FIR #505: Social Media’s Big Shift

Mar 17, 2026

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In FIR #505, Neville and Shel dig into Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2026 report, which argues that social media is no longer just a communication channel — it’s morphing into a search engine, cultural radar, and real-time research tool. They explore what it means for communicators when younger audiences treat TikTok and Instagram as their primary discovery platforms, and when Google itself starts indexing social content. The conversation also tackles “fastvertising” — the growing pressure on brands to react to cultural moments within hours — and whether that speed actually translates to bottom-line results or just burnout.

The discussion takes a provocative turn when Shel raises Ethan Mollick’s warning that public forums are being systematically overrun by machine-generated content, with research suggesting one in five accounts in public conversations may be automated. They weigh the AI paradox facing communicators: generative AI has become table stakes for social media production, yet 30% of consumers say they’re less likely to choose a brand whose ads they know were AI-created. Neville and Shel agree that social media can serve as both a publishing channel and a listening tool — but only if human-to-human communication can survive the rising tide of bot-generated noise.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 505 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: And I’m Neville Hobson. Social media might be going through its biggest change since the rise of the news feed, and it’s happening quietly. Platforms that started as places to connect with friends are increasingly acting like search engines, cultural sensors, and even market research tools. It’s been a while since Shel and I talked about social media on the podcast, and frankly, that’s partly because the conversation often feels repetitive. New platforms appear, algorithms change, someone declares the death of Twitter again. That’s the kind of format that we seem to be following. But every now and then, a report comes along that suggests something deeper is happening. Hootsuite’s new Social Media Trends 2026 report published last month argues that social media is no longer just a communication channel. It’s becoming something much broader — part search engine, part cultural radar, and part market research lab. Take search, for example. Younger users increasingly treat platforms like TikTok or Instagram as search tools. Instead of Googling “best coffee shop in London,” they search TikTok and watch short videos from real people recommending places to go. And now Google itself has started indexing Instagram posts and surfacing short-form social video in search results. The line between social media and search is starting to blur. At the same time, we’re seeing a strange tension around artificial intelligence. According to the report, most social media managers now use generative AI tools every day to write captions, brainstorm ideas, edit images or video. But audiences are increasingly suspicious of content that feels automated or synthetic. More than 30% of consumers say they’re less likely to choose a brand if they know its ads were created by AI. So brands are in a curious position. AI is becoming essential behind the scenes, but the content that performs best often needs to feel unmistakably human. And culturally, social media itself is fragmenting. The report points to what it calls Gen Alpha Chaos Culture — absurd memes, distorted audio, and intentionally chaotic editing styles that dominate TikTok among younger audiences. Meanwhile, older audiences — that’s you and me, Shel — are gravitating towards almost the opposite aesthetic: nostalgic references to the ’80s and ’90s, calming, cozy content, and even posts about slow living and digital detox. I do some of that, but I also do the other stuff too. So it’s hard to pigeonhole me, I have to tell you that. So reading this report left me wondering something slightly provocative. Maybe social media isn’t really social anymore. If discovery is driven by algorithms and search behavior rather than who you know, perhaps these platforms are evolving into something else — systems that surface information, culture, and trends in real time. Which raises the bigger question for communicators. Are we still thinking about social media as a place to publish content? Or is it becoming something much more powerful — a tool for understanding behavior, culture, and trust as it unfolds online? Which leads me to a first question. If people increasingly discover products, places, and even news through TikTok or Instagram rather than Google, does that fundamentally change how communicators should think about social media?

Shel: I absolutely think so. I mean, this shift deserves way more attention, I think, than it’s been getting from marketers and communicators. We’re looking at a fundamental change in how people get information. The rise of social media as a primary search engine — this is not a fringe behavior. In 2026, this is going to be the dominant reality for a massive swath of the population. Brands are just starting to get their arms around AEO. And now they’re going to have to apply the same efforts to social content that they’ve historically reserved for traditional search engine optimization. So captions and alt text and subtitles aren’t going to be nice-to-haves. These are the bedrock of discoverability. And there’s a specific angle here for those of us in internal communications too. I mean, if employees are using TikTok and Instagram the way they used to use Google to make personal decisions, we have to ask if that behavior is bleeding into their professional research. And there’s data that suggests it is. A company called Alpha P-Tech did a study and found that 75% of B2B buy-side stakeholders are going to use social media to gather information about vendors and solutions this year. So this isn’t just a consumer trend. This is a professional evolution too.

Neville: Yeah, I would agree with that, I think. I mean, there’s a lot to unpack here from Hootsuite’s report. And I think it’s, you know, I throw out thoughts that occurred to me when I was reading this. It talks about something I’d not encountered before, whether you have — fast, if I pronounce it right, even it’s a manufactured word — fastvertising. So the word “fast” with “vertising” from advertising, right? Fastvertising. The question actually is, does the fastvertising culture create more risk for communicators, things moving so fast, where, according to Hootsuite, brands now feel pressure to react to trends within hours, if not less than that even? So reacting too quickly can lead to tone-deaf, poorly thought-through posts, I would say, as does Hootsuite, in fact. Are we moving into a world, then, where social media requires newsroom-style judgment and governance? What do you think?

Shel: Well, yes, and I think we’ve been there for a while. We remember the — what were they called — the war rooms that social media teams for various brands were using. Remember Oreo during their 100 Days of Oreo several years ago now. And they had a newsroom that was looking for trends so they could take the one that was planned based on somebody’s birthday. And if something major happens, they could just switch it up and really quickly knock one out that was relevant to what was in the news. I remember they had one cookie that had black and white stripes. And it turned out that it was related to a National Football League referee strike that had just been called. So yeah, I think brands have gotten accustomed to monitoring trends and knocking stuff out fast. Another one was, I think it was the tequila with the chocolate beans, that they pulled that out of Google Trends and said, let’s get that out there while this is a hot trend. And it was up and it did really well, that particular post from whatever tequila company it was. So this is something that I think brands, a lot of them anyway, are already accustomed to. I think the scale that we’re talking about here though is probably not good. I think if you’re reacting to just what you happen to see and not running some analytics, you risk being tone-deaf by jumping into a conversation that turns out to be not that big a deal. You risk saying something that is incongruous with the tone of the conversation because you rushed. I guess the only benefit you get out of this is the fact that everything’s moving so fast that in six hours, no one’s going to remember what you did.

Neville: Yeah, Hootsuite talks about this in the context of fastvertising. Obviously, the word du jour for this thing that’s been around a while is disrupting the content calendar. To that point, online brands are now responding to cultural moments within hours, not days. 22% of marketers feel pressure to respond to trending topics or viral moments daily or a few times per week. And 37% feel a high level of burnout from that pressure, according to data from Adobe quoted by Hootsuite. Timing matters, they say. If you’re quick, you’re in. If you’re slow, you’re a laggard. But you still can’t prioritize speed over quality. And they cite 39% of marketers say their content flopped due to rushing. So being the fastest isn’t necessarily the answer. Yet that’s what a trend seems to be building further, that fast is the important thing, being fast.

Shel: But the thing is that even if you’re adept at this and you really have your finger on the pulse or you have a big enough team that there’s somebody there who has their finger on the pulse and can craft just the perfect post to be part of whatever this is that’s going on at the moment. And let’s say it’s a big success. It goes viral. Does that translate into sales? Does that translate into bottom-line results or are you just one of the cool kids participating in the conversation? I’d like to see the correlation at least between being fast and being good at being fast with this fastvertising and getting the kind of results that pay the bills and incentivize the leaders of organizations to fund these kinds of efforts.

Neville: So being fast and furious isn’t necessarily the solution. OK, I get that. Let’s talk about algorithms. Hootsuite talks a bit about this, which I found interesting. If algorithms prioritize behavior over followers, which is what Hootsuite is saying is a trend that’s developing, does brand loyalty matter less? That reminds me of, I think, a very related theme to this we discussed probably five or six episodes ago about brand loyalty mattering less in certain circumstances. So if content reaches people based on micro-behaviors, asks Hootsuite, rather than follower networks, the old idea of building large follower communities might be fading. So they ask, is the new game about relevance rather than loyalty?

Shel: Well, I think relevance has always been at the heart of what we do. I mean, you can build a huge base of followers, people who have opted to get your content, and they’re very casual about what they see. We saw this data in the early days of the news feeds as a forum for brands — was that you had one brand that had a million followers, but they hardly ever came back and looked at your stuff again. And then you had a competing brand with fewer followers, but they were constantly engaging with the brand. Which would you rather have? So I think having brand loyalty can be valuable if you’re engaging that base rather than waiting for them to get your content in their feed because that’s growing less and less likely. If that’s an effort you’re not willing to make or you don’t think will pay off, then yeah, brand loyalty is going to take a backseat to getting the impressions through other means. But again, I want to see that line that connects those impressions, even that engagement, with your bottom line. Because I’m not convinced that this participating in this fastvertising environment has produced those results. I have not seen a study that shows that it is.

Neville: I think it’s interesting the kind of direction of travel that this seems to be pointing towards where one of the findings talks about engagement is no longer a big-deal metric. Even impressions aren’t. And that comes down to the ROI from micro-audiences. So it’s not clearly defined yet. This is still evolving. But it is shifting without doubt. So another point from the report. It suggests social listening and analytics are becoming real-time intelligence systems. They’re asking, is social media now the fastest research tool organizations have? Could social media become one of the most valuable organizational listening tools, asks Hootsuite, not just a publishing channel? That’s a big shift for communicators, they argue.

Shel: Yeah, I mean, and it has been for a while. And I think the type of activity we’re seeing now probably elevates that value. But is it the most important listening? You know, I don’t know. I think asking direct questions in a survey and a focus group still have tremendous utility. But if you’re looking for real time, again, this is — I think particularly valuable say in a crisis. And this could be a brand crisis rather than an existential corporate crisis. But finding out what people are thinking, what the sentiment is in close to real time can be ridiculously valuable in that kind of situation. But I also think that you have to remember that the people who are engaging in this kind of activity on social media is not necessarily the majority of your target market. There are a lot of them who maybe don’t do this at all, or they’re passive consumers of the content that’s posted online and not actively creating any of that content. And what do they think? I think, you know, if you put all of your eggs in the basket of what the number of people who are producing this content are saying and say, well, this is going to drive the perception of our brand, it’s going to drive sales — yeah, I think that’s very, very risky. I think as an element of a marketing program, of a communication program, it can be useful. But the way some organizations are looking at this, apparently from what I’ve seen, is that this is now the be-all and end-all of their online marketing. I’m not sure that’s wise. I think still, you know, publishing thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn still has some value, right?

Neville: That’s — that’s probably — I hesitate because I’m trying to remember. I read something about this just the other day which says it’s not at all — has no value doing that on LinkedIn, and it gave some reasons. I don’t remember, obviously not compelling enough to make me recall the article or the author. But I’ve seen many different opinions and different takes on, you know, where’s this all going that it’s hard to settle on one, I suppose, which I think makes this quite an interesting landscape for discussion, really, to get some good debate going. It’s interesting Hootsuite’s look at the role AI is playing in all of this, where they say AI might make social media less interesting. The paradox around generative AI they talk about and the report saying AI is now table stakes for social media production. But I’m wondering if that actually makes social media less interesting. If everyone has the same tools, generating ideas, writing captions, and editing video, doesn’t that push everything towards the same tone and style? Doesn’t it kind of make everything just bland as hell?

Shel: Yeah, slop, right? I think there’s two ways to look at it.

Neville: Well, not necessarily slop — not necessarily slop, just the sameness across the board.

Shel: Yeah, I think that’s how some people look at slop. But there are a couple of ways to look at this. One of them is just the data. According to the Hootsuite report, 30% of consumers say they’re less likely to choose a brand if they know the ads were created by AI. We saw this, by the way, with the Super Bowl, where there was backlash aimed at the ads that were generated with AI. So there’s a practical takeaway for communicators, and that’s use it for infrastructure and not as the voice of the organization. The moment your messaging starts to sound like it was spat out by a machine, you’ve sacrificed the very thing that social media was built for, which is trust. But I want to take this to a bit of a darker place than what was covered in this report. This was a post by Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn. And he shared a perspective that I think should make us stop and think about this. He’s concerned that the public forums are being systematically overrun by machine-generated content. He said that while established voices can remain in broadcast mode, we’re losing that serendipitous discovery — the ability to find smart human insights in the comments on LinkedIn and presumably on Facebook and the other networks. And I’m not being an alarmist here. The University of New South Wales did a study and found that in a simulated social media campaign, more than 60% of the content was generated by competitor bots, surpassing 7 million posts. There was a peer-reviewed analysis last year that estimated about one in five accounts in public conversations were automated, and we’re seeing the emergence of AI overwhelm. That’s a label for a phenomenon where the sheer volume of machine-generated noise leads to a systematic breakdown in trust. Now consider Multbook. You remember Multbook. This is the platform where the AI agents from whatever that is called this week — it’s gone through so many name changes — but it was the tool that you could set up on a computer that would deploy agents. People were running out and buying Mac Minis to do this because they didn’t want it on their computer having access to their bank accounts and the like. Somebody built Multbook where the agents that were deployed by this thing could interact with each other and we, the humans, could sit back and observe. And Professor Mollick wondered whether LinkedIn was going to become Multbook with a LinkedIn logo. We’re building the infrastructure for bot-to-bot communication. And we should be asking whether human-to-human communication can survive at all. If all of these shifts in what the Hootsuite report says we can now use social media for — in a year, if it’s been overrun by AI content, and we’re talking about the bots creating original content in response to posts and then creating posts — we’re not going to be able to use it for much of anything at all.

Neville: Yeah, that’s taking it to quite a dark place, Shel. I don’t think that’s the likeliest outcome, of course. So let me circle back to the first question then. When we started this conversation, we asked this one then. So are we still thinking about social media, generally speaking, as a place to publish content, which is what we currently do, right? Or is it becoming something much more powerful — a tool for understanding behavior, culture, and trust as it unfolds online? How do you see it?

Shel: We’ll see.

Shel: The answer to that is yes. I mean, it can be both things. I would not recommend that brands and companies stop publishing content, especially when people are starting to use these tools for search. I mean, man, you talk about TikTok being used for search. I do. When I’m looking for a new place to have breakfast, because I love a good breakfast, I’m not going to the usual places. I’m not going to Yelp. I’m not going to Google. I’m going to TikTok because I want to see somebody who created a video of this awesome breakfast they had at some restaurant a mile and a half from me that I’ve never heard of. So if you want to be discovered that way, you better have the content there. But we have to start using it in these other ways as well, for as long as that’s a viable thing to do.

Neville: I agree with that.

Shel: Well, in that case, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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