The paid social landscape underwent major shifts in 2025, with creative formats evolving, platform competition intensifying, user behavior changing, and of course, the increasingly relevant role of AI in the everyday. As we get further into the new year, reflecting on last year's winners, losers, and understanding the key takeaways is paramount to staying competitive.
Platform Winners and Losers
TikTok really cemented itself as a performance marketing powerhouse in 2025. Previously viewed as more of an awareness/discovery platform, the ever-advancing algorithm, in combination with the robustness of TikTok Shop's interface, proved that the platform can and did drive meaningful conversion volume.
Meta proved resilient among competing platforms. Instagram Reels gained popularity as users embraced the endless scrollability format inspired by TikTok, and Sales campaigns continue to become more hands-off as a self-driving conversion engine.
LinkedIn and Pinterest also emerged as somewhat unexpected winners. LinkedIn further solidified its place as a B2B paid social powerhouse with meaningful ROI, despite its high CPMs. Pinterest quietly dominated purchase-intent audiences, with its keyword-based visual search and Google-like shopping features driving notable conversion rates for brands in fashion, home decor, and lifestyle verticals, more than previous years.
X and Snapchat struggled in 2025—with advertisers being hesitant about brand safety within X, and Snapchat losing its Gen Z audience as their preference moves to other platforms.
2025 Paid Social Creative Trends
True Authenticity
As AI-generated and AI-enhanced creative becomes more and more common in our feeds, users are responding more favorably to raw, authentic, human-made content. Audiences are hyper-aware of "faked" UGC and overpolished brand images. Genuinely real, unpolished content from actual customers saw engagement rates 3-5x higher than traditional creative. Users trusted micro-influencers over highly produced brand content.
Brands with authentic, involved, and vocal communities saw significant performance improvement. Brand communities also benefit the brand by providing endless UGC, instant feedback, and primed audiences to assist paid social efforts.
Volume & Variation
Brands testing 20+ creative variations per month consistently outperformed those running less frequent (i.e., quarterly) refreshes. Paid social platform algorithms' appetite for novelty and newness meant fresh content, even if imperfect or less differentiated, beat stale winners.
2026 Paid Social Predictions
Algorithm-Guided Broad Targeting
As we've seen from Meta's Sales campaigns, platforms' AI-guided algorithms work best with broad targeting with few limitations. The new targeting is creative and landing page signals. There's potential for platforms to start taking more and more control away from advertisers and putting it into the hands of their own algorithms and technologies to drive results.
In-platform Social Commerce
TikTok Shop's success is leading more paid social platforms to improve their own native commerce capabilities, including Meta and Pinterest. The line between content and commerce is gradually disappearing, as we've seen with the swift integration of TikTok Shop items into creator-made content. The shoppability of ads is no longer a click to a website, they now fully circumvent websites altogether, with the shopping experience staying in the platform.
Authenticity Saturation
Brands will be in competition as to who can be the most authentic with their paid social content –the most real, in a landscape where users are valuing that more and more. Winners will emerge in terms of whose ads people actually trust and believe in, versus whose are performative and scripted.
The Bottom Line
As we move through 2026, success will come down to embracing platform evolution rather than fighting it. That means leaning into algorithm-guided broad targeting, investing in creative volume over perfection, building involved customer communities that fuel organic and paid social content, and preparing for the shift to native in-platform commerce.
The brands that will dominate aren't those clinging to old playbooks, they're the ones willing to let evolve alongside platforms' AI algorithms & focusing their energy on what algorithms can't replicate: genuine human connection and trust with their audiences.
