December 2024 in Digital Strategy

Everything you missed in December about digital and influencer marketing, with insights into life as a digital nomad, politics, tech, and culture.

Jan 02, 2025

Happy New Year!

Welcome to The Month in Digital, arriving in your inbox on the first business day of each month. Each issue kicks off with a summary of the past month in digital strategy—covering key news across social media, influencer marketing, and broader digital communications. I’ve read it all so you don’t have to.

My goal is to make this useful and actionable for anyone working in marketing and digital—whether you’re managing social media day-to-day or leading a larger marketing team.

On Monday, I’ll share a special edition summarizing 97 articles on 2025 social and influencer marketing trends. I’ll highlight the trending trends shaping digital strategy in 2025. Keep an eye out.

Please forward this to a friend or colleague who might find it useful.

Wishing you a fantastic 2025,

Ryan

The Month in Digital Strategy - December 2024

Here’s what shaped the digital landscape last month: the rise of Gen Alpha marketing, the uncertain future of TikTok, platform updates, AI's influence on advertising, and insights into podcast trends and landing page optimization. Plus, a few thought-provoking stories beyond the digital sphere.

Social Media

Big Picture:

A new study shows that outrage remains the most effective driver for users to share content—often without bothering to even read what they’re sharing.
Russia was behind most foreign disinformation about the 2024 election, aiming to divide Americans on key issues and amplify conspiracy theories.

The State of Social:

1,500 marketers share their biggest social media challenges for 2024.
#6: Keeping up with trends—is something you're doing right now by reading This Month in Digital.
Social media marketers need to remember: the goal isn’t just to create great social media content—it’s about delivering on your organization’s key objectives.
Forget Gen Z—brands are now figuring out how to market to Gen Alpha, born roughly between 2010 and this year.
Most of your followers aren’t seeing most of your posts. Here’s the case for reusing old content.
The Death of the Hashtag: Hashtags are no longer expanding reach across platforms. Musk says don’t even bother using them on X.
Are social media channels becoming the new ghost shopping malls?
The latest digital benchmarks for arts organizations.
🚫📉 Don’t be boomer cringe! Here are the emojis on their way out in 2025.
Marketing 101: Every great campaign starts with great copy.

Influencers

I just wrapped an EOY fundraising campaign for a large non-profit organization that relied solely on influencers, and we achieved a 300%+ ROAS. Look for creators to supercharge your social fundraising in 2025.

When a creator posts their video on their social channel, that should only be the first stop for that creative.
Creator assets can be whitelabeled and boosted directly from the creator's profile — the most authentic way to scale content. Or they can be repurposed as assets in programmatic advertising to scale across the web, apps, and even out-of-home (OOH) platforms.

But paid advertising is just one of many stops for creator content.
Here's a sampling of other ways we’ve repurposed it over the years:
- Branded social 📲
- Landing Pages / Websites 🌐
- Emails / Newsletters ✉️
- Radio Advertising 📻
- Podcast Advertising 🎙️
- Billboards 🛣️
- TV Ads 📺
- Direct Mail 📬
- Doorknockers 🚪
- Spliced together with other creator assets for brand-new creative ✂️🎞️
Creators can serve as a bottom-up creative agency for your brand or organization.
“New Global Study Reveals: 360M Digital Creators Generate Nearly $370B Economy”
“Creators Drove 486.6 Billion Impressions For Brands In 2024, A 184% Increase Year-Over-Year”
"62% of surveyed creators said they don’t vet the accuracy of content before sharing it with their followers."
“47% of all influencers screened were flagged for some sort of misconduct.“
A useful deep dive on the demographics of creators.
My latest for People First: “How Trump and RFK Jr. Leveraged Microinfluencers to Drive the "Make America Healthy Again" Message
CameoX opens up to all creators.
AI influencers have truly arrived.
All the different ways you can collaborate with influencers on YouTube.
Mass creator outreach doesn’t work, it’s getting harder to scale creator campaigns.
I guested on Social Media and Politics, discussing how influencers were used by Democrats and Republicans this election cycle. Listen here.
A useful 101 on FTC guidelines for working with influencers.

TikTok

All marketing eyes are on TikTok as its case heads to the Supreme Court on January 10. While nobody really knows what’s going to happen, there’s a strong chance TikTok could soon be off the social media menu.

The EU is investigating TikTok's interference in Romania's botched presidential election.
Flashback: “How Campaigns & Non-Profits Can Navigate TikTok Uncertainty”
On Black Friday, TikTok creators held over 30,000 livestreams and sold over $100 million in merchandise.
How to find the best times for your brand to post on TikTok.

Instagram

If TikTok goes away, Instagram Reels will be one of the big winners.
There’s now a way to test your Instagram Reels with non-followers before sharing them with your audience.
80% of sponsored posts on Instagram weren’t disclosed as ads. When will the FTC step in with enforcement?
Instagram will generate 50% of Meta’s ad sales in 2025.
One of 2025's trends is private communities, so it makes sense that Instagram is adding more features to Broadcast Channels. Brands and organizations should pilot Broadcast Channels in 2025.

Facebook

Meta is making affiliate links easier to use for creators and users on Facebook.

Threads

Threads now has 100 million daily active users and 300 million monthly active users.
Threads has finally figured out that when you search for something, you’d like to be able to find it.

LinkedIn is set to become even more important on the B2B side, but also expect it to expand into B2C. Now is a great time to pay attention to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn released data on the best performing ads of 2024:
“Content featuring multiple people increased engagement rates by 14%, but what really connects is seeing the whole person, not just the professional persona. Content showing people in casual clothing, including trainers, saw a 37% increase in video completion rates. Even small personal touches like jewellery contributed to a 53% lift in performance.
Face value takes on new meaning in emotional performance metrics. While smiles drove a 14% increase in video view through rate (VTR) 25%, expressions of frustration (+59%) and confusion (+21%) also resonated strongly. B2B audiences connect with content that acknowledges the full spectrum of work-life experiences, not just the highlight reel.”
Over the past year, B2B influencer marketing has become a real thing.
50% of LinkedIn creators have upped their game in the last 12 months. That’s why you’re seeing so many professionals (myself included) posting more frequently and with greater purpose.

LinkedIn users are embracing this shift, with 58% of users expressing enthusiasm for increased creator content.

Most LinkedIn creators focus on highly specific niches—whether it’s marketing, human resources, or finance—making them an ideal match for brands and SaaS products seeking to engage targeted audiences. Who better to promote your hip HR tool than someone who’s spent their career in HR?

Because of the quality and expertise of LinkedIn creators, expect to pay a premium to access their audiences compared to influencers with similar followings on X or Instagram. Don’t forget to maximize your investment by repurposing creator content for LinkedIn ads tailored to your customer segments.

Read the full study of 4,000 LinkedIn users and 500 creators here.

Twitter/X

“X Has Become a Hate Machine”
Hundreds of thousands of European journalists may be leaving X this month.

BlueSky

Publishers are reporting more traffic and engagement on BlueSky.
I’m not convinced this way of journalists doing account verification is very good or easily scalable.
Your BlueSky posts are being used to train a bunch of AIs. But, to be fair, anything you post on public social media or the web is also being used to train a bunch of AIs.
The murder of a healthcare executive revealed just how cruel BlueSky can be.
BlueSky did okay with its first big social media news moment—the South Korean coup.

Reddit 101
Reddit Answers is a new AI bot that lets you ask questions and receive answers based on millions of Reddit posts.

Substack

The CEO of one of Substack's biggest competitors lays out his case against the platform.

YouTube

YouTube looks to fuel its comments with AI-generated slop. Facebook already did this with birthday greetings months ago.

Podcasts

More than half of daily podcast listeners have made a purchase based on something they heard.

Email

A deep dive into writing email subject lines that work.

Websites

The social-to-web content pipeline is getting more direct: mainstream news websites are starting to embrace short vertical videos on their homepages.
Landing page leader Unbounce shares major learnings on ensuring your pages convert.
The placement of social proof logos on your landing page significantly impacts conversions.

AI

I won’t cover everything happening in AI, but I’ll highlight key updates for marketers and advertisers.

What folks are currently using AI agents for.
OpenAI has finally launched Sora, their sorta fine video generator. Here’s how to use it.
That sexy model you’re chatting with on OnlyFans? Yeah, they’re an AI bot.
Creeps are creating AI-generated porn featuring women lawmakers.
They screened AI-generated short films in a movie theater, and they all sucked.
Is AI innovation slowing down?
Key highlights from a new study on how folks feel about AI-generated ads:
- “Four in five ad industry respondents (80%) believe consumers feel very or somewhat positive about AI-generated ads, but less than half of Gen Z and Millennial consumers actually feel that way.”
- “52% of industry executives said brands that use AI-generated ads are “creative,” only 38% of Gen Z and Millennial respondents shared that perception.”
- “Consumers were more likely to perceive brands that use gen AI to create ads in a negative light—such as “inauthentic” or “unethical”—compared to industry respondents.”
- Bottom Line: People who work in advertising like AI ads much more than consumers do. Worse, they falsely believe in their little hearts that consumers feel the same way they do.

More Digital Bits

Livestream views on Twitch are way down from their pandemic peak.
Linktree is leaning into social commerce and making it easier for creators to benefit from the platform.
Spotify Wrapped flopped this year. But I’m more interested in all the junk music that’s flooding the platform.
Is the era of quantum computing finally arriving?
Group chats are social media with people you know—and mostly like.
The New York Times explores how the Trump campaign leaned into highly targeted digital ads during the election. A Democratic paid media expert responds.

Beyond Digital

Graph Of The Month

Other Stuff

The man who assassinated a healthcare executive in cold blood used a 3D-printed "ghost gun" to commit the murder.
The drone scare is almost certainly just a technological panic.
Don't miss my story about almost having to pay a bribe to a Puerto Vallarta cop. He even had me in a handcuff!
America’s students' test scores are collapsing.
If Jordan Neely had been institutionalized, he’d still be alive today.
All the ways our news media is decentralizing.
Politico reporters dish on the 2028 Democratic Primary.
My History Can Beat Up Your Politics remembers Jimmy Carter.

The Month In Digital

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