The State of Social Media in 2025
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There’s a lot going on in the social media world in 2025
For years, I’ve loved working in social media because it’s constantly changing and you never get bored. But sitting here in 2025, I’m starting to feel like we’ve had enough changes! Social media is getting harder and harder to keep up with, and its influence on the real world continues to grow. These aren’t just silly little apps we all waste time on; they have a massive impact on society and culture. Today on the blog, I’m sharing the latest updates on how social media is changing in 2025, my recommendations as a marketer, and my personal opinions as a human.
Meta
This seemed to be the news heard ‘round the world, but if you’re living under a rock (or are less chronically online than some of us): in early January, Meta announced that they would stop all fact checking on their platforms. Fact checking was first introduced on Meta products in 2016; discontinuing it in 2025 aims to allow for “more speech and fewer mistakes.”
What does this mean in practice? Hate speech is now far less restricted on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Tech outlets obtained training materials after the policy change and documents showed that phrases like “trans people are freaks” and “there’s no such thing as trans children” are now perfectly fine to say. While Facebook and Instagram already have pretty toxic comment sections, I anticipate that we’ll see more vile comments cropping up more often.
Why this sudden change? Zuckerberg framed this as a change to empower people to speak freely online. He doesn’t want to ‘censor’ people on his platforms. Zuckerberg argues that comments like the transphobic ones above are part of ‘mainstream discourse,’ so anyone should be able to say them on his social media sites.
Mark Zuckerberg has swung to the right and it’s clear in his policy choices. He recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and talked about how corporate America has become “neutered” and “emasculated,” saying that Facebook needed more “masculine energy.” While this shift may seem abrupt, it’s actually been a slow evolution right before our eyes. Podcaster PJ Vogt traced this evolution in an excellent episode of Search Engine called “The New Zuckerberg.” The short version: for years, Zuckerberg tried to appease democrats and play nice at Capitol Hill. Lawmakers and the public continued to criticize his actions, and as this intensified during the pandemic, he started to lose faith in the government. Ultimately, Vogt and his guests suggest that Zuckerberg wants nothing more than to have Facebook reign supreme, totally unchecked by any kind of government regulation.
So those are the big-picture changes with Meta. Let’s get into the individual platforms.
Facebook has not had any major changes to its features recently, but it feels different these days. AI slop and suggested content are to blame; my feed has become saturated with both.
Even if you haven’t heard the term AI slop, I’m sure you’ve encountered it before. It’s simply low quality media (both writing and images) created by generative AI and shared on mysterious Facebook pages full of similar garbage content.
I knew of this phenomenon (shrimp Jesus, anybody?), but hadn’t experienced it personally until recently. In late January, it was like a switch flipped. Suddenly every other post in my feed was AI slop. I’ll include a sampling below–they’re absolutely bizarre. It’s alarming that many people don’t realize these images are AI.
The AI slop isn’t pointless. These pages aim to amass a huge following and generate lots of engagement with their posts. Then, in the comments, they share links to websites they run that are chock-full of ads they’re making money off of. Ultimately, it’s a hustle to steal your attention and profit off it, all for very low effort on their part.
As for suggested content, this is different from ads you see in your feed. Facebook is desperate to hold users’ attention. Globally, users spend an average of 95 minutes per day on TikTok and only 30 minutes on Facebook. To lure you in and get you to stay longer, Facebook is filling our feeds with suggested content–posts from pages they think you might like. Their algorithm is nowhere near as good as TikTok’s, so the content they serve you may not be of interest. I often get cheesy mom content and miscellaneous pop culture stuff. Just today, I saw a transphobic post mocking Jonathan Van Ness for wearing a dress. I reported it as bullying and spoiler alert: Facebook did nothing. Below is a sampling of suggested content I’ve seen in my feed over the past few weeks.
Does the AI slop and suggested content mean Facebook is worthless as a platform? Nope.
Marketer’s Recommendation: Facebook is still the largest platform by far with 3 billion monthly active users. Whoever your target audience is, there’s a good chance you can reach them on Facebook. It’s easy to assume that Facebook is all boomers, but the largest demographic on the platform is actually people in the 25-34 age bracket, making up 29.9% of users. Unfortunately, organic reach has fallen significantly on Facebook over the years. Don’t put a ton of effort into your Facebook content. In 2025, it’s okay to repost content from other platforms. Just make sure it’s sized properly for Facebook. Facebook isn’t likely to serve it to a ton of your followers, anyways. Experimenting with video content on Facebook is worthwhile; they’re pushing Reels hard, so sharing more Reels can be a good way to get your content seen. At the end of the day, there’s no need to abandon Facebook yet.
Personal Opinion: I’ve seen lots of people advocating for people to leave all Meta platforms in 2025. People are (understandably) angry at Zuckerberg for 1) lobbying so hard for the TikTok ban and 2) ending fact checking and loosening restrictions on hate speech in the name of ‘free speech.’ Personally, I don’t think the boycott will have that big an impact. 3 billion users is a lot of people. And sadly, we don’t have a lot of other options in the current social media landscape where people can migrate easily and find their community. We desperately need community and connection, both IRL and online. Facebook and Instagram are places where people can find it. For me, I love a few Facebook groups and the platform is worth keeping for that alone.
In mid-January, Instagram rolled out a shocking change: the iconic square photo is dead. All the images on your grid are now vertical in a 4:5 aspect ratio. There was no warning before this sudden shift, and it left creators feeling frustrated that their meticulously curated grids now looked wonky. The change makes sense, to some extent. Vertical content has dominated the social game for awhile, particularly vertical video with TikToks and Reels. Stories have been more popular than static posts for a long time, too. So why not make everyone’s grids vertical?
A sampling of vertical grids featuring my account and two of my clients.
When you’re creating content moving forward, make sure your Instagram posts are vertical. Your portrait images can be up to 1,080 x 1,350 pixels. I think we’ll all adjust to this change quickly enough; I just find creating visually interesting carousels more challenging in vertical compared to square.
Atmos does a great job with vertical carousels breaking down their stories.
Marketer’s Recommendation: Again, while people claim they’re going to boycott Meta, I think most users will stick around on Instagram especially. There’s not a great Instagram alternative yet (though the creators of Bluesky are working on an Instagram clone called ‘Flashes’--terrible name imho, and the last thing I want is another social app, but I digress). Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users, and 61% of them are between the ages of 18 and 34. For marketers who want to reach young people, Instagram is still a great place for it. In my own work lately, I’ve found that memes are performing particularly well on Instagram. People have short attention spans and making them laugh is a good way to get their attention.
Memes I made collaboratively with the folks at World Animal Protection Canada.
Personal Opinion: I’ve written before about my frustrations with Instagram. For a few years, I experimented with not following many people on my main account and following a few friends, writers, and publications on a separate writing account. While I thought it would help my mental health, it honestly just made Instagram less fun. I consolidated back to one account in 2024 and am enjoying Instagram more now. One of the things that turned me off the platform in the past is the culture that everyone *needs* to say something about every issue in order to prove that they care about the *right* things. It’s a form of performative activism that aggravates me to no end. Posting an informative carousel in your stories is not as impactful as being involved in your community in the real world. There’s still judgment surrounding who speaks up about what issues and how much, but I think more nuance is joining the conversation and I’m grateful for it.
Threads
I haven’t used Threads myself or for my clients, but I want to touch on it briefly. Threads is a Twitter clone that Meta launched in 2023. It saw tons of downloads after its launch, but it hasn’t reached the cultural prominence of Twitter in its heyday. They currently have 275 million monthly active users, but only 33 million daily active users. 30% of users are in the 25-34 age bracket.
Marketer’s Recommendation: If you have the bandwidth to use Threads and think your audience is active there, go for it! I’d advise low-effort content; don’t put a ton of work into creating things custom just for Threads. I don’t think the ROI is there yet. It’s also worth noting that you may not want to put all your eggs in the Meta basket. Diversifying your social media marketing efforts and having a presence on at least one non-Meta platform may be more valuable than investing in Threads.
Personal Opinion: I quit Twitter in the summer of 2021 and lost the desire to tweet my every waking thought within a few months. I haven’t been in the market for a Twitter replacement since then, so I’m skipping Threads. Furthermore, it frustrates me to no end how much Meta uses rage bait to try to engage users. They constantly show me Threads posts that they know will infuriate me. They have my data. They know I engage with progressive content. Meta consistently serves me transphobic Threads posts, hoping I’ll click through, download the app, and argue with transphobes. No thank you.
X (formerly known as Twitter)
Last year, I wrote a blog post giving folks permission to leave Twitter. That should be all I need to say here 🙃 There isn’t great data about Twitter’s user demographics since Musk took over; some sources claim X has 500 million monthly active users and 200 million daily users. I wonder how much those numbers are inflated by bots. Other sources report that after rebranding to X, their user base shrank by 13%. It’s also worth noting that the platform skews 63% male; women left the platform in droves as content moderation dwindled and harassment increased exponentially.
In 2025, when X’s owner Elon Musk did a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, even more X users decided it was time to leave. It’s too soon to say how the numbers will shake out, but I hope this round of the X exodus sticks.
Marketer’s Recommendation: It is 100% okay to leave Twitter/X at this point. It’s no longer the trusted, credible community square that it once was. The discourse is not civil. It’s full of bots, misinformation, hate speech, porn, and trolling. I recommend leaving your handle up and running with a pinned tweet and a note in your bio about where to find you; otherwise someone else could grab your handle and impersonate your organization.
Personal Opinion: Twitter developed a toxic culture of dogpiling and casual cruelty long before Elon Musk’s takeover. It also contributed to the context collapse we commonly see online now. We’re quick to criticize and call out strangers based on a single post, or to demand book bans for books we’ve seen one page of online and have never picked up ourselves. I have no interest in using Twitter/X personally or professionally, and I’m not interested in a Twitter alternative.
Bluesky
After Trump’s reelection, which Elon Musk played a large part in, downloads of Bluesky surged. People were desperate for ‘the old days of Twitter’ before Musk’s reign. Bluesky claims to offer something similar, with the distinction of being open source and not controlled by any one company. People praise the culture on the platform so far and its robust safety features.
While it seems like Bluesky has become wildly popular, it actually remains quite small with only 30 million users. Like X, Bluesky skews male, with men making up 64% of its users. 42% of users fall in the 18-24 age bracket.
Marketer’s Recommendation: Many people are eager for a Twitter replacement, but let’s be real: 30 million people is not a lot of users, especially when compared to Facebook’s 3 billion. It’s just not worth investing in a platform so small right now. It needs more traction to make it worthwhile. You also can’t run ads on Bluesky, so that’s a downside for marketers. Again, it’s valuable to diversify your social platforms, so if Bluesky appeals to you, try it! It’s good to build a presence on non-Meta platforms.
Personal Opinion: Bluesky was founded by then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019. Given how horrible Twitter/X has become, it’s easy to forget that Twitter was a flawed platform before Musk took over. I have no reason to believe Bluesky, created by the same people, won’t make the same mistakes. Personally, I’m not interested in a text-based site full of hot takes and ~discourse~. It’s not something I need in my life.
TikTok
What a doozy of a time for TikTok! The TikTok ban was supposed to go into place on January 19th, and as we witnessed, the app was shut down for less than 24 hours before coming back online. When the app became available again, it was with a short message thanking President Trump for being willing to work with them. The message left a sour taste in people’s mouths and conspiracy theories started to spread widely.
Below are the messages TikTok users saw during the shutdown and a satirical post by a comedian about the whole situation.
TikTok users spotted that Facebook and Instagram had verified TikTok accounts and theorized that TikTok had been sold to Meta. They speculated that the 14 hours the app was offline was so that TikTok’s data could be migrated to Meta servers. They claimed that their algorithms felt different and again blamed Meta. Let me be 100% clear: there is no evidence to support these claims. Mark Zuckerberg is powerful and greedy and lobbied hard for the TikTok ban, but there is no reason to believe Meta owns TikTok. A business transaction of that size would be public knowledge by now, not some nefarious secret.
Others claim that TikTok is now ‘state-run media.’ I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that, but I think it’s clear that TikTok must play a political game and remain on Trump’s good side if they wish to remain available to Americans. It’s concerning that social media companies are in a position where they have to set policies and suck up to the government in order to operate. I can only hope that TikTok doesn’t follow Musk and Zuckerberg and start to implement more conservative-leaning policies when it comes to content on their platform.
Marketer’s Recommendation: It’s tricky to know what to do with TikTok in 2025. TikTok has seen massive growth over the past few years (hence Zuckerberg feeling threatened). They currently have 1.7 billion users, 170 million of which are in the U.S. The gender split is pretty even on TikTok; its largest age demographic (36% of the platform) is 18-24 year olds. You can certainly find your target audience on TikTok and the algorithm is excellent for discoverability. It’s easier to reach new eyes on TikTok than on Facebook or Instagram. If your business is already active on TikTok, I say keep going. If you are not active on TikTok and think it’s a good fit for your audience, dip a toe in but proceed with caution. We don’t know what will happen in the political battle over TikTok. The ban might still move forward in some form. Try making video content for Reels and repurposing it for TikTok; once we know that the platform’s future is secure, you can start investing in it more.
Personal Opinion: I’ve grown to love TikTok over the years. I’ve found a wonderful, supportive community there in many different niches. I’ve created a lot of content and gotten comfortable on camera. I’ve learned and laughed a ton. Our elected officials are too old and out of touch to understand TikTok; it’s a disservice to the many Americans who enjoy (and even make a living on!) the platform). I hope TikTok will be allowed to continue to exist. I believe that corporate greed is at the heart of this ban and that the national security concerns are vastly overstated. Instead of banning TikTok, we need better regulation for all social media companies so users’ data and privacy is actually protected. Facebook has done more harmful things with Americans’ data than we have any evidence of TikTok doing.
Lemon8
In 2023, I wrote an optimistic blog post about Lemon8. The platform seemed like an interesting blend of Instagram and Pinterest, something that might appeal to a wide array of people. Despite being from ByteDance, the makers of TikTok, Lemon8 didn’t have an amazing algorithm or the kind of content I like. A few months after my initial positive review, I was featured in an article on Rest of World exploring just how hard Lemon8 flopped in the U.S. The app was inauthentic and overly curated; Americans weren’t enjoying it.
In the weeks leading up to the TikTok ban, TikTok started pushing Lemon8. Users received notifications encouraging them to migrate to Lemon8 and highlighting how easy it would be to port over all the accounts you follow. All over my FYP, I saw people saying they tried to migrate to Lemon8 and it didn’t actually bring over all their followers like they hoped. Now when I browse TikTok, I see many people with Lemon8 links in their bios. I still get notifications of mutuals requesting to follow me on Lemon8.
It’s unclear why TikTok pushed Lemon8 so hard in the lead up to the ban. Lemon8 and TikTok share a parent company, ByteDance, and it’s possible that Lemon8 could have been banned under the same law banning TikTok. Perhaps we’ll learn what their motive was later on.
Marketer’s Recommendation: It’s a no from me. You can skip Lemon8. The app has about 8 million monthly active users, which is even less than Bluesky. I don’t see this platform being useful as a marketing tool anytime soon.
Personal Opinion: I experimented with Lemon8 and concluded that it wasn’t for me. They kept serving me trad wife content, anti-vaccine nonsense, Bible quotes, and Disney trips. There was no way to give the algorithm feedback that I wasn’t interested in those things. When my photo of a bumper sticker reading ‘protect trans kids’ received over 93,000 views and hundreds of transphobic comments, I deleted my account.
Rednote
Rednote is a Chinese social media platform similar to TikTok. Known as Xiaohongshu natively, it has a discovery-based algorithm that serves you content based on what you tell the app you’re interested in when you join and how you interact with the content you see.
Rednote exploded in popularity stateside when American TikTok users decided that the most petty response to the looming TikTok ban was for everyone to download this Chinese social media app so we could deliver our data ‘directly to the Chinese government.’ It’s worth noting that Rednote is not actually owned by the Chinese government. Its founder and CEO own 10% each, and Chinese tech companies Alibaba and Tencent each own a stake as well, but there is no evidence of state involvement. Rednote soared to the top of the App Store charts and searches spiked 99x. Americans started learning Mandarin; Duolingo even saw a 216% increase in U.S. usage.
duolingo casually pokes fun at users eager to learn mandarin as they join rednote in droves
Surprisingly enough, this turned out to be a wholesome moment on the internet. Americans and Chinese citizens started bonding online, sharing experiences about what daily life is like in their country. Both parties learned that they had been fed a lot of misinformation about what it’s like in the other nation. Many Chinese folks expressed sympathy for Americans and shock at basic facts of American life, like that we have to pay for an ambulance ride or that the federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up in 16 years.
Almost immediately, marketers on LinkedIn started debating whether or not you should sign your brand up for Rednote. So, should you?
Marketer’s Recommendation: No, you don’t need to join Rednote right now. Rednote has about 300 million monthly active users, most of which are in China. It is estimated that 700,000 Americans joined Rednote in a two day window before the TikTok ban. At peak, over 3 million Americans were using Rednote. Once the TikTok ban was paused, U.S. Rednote users dropped off by 54%. The popularity of Rednote in the States is likely to keep declining, so for now, no need to invest in Rednote if you’re a marketer in the U.S.
Personal Opinion: I made a Rednote account out of curiosity and have enjoyed it more than I expected to. The wholesome cross-cultural exchanges are interesting to read and there’s a lot of cute content that’s right up my alley (babies, pugs, and food shaped like capybaras and Studio Ghibli characters). I’ve posted a little and have even gotten parenting advice from Chinese moms! I’ll likely keep messing around with the app just for fun. Below is a sampling of some of the entertaining (and surprising) content I’ve seen in the app. The Chinese really love Luigi!
Other Players
I’m not an expert in any of these platforms, but they’re worth mentioning.
Snapchat
While it’s been years since I’ve used Snapchat personally, I know that the majority of my students at Nazareth University use it on a daily basis for communicating with friends. Snapchat has 414 million daily active users and 38% of them are in the 18-24 age range. If you’re looking to reach Gen Z, Snapchat is a great option, especially if you’re looking to divest from Meta or just diversify your social presence.
I’ve never been much of a Pinterest girlie, but I know it’s a beloved resource for many. Anecdotally, I’ve heard it’s become saturated with AI slop and isn’t as amazing as it used to be. Nonetheless, Pinterest has 498 million users and skews female, with 76% of users being women. It also tends to attract higher earners who are closer to making a purchase, so if you sell a product or service and your target audience is on Pinterest, it may be a good option to invest in.
In the era of Google AI search results, Reddit has risen in prominence. As a new mom, I’ve googled numerous baby-related things and found the best answers on Reddit every time. My friend Nicole Vandenbergh, an excellent freelance paid social strategist, has reminded me of the value of platforms like Snapchat and Reddit. When it comes to paid ads, “Reddit is an extremely underutilized platform,” she says. Reddit has about 500 million monthly active users, about half of which are in the U.S. About two thirds of users are male and most people are on the platform for entertainment. Depending on your business goals and target audience, Reddit could be worth investigating as another social platform to add to the mix.
Phew! I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post this long. After 13+ years of working in social media marketing, I have a lot of opinions about the social media landscape in 2025! If you’ve read this far, thank you. Did I miss a platform you love? Got a question for me? Let me know! I always love getting feedback and having conversations about the wild world of social.
Eager to learn more about social media? I’m now booking workshops for spring 2025! Check out my list of workshop topics and reach out today.
