My least favourite social media trends of 2025

Everyone loves to talk about their favourite social media trends. The campaigns that inspired them, the strategies that worked, the creative moments that defined the year. But let’s be honest, 2025 certainly had its ups and downs. Trends that damaged brands, alienated audiences, and made PR departments everywhere collectively cringe.

So whilst everyone else is celebrating their highlights, I’m doing the opposite. Here are the PR trends from 2025 that desperately need to stay in 2025… 

1. The “Apology” Trend

Somewhere along the way, brands decided that posting jokey, ironic “apologies” for minor inconveniences was peak social media content. “Sorry for making you hungry with this food pic 🤪” 

This trend has completely devalued the word “apology” in brand communications. When everything becomes an apology, the word loses all meaning and impact. It’s the classic “Boy Who Cried Wolf” situation – when your brand needs to issue a real apology for an actual problem, nobody will take it seriously anymore.

You’ve trained your audience to see brand apologies as jokes, as content, or engagement bait. The word has been so diluted by ironic usage that genuine contrition no longer registers with audiences.

Your crisis communications deserve better than competing with your own brand’s jokey apology posts from last month.

2. Rage Bait Marketing

The Oxford word of the year for 2025 “rage bait” I was not surprised in the slightest. Whether it was American Eagle’s “great jeans/genes” campaign with Sydney Sweeney, or e.l.f.’s collaboration with controversial comedian Matt Rife, it was full of brands deliberately courting controversy for engagement.

Rage bait is the social media equivalent of setting your reputation on fire for warmth. Yes, you’ll get some social media engagement. Yes, you’ll trend. But at what cost? It destroys brand trust, customer loyalty, and your ability to control your narrative. Once you’ve positioned your brand as the one that will say anything for attention, you’ve lost the moral authority to take stands on issues that actually matter.

Build brand value through substance, not shock. Understand that algorithms reward provocation, but customers reward authenticity and consistency. If your PR strategy relies on making people angry to get them talking, you’re not building a brand.

3. Lazy AI-Generated Content

If 2024 was the year brands experimented with AI, 2025 was the year they proved they had learned absolutely nothing from those experiments. 

AI content is getting better at looking real, which means when it fails, the failure is even more spectacular and trust-destroying. Brands using AI to recreate emotional moments (like Christmas traditions) come across as hollow and cynical. 

Let alone the fact that AI doesn’t understand nuance, context, or cultural sensitivity. It can generate content that’s accidentally offensive, legally problematic, or brand-damaging without any human catching it before being posted on social media. 

As I’ve written before, AI generation has massive environmental costs. Brands touting sustainability whilst pumping out AI content are walking contradictions that savvy audiences will eventually call out.

If you can’t afford to create real content, scale back your content ambitions rather than flooding the internet with algorithmic slop. Your customers deserve better, and your brand deserves better than the reputational damage that comes when audiences realise you’ve automated authenticity.

Final thoughts

The most successful PR strategies in 2026 won’t be the ones that chase trends, they’ll be the ones that resist the bad ones. As PR professionals in 2026, we have a choice to either keep chasing these harmful trends because they generate immediate metrics, or reject them in favour of building actual, lasting brand image. I know which one I’m choosing. 

Good riddance to these trends. May they rest in the digital graveyard alongside other terrible PR ideas, and may we all be smart enough not to resurrect them.

Want to make your brand culture-ready in 2026? Get in touch.