Best practices in social media continue to constantly fluctuate and, at times, it is a very unpredictable medium. A combination of increasingly opaque algorithms, intensifying monetization, and a massively oversaturated audience lead to a cluttered mess of digital content. Consequently, it becomes harder and harder for individuals, brands, and organizations to maintain visibility. The idea of going ‘viral’ is largely dead, ousted by a rapidly shortening attention span or appetite for curated content among audiences.

The new buzzword in social media, and marketing at large, is ‘authenticity’.

Audiences have become fatigued by the overabundance of curated content, often carefully crafted to maximize a cognitive-emotional reaction, that is perceived to treat individuals as wells to be intentionally tapped over, and over again. This feeling, coupled with a documented shift in the human experience from ‘the real world’ to a ‘digital world’ increasingly dominated by AI, combine to breed a mistrust of obviously contrived content. Even if we don’t consciously think of it every day, many people have a feeling of disconnection driven by symptoms of our digital engagement: increased boredom, a reduction in our ability to record memories, and media addiction (to name only a few).

This makes ‘authenticity’ more than a buzzword: it has become a commodity craved by individuals in an effort, whether conscious or subconscious, to offset decades of manufactured digital experiences that have real physiological consequences.

However, the concept of ‘authenticity’ itself becomes questionable in the social media medium when it paradoxically becomes an intentional strategy for audience growth and engagement. Nevertheless, the notion of authentic content creation is the most obvious trend of 2025 on social media, and there is no reason to believe it will not continue through 2026.

What Constitutes ‘Authentic’, and How Do You Compete?

Given the inherent contradiction in strategically and intentionally producing ‘authentic’ content (i.e. raw, unfiltered, unscripted, natural), it’s a valid question whether any of it is genuinely authentic. It may be more apt to regard authentic content as that which creates a genuine perception among the majority of an audience that it is ‘real’. In practice, this is often achieved through content creation tactics including unpolished commentary with minor intentional mistakes, candid moments, or spontaneous ad-libbed videos. In reality, much of this content is not truly authentic – it is every bit as curated as a slick advertising campaign, but the aesthetic will often successfully match a ‘raw’ or ‘real’ feel, when done well.

The oversaturated state of the social media market naturally drives content creators to stand out. Even with fragmented attention spans, there are only so many pieces of content a given user can consume in a day – ensuring that, as a creator, yours is always at the forefront poses a significant challenge. In years past, the challenge was often tackled by trying to produce the highest quality, most polished content for users. This is being replaced by a constant escalation in how much ‘real’ content is shared, leading to an increasingly invasive picture of content creators’ lives imposed upon themselves. Creators and brands are moving toward the realm of oversharing, in an effort to produce content that is more ‘real’ (i.e. unmitigated vulnerability, behind-the-scenes of their life, and personal anecdotes).

Showing Everyone How the Sausage is Made

This commodification of identity and experience has real consequences for the mental health of individual content creators, and is not sustainable in the long term. With a trend of escalation to remain competitive in an oversaturated market, not only are content creators liable to expose too much of themselves, but they may increasingly manufacture genuine problems or drama in their personal lives in order to capture it for their audiences. The risk is intuitively obvious – a massively decreased quality of life in exchange for a lucrative hold on a market share of the audience. Indeed, content creators are already twice as likely to consider suicide than the general population.

For brands or organizations there is obviously not an increased suicide risk per se, but being overly ambitious in sharing ‘behind-the-scenes’ content for the sake of authenticity will lead to an increased risk profile. To be glib, there is an age-old idiom about this: ‘Everyone wants to eat the sausage. No one wants to see how the sausage is made’. Oversharing from the standpoint of a brand or organization can easily lead to the erosion of trust among constituents and consumers or, in a worst case scenario, destroy brand equity altogether.

Imagine that a genuinely well-regarded organization shoots short, live feed video capturing interactions between their representatives and constituents, hoping for loveable and wholesome ‘authentic’ content to demonstrate their value in a relatable way to a broader audience. Now, suppose that in doing so they happen to capture an interaction with a constituent furious with them for legitimate reasons. Now they have to answer for an issue that may otherwise have never been revealed and, depending on the nature of the crisis, they may never recover. Or perhaps a CEO or Director has a content team that routinely creates ‘candid’ live videos in an effort to improve the perceived connection between the company and its customers, only to accidentally catch a crisis team’s nightmare on a live feed. Though it was not by any means intentional, you might imagine echoes of the Astronomer CEO’s ‘authentic’ moment with a woman who was not his wife, at a Coldplay concert.

Drawing Lines: Relatable v. Performative, Bold v. Safe

For brands (whether individual or organizational), this leads to a complicated architecture when it comes to creating authentic, personality-driven content that does not breach brand guidelines or introduce an increased risk profile. The key word here is ‘personality’. One of the best ways to engender a feeling of authenticity is to maintain a consistent personality.

Many content creators succumb to the pressure of escalating how intimate the window is into their world (or their organization’s world), conflating intimacy and superlative transparency with ‘personality’. In many ways, this increased access to a creator may indeed help an audience feel that they have an ‘inside window’ to their personality… but this strategy comes with all of the negative elements covered above: in short, a heavily increased risk profile.

Personality can still shine through the social media medium simply with consistency, or in standard corporate terms: adherence to brand guidelines. The trick is to move away from exactly that kind of corporate language and sterile mode of communication in order to set a brand apart in a crowd, and carve out niche territory held solely by their personality. ‘It’s just how my personality is’ sounds far more human and relatable than ‘I cannot deviate from the standard brand guidelines’, even in a context where they mean exactly the same thing.

What audiences are actually craving is connection. They want to encounter something, or someone, they can relate to or understand at a human level. People want a relatable personality, but there is no need to manufacture this by opening the doors to the depths of every creator’s personal life, airing dirty laundry or every emotional moment in the name of ‘relatability’, even if it also works. By cultivating a genuine, consistent digital personality that feels human, organizations and brands can mitigate increased risk exposure, while still taking advantage of the current desire for authentic content.

The Upshot

For companies or organizations, this often means leaving the conventional corporate communications style by the wayside. By jettisoning the dispassionate, careful style of past organizational communications, there is plenty of room for an appropriate personality to be developed and showcased to great effect.

For example, Wendy’s notoriously developed a sharp, sarcastic (borderline abusive) personality on what was then Twitter – it worked, because people found the humor far more relatable than the generic, soulless (but safe!) posts from other fast food chains. Planned Parenthood has developed one of the most ‘human’ non-profit personalities online by utilizing an effective cocktail of short-form video with candid and emotional public health outreach from staff, humor-driven posts that show awareness of current events and pop-culture fluency, and consistent tone across platforms and regional offices. Meanwhile, Duolingo found great success in leaning into their brand mascot (the green owl), intentionally cultivating a personality that is rude, unhinged, raucous… and impossible to ignore on TikTok.

All of these are examples of personality-driven social media strategies that cultivate a sense of relatability, trust, and authenticity with their respective audiences. While there may be some risk in making your brand mascot into an abusive persona in an effort to engage audiences, there is minimal risk in the principle itself: show a personality that eschews the PR-like formality of brands in a bygone era, and embrace a more conversational, fallible, and unpolished voice.

Your brand or organization does not need to constantly look for ways to outdo itself in airing overly intimate content or sensationalist personal dramas in order to capitalize on the authenticity trend. Simply be less stiff and less sterile; be bolder and more relational – and consistently so. Allowing brand guidelines to be more fluid and less monolithic, will enable you to invest in a brand personality that is more enticing for your audience to connect with – one that is more human.