Around 5 billion people use social media. That’s more than half of the world’s population to try to connect with. Considering the market size, we can see why the predicted spending on social media marketing was $219.8 billion in 2024. These are big numbers.
And there are so many other statistics out there. Instead, we’ll start the article that’ll talk you through why a business absolutely does need social media to succeed in 2025.
Can Businesses in 2025 Succeed Without a Social Media Strategy?
Social Media in Modern Business
Platforms designed to share posts, memes, views, ideas, and more have become preferred tools for businesses to achieve their goals of selling products. It’s easier than ever to integrate social media with other platforms like your website. If you are establishing your business nowadays and looking for a website builder to create it on your own, choose one that offers a variety of templates. This makes the process smoother, easier, and ensures an impressive design and professional look.
And it’s not just the businesses that need active social media accounts. One study found that 46% of shoppers will use social media to research a brand before buying a product.
In 2025, customers expect a business to maintain one of the strongest social presences to:
- Market products and services offered by the company.
- Bring traffic to their website.
- Increase the patronage of their brands through engagement.
Instagram and Facebook are two of the biggest platforms for social media that apparently produce the most ROI for brands, although we’d question whether that’s true for Facebook in 2025. Compared to some of the platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn, we think there’s room for more ROI on other platforms.
Another key benefit is the ability to gain insights from customers instantly. A business can address issues, modify its products, and enhance service quality using social media. It’s something that was once so delayed and filled with problems. Now, a simple direct message and you’re communicating with customers in seconds.
In our opinion, brands that want to succeed in 2025 should be using Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. With TikTok, brands are finding such massive success by jumping on the hype of leaving joke comments, creating gag videos, etc. Ryanair (the Irish airline company) is a great example of this.
Understanding a Good Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy is much more than just a set of random posts. It’s a calculated and well-thought-out set of random posts that business owners hope will generate sales.
In 2025, a good strategy includes aligning with business objectives, understanding the audience, and tracking meaningful metrics like engagement, conversion rates, and ROI. It should follow market trends and social media trends to achieve maximum engagement with the post. It should be getting shares, comments, and likes across multiple platforms to boost exposure.
Is it that easy? No. Most successful businesses are outsourcing their social media marketing or have enough money to hire a dedicated in-house team.
Adapting to Changing Trends
There are always changing trends—and trust us, trends matter. The more on-trend you are, the more you’re going to sell. Even if the trend doesn’t necessarily directly relate to your business niche, you can make it.
And as quickly as one trend emerges, a new one replaces it. New platforms come up, audience behavior shifts, and algorithms change. That’s why we think the most successful brands in 2025 will outsource their social media marketing. Posting should really be every 2-3 days with interesting, trending content. Do you think you could manage that in-house?
Short-form video content will be the most popular in 2025. If you’re not creating Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and TikToks, you’re not in our successful business category for 2025.
Competitor Insights
Always analyze how competitors are using social media marketing. For example, if a competitor is successful with their Instagram marketing but not on LinkedIn, there’s an opening for passive dominance on LinkedIn.
Competitor analysis is about identifying strengths and understanding and identifying weaknesses. Maybe the customer service managed through social media platforms is slow, or the content strategy is very inconsistent. These areas are opportunities waiting for your business to capitalize on.
For a thorough analysis, consider the following:
- Identify Key Competitors: A standalone list of direct competitors and major businesses in the industry needs to be made.
- Evaluate Their Presence: Check the platforms they value and how well they interact with their audience.
- Analyze Engagement: See their most liked posts to learn what content works for them.
- Spot Missed Opportunities: Identify gaps in tools or formats that can work in your favor.
Competitor analysis can also be a source of creativity. Watching the different approaches taken in creative campaigns or even simple new ideas can give you great concepts for unique strategies for your business. Still, you have to be careful not to use their approach as it is.
The worst thing you can do is look like you’re copying your competitors—unless you do it well, strategically, and comically, like Aldi has done.
Building a Social Media Strategy: Key Steps
Starting from scratch for a social media strategy can be stressful. But it can be dissected into smaller, easy parts as follows:
- Align Goals with Business Objectives: Make sure the social media strategy integrates with wider targets like increased sales and improved customer loyalty.
- Know Your Audience: Statistics and direct questioning can give a good understanding of your target audience.
- Optimize Profiles: All profiles should be the same, cohesive, and easily found in searches.
- Create a Content Calendar: Plan ahead to give out uniform posts at the right time for maximum interaction.
- Track and Adjust: Analytics can prove how effective the strategy is and aid you in making necessary adjustments.
These pointers can help build a proper social media strategy that is easily executed and actually fulfills the intended goals.
Risks of Neglecting Social Media
In 2025, businesses that do not use social media are highly vulnerable. They:
- Miss Out on Reaching Younger, Tech-Savvy Audiences: Younger audiences, for example, are heavily engaged with social channels. TikTok and Instagram reels are the platforms to be on if you want to engage with a younger audience.
- Struggle to Build Trust and Credibility: In the era of online consumer engagement, having no or limited presence on social media is alarming. Many people are likely to question the legitimacy of a company, dampening their willingness to engage with the brand or make purchases.
- Fall Behind Competitors Who Dominate Digital Spaces: Competitors with effective social media strategies can easily conquer firms that do not operate online. Such companies will capture, engage, and convert the audience, while other companies remain idle.
Businesses that ignore this critical component of contemporary marketing are bound to lose relevancy.
Measuring Success
Businesses have to work off numbers that touch their objectives directly. The top metrics we think you should be following include:
- Engagement Rates: Content metrics like comments, shares, or saves shed some light on how well content and the brand resonate with the audience.
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): This displays the percentage of users who engaged with a CTA and arrived at the targeted site or landing page.
- Conversions: Whether it be purchases, newsletter subscriptions, or different types of downloads, conversions remain the single most conclusive measure of the success of a campaign.
You can use tools like Google Analytics, tools within the social media platforms, and social media management software to manage these metrics.
Conclusion
So, to sum up, yes, social media does matter to a business’s success. In 2025, we’d say a business can’t succeed without it. The right social media marketing strategy does matter!
