As the years pass, social media just keeps on growing. With social media becoming active in our everyday lives, many trends stem from it. I’m going to cover a few of the big new things/trends this year I’ve noticed.
The first major trend I noticed was AI. If you didn’t know, AI stands for artificial intelligence and it’s basically a computer generated machine that can think like humans. For myself at least, I never really thought about AI in the past years but this year it’s become a huge thing.
A reason why it’s become so big among our generation is the fact that Snapchat came out with this update called “My AI.” On Snapchat, this feature is basically like another “friend added” and shows up at the very top of your recent snaps. If you start typing in chat and send something to them, they respond almost instantly with a computer generated response.
It was released on Feb. 23 and it has become a pretty big trend among social media users. Another big reason for the popularity it gained was the eeriness about it. Over time, the AI chatbot started saying things that were personal to the people on the other end of the screen.
The chatbots were meant to be a fun way of having a friend who was always there for you, but are they really your friend? A source states, “a chatbot was found to be offering harmful advice to people through an eating disorder hotline” (Snapchat AI, The Conversation). People started getting creeped out by it, therefore gained a lot of attraction this past year.
Another big trend in the social media industry is instagram reels. Personally for me, before this year, I never looked at reels on Instagram. It was always a running joke in my family because my mom is obsessed with reels. So, when my siblings were making a joke pertaining to TikTok and my mom wouldn’t understand, we would always tell her that she’ll understand in a couple weeks when the TikTok finally shows up on her reels.
Instagram reels are another way to get funny videos out to society and resemble TikToks or Vines. It has been very popular in the past with late Gen X or Millenials, but this past year, it has been very popular among Gen Z: “74% of Instagram users are using the platform’s Reels feature” (Instagram Reel Statistics, Influencer Marketing Hub).
One last trend I would like to highlight is storefronts. This is a really cool feature I liked that has gained attention because it makes things a lot easier. As a girl, when I see someone wearing something I like especially on TikTok, I always want to ask them where they got it from or I start looking for similar clothes. It soon became frustrating because I could never find the outfits they’re wearing.
I came across storefronts one day when I was looking at the comments on a TikTok post of a fellow watcher wondering where someone got a top from and the creator replied with “it’s in my Amazon Storefront.” I soon became intrigued so I went to her page and clicked the link on her profile labeled “storefront” and sure enough it was all the clothes on her posts linked to a page on Amazon. I feel this is such a cool concept that has been created because it provides another resource to get things. This has become a trend because the creators started getting commission for people looking through their storefronts and purchasing said items the creators posted. Now on social media, it seems almost all the creators have a storefront linked in their bio.
In the past couple of months, social media tendencies took over and there are so many more trends, but these are just a few that personally caught my eye.
