Creating a social media marketing trends report heading into 2026 was an interesting challenge. Trends are no longer linear, or even shaped like a traditional bell curve. They can be splintered and contradictory.
Social identities and communities are becoming more personal while AI is taking over content creation. Absurdist chaos battles it out with cozy nostalgia. All while social media evolves from a communications channel into a search engine, a research lab, and a high-stakes creative testing ground.
In our annual exploration of the latest social media trends, we highlight what brands need to know to stay relevant in the lightning-fast social ecosystem of 2026. ..
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TikTok is not a social media platform. It’s an entertainment platform.
That’s how Khartoon Weiss, TikTok’s Global Head of Agency & Accounts, described the world’s most downloaded app at The Gathering, an annual business and marketing summit held in Banff, Canada.
What’s the distinction?
People don’t “check” Tiktok. They watch it. And, Weiss says, “that small pivot in behavior is everything.”
Continue reading For Hootsuite: How To Win at TikTok (According to TikTok) →
The work landscape underwent massive changes in 2020. This came with a new and urgent focus on digital tools that empower teams to collaborate with coworkers they may never have met. Workflow management — and integration tools in particular — have become critical for teams that need to accomplish, track, and manage everything from repetitive tasks to complex large-scale projects…
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Companies of all sizes are moving their infrastructure, digital assets, and work processes into the cloud. Gartner expects companies to spend $116 billion on SaaS tools in 2020. That massive investment represents multiple tools all being used at the same time. The average mid-market business used 137 SaaS tools in 2019. That's an increase of 30 percent from the year before. This increase isn't just present at the business-level; individual employees are using 10 apps or more. The sheer number of tools used by the average organization creates a new obstacle for collaboration: the tool silo…
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You've put a ton of effort into planning, filming, and editing your video, and you're confident it's great content that viewers will love. But what if they never get a chance to see it?
Your video thumbnail is the gateway to your content. Like a movie poster, it should convey everything a potential viewer needs to know to compel them to watch.
Sure, your video platform will generate an automatic thumbnail for you. But would you go to see a movie if the poster was just a random (and possibly blurry) frame from the film?
Read the rest on the Vidyard blog
That wacky video with the cows in the airport. That holiday video about the animated cat. That swift video journey through a company's storied history.
They're all company culture videos.
Now, more than ever, people care about the values behind the brands they interact with, buy from, and work for. That's where video comes in…
Read the rest on the Vidyard blog
For marketers, it’s important to understand apparent shifts in social behavior. After all, if you base your marketing strategy on incorrect assumptions, you’ll have a hard time meeting your goals. Unfortunately, the headlines don’t always get it right when it comes to analyzing social trends.
Enter Simon Kemp. The founder of marketing strategy consultancy Kepios examines the activity behind the headlines. He shares that data in reports produced in collaboration with Hootsuite and We Are Social.
Kemp recently shared highlights from his Q2 Digital Statshot at The Next Web’s TNW2019 conference in Amsterdam. Here are three ripped-from-the-headlines social trends that Kemp says are being reported all wrong.
Continue reading For Hootsuite: 3 Social “Trends” That Just Aren’t True (And Why Believing Them is Bad) →
The prevalence of mobile devices has “made traditional desktop marketing playbooks obsolete,” according to Facebook’s head of global travel strategy. Speaking at the Phocuswright Europe conference in Amsterdam, Nikhilesh Ponde outlined five key strategies marketers need to implement now to keep up with the move to mobile.
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Focus on “people-based marketing”
It’s important to understand where your audience is already spending time online.
Continue reading For Hootsuite: Five keys to social marketing success from a Facebook exec →
With more than 45 million fans on Facebook and 86 million followers on Instagram, National Geographic is one of the top non-celebrity brands in the social sphere. If you’re following Nat Geo on any of their channels, you already understand why. Their photos and videos are stunning and their storytelling is top notch.
Behind the scenes, National Geographic’s social strategy is based on four core guiding principles, as we learned from Annabelle Canwell (National Geographic’s SVP of travel partnerships) at the recent ITB Berlin travel conference in Germany. Let’s take a look at the lessons these principles hold for any brand trying to build a strong presence on social.
Continue reading For Hootsuite: The 4 Lessons Any Brand Can Learn From Nat Geo’s Social Media Success →
A freelance travel writer/editor based in Vancouver
