to move away from guessing and get far more practical about what brands need, what works and what matters” in influencer campaigns, Gutfruend said. In today’s social media landscape, a creator’s follower count no longer equates to how many people are going to see their content, and vanity metrics such as likes “don’t even matter anymore,” she said. 

Instead of these “artificial metrics,” advertisers are honing in on specific qualities of creators and their content when selecting brand partners—for example, an activewear brand targeting gym enthusiasts might search for “fitness creators who make content inside a gym” rather than “fitness creators who have five million followers,” Gutfruend said.

“It’s much more of a media-driven approach,” she added. “It’s much more like when you used to buy print in the old days, and more sophisticated. It requires more data and more analytics, but it’s more targeted and less guessing.” 

Also read: Ad metrics that matter most in 2025

Salzman echoed Gutfruend’s sentiment, noting that he’s seen an uptick in brands pivoting away from conventional lifestyle influencers who lack a distinct point of view or differentiating factor that sets them apart from the sea of other creators making the same type of content. 

“Influencer marketing is about borrowing the credibility of somebody else,” he said, “and I’m seeing brands starting to work with influencers who actually have authority in different spaces, whether they’re chefs, designers, trainers—people that bring credibility with them. Because [with] the idea of just a ‘professional influencer,’ I don’t see how that is creating that connection with the consumer or driving more than just a moment of visibility.” 

This year, more marketers will be “actually holding creators accountable, the same way we buy media and we hold networks accountable for performance,” Salzman added. How marketers measure that performance, however, will vary based on their objectives, and could include everything from reach and engagement (particularly comments and shares) to more traditional metrics such as awareness, favorability or purchase intent, he said.

Marketing higher-ups are also increasingly emphasizing the performance of social content as a whole, not just sponsored influencer content, said Nathan Jun Poekert, CMO of creative agency General Idea, in an email. 

“In 2024, I’ve seen more CMOs start to say, ‘Hey, this is great, but is it working?’ And therein lies the challenge,” he said. “We invest in non-measurable channels like TV, print and billboards in heavy volumes, but social is starting to get pressure to show impact … I can predict a divestment in organic social from some brands and a further increase in social amongst others. And the reality is that neither is the right or wrong approach. Some brands just aren’t meant to be memed. Some brands aren’t ever going to get high engagement."

More brands follow creators beyond social feeds

Influencer marketing has been steadily extending beyond social media content over the past few years, and that trend will only accelerate in 2025, experts said. It’s a phenomenon fueled by both creators and advertisers, with more creators realizing the risk of hinging their success (and incomes) on social media algorithms, and advertisers increasingly recognizing the value of expanding their creator collaborations to include mediums such as connected TV, out-of-home and experiential marketing.

This desire is only increased by the potential ban of TikTok. A U.S. ban on the app is currently set to take effect on Jan. 19, though the Supreme Court will hear arguments from TikTok on Jan. 10. President-elect Donald Trump has also urged the Supreme Court to pause the ban until he has the opportunity to “seek a negotiated resolution” of the legal dispute after his Jan. 20 inauguration. Marketing and agency leaders are already bracing for a future without TikTok. 

“Whether or not TikTok is banned, creators seem sufficiently freaked out at the possibility an entire platform could disappear that we’re seeing a lot more comments recommending ‘owned’ channels” such as Substack newsletters, podcasts or blogs, Haberman said. As the legal battle over TikTok’s fate in the U.S. plays out in the coming weeks, many creators will likely focus on launching properties on these channels as “insurance,” she said—if the previous discussions around TikTok’s possible U.S. ban hasn’t already driven them to do so.

As creator content continues to outperform traditional brand content, more brands will amplify their influencer collaborations across additional mediums such as billboards and CTV ads to “meet audiences wherever they are,” Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer marketing agency Influential, said in an email. 

But creators expanding their content beyond the For You page isn’t just a matter of job security. Many are growing “really interested in taking control of their destiny a bit more … and thinking of themselves like a business,” said Ahad Khan, CEO of creator commerce platform Kajabi. 

“You’re starting to see creators think about the ‘economy’ piece of the ‘creator economy’ much more explicitly than they had before,” he said. “Like any business, [creators] want to have growth opportunities, but [they] also want to have sustainability. So hey, if brand deals are great, awesome, I could do more brand deals. But if brand deals aren't great, I have an audience that I own, that I can go and talk to and activate and build products or build value for … and build an income around that.”

Brands attempt to dive into dark social

Brands are also increasingly looking to creators to help tackle the rise of so-called “dark social” content—that is, direct messages, private groups or other areas of social media that aren’t publicly accessible—said Liz Cole, chief social officer at VML. 

“For so many years, the project for a brand was to be thumb-stopping—that you’re going to be in this public feed and that someone’s going to land on your content and pay attention,” she said. “The real project now—and sort of the harder thing— is how do you truly earn salience in people’s minds and get share of  voice among earned conversation? How does the brand find its way into the group chats, into the Discord servers, into the peer-to-peer Snaps, and all of those places that you can't control and you may not be able to even measure?”

Social platforms have embraced this shift from public feeds to private messaging over the past several months. Instagram, for example, added several new tools to its “broadcast channels” last month to make the previously one-to-many messaging feature more interactive, including the ability for users to reply to messages shared by brands or creators in those channels. Creators and their audiences are currently exchanging over 1.5 billion messages in these broadcast channels per month, according to Instagram. 

Snapchat also recently introduced a new “sponsored Snaps” ad tool that enables brands to deliver videos directly to users’ inboxes on the platform and allows users to reply to the brand. In November, Snapchat partnered with Universal Pictures to roll out the first-ever sponsored Snap—a video of actor Jonathan Bailey encouraging viewers to buy tickets for “Wicked.” 

“People just aren’t posting in-feed anymore,” said Randy Romero, social media director at creative agency GSD&M. Gen Zers, in particular, tend to “lurk” on social media rather than sharing content, he added. Indeed, 79% of 13-to-39-year-olds said they “rarely post [their] own content” in last year’s annual “Social Media Behavior” report from youth market research firm YPulse. 

In 2025, “brands, along with users, are going to shift back toward ‘social networking’ versus ‘social media,’” Romero said. “‘Social media’ implies that you’re creating for an audience—which, from a user point of view, is really anxiety-inducing … and brands being able to adapt to that and create marketing and messaging that feels really personal through social media is going to be, I think, a big trend.” 

Brands are also turning to private communities such as Discord groups and Instagram broadcast channels to conduct consumer insight research or as “incubators” for new product development, said Carolyn Rooke, group director of social at VML. “There's a ton of value in that, and I think we'll continue to see that happening,” she said. 

Creators and marketers adopt AI

Creators and influencer marketers increasingly adopted new generative AI tools last year, and experts expect AI to play an even larger role in the influencer industry in 2025. 

But that doesn’t mean every creator will suddenly be pushing out a slew of AI-generated content this year. Most will continue to incorporate generative AI tools into the more tedious aspects of their workflow, such as brainstorming potential video topics based on their best-performing content or assisting with the development of video titles or thumbnails. 

Also read: 5 AI marketing predictions for 2025

“Creators are going to get more creative, because AI is going to help them be able to make way more decisions than they typically make with a lot more efficiency,” said Aaron DeBevoise, CEO and founder of creator platform Spotter. For instance, creators who leverage AI software to help speed up their video editing process, or those who brainstorm a list of 50 possible video titles using generative AI in a handful of seconds rather than spending hours trying to produce that list, will have more room in their schedules to plan and film additional videos, he said. 

“On the whole, creators do not have massive workforces,” said Neil Waller, co-founder and co-CEO of Whalar Group. “[AI] isn’t going to replace creators—no one’s going to want to watch only content completely made by AI—but it’s a time-saving tool” that will dramatically speed up their creative processes over the next several months, he said. 

When it comes to marketers, Amy Luca, executive VP and global head of social at S4 Capital’s Monks, anticipates more brands will experiment with AI-generated brand ambassadors this year. “Imagine the Burger King coming to life and being able to have a conversation with him at scale,” she said, or a brand partnering with a celebrity to create an AI-powered avatar of them that consumers can interact with. 

“Everyone goes, ‘Oh, you know, consumers won't like it.' They will,” Luca said. “They're going to be fine with it, as long as there's a very clear brief for the AI [ambassador], meaning they’re only talking about this one thing … And honestly, these made-up avatars are perfect for brands that don’t want to be tied to a human personality that has all its issues and controversies.” 

But AI-generated avatars rolled out by social media platforms such as Meta have faced significant backlash from consumers. Last week, Meta took down roughly a dozen of its AI-generated character accounts across Instagram and Facebook in response to widespread criticism of the Meta-managed AI avatars on X, formerly Twitter. The company introduced those characters in late 2023 alongside a series of AI chatbots modeled after celebrities such as MrBeast and Paris Hilton, which Meta has also since scrapped.

Both Meta and TikTok are building out AI-powered digital avatars based on the likenesses of existing creators or paid actors to help advertisers scale their video production—but given the recent backlash against Meta’s AI characters, those avatars may not be received as warmly as the platforms hope.

Social commerce soars

Social commerce skyrocketed in 2024, with the number of U.S. consumers shopping through TikTok Shop and other social platforms surpassing 100 million for the first time, per EMarketer data. By the end of last year, nearly half (46%) of all U.S. social media users aged 13 and up had made at least one purchase through a social media channel, according to EMarketer. 

“I do really believe that social commerce is just going to explode” in 2025, Romero said. “It's been something that's kind of been bubbling in the background in terms of these social platforms and what they're investing in, but all signs indicate that users are more comfortable buying things online—specifically with TikTok Shop.”

TikTok Shop drove over $100 million in sales on Black Friday alone, roughly triple the amount of sales the platform saw on Black Friday in 2023, according to TikTok. And between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the platform saw 165% more shoppers compared to that time frame in 2023. 

On a recent episode of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast, Casey Lewis, author of the youth trends newsletter After School, said she anticipates a livestream shopping boom in 2025. “I think the livestream shopping format has finally broken through with TikTok and TikTok Shop,” she said, “and I think that we’re going to see more and more brands testing out those kinds of features, because people like to experience something that feels … very in-the-moment and not scripted.”

While most liveshopping streams have closely resembled the Quality Value Convenience (QVC) model up to this point, Gutfruend expects brands to shift toward more shoppable entertainment-oriented livestreaming this year. “We’ll see higher-end talent, celebrities and creators that you know that are more household names with more production value adding into this, because the numbers are just huge,” she said. “We’re going to redefine what [liveshopping] means, so that it doesn't immediately trigger this concept of QVC in your head.”