11 social media trends every marketer should watch in 2026 [new data]
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Article Summary The state of play: 67% of marketers say social will be more important in the next two years, while 73% say it's harder than ever to stand out — making strategic focus more critical than ever. The 11 trends: Short-form video leads every major platform; authenticity beats production value; brand awareness has reclaimed the top goal; 94% of teams use AI but mostly for shallow tasks; Instagram leads all performance metrics; TikTok's real value is in paid ads; influencer marketing has shifted toward micro- and mid-tier creators; community building is now a competitive moat; depth on fewer platforms beats breadth; video and AI are the hardest skills to hire for; and social search now starts the discovery journey for 1 in 3 consumers — and over half of Gen Z. The platform playbook: Instagram is the safest cross-industry bet; TikTok rewards a paid-first, humor-forward approach; LinkedIn is emerging as a real content destination for B2B; and cross-posting identical content to every platform hurts algorithmic performance on all of them. The strategic takeaway: Social is no longer just distribution — it's where discovery happens and buying decisions start, which means the winning move is going deeper on fewer platforms, pairing AI efficiency with human creativity, and treating community and creators as core growth engines. The data doesn’t lie. According to HubSpot’s 2026 State of Social Media Report, 67% of marketers believe social media to be more important in the next two years, while 73% say it’s harder than ever to stand out. If you’re still running last year’s playbook, you’re already behind. To help you recalibrate, we surveyed thousands of marketers for the 2026 State of Social Report and pulled out 11 trends that are actually driving results. From short-form video and AI to social search and community-led growth, here’s what’s working—and what to do about it. Explore the top trends in social media for brands to know and optimize your social strategy. I’ve grouped the biggest trends from our report into five themes: According to our study, short-form video is the top-performing format on TikTok (73.31%), Instagram (61.82%), and Facebook (43.03%), while Sprout Social’s 2026 Social Media Benchmark found that TikTok’s engagement rate hit 3.70%, driven almost entirely by short-form video (up 49% year-over-year). You don’t need a report to validate this; just open any feed. But that doesn’t mean you can mindlessly go all in on short-form. Its effectiveness depends on the platform. YouTube, for example, introduced Shorts a few years ago, but long-form video still leads the way, with 54% saying it’s the platform’s highest-performing format. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and Xa are still text-driven, which matters enormously for B2B strategy. Pro Tip: Write the way people actually search on TikTok and Instagram, not the way your brand talks about itself. Captions, voiceovers, and on-screen text are all indexed by in-app algorithms, and experts believe they can even help with AEO. It’s especially smart to use these early on in your video “hooks.” Now, this “trend” isn’t new, but it’s getting more pronounced. Since TikTok’s rise during the COVID-19 lockdown, we’ve seen a steady shift toward raw, unpolished content. Now it’s definitive: 76.56% of marketers say authenticity matters more than production quality.
Source: HubSpot
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