Instead, Hannah Anderson at NewGen says she has a hope to share: that social media will return to a more human version of itself.
People look for the connection they once found online in real-world settings such as the gym, says Anderson
Nobody really knows how social media will look next year. We barely know what it will look like next week. In fact, by the time you’ve packed away your Christmas trees, the social landscape will have shapeshifted yet again – almost definitely into something none of us put in our trend reports.
Every December, we open Google Docs and get ready to pull ‘social predictions’ out of thin air. And yes, we can all take an educated guess at what we think might be the next big thing. More of this, less of that, a shiny new feature that may or may not survive beyond beta testing. But the uncomfortable truth is this: any prediction for social media in 2026 is, at best, a hopeful estimate… and, at worst, completely baseless.
It sounds pessimistic, but it’s true. I know this because everything we confidently predicted this time last year, everything we were sure was going to ‘change the industry,’ is nowhere to be seen. Some of those predictions didn’t just miss the mark; they didn’t even make the pitch.
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Sure, there will always be trends, patterns, and an overarching sentiment about where culture appears to be heading. We can point to themes, behavioral shifts, and new formats. And those insights are helpful to an extent. But social media is moving at the fastest pace it ever has. It’s evolving so quickly that even the platforms can’t keep up with themselves. Anyone who claims they can accurately map where we’ll be next month, never mind in three, six, or 12, should probably close their forecasting spreadsheet and go buy a lottery ticket instead.
As professionals working in this chaotic, emotionally charged, ever-morphing ecosystem, prediction isn’t really the job anymore. Survival is. Adaptation is. And, honestly, sometimes it’s simply about hoping for the best. Hope that the online world we’ve all collectively built veers, at some point soon, off the path it’s currently heading down. Because right now, let’s be honest, it feels like a one-way train to AI-generated slop and endless cycles of the worst news humanity has to offer.
What used to feel fun, spontaneous, and genuinely communal increasingly feels engineered, optimized, and a little bit soulless. And we feel that, not just as marketers, but as humans. Social used to be unpredictable in a good way. Now it’s unpredictable in an ‘I wonder which new apocalypse-adjacent headline I’ll see before 9am’ way.
So rather than offering a prediction for 2026, I want to offer something different: a hope.
A hope that social media finds its way back to what it once was. A place to laugh. A place to chat. A place to make friends, not just content. A place to connect, not just consume. A place where people feel like participants in a community, not just data points in an algorithm.
Maybe that sounds idealistic. But the signs are already there. People are logging off. Not dramatically, but subtly. The soft launch of stepping away from feeds that feel draining instead of energizing. It’s no longer cool to be chronically online. The micro-moments of collective joy that once defined the early internet feel rare. And we’re craving the connection we once got from social platforms, searching for it instead offline: in gyms, in hobbies, in friendships, in real-world micro-communities.
The question becomes: what can we do? What is within our control?
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We can really try to make social media social again.
We can create content that feels human. We can encourage conversation. We can champion real voices and real communities over scale for the sake of scale. We can remind brands that not every piece of content has to be the most optimized or algorithm-friendly. Sometimes it just has to make someone smile, or feel seen.
We can push back, even gently, on the pressure to constantly churn and optimize at the expense of genuine interaction. We can embrace the imperfect, the playful, the messy.
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Will that happen? Who knows. Nobody can say. And that’s the whole point.
The only thing we can predict about social media is that it will continue to be unpredictable. Everything else is hope, intention, and the choices we make along the way.
Only time will tell.
NewGen
NewGen is a social-first creative and creator agency that stands at the forefront of culture, creators and community. On a mission to challenge outdated advertising...
