December 24, 2025

Signing off for Christmas. Properly.

Immediate Future will be closed from the end of Wednesday 24 December and we’ll be back on Monday 5 January. Emails will be answered then. Brains refreshed. health intact.

Before we disappear into mince pies, family time and the odd bit of Christmas telly, it felt worth pausing. Not just to say thank you, but to share what 2025 taught us about social, and what we think really matters heading into 2026.

A genuinely big thank you

First, the human bit.

Thank you for trusting us with your brands, your reputations and your results this year. Social is no longer a “nice to have” channel. It’s where trust is built, opinions are formed and buying decisions quietly take shape. Being invited into that space is never something we take lightly.

Before we switch off for Christmas, a straight take on what 2025 proved about social, what actually worked, and what we think will matter most in 2026.

We’ve loved the ambition, the honesty and the willingness to try things that don’t come with a safety net. That’s where the best work has come from.

What 2025 made very clear

This year stripped away a lot of comforting myths.

Posting more didn’t equal growing more. Being everywhere didn’t equal being remembered. And chasing the algorithm never paid off for long.

The data backs that up. Metricool’s 2026 Social Media Study analysed nearly 40 million posts across all the major platforms and one theme kept coming through: saturation is real, and attention is harder to earn than ever.

A few signals we’ve seen repeatedly, both in the data and in client performance.

Video still earns attention, but only when it earns trust

Video continues to lead on reach and interactions across most platforms, particularly TikTok and YouTube. But 2025 was the year the gap widened between video that says something and video that just fills space.

Fast, imperfect, human content consistently outperformed polished, over-produced work. One client’s best performing post this year was a simple, opinionated clip filmed on a phone, shared by a real person, with a point of view people recognised.

Algorithms reward reaction, not perfection.

Instagram and LinkedIn are crowded, not broken

Both platforms saw more accounts, more posts and more competition, while average reach and interactions per post declined. Eeek!

What worked was clarity. Clear topics. Clear audience. Clear reasons to care. Carousels, polls and content that invited participation consistently beat one-way broadcasting.

If you felt like you were shouting into the void this year, it probably wasn’t effort you were missing. It was focus.

Facebook never actually went away

Despite the headlines, Facebook quietly delivered meaningful gains in reach and interactions in 2025, driven largely by video consumption and sharing behaviour

For brands willing to treat it as a social platform rather than a media dumping ground, it did real work. Especially in community-led and entertainment-driven categories.

What we’re taking into 2026

We’re not interested in predictions that sound clever but don’t change behaviour. So here’s what we genuinely believe will matter next.

Social will keep shifting from platform-first to content-first

AI is accelerating this. Platforms are getting better at redistributing good content based on intent, not format labels. The question is no longer where should this live, but is it actually worth anyone’s time.

That makes taste, judgement and point of view more valuable than ever. We’ve got some fabulous design trends in 2026 for you to enjoy too.

Trust signals will matter more than reach

Saves, sends, branded search lift, repeat exposure and time-to-opportunity are becoming the signals that matter internally. Vanity metrics are getting harder to defend, especially under CFO scrutiny.

Social that works in 2026 will feel slower, calmer and more deliberate, even if it’s published more often.

Human voices will continue to outperform logos

Creators, founders, experts and employees aren’t a tactic. They’re how brands show up credibly in a crowded feed. The brands that win will stop asking “is this on brand?” and start asking “is this useful, true and recognisably us?”.

A final Christmas note

If you’re switching off over the next couple of weeks, good. Social will still be there in January. The algorithm will survive without you for a few days.

We’ll be back on Monday 5 January, ready to help you make sense of what matters, cut through the noise and make social work harder for the business.

Have a genuinely restful Christmas, and thank you again for being part of our year.

Katy and the Immediate Future team

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