If there was one defining lesson from 2025, it’s this: social media hasn’t changed — the competition has.
Across platforms, brands produced more content than ever, adapting to new formats and best practices at a rate of knots. Yet, many still saw declining reach, lower engagement and weaker returns. The problem wasn’teffort; it boils down to platform saturation.
Now, as we look ahead to the year ahead, the key to a successful strategy isn’t just reviewing the updates from 2025 but understanding why standing out has become so much harder.
Search Hasn’t Gone Away, It Has Evolved
One of the earliest signals of change in 2025 came from Search. Traditional search engines, like Google, saw global market share drop below 90% for the first time since 2015, but the more important shift was how search itself changed. AI-powered overviews began answering queries directly, contributing to falling click-rates and reducing the need for users to visit multiple sites.
At the same time, discovery behaviour moved decisively towards platforms and AI tools:
- TikTok reported searches were up more than 40% year-on-year
- Instagram invested heavily in improving in-app search
- Reddit emerged as the most-cited source across major AI platforms
Instead of clicking, users increasingly search by skimming and summarising, often without ever leaving the platform or AI interface. The implication is significant: visibility now depends less on being the final destinationand more on being the source that feeds AI summaries, social results and recommendations.
Click here to read more about staying visible in the age of AI search.
The End of #Hashtags and the Rise of Social Search
One of the quietest but most important shifts of 2025 was the decline of hashtags as a discovery tool. Across the year:
- LinkedIn confirmed hashtags are no longer key drivers of reach
- TikTok introduced a five-hashtag limit
- Followed suit by Instagram with their own five-hashtag limit, and multiple confirmations from the platform’s
CEO that hashtags do not drive meaningful reach anymore.
Interestingly, this has coincided directly with improvements in how platforms — and AI systems — understand content. Captions, on-screen text, spoken audio and visuals now carry far more weight than user-applied tags.
Discoverability is no longer about tagging topics; it’s about clearly communicating them. If content isn’t explicit, readable and context-rich, it’s unlikely to surface, whether in feeds, in-platform search, or AI-generated summaries.
Video Became the Default
Video is no longer a competitive advantage. It is the entry requirement. More than half of the time spent on Instagram was on Reels, LinkedIn reported a 36% increase in video uploads and watch time, and Meta merged all Facebook videos into Reels by default. Even YouTube leaned further into optimisation, rolling out global title A/B testing.
The result? Feeds filled with video — but not necessarily with ideas that stood out. When everyone adopted the same format, format alone stopped being enough.
More Users, Less Visibility
Despite continued platform growth, performance told a different story. On Instagram, many saw posts and Reels reach decline, with impressions and interactions following suit. Data from Metricool shows TikTok leading the way in reach, interactions and growth potential, reinforcing the idea that relevance mattered more than volume.
Even Facebook, often written off, quietly delivered strong results in 2025. With over three billion monthly users, it remained the platform with the largest global reach, while average reach, impressions and interactions all grew by more than 50%.
Despite what this data might show on the surface, the story here isn’t platform decline. It’s content overcrowding in saturated feeds.
Saturation Was the Real Story of 2025
By the second half of the year, the effects of saturation were impossible to ignore.
CapCut became one of the most downloaded free apps globally, while Instagram’s Edits showcases a host of new features on a nearly weekly basis. Instagram itself surpassed three billion
monthly active users, with messaging, Reels and recommendations key to driving that growth. Anyone with a smartphone could create content that looked polished and native, before even accounting for the accelerating role of AI-generated content.
As a result, “good enough” has stopped working. Consistency alone no longer guarantees visibility. Safe, familiar content is increasingly blended into the feed.
What This Signals for 2026
Social media itself isn’t likely to change dramatically in 2026. But how brands succeed on it must.
The insights from 2025 are clear:
- Video is mandatory, but ideas matter more than execution
- Clarity beats cleverness in a search and AI-led environment
- Posting more won’t fix weak creative
- Emotional insight outperforms information, stopping the scroll
- Distinctive, risk-aware content is the only way to stand out
Looking Ahead
2025 didn’t reward brands for being present. It rewarded brands for being understandable, distinctive and useful.
Now in 2026, the opportunity remains, but only for those willing to rethink how their content earns attention across feeds, search results and AI-driven discovery.
Found this useful, but still not sure how to re-invigorate your digital strategy? Our Digital Team are here to help – contact us to learn more.
