Low stakes and new intimacies: social media in 2025

We Are Social published its annual Think Forward report last month, predicting the trends that will shape social media and other online spaces in 2025. We asked Paul Greenwood, global head of research and insights at the agency, to give us the details.

You called the latest report A Liveable Web. What do you mean by that?

Social’s promise was connecting with friends and family and fostering community. But what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that social media’s no longer about being social, it’s about entertainment — and that’s linked to the shift from the social graph to the interest graph, and the rise of TikTok.

And while we’ve made lots of progress in terms of beauty ideals or what it means to be successful, those niggling doubts at the back of your head, in terms of having to look a certain way and achieve certain things, have been expanded and amplified by social. So the idea of wanting to be, do and have more is still there. And there’s a push back in wider society around capitalism and what that means for younger generations because of the intergenerational wealth gap. We’re also seeing people feel that they need to keep up with everything: trend cycles, news, gossip. That’s really difficult to do. There are more people just taking a step back and thinking about what a more sustainable use of social media means for [them]. What we saw after or during Covid-19 is that because everyone digitised their lives, there were a lot of niches and fragmentation on social media, and so there were very small communities. As we’ve moved away from the pandemic, people are seeking out those bigger mono-cultural moments, like Barbenheimer and the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. People want to engage in these bigger moments for collective unity. The niches were too small and the monoculture was too big; now they’re trying to find the happy medium.

You’ve identified five overarching trends in this year’s report. Can you talk about them briefly?

Yeah, sure. The first one is called Primal Renaissance. We were looking at advertising over the last 20-30 years. Back in the day, if you watched TV and linear TV, they were quite risqué. There were things that brands would do. PlayStation would talk about addiction — and obviously there was a big conversation around being addicted to gaming — but they were talking about addiction in different ways, and they were really pushing the boundaries of what creativity could be and the taboo spaces that you could play in. What we’ve seen over the last decade or so, partly driven by social, is that advertising and social content has become a bit more sanitised.

When brands do try and push boundaries and get it wrong, people are quick to call them out — and that’s also spilled over into real-world lifestyles. Having to be, look and feel a certain way is playing out in broader culture. People are rejecting that and leaning into messier lifestyles, more raw content, base human desires, hedonism, and just seeking out fun. 

The next one is Low Stakes Social. In response to the real world, where everything can feel very heavy, people are seeking out content that isn’t as heavy online. They’re seeking out more playful, fun, wholesome, joyous content. That content can sometimes feel meaningless, but it has a real positive outcome to it. It’s less labour-intensive, but you’re still getting joy out of it. The next one is Intentional Consumerism, which is the hardest one to explain but probably the most pertinent for brands. We talked about late-stage capitalism and the movement asking, what if society’s not really giving [people] that kind of leg up and means to improve. People are really pushing back against that. Part of that trend, we saw in the influencer economy last year, is the de-influencing trend and under-consumption core.

People are reappraising the way that they consume and buy products. As a result, people want to get more joy out of the consumption of a product, not just from the initial dopamine hit of the purchase. E.l.f. cosmetics do this really well. They’ve tapped into this trend, giving tips and tricks to get the last bit of product out of the makeup tubes, and with the Get Ready With Me content, where people getting ready to go out can listen to the content. It elevates the product and the joy around the product use.

The next one’s around Modern Mythmaking, which is brands using social, culture within social, and adjacent cultures to their category, to find inspiration and insights around creative ideas. CeraVe at the Super Bowl is a really obvious example, and everyone talks about it time and time again, but that’s because it was well executed. It [came from] a 15 year-old Reddit [group] where people were theorising [that] Michael Cera created and marketed CeraVe. Obviously, he’s not, but they just lent into that. So, it’s about brands looking at where consumers and social media users are talking about them in adjacent spaces and using that to feed their own law and mythology.

Then finally, New Intimacies, which is probably the trend that talks most to that [shift from niche communities to monoculture moments], in terms of how you find that balance and community that has a lot of value to you, and how you might push back against the interest graph. If it’s all about entertainment, how do you find your tribes and protect them? How do you create more balanced communities that aren’t too big, not too small, and generate value for you?

The conversation around polished vs authentic content made me think about how Instragram was the dominant social media platform but now it’s TikTok. How much of this trend is dictated by the nature of the platforms themselves, and how much is what the users prefer, in terms of content and visual aesthetic?

We used to work for Instagram. We decoded the DNA of Instagram and what people wanted it for, and you’re completely right. Each platform matured at different times and therefore had a different audience and DNA. Each platform had a different purpose. To ensure that the trends work across each of those different platforms, we have a social spotting network across the agency, and we’re constantly looking for these cultural artefacts on social.

We then cluster those [artefacts] across the different platforms into different themes. We’re looking for cross-platform, global trends that will work for every brand. Sometimes it’s not the easiest because it has to work in different cultures and across different platforms, but we feel like they do work across each of them.

What’s interesting is that you’ll spot a TikTok trend two weeks later on Instagram. So it’s not that those trends don’t travel across platforms. But TikTok right now is the platform that feels like it’s shaping trends more broadly.

Do the trends differ when you look at different age groups?

This is a hard one. There’s a really weird thing going on with different generations.  Older generations like millennials are engaging in youth culture a lot more than they would have in the past — people going to Chappell Roan concerts, millennials going to festivals more.

It’s interesting because you often feel like youth culture is just for the youth but older generations are engaging with youth culture and younger generations are yearning for nostalgia. That’s why Friends is the most popular TV show on Netflix.

You’ve got this really weird thing where you think the trend should only be for one generation, but it’s more around mindsets and interests. Those trends will work for each different generation in a different way.

The first trend in the report is about authenticity and the fourth one is about community building, both of which the industry has been discussing for some time. How do you think brands can keep innovating in these fields and stay relevant?

Authenticity is a really interesting space because I’ve been having bigger conversations internally around whether authenticity matters or not. I don’t know if it still does. If it does, it’s definitely showing up in a different way. Authenticity in the past was all around having your personal brand and staying true to that. What we’re seeing nowadays, especially with younger generations, is that they don’t mind if you change your personality and evolve over time. Some people and cohorts of different generations actually expect you to change over time, and they find that is a much more interesting journey than a static personality. Being able to stand out from the crowd is now seen as authentic.

Primal Renaissance in itself, whether you can be messy-but-relatable, whether you can be gory and funny at the same time, whether you can be a superstar athlete but also maybe not a nice person. Those kinds of paradoxes or tensions interest people.

The other thing you were asking about was community building. This is a hard one — there are lots of ways that you can build community. It depends whether you’re coming from top down or grassroots. If you’re an established brand, it’s probably easiest to go grassroots up, to identify a community that you can add value to. What would you offer them that will make that community a little bit more elevated? You’ll have to be quite sensitive to the needs of that community and over time you’ll be able to work with them, build up their trust and then play a role in that.

If you’re a smaller brand, maybe a newer brand, you could do the same thing but it’s probably a little bit harder for you because you might not have the resources. [It helps] if you have a very charismatic founder or an ambassador, someone who’s a figurehead and can bring people together around the product. Beauty brands do this pretty well.

You mentioned in the report that social media is full of short-lived micro trends. How can brands be more discerning about which trends they jump on?

This is a question that we get asked every single day from our brands. There’s a new trend every week and it would be unsustainable for brands to react to every single one. When a client starts working with us, we take their brand strategy and translate that into a social strategy. What’s their reason for being on social? What’s the brand point of view? What’s your tone of voice and what do you want to talk about?

We come up with a content strategy and that will give us very clear guardrails around what’s in and out of bounds. We create many different playbooks for brands, which showcase that in real examples. So we go, ‘this is a trend that’s just happened. Could you respond to it? And if you were going to respond to it, how would you respond to it as a brand in a way that adds something to your audience’s enjoyment of it?’ You need a content strategy that is firm and fixed, but you need to have enough flex in that to be able to react to certain moments.

Do you see a decline in the number of people using social media to post vs just consume content?

I couldn’t find comparison data year on year, but I know from the past that the predominant number of people [who] use social media consume content rather than create it. That’s always been the case. I don’t know if that’s getting more or less. I know the share across platforms is different.

On Instagram 70% of people will create content vs 63% on Facebook, 41% on TikTok and 27% on X. It feels like there’s more content out there if I’m honest, but then that could be created by bots.

There’s a lot of AI content out there which is flooding feeds. That’s maybe why it feels like there’s more content.

What about when social media companies copy each other’s features, even when they seem a bad fit for the platform — like LinkedIn launching short-form videos. What do you think about that?

It’s not unreasonable that, as newer generations who are used to video content start using LinkedIn, they introduce that functionality to the platform. I know that when we’ve used video content on LinkedIn, it’s done very well. It’s surprising that people want to see that.

It’s a hard one because platforms themselves should trial it. What we say to our clients when we’re creating any type of content is that you post it, you optimise, and you see if it works or not. You can’t not try something just because it might not work. Give it a try and see if it sticks. If it does, create more of that content and optimise.

I think that’s what a lot of the platforms are doing. They see it working on another platform [and] think, ‘that functionality could work here’. Sometimes their user base aren’t ready for it and sometimes they are. I don’t blame the platforms for trying. You do need to innovate. You do need to shift with the expectation of your audiences.

Final question — what are some of the brands that you think are doing a good job on social media?

I love Mark Jacobs. They’ve got a new social media manager who’s come from Vice. She’s come up with a way of working, which is: find the latest trends, jump on them first, say something with rising creators, and just have the product somewhere within their natural habitat.

They’ve done it so well, and I love that each piece of content, especially on TikTok, is its own narrative. They had a guy called Jack the Great, who was this little kid. He loves it when the lights get switched off, and all they did was invite him to the store and switch lights off.

He just produced loads of content, which was really wholesome but fun. It’s not really the audience that they should be after, but people loved it. It’s just clever and really shows them as understanding social, internet culture and being on the pulse of it. We called it ‘being chronically online’.

The other one that I loved is Loewe. Having excellent community managers can add so much extra engagement and reach to your content, but also change perceptions of a brand.

There was a post where someone just said, ‘this tomato is Loewe coded’. [Loewe’s creative director] Jonathan Anderson liked it. It had 3 million views and then two weeks later he created the clutch, and it looked just like a tomato. It was just the ultimate piece of fan service.

Featured image: Stephen Mease / Unsplash