Today we mourn the beginning of the end of an era: brands relentlessly posting on social (as we know it).
I read this take on The Trend Report and felt like it's exactly what my writing has been leading up to as of late. The posting ennui, the dead internet theory, the campaign creep, the “how to market when the market says no”, the flattening of everything under the sun thanks to AI – all roads lead to here. Well, this feels as natural as the progression of things can, anyway.
The timeline is tired, the brands are tired, and the audience, well, insert Rose McGowan’s infamous “imagine how tired we are".
I knew once a certain multilingual green bird posted about swimming in Dua Lipa’s piss while simultaneously telling employees it planned to go “AI first,” we were circling the drain.
The matter of fact is, you don’t exist in a vacuum. Neither does your audience.
They know the “out-of-pocket” tweet had five rounds of approvals and a 37-slide deck justifying it. Just like they know that the “we care about people” post dropped the same week as the news of a thousand layoffs. And they definitely know that the “relatable” meme was templated in Canva by an intern following strict tone-of-voice guidelines.
Basically, the jig is up. Social users have become hyper-literate.
What once felt cheeky now feels choreographed.
The corporate wink-wink of brand personality has lost its charm. Because, at this point, we know exactly who’s behind the curtain, and it’s not your cool community manager; it’s a committee.
And the thing about committees is they don’t make culture. They maintain it. Which is why so much of brand social today feels like a museum of past trends: a flattened, delayed echo of the internet’s original pulse.
The playbook for brands for the last few years has been “act human.”
They became comedians, activists, therapists, even best friends. That worked in the chaos years when social media still felt like a living organism. But now, in a landscape ruled by algorithms and automation, that kind of “human” feels out of place, and more uncanny than authentic.
The feeds look alive, but much of what’s circulating is pre-scheduled, AI-generated, or recycled from somewhere else. It’s campaign creep meets posting ennui; the great flattening of everything.
It’s transactional, operational, even bureaucratic (eugh). The feeds that once created culture are now places to sell culture back to us. Increasingly, it’s not where we gather. It’s where we window-shop.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means the function of these platforms has changed. Social has become less of a stage and more of a mirror, a reflection of what people are doing elsewhere, rather than the birthplace of new ideas.
For brands, that means the strategy can’t just be “keep posting.” It has to be: why are we posting, for whom, and what purpose does this serve in the larger ecosystem?
So, what comes next?
This is the part where the smart brands quietly reinvent themselves. The ones that stop performing and start listening. The ones that understand that visibility without meaning is just noise.
The future of social isn’t louder—it’s sharper. It’s less about having a “voice” and more about having values. It’s not about being the funniest in the feed, but the most useful, credible, or interesting to the people who actually matter.
Brands that cling to the old playbook, the self-aware tone, the meme-as-content strategy, the relentless “posting to stay relevant” will end up looking like the last jesters in the castle. Dancing in an empty hall, for an audience that’s already pivoted elsewhere.
Look I’m not sounding the alarm and yelling from the rooftops, claiming brand social is dead.
I’m not getting caught in the trap of saying that again (if you know you know lol.)
But the show is over, folks. The lights are up, the audience has left, and the brands still monologuing to the algorithm might want to take the hint (please, it’s getting awkward in here.)
The next era of social will reward discernment over noise, participation over performance, and real alignment over empty affirmation. It’s time to rethink what being “present” online actually means. Because it's not to be the loudest in the room, but the one saying something actually worth hearing.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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