Anyone managing social media right now knows the ground keeps shifting. A platform adds a feature one week, kills it the next. Your best-performing content type from October suddenly flops in January. Certain patterns have emerged this year that separate brands gaining traction from those losing it.
Brands Ditch Consistency for Creativity
Those brand voice guidelines everyone spent months perfecting? Most companies barely glance at them anymore. The rulebook got thrown out somewhere around mid-2024, and nobody’s rushing to write a new one.
Look at what’s happening on Threads and X. Brands post content that would’ve given their legal teams nightmares two years ago. About 43% of companies have tested completely different personalities over the past year. Some don’t even have official guidelines for newer platforms—the strategy basically amounts to “be entertaining and see what happens.”
Why the shift? Audiences developed razor-sharp detection for corporate speech. Those posts that clearly got wordsmithed through five approval rounds? They die in the feed. But a brand willing to post something weird, funny, or slightly chaotic? That content takes off.
Nobody Wants Your Ads Disguised as Posts
Here’s what changed: brands finally figured out that over 60% of their content should entertain, educate, or inform rather than sell. Walk through your own feed right now. How many brand accounts are you following that constantly pitch products? Probably zero, because you unfollowed them ages ago.
The accounts you still follow make you laugh. They teach you something useful. They’re interesting enough that you don’t scroll past. That doesn’t mean promotional content disappeared—just that the ratio flipped. Smart brands now post several genuinely valuable pieces before asking anyone to buy anything.
Influencer Marketing Overtook Ad Spending
This one caught a lot of people off guard. Brands now pour more money into influencer partnerships than traditional social or digital ads. Not testing the waters—actually moving significant budgets away from ads into creator collaborations.
Casino and gambling brands were among the first to take advantage of this opportunity. Gamers who were broadcasting their gameplay on Tik Tok and YouTube gained large fanbases by turning betting into entertainment. They break down strategies, review platforms, and make it engaging enough that people watch for fun.
The online gambling world got sophisticated about social media. Players are addressed by influencer partnerships, content targeted, and community building through casino platforms. Places that unite Malaysian players with the reputable casinos provide game reviews, bonuses comparisons, and guides, including slots to live dealer tips. For more details on how these platforms operate and what they offer, these resources meet people where they are: scrolling social media for entertainment and recommendations.
This is not just a gambling strategy, because almost 85% of marketing professionals consider influencer marketing to provide outcomes, and even more than that plan to continue to invest in it.
Short-Form Video Dominates Everything
If you’re still not making short-form videos, you’re missing the most engaging format out there. The numbers don’t lie—viewers find these clips 2.5 times more engaging than longer content.
YouTube Shorts, Tik Tok and Instagram Reels conditioned people to get fast value hits. These formats are always consumed more by the audiences and the engagement rates of the brands that create short-form content are so high that their other posts seem irrelevant in comparison.
AI Became Standard Operating Procedure
Generative AI stopped being this novel thing teams were “exploring.” Now it’s standard practice. According to McKinsey’s research, 78% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, with marketing and sales among the top areas of adoption.
What’s different in 2025 is the transparency. Marketers quit pretending AI had nothing to do with their polished content. They started sharing prompts, teaching techniques, building this collaborative culture where everyone learns from everyone else.
Social media managers report AI as their main tool for getting everything done. Even industries like finance and healthcare—ones that were super cautious last year—now use AI more aggressively than less-regulated sectors.
Social Listening Proves Its Worth
Social media teams always struggled to connect their work directly to revenue. Social listening tools changed that game by tracking conversations, measuring how people feel about brands, and tying social activity to actual business results.
The marketers using social listening tools report way more confidence in proving ROI. These platforms break everything down—demographics, locations, specific interests—letting brands adjust based on what customers actually say instead of what teams assume they want.
Gen Z Rewrote the Playbook
Gen Z controls more than $450 billion in spending power worldwide. Their shopping habits look nothing like what came before. B2B companies are scrambling to figure this out because even business purchases increasingly involve Gen Z decision-makers.
This generation finds products almost entirely through social media. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube work as their search engines. They trust creators and influencers way more than traditional advertising.
Younger people approach digital platforms fundamentally differently than older demographics. Gen Z stays highly active on social media while being picky about what actually gets their attention.
Everything needs to work flawlessly on mobile too. Gen Z grew up on smartphones. Desktop optimization barely factors in reaching them.
Viral Success Looks Different Now
“Going viral” used to mean millions of views from everywhere. That definition changed. Brands now chase micro-virality—content that hits hard with a specific niche rather than trying to appeal to absolutely everyone.
Algorithms evolved. Platforms reward deep engagement within communities more than raw view counts. A post that had 500 likes and 100 genuine comments by interested users is better than one that had 5,000 views but no one considered it worthwhile to comment.
Strategic Commenting Pays Off
The most successful brands went beyond posting on their own pages. They are now commenting actively on the content of other people, particularly creators who have developed loyal audiences. It places them in front of people they would have not otherwise bumped into.
Around 41% of companies are testing this approach. When the original creator responds to a brand’s comment, engagement jumps 1.6 times higher. That’s real, measurable payoff from something as simple as leaving a thoughtful comment.
According to benchmarking data from Sprout Social, brands experienced a 20% increase in average inbound engagements in 2024, but the average number of outbound engagements per day for all industries stayed at just two. This disparity indicates enormous unrealized potential for brands that are prepared to take the initiative.
The trick? Actually add something to the conversation. Drop a promotional message and you’ll get ignored. But brands figuring out how to be genuinely useful in comment sections are building real relationships.
Platform Fatigue Changed the Game
People are tired. Social media exhaustion hit hard this year. Gartner predicts half of all consumers will significantly cut their social media time by year’s end because they’re frustrated with platform quality.
Social media teams experience the pressure. They are stretched too thin on too many platforms, and dropping the ones that are not working. You can no longer be everywhere. Focused strategy wins over the thinness in all media.
The majority of marketers are probably drawn to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Tik Tok. The others are stuck in the gray area, where one brand achieves remarkable levels of engagement while the other never gains traction. Success means figuring out which platforms actually matter for your specific audience and going deep there.
