Stay ahead of the curve by using Instagram's annual trend reports to better understand emerging user behaviors, particularly among Gen Z. These insights can help marketers and content creators tailor their strategies to match evolving values around sustainability, individuality, and platform use.
Key Insights
- Instagram's yearly trend reports provide detailed data on user preferences, such as Gen Z's growing interest in sustainable fashion practices like repeating outfits, thrifting, and shopping locally.
- Gen Z, a primary user base on Instagram, values individuality in fashion and beauty, shifting away from traditional brand-centric influence toward personal expression and DIY aesthetics.
- GSUSA's Instagram Marketing course highlights the importance of monitoring platform-specific trend reports to build accurate audience profiles and align marketing strategies with generational preferences and emerging behaviors.
This lesson is a preview from our Digital Marketing Certificate Online (includes software). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
One thing I want to point out is that Instagram, like many of the social media platforms, offers various types of blog content, including trend reports, right? So you can click through or do so in a moment to get information about new trends on Instagram, new features, new ways to, you know, market or monetize your content. And it's a great resource and something that you should regularly check out, particularly if you're going to be a content creator or a brand marketing on the platform. One particular report that is offered on a yearly basis is a trend report.
In a little bit, we're going to be talking about developing an audience profile as a key step to marketing on this platform. A trend report is one of the ways that you can get information about the audiences that you might want to target on this platform. So let's just look at a recent trend report.
Actually, it's from 2024, but I want to particularly use this one because it is focusing on Gen Z trends, right? Now, why is that significant? Because different social media platforms may be focused on different consumer segments, generational segments, or may tend to have a greater focus on certain segments than others, right? So we think of Facebook. Facebook at this point in time tends to focus on the boomers and Gen Xers, like myself, my age frame, whereas Instagram skews younger, right? There are boomers on Instagram. There are certainly Gen Xers on Instagram.
But the primary focus of Instagram in terms of the largest percentage of users is younger, including younger millennials, Gen Zers, and now Gen Alphas, the generation coming after Gen Z, right? So if you are marketing a product or service that is targeted towards Gen Z, this platform and perhaps TikTok would be the ideal or the premium platforms you want to pick, right? So now, if that is also the case, you'd want to understand as much as you can about the Gen Z audience, right? So, a trend report such as the Instagram trend report could be useful because Instagram is talking to its audience, which consists largely of Gen Z users, right? And by staying on top of these trends, you will be able to see how it's a survey looking at Gen Z trends across several large countries and major regions of the world. And they ask the survey participants about topic issues and trends that matter to Gen Z. And from this, at this point in time, it was a projection of what they expected you would see across the platform around core verticals such as fashion, beauty, social media, dating, friendship, etc., right? And so if your brand is particularly marketing any of those verticals, this could be very critical information for you, or if you're an influencer in any of those verticals. So just look at some of the highlights of the report.
You can click into any of these, you know, into the full report to get a more detailed explanation of these different areas. But take fashion and beauty, right? Gen Zs are focusing on sustainable fashion goals in 2024. They're most likely to buy fewer new clothes, repeat outfits, and shop locally.
The five sustainable fashion practices we will see from Gen Z this coming year include buying less new clothes, repeating outfits, shopping local, drifting, and or shopping second hand. Fashion trends that they predicted were also modern dressing, drifting, vintage, heirloom, repeating outfits to be more sustainable, wearing clothes in an unexpected way, and do it yourself, DIY. Fashion and beauty are going to be all about individuality, all right? One third of Gen Z say that they are looking to get more creative with how they dress, closely followed by finding their signature set and their own core aesthetic, right? So why is that important? Because if you had done this report maybe 10 years prior in the early days of Instagram, it was a very different vibe.
It was a different generation, millennials. And in that particular time, it was far more of a fashion focus. It was the early days of the Instagram influencer, where people were flossing and showing themselves on private jets and exotic locations and wearing designer stuff, right? So some brands prospered during that time because they understood that and knew how to present themselves to that audience.
But things began to change. And if you didn't anticipate that change, you still had a designer label focus, well, you might be out of step with this generation, which is looking more towards individuality as opposed to brand, fashion brand identity, who are more into drifting and secondhand repeating outfits, being more of an individual aesthetic and style. So this is some of the types of insight that you can gain by regularly looking at these reports.