Notice something different about your feed? If you feel like social media is constantly changing, you’re right – and we’re tracking what’s new. With emerging features, trends, and algorithm shifts shaking up platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn, brands need to readjust their content strategies to disrupt the endless scroll.
We regularly scour every corner of the social media landscape to identify top trends and updates – here are a few to keep an eye on.
Embracing a New Algorithm: From Engagements to AI
As AI-powered algorithms get smarter, feed recommendations are no longer reacting only to likes and clicks; they’re predicting what users want to see based on more subtle behavioral signals. Across platforms, today’s algorithms prioritize actions that indicate deeper interest – like watching a video to the end, swiping through an entire carousel, saving a post, or directly messaging it to someone else – over traditional metrics such as likes and comments. Think quality over quantity; meaningful interactions reveal more about your consumers than surface-level engagements.
What Else is Changing? A Platform-by-Platform Deep Dive
TikTok’s discovery-centric algorithm is becoming increasingly predictive, using behavioral AI to anticipate what users will enjoy before they even search for it. Besides an algorithm that’s so good it’s kind of scary, TikTok is also expanding into new frontiers like search-first discovery. Nearly half of U.S. consumers now use TikTok as a search engine (as predicted by Planit in 2022 and cited in a 2026 study by Adobe). This number is likely to rise even further as social media evolves into a hybrid of entertainment, discovery, and commerce.
LinkedIn is also leveraging AI, with its new “360Brew” system taking a more advanced approach to evaluating content. 360Brew analyzes the context of each post, rather than relying only on keywords and hashtags. As a result, content that clearly communicates its intent, insight, and professional value is outperforming posts that are optimized in the “traditional” sense.
Retention is now one of the most valuable metrics on Instagram, prioritizing scroll-stopping content that hooks users within split seconds. For example, if users don’t swipe past the first side of a carousel, reach drops significantly.
Successful carousel posts follow a “Hook → Retention Trap → Value → Save Trigger → CTA” formula. The first slide acts as a hook while slides 2-3 hold interest, setting off the retention triggers that Instagram’s algorithm seeks. When done correctly, this format can have a major impact; we’re already seeing educational carousels outperform reels when it comes to engagements.
Reels are still going strong, however, continuing to dominate feeds (another Planit prediction?). To extend watch time, Instagram is introducing episodic reel linking, which allows creators to connect a series of reels directly to each other to tell a longer story and increase visibility.
On the paid social side, Meta’s new “Andromeda” algorithm has replaced the manual targeting systems that advertisers have relied on for years. Now, instead of advertisers selecting detailed audiences, Andromeda determines who is most likely to respond to content and ads using prediction models driven by – you guessed it – AI.
Getting Real: Authenticity Over Polish
As feeds fill with AI-generated content, formats like candid photo dumps, collaborative posts, and lightly edited videos offer a break from the noise, often outperforming their more polished counterparts. Human-to-human interaction is just as valuable: for example, direct message shares are now the number one algorithm signal on Instagram, holding major influence over the feed.
Meaningful conversation also leads on the public front, where comments under six words carry less algorithmic weight than longer, back-and-forth discussion threads. In short, brands should prioritize content that encourages active community participation, rather than just passive consumption.
Power to the Profiles: Algorithms Get Collaborative
Instagram recently introduced the “Your Algorithm” page, which gives users the ability to manually design their feeds. Available in the “Settings” tab, the new feature allows users to add or remove interests, prioritize certain content categories, and even reset their recommendation history entirely.
As discovery becomes more user-directed, this shift means that brands must continuously re-earn their place in users’ feeds – they can’t just rely on the algorithm to always deliver their content to the same audience.
Goodbye Google? Social Media as a Search Engine
According to a study by Forbes, 24% of users primarily use social media to search online, a number that jumped to 46% for the Gen Z respondents. Users are searching directly within social platforms for tutorials, product reviews, and industry insights, with TikTok leading the charge. As a result, social content now benefits from SEO-style optimization, including keywords, descriptive alt-text (which we broke down in its own blog), search-friendly bios, and FAQ-style content that answers commonly asked questions.
Too Long, Didn’t Swipe
The “post consistently and hope for the best” era is over. In an ever-evolving social landscape, authenticity and interaction drive visibility (AKA: the three S’s: swipes, shares, and searches!). Even algorithms increasingly driven by AI are prioritizing human-centered content, keeping real people and conversations at the heart of the feed.