Transcription
Social media is about to change forever. For creators, for brands, for anyone looking to build a business using content. If that's you, you're going to want to pay really close attention to what's happening right now in 2026. Cuz the truth is, the social media content game is being completely reset. And marketing as a whole is entering a brand new era.
Now, I know this because I spent all day on the cutting edge of content, marketing, and distribution. I have a million followers. I've done billions of views. and I'm starting to see trends and patterns that are not obvious to the average person that are going to create tons of new ways to win for a whole new class of creators and entrepreneurs. So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through the six biggest social media trends that are going to change the content game in 2026. And if you care about growing your business at all, you're going to want to pay attention.
All right, social trend number one is called macro becoming micro. And if you're just starting out, you're going to love this. In 2026, we will see the prioritization of nano influencers and micro niches. Let me explain what I mean. First, nano influencers. The most valuable type of creator in 2026 is the nano influencer. Now, these are people with 5 to 50,000 followers that have shown an ability to make high-quality content, but haven't yet broken out with mainstream growth. Now, these people are super underpriced relative to the influence they wield. And because they started out in this current social era, they know how to make content that will actually convert in 2026. On the flip side, macro influencers, anyone with over a million followers, are basically just TV channels played vertically. And I wouldn't give any of these people deals unless their top five in their category, built the majority of their following in the last couple years, and preserved their cult fandom as they got bigger.
Now, tactically, you can take advantage of this nano influencer trend in four ways. First, if you're looking for high-erforming content ideas that are validated but not yet mass adopted, the best place to look will be to study the nano influencers in your niche. Chances are, if they got a huge outlier to rip, it was the idea itself that was the reason for the growth because their face and personal brand typically isn't known yet to have had a huge impact. Hands down, the most valuable thing you could do from a research perspective is find all the nano influencers that are currently popping in your niche because if you study those winners, those will typically be more valuable than any winners from the large accounts.
Now, the second way to take advantage if you're a brand looking to use paid influencer spend in 2026. The money ball strategy will be to pay $500 to 50 nano influencers instead of $12,500 to two macro influencers. Now, this will give you 25 times more shots on goal and you can also negotiate paid ad spend boosting without paying a premium to the nano influencers. Obviously, the hard part is finding these nano influencers in the first place. One of the best ways is to use sandcastle.ai, which is a tool I built that makes everything social media growth related way easier. We just launched a brand new feature that will help with this called discover channels where all you have to do is type in your niche and we will automatically match the 25 channels that are the best fit. Some of these will be nano influencers and some of them will be macro ones. And so this is an automated way to run this nano influencer identification process.
Now, here's the third way to play this nano influencer trend. If you're a brand looking to build an in-house SWAT team of creators that are more than a one-off influencer, but less than a full-time employee, nano influencers are the best people to look at for these roles. Typically, you want to look at the upper end of the nano influencer class, closer to that 50,000 follower mark. Now, these people probably aren't making that much from content, typically less than 10K a month. And so, they're open to taking some of these more expanded retainer partnerships. Getting a few of these people in a Discord or Slack together, even if it's only part-time, is the future of building content marketing pods. And this could be the difference between getting your content hit rate from 1 in 30 down to 1 in five.
Now, the fourth and final way to play the nano influencer trend is to just become one yourself. And it's actually a lot easier to break into the nano influencer tier and start monetizing in a variety of ways because the for you algorithms are essentially just slot machines. Every video you make has home run potential. So if you know what you're doing or you have unique expertise in some niche area, it's very possible to become a nano influencer and break into that category in just 15 to 20 videos. And this opens up a world of possibilities for you with all the things I already mentioned as well as what I'm about to cover next. But the beauty is unlike before, you don't have to wait 5 years to monetize a huge macro following. 3 months, 4 months, 6 months, and you're good to go.
Now, on the other side of the micro trend is micro niches. And I often refer to these as super duper niches. In previous content eras, the guru guidance was to pick niches with massive TAMs, go for huge, mass appeal, and try to rack up total views as much as possible. But now the most valuable content positioning play you could make in 2026 is to pick a super specific niche where you have expertise and become the best in the world at serving it. Pure value or story wrapped value are going to be the two best storytelling metas that are going to work for serving this niche. And here's why this whole approach picking a micro niche is so so valuable in 2026. The algorithms are getting extremely good at keeping content inside the walled garden that you want it to be in. If you make vintage car review content, your video will go to vintage car fans and be seen by nobody else. Before it was largely spray and prey and the content got spread across all these other audience avatars. But now the audience match capabilities in the social algorithms are extremely dialed. As we know, every single person has a super unique algorithm. And so this means as a creator, you're finally getting rewarded for staying super specific and on topic over and over. The mega tip here on the macroto micro premise is this. You want to niche all the way down as far as you can possibly go. It'll seem counterintuitive, but I promise you this is where all the value is because category and term ownership are the beachfront property equivalent in the attention world. If someone can think of your name and face associated with a term or concept, you win. And the easiest way to build that term ownership and grow cult fandom around it is to niche all the way down.
All right, social media trend number two is called a tale of two games. And here's what I mean. The first generation of short form content was all about mass top offunnel views. It was about making sensationalist massive TAM content with trending audio all optimized to try to get as many views as possible. And a lot of people did have success with this in previous years. But the more you play the social game, you realize there's actually two very different games at play. There's the game for mass attention to monetize via brand deals. And then there's the game for ontarget attention to flow people off platform to your own products and services. One game is getting harder, the other game is getting easier. And spoiler alert, it's the mass media awareness game that's getting harder and the conversion game that's getting easier. So, in 2026, we're now entering the second generation of short form content, where we'll start seeing the broadening between art and business in content, between artists and engineers, between mass attention and ontarget attention.
Now, this phenomenon has obviously existed before 2026 on the edges, but 2026 is the first year where the business owner content path becomes extremely formulaic and less of a guessing game. I'm calling 2026 the year of the business owner creator because you can legitimately make a million dollars a year in profit from a social media account with just 10,000 followers posting three times a week if you have the right viewer avatar aligned with the right offer and you understand how to use proven psychology. You do not need mass views anymore. In fact, now that's a inferior strategy. And again, this is because the algorithms have gotten so good at being able to serve niche content to the exact audience that wants to see it and not spilling it over to uninterested parties. In other words, if you can engineer your content offer alignment and have strict idea selection, you could become cult famous in one town without anyone in another town having ever heard of you.
Now, here's why this is such a big opportunity right now. I've realized there's a huge gap between people that know how to make content and people that know how to monetize that attention in ways other than brand deals. And I think because of that, you're going to see a lot of business owners really take content seriously starting in 2026 and win big. And I personally am going allin on serving anyone living in that zone. If you're a business owner and you're trying to use social media and YouTube to build six and seven figure businesses, this will be the best channel in the world for you. And I've got a bunch of free stuff linked to get you going below.
All right, social media trend number three is called the year of the set. In 2026, visuals are going to matter more than ever. We know that 85% of viewers watch their videos without sound. And if you didn't know that, then you're probably as shocked as I was when I heard it for the first time. Because of that, you will realize immediately how important visuals are. Now, because 2024 and 25 were the first time where a lot of new people entered social media and all the editing operations copy each other, a lot of the visuals have gotten really stale over the past 6 months. The videos have lots of visuals, but it's all the same kind of visuals. In other words, things are converging visually, and it's kind of hard to stick out. So, in 2026, visual differentiation will matter way more than it ever has. This means visual layouts, visual elements, shot angles, and most importantly, in world sets. 2026 will be the year of the set.
Now, Orin has talked about this a lot, and I've also mentioned it in several of my other videos before. Overediting with graphics, a layer on top of the main shot, will continue to be commoditized because anyone can do that from anywhere. So, the counter punch you're going to start seeing is an explosion in uniqueness in in world set building. Because for $5 to $10,000, anyone can build a Hollywood level looking set that they can film in. So, I expect to see tons more unique visual sets pop up that become the backdrop for new people's content. And with the right set, this is all you need to stand out. That will let you make slow content but still be visually interesting because it varies from what people typically see on the feed. If you want to learn how to make a signature visual style for your content, something people instantly recognize, I'll link another video below that I made on the channel breaking down all the core elements you need.
All right, social trend number four is the emergence of the modern content stack. 2026 will be the year that most business owners realize they need both short form and long- form content driving to email. These the three pieces of the modern content stack and really all you need to be able to build an 8 figureure a year business. Now, here's why the adoption of the modern content stack will emerge in 2026. People are starting to realize it is extremely difficult to build longitudinal trust on short form only. Now, this doesn't mean social media isn't valuable. Of course, it is. But it can't be the only content medium you're playing with as a business owner. And this is because the higher the price of your offer, the more trust that is required to acrue in order to get somebody to buy. Trust acrruel is just very difficult to compound over time on short form. Because each video is so so short, you can only add a very tiny hit of incremental trust with each video. And so it just takes a lot of videos compounded month over month over month to build up that trust big enough to get someone to convert on a high ticket product. Conversely, it's actually extremely easy to build deep trust quickly using long- form content. Think about it. You've probably been watching this video for 8 to 10 minutes now, and you've probably already made up your mind whether you like and trust me. That only took one video. The true god tier content formula for business owners is to use short form video for world exposure and then long- form video for world immersion. The goal is that one can feed the other and vice versa using natively optimized posts on both. 2026 will be the year that proumer creators and business owners realize they need to add the complement to whatever they don't have in the stack. And I'm telling you, all you need is short form video, long form video, and email. That is the modern content stack. You are good with that. If you have all three of these and an aligned offer, you can build an 8 figureure business.
Now, if you're a business owner and you want to solve long form YouTube in 2026, I have something very special dropping next week. So, make sure to stay tuned and be on the wait list in the description below.
All right, social media trend number five is LinkedIn video. I think there is a massively underpriced opportunity on LinkedIn video in 2026. So, here's what happened. LinkedIn launched short form video in 2024. They were the last one of the party to do it. And as soon as it came out, they juiced it super heavy. Videos were getting millions of impressions that really didn't deserve it. And because of that, the engagement on those videos was very low and the conversion was not there. Now, this was mostly because LinkedIn users, which are used to text posts, were just not primed and ready to consume video. It was on a new tab. It was new to consume. There was a supply demand mismatch and the initial quality of supply was just not that good. Now, LinkedIn got heavy push back from their core user base who were not video native. These are keyboard warriors that did not want to be on video. And so, LinkedIn pulled back the push of video in 2025. They still had it, but the reach was just not there. Recently, in the last couple months, LinkedIn has begun juicing their short form video again. And so, in 2026, this is the year for LinkedIn video. I expect to see huge alpha here for teams that are early on LinkedIn video. It's not for every business and it depends on what your offer and kind of expertise niche is, but if it's a fit for you, you want to go hard here. The underpriced attention is insane.
All right, last is social media trend number six. And it wouldn't be a 2026 predictions video if I didn't mention AI at all. Obviously, AI is everywhere and its abilities are compounding at a rate that we've just never seen before in technology. And while it can be doomsday, I choose to take more of the optimistic lens. So, I don't believe AI is going to replace human creators in 2026 or even 2027. The capabilities on a demo basis might be good, but in reality, they're a bit overblown, and I think there's a huge moat for the next year or two. However, I do believe we're going to start seeing some AI content agents in 2026. Meta just acquired a company called Manis for $2 billion. They were one of the leading companies in the world building AI agents. I also had some of the earliest beta testing access to Meta's AI creator product where they'd have an agent actually respond to DMs on your behalf. It wasn't quite ready, but it was a great look into the future of what AI agent enabled content is going to look like. And I guarantee there will be something that ships here in 2026 because of the Manis acquisition.
Now, I don't think this is going to be an agent that makes content for you where you just put in an idea and a video spits out, but I do think there's a lot of cool agent capabilities that could be bolted on to the content workflow. Whether this is analytics, workflow optimization, community management, bulk DM responding, there's half a dozen use cases that could be really interesting for Meta to try. With respect to action on your end, there's really nothing to do besides sit, wait, and then when something comes out, sprint towards it, not away from it. I'll keep you posted when Meta announces something. Maybe we'll even get Zuck on here in person to kind of break it down if he wants to, but we'll loop back on that. But for now, know that this is coming. It's on the horizon and it will be a net positive as it adds agent capabilities to the workflow.
All right guys, that is all I've got for this video. As a recap, we covered the six most interesting social trends coming to the content world in 2026. And I just want to end with this. Most people are super doomsday and doom and gloom about AI replacing social media. I could not think they're more wrong for 2026. This is the golden era to build a powerful personal brand for free. The window will eventually close where you can no longer get free reach. But right now, you can wake up, make a video, post it, and get a million free impressions, drive people to your products, all for free without paying anything. That window will close. User attention is shifting to social. Brand spend is shifting to social. This is the year of the business owner building the personal brand. If that's you, I'm telling you, seize the opportunity.
Now, like always, I'm going to do everything I can to just give you the answer key. And as many cheat codes as I uncover, I'm going to break them down here. So, be sure to subscribe and check out all the free stuff I have linked below. And as always, the last thing, I've got a free community for business owners called Wavy World. I've got 65 free trainings just like this. 40,000 other entrepreneurs. Everybody's in there giving feedback to each other trying to get better. So, if you want a peer group to help you and get feedback, as well as go deeper down all the tutorials I've made, I've got a free invite link for you in the description. All right, guys. We'll see you on the next one. Peace.