5 Social Media Lessons From 2025 That Will Shape Your 2026 Strategy

In the season three finale of Untamed Social, host Laney Goff pulls together the five most important lessons from a year of conversations with brand strategists, creators, and social media experts.

From why “good content” is no longer enough, to how your brand voice might be holding you back, this episode unpacks the shifts every marketer needs to understand before heading into 2026. You’ll hear why sameness is the real enemy of growth, how to build systems that fuel idea generation, and why audience signals—not gut feelings—should guide your strategy.

Laney also breaks down the critical difference between brand strategy and social media strategy, with real-world examples from brands like Nike, Duolingo, Scrub Daddy, and The Washington Post.

If you’re ready to stop blending in and start creating content that resonates, this episode is your roadmap. Let’s make 2026 the year your content finally hits.

Sometimes all it takes is ONE focused day. Our consulting bootcamps target the exact area slowing your growth—planning, content, or clarity—so you can finally move forward with confidence.
 

Details: https://strellasocialmedia.com/social-media-bootcamp/

Transcript

Laney Goff: Hey friends. Welcome back to Untamed Social season three. Today is our final episode for this season, and this one is going to be a little bit different. Over the past nine episodes, I've talked to brand strategists, content creators, analysts, social media experts they're— who were all living in the trenches of social media every single day, and today I'm pulling together five of the most important lessons from all of them.

The things that worked in 2025 that need to be transferred over into 2026. We're gonna cover what's working and what's tired on social media, how the best brands are adapting, and the biggest mistakes to leave behind this year. So let's jump into it. Lesson number one is that good content just isn't enough anymore, and honestly, we need to retire the phrase, just focus on good content because the internet is overflowing with good content.

Everyone is making it. Every brand, every influencer, every niche account. Most of it is solid, professional, informative. So why do some posts go viral and others, just as well made, get maybe three likes and a pity comment from your mom. Because good isn't what moves the needle anymore, attention does, memory does, emotion does. Lauren Mikov and I talked about this actually in episode one of season three. And she said something that really stuck with me. She said, the bar has been raised good content is now the price of entry. What wins is different content, bold content, content that punches through the scroll.

So let's kind of unpack that for a minute. You know, good content means that your video is in focus. Your caption is typo free. Your design is on brand, but like that's the baseline, right? That's the starting point, at this time. It doesn't guarantee that anyone will care, let alone engage or, definitely doesn't mean that they're gonna remember it.

It's like showing up to a job interview and saying, I'm on time. Cool. You were supposed to be, right? So if you are creating content that checks all of the boxes, but it's still not performing, then this is your reality checks. And by checks I mean check. This is your reality check. You're not doing anything wrong, but you're not doing anything memorable either, and social media is not about being perfect. Obviously we know this. It's more about being memorable in under three seconds. Like don't forget that part of it. And just to kind of like help with this, here's a simple test that I like to use with some of our clients. Open your feed, any social media platform, whichever one you prefer.

Take your pick and scroll for one minute, and then after you've done that, I want you to ask yourself, what do you remember? Not what looked good or what you double tapped out of habit. What actually made you pause or made you rethink or even what made you want to possibly send to a friend? Um, it's usually something that made you feel something, right?

Emotion is what gets content shared. It's what makes content stick. And right now, the most successful brands on social media are leaning into that truth. And by the way, your audience is starved for this. If you ask my opinion, the average person scrolls past 300 plus posts a day. That's crazy. And if you're not delivering an emotion, a surprise, or a shift in perspective, then you are just background noise, right?

You are just one of those 300 plus posts per day that somebody scrolls past that they don't even remember what they consumed. So. Here's what we're seeing from top performing content in 2025 that you need to keep in mind. Number one, brands are ditching polish, which I think we've been ditching polish for years, but I think we're finally like fully in that, and instead they're embracing low fi behind the scenes or unfiltered moments that feel real. They're also really focusing on narrative driven videos that don't just sell, they tell a story. Nike is a really great example of this, right? You typically don't see a Nike post where they're promoting a new shoe or new apparel. They're telling stories, real stories of athletes. That's how they're promoting their brand by utilizing storytelling of athletes.

Um, another thing that top performing of another top performing content that we're seeing is voiceovers, but not just like voiceovers. That's like a marketing ad campaign, right? Voiceovers that sound like a friend. We're not trying to sound like a marketing department. And then another thing that we're also seeing performing well are carousels that teach one sharp idea really fast, and they're also not trying to be everything at once. So you have to ask yourself, when's the last time that you made content that made someone stop scrolling or made them think differently or feel something real? The odds are you don't have a content problem, you have a sameness problem, and that's actually good news because sameness is fixable.

So the first lesson that we learned from 2025 that needs to be translated into 2026 is that good content just isn't enough anymore. Lesson number two that we've learned is that your brand voice is probably too safe, because if I had a dollar for every brand that said we wanna sound authentic and bold, and then they approve captions that read like a legal memo, I'd have enough money to buy Meta and rename it back to Facebook.

Okay? The brutal truth is that most brand's voices on social media are beige. They are boring, they're polite, they're predictable, they're polished to the point of being really invisible. And in 2025, that's not just boring, it's, it's a liability to be honest. We see, you know, a lot of times we have these kickoff meetings with our clients where we ask them about their brand voice and their tone and what they want, and they'll say things like, you know, we wanna be professional, but also approachable. Or, we wanna sound credible, but fun. Okay, but what does that even mean? You know, because too often it means you're trying to be everything to everyone.

And we all know that when you do that, you end up sounding like. Say it with me. No one, right? Your content disappears into the scroll. Um, and Alex MH Smith and I talked about in episode two of season three, the importance of defining a point of view. Your voice should really tell me two things. Number one, what hill are you willing to die on?

And number two, what do you believe your audience needs to hear, not wants to hear, but needs to hear. Even if it ruffles a few feathers, and that doesn't necessarily mean being rude or loud or edgy for the sake of attention. It means you're being clear, opinionated, and distinctly you. Authenticity. We've talked about that so many times on this podcast.

If you're not sure whether or not, if you're, well, if you're not sure whether your voice is strong enough, then I would suggest trying this. You know, read one of your most recent posts out loud. Okay. Not to yourself. Read it out loud and then ask, could this have been written by any brand in my in industry?

If the answer is yes, then it's not your voice. It's a template. And that's just the truth of the matter. The brands that are winning in 2025 are those who are dangerously clear in how they sound. You hear them once and you remember them. You know, safe just doesn't work anymore. Algorithms reward engagement, right?

But engagement comes from emotional reaction. An emotional reaction comes from you guessed it, voice. Your audience doesn't want a robot with brand guidelines. They want a real human behind the screen. Who, as much as I hate to say it, who has a vibe, who has a story, a stance who has a soul. Okay, can I say that?

Like, let's just show people that we have souls. If your brand voice feels like it could work for an accounting firm or maybe even a dog food brand, then you don't have a brand voice. I hate to tell you the most valuable thing that you can do for your content in 2026 is to stop being so polite. Stop trying to play it safe and start trying to sound real, because when people feel like they know you, they start to trust you.

And then when they trust you, they follow you, they engage with you and maybe even invest in your product or service, which is exactly what we want. So lesson number two of 2025 with social media is that, I'm going to guess your brand voice is just too safe.

Moving on to lesson number three in 2025 that we learned about social media is that idea generation isn't just a creative problem. If I had to guess, you or your team has probably said at some point something like, I'm just not feeling creative right now, or we've already posted about this topic five times.

How many times have we heard that, right? It's the great content rut. We all have been there. And when you're stuck, it's easy to assume that the problem is creative. But the truth is, is that idea generation isn't just a creative problem, it's actually a systems problem. It's a process problem. It's a signal interpretation problem. And in episode seven, Ella Gunnell and I unpacked exactly why that is. You see, we, we tend to assume that idea droughts mean that the, the team isn't being imaginative enough, but a lot of times the issue isn't imagination, it's infrastructure. If your system for capturing, organizing, and repurposing content ideas is broken, even the most brilliant creatives will run dry, and it usually shows up looking like, you know, maybe you brainstorm.

Once a month and that's it. Or you're only pulling from internal ideas, not audience data, or you have no central idea bank, which shocks me the amount of companies and brands that don't have an idea bank to reference, when you know your brain feels like soup, um, or you are just waiting for inspiration instead of designing your way to it. You know, we, we really romanticize idea generation, like it's supposed to come to you in the shower or after a long walk in the woods, and sometimes it does, but you can't build a brand around vibes and timing if your social team feels like it's white knuckling the calendar every month that you probably don't need more creativity.

You need more structure. So then the question comes, okay, well how do we do that? Here's what I would recommend. Alright, number one, create a real time idea bank. You need to do it. You know, we use a lot of different platforms here at Strella Social Media. Uh, you could use a Notion Board or a Trello card.

Those are two that we use. You could use a Slack channel, whatever works for you, but make it always on. Anyone on the team can drop in ideas or screenshots, funny comments, trends they're seeing. Uh, post reactions, that's something that we do as well. Anything, and then this becomes your compost pile, right?

And the more scraps that you toss in, the richer the soil, the richer the result of the content ideas that you're gonna get. The second thing that I would recommend is to schedule different kinds of idea sessions. Um, because it would be easy to say, okay, just have an idea session every month and then just throw everything in at once.

But it's not, if it's not really focused, then it's not gonna be that productive. So number one, I would have an idea session that I like to call harvest sessions and what you wanna do here is you wanna look back at what's working and figure out why. This is going to require you to look at your analytics.

But don't worry, let me not get ahead of myself. We're gonna talk more about analytics in a moment. So look at what's actually currently already working for your social media content. The second type of, um, you know, idea session that I would suggest is a theme session where you choose one topic and you go really deep across multiple angles or formats.

And then the third one would be, you know, sort of a repurposing, remixing sort of session where you're taking old posts and finding new ways to repurpose them. Not just recycling them, right? You're finding new ways to repurpose them. And then this gives your team a rhythm to idea development. So it's not just, I hope inspiration hits this week.

You know, that's not what we're doing. Idea generation, you know, going back to recycling versus, you know, finding new ways to utilize old content. It, it doesn't mean, idea generation, it doesn't have to be new every time, right?

There's a mindset shift. Not every idea has to be original to be valuable.

Um, most social media audience audiences don't even remember what your content look like. They don't know it like you do. If something resonated six months ago, revisit it. If a trend applies to your core message, apply it. No matter how many times you've said your core message. Ella said in episode seven, we're not creating for novelty, we're creating for resonance.

You know, when your content feels safe, your instinct might be to squeeze your creative brain harder. But great content doesn't start with inspiration. It starts with a plan to find it consistently. And if you build a system for your ideas, you won't have to fear having a blank calendar because we've all been there and we all know what that feels like.

It doesn't have to be a fear of yours. If you have the correct structure and process in place to make sure you're consistently coming up with creative ideas. So that is lesson number three. Moving on to lesson number four. We want audience signals over gut feelings. This is what I believe is the foundational shift every brand and social media manager needs to make going into 2026.

Your gut instinct is not your strategy. Data is. Okay? I know. I get it. I'm a creative. You're probably a creative if you're watching this. We love our ideas. Sometimes we may even get like a little high off of a good brainstorm and we'll tell ourselves, you know, this will go viral. I just feel it. And sometimes we're right, but most of the time the audience tells us what's working, not our brand board, not our feeling at 11:30 PM when we think we've really like cracked the code.The truth is, is that if you're not consistently looking at the audience signals, like your saves, shares, comments, average watch time, then you're building your content on sand. Let me give you an example. Okay.

 We had a client, I'm not gonna name names, but we had a client who swore that their quote graphics performed the best.

They felt it, right? They, they loved them. Their whole team was on board with these quote graphics. But yet, the data told a completely different story. You know, quote, posts were getting really low reach, no saves. Um, they were only being liked by the same 20 super fans over and over. And by super fans, I mean people who probably worked at the brand.

Meanwhile, they're more casual behind the scenes videos were getting 10 times the reach. They were definitely getting saves, whereas the other ones were not and triple the amount of comments, and yet they didn't wanna pivot. Why?

Because they were listening to, or they weren't listening to the audience signals.

They were listening to their ego and that little creative voice that says, but I like it this way. Right? We've all been there. So, you know, when I talk about audience signals, what are they? Let's break that down, because not all metrics are created equal, and there are some that matter and some that don't.

We all know this. There's vanity metrics and there's the ones that count, but when we say they count, what do they actually mean? So for example, saves, um, if you're getting saves, then this is your audience basically saying, I wanna revisit this. This is, this is gold, right? They're saying, I like this enough to want to come back to it.

The second thing is, and probably the most important is shares. If you're getting shares, whether that's reposts or people sending your content to other people in their dms, this is them saying like, oh, this made me laugh or this made me cry, or this was really meaningful. This is what you want. The more shares, any platform, Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, it doesn't matter.

You name it. The more shares, the more the algorithm's gonna be pleased and the more they're gonna push your content out. So we really like that. Comments, this is when your audience is saying, I care enough to speak up that, you know, and that's a big deal because I've said it before. Today, the cost of a follower is higher than ever.

You know, it used to be that you could get onto social media, you'd see one post from someone and you liked it and you decided to follow them. Now you have to see it 10, 15, 20 times for you to be willing to invest to follow them. Um, another metric that you really wanna keep your eye on is your watch time.

Uh, I've said it over and over again. We're looking not just to hook people. People always wanna talk about hooks. They wanna talk about how do you capture your attention? Yeah. We know that everybody knows we wanna capture attention, but they're forgetting about the fact that we actually wanna keep their attention.

It's about retention. Um, so we wanna watch our watch time. If we're able to hold somebody's attention, that's a big deal. That's something we wanna pay attention to. And then of course, you wanna look at your dms, you know, um, whether that's just personal messages that are sent to you or replies to stories on Instagram.

If you are getting dms, then you have triggered a direct interaction that is taking it to another level. Somebody feels comfortable enough, they trust you enough to DM you directly instead of just leaving a comment on a post. It's more intimate. It's more meaningful. You know, you can have a post with 3000 likes that doesn't do squat for your brand if no one saves or shares it.

Meanwhile, a post with 27 saves and 12 shares, and 4 likes could lead to your next con uh, client. And because those signals tell you what stick, that's why these are so important. Now, I'm not saying become a robot. I'm not saying, you know, let a spreadsheet dictate your every move on social media, but I am saying that smart creatives let data inspire them. Great social media managers, don't guess what to post. They reverse engineer what's already working so they can do more of that, right? You need to look at your top performing posts and ask yourself, you know, what format was this? What emotion did I tap into?

What hook did I use?

Was it controversial? Was it relatable? Was it valuable? These are all questions you should constantly be asking yourself about your top performing con uh, content. And then once you've done that, and then you double down, you remix it, you refine it, you don't reinvent the wheel every week, you reinforce what's working.

Don't just show up on social media with a message. You have to show up with ears, right? Active listening. Because if your audience is giving you clues and you ignore them in favor of your gut, you're not doing strategy, you're doing improv, and your budget is on the line with that. There's no— we don't wanna do improv with that big of a budget on the line.

So that is lesson number four. We want audience signals over our gut feelings. And finally, lesson number five of 2025 with social, uh, social media is brand strategy is not the same as social media strategy. They are two completely different things. This is a trap I see way too many good brands falling into, okay.

They think their brand strategy is their social media strategy. I hate to tell you, but it's not okay. And look, I get it. You've worked hard on your branding.

You've got your fonts and your colors and your brand voice, and your mission is polished, your messaging, it's aligned. But guess what? None of that guarantees that your social media will actually work because social isn't just a broadcast platform, it's, it's not a brochure.

Social media is a living, breathing, fast moving conversation, and it needs a strategy that matches its pace and purpose. You know, your brand strategy is really the foundation, but your social media strategy is the execution layer that makes your brand come alive in public. Most teams, social media teams, whether you're one person or you've got 15 people on a team.

A lot of times we treat social media like a checkbox, checkbox, right? Like, so check off, resize this graphic, paste this mission statement, post it on Instagram, wait, and then when it flops, they're shocked. And if you don't know if this is you or not, let me give you some common signs that your brand strategy is really overpowering your social media strategy.

If, if you have a social media channel, channel where everything looks polished, but it all feels the same. You've got the perfect grid, but no personality. There's no curiosity, no surprise, and, and that's what makes people scroll past then, it's more, more likely that your brand strategy is overpowering your social media strategy.

Or maybe you, your Katie, your cadence is campaign based and not conversation based. You're operating like a marketing calendar, not like a content creator. Um, another sign is that you're recycling assets instead of remixing the stories, right? That flyer that you made for your annual event, it doesn't belong on Instagram Reels, my friends.

It just doesn't, or that testimonial that you have, it's not gonna cut it on TikTok. That's just the bottom line. And you would be surprised at how many brands we see do this. That is a signal that your brand strategy is overpowering your social media strategy. So how do you fix it? You know the, the real answer here is that you have to build a social first strategy, and that means that you look at the world through a different lens.

Alright? There's really three things that you need to focus on. Number one is the pacing. Brand campaigns are quarterly. Social trends, they shift weekly, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly. I'm not even kidding. You've gotta move fast. Like test quick and don't get too caught up on one idea because it's going to shift at any moment and you have to keep that in mind.

The second thing that you really need to focus on is your format, you, your glossy videos. They're probably beautiful. I'll give it to you. But unless they hook people in that first two seconds, then they're going to be invisible. That means that, you know, you really have to focus hard on, on that hook and capturing people's attention.

But also you need to focus on platform specific edits. Um, you know, each platform really gives a lot of tools and features to customize content to that specific platform, and there's not enough brands taking advantage of this. Is it more work? Yes. Hate to say it. It is. I'm not gonna lie about that, but it's something that has to be focused on.

Because if you're just taking one piece of, say you have one video and you're just taking that same video and putting it on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and you're expecting it to perform really well on all of them, you're delusional like, that sounds so tough, but I'm being serious. It's just not the name of the game.

The third thing that you need to focus on are feedback loops. You know, like we talked about with analytics and audience signals, social gives you real time evidence, real time understanding. If something's getting saved or shared, you need to lean into that. If it's flopping, you need to pivot, and you need to pivot, pivot quick. Now, this doesn't mean that you're, you know, chasing trends blindly, but it does mean that you're listening, you're measuring, you're adjusting. And there are a few brands that are getting, actually, there's a number of brands that are getting it right, but I'm gonna give you some examples. Um, number one would be Duolingo.

Uh, everybody talks about Duolingo. Their brand is educational, right? But their social media strategy I would categorize as unhinged. Um, Scrub Daddy, another one, unhinged. They're, they've personified their mascot. And they embraced the TikTok chaos that it is. And guess what? They're memorable. You know, they didn't abandon their brand, they translated it into a language of the platform.

Another example would be the Washington Post. Yes, the Washington Post has a TikTok team. Shocking. I know. But instead of just posting articles, um, they create skits. They have explainers and hilarious news videos. Why? Because their social media strategy honors the format, not just the brand. And this is something that you have to take into account.

Okay.

If you've made it this far, you get it. You know, social media in 2025 is not about doing more, it's about doing it smarter, and it's not about chasing every trend, it's about understanding your audience and delivering content with purpose. So just as a recap, what the big five lessons of 2025 are with social media that we need to translate into 2026.

Number one, good content. Isn't enough anymore. Number two, your brand voice is probably too polite. Number three, idea generation isn't just a creative problem, it's a process problem. Number four, audience signals over our gut feelings. And number five, brand strategy does not equal your social media strategy.

If you are ready to level up your social strategy in 2026 and you want a team that actually understands how this landscape works, then book a discovery call with us. There's a link right in the description, no fluff, no sales pressure, just real strategy, real ideas, and real results. So let's make 2026 the year your content finally hits. Thank you for being here for season three of Untamed Social. I'm Laney Goff, and I'll see you next season. Bye.