Analyzing Hootsuite's "Social Media Trends 2025" Report on the Education Industry

Each year, Hootsuite releases its annual "Social Media Trends" report, which analyzes the future social media landscape, including analytics tracking, engagement, content strategy, and more. As a Strategic Communications Intern for Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts, I find the education industry section of the report exceptionally helpful in understanding the ever-changing social media landscape.

The education industry report focused on key elements of the overall report's findings pertaining to the industry. The three top social media trends for 2025 are content experimentation, social listening, and AI. Strategic platform usage affects the audiences that educational institutes are looking to target and what content to utilize. Social strategy has gone through more significant changes this year than in years past. The report ends with tips for social teams to best succeed in 2025.

Three Social Media Trends

Social teams are beginning to experiment with ditching their brand consistency

to push creative boundaries. Our communications team has begun posting more lighthearted, relatable content for students across our social media accounts, moving away from a more formal brand tone.

Social listening has become a must in the industry as the report found that over 60% of educational institutes now use social listening tools. We utilize sites such as Hootsuite and do our research online to ensure that we are staying up to date with current trends.

Generative AI has become a part of social media teams everywhere. In education, the report found that "Editing and refining text (76%), producing text from scratch (75%), and completely revising/rewriting text (68%) are the top 3 most common uses of AI for social marketers." The use of generative AI can help organizations with efficiency, creativity, and impact.

Platform Usage

Social media marketers in education have found that the platforms producing the highest investments in ROI are Facebook (83%), LinkedIn (75%) and Instagram (74%). Our communications team focuses on these three platforms as they provide a mixed range of audiences, varying levels of professionalism, and styles of content.

Social Strategy

More often than not, educational institutions are updating their social media strategies 33% quarterly and 23% monthly compared to the other frequencies of weekly, yearly, and not at all. There are countless reasons for changing strategy including meeting company needs, trends changing, or competitor activity. More often than not for our communications team, we change strategy on a quarterly cycle that is based on changes to cultural changes and campaign performance.

Tips for 2025

The report leaves social media marketers with these three tips to succeed in 2025:

1. Level up your social strategy with help from others

2. Get creeping on your competitors

3. Spark engagement with visual creativity

I have seen other educational institutions effectively utilize tactics of employee/influencer marketing as a means to the level of social strategy. I hope to include this in our strategy next quarter to show the faces of my fellow interns and other students in the college who have a social media following. Having our interns analyze other colleges at Penn State University Park and other universities can showcase what is working well in academia on social media and what is not. Doing an audit quarterly can provide new ideas and perspectives to impact our future goals. Additionally, our communications team will continue to follow the content that performs best on each platform to increase engagement on our accounts.

Instagram Reels I have created for the @pennstateliberalarts account during my internship