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Grow Your Local Business
2026 Social Media Predictions And What They Mean For Your Local Business
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You are listening to the Grow youw Local Business podcast, where local marketing expert and life coach Leslie Presnol shares the strategies and the mindset to help you reach more people in your city and bring in a steady stream of clients. All right, let's dive in.
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Hello. Happy New year. Welcome to 2026. I wanted to kick off this year with a podcast all about my social media predictions for 2026 and just the social media trends that I think we'll see and what it means for you specifically as a local business owner. Social media is always changing, like, every single day. But I have narrowed down this episode to my top. Let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 predictions that I think are going to be the most relevant to you. So, number one, I think there's going to be more AI generated content than ever. But I think your people want real. So my prediction, more AI generated content more than ever. That's just going to keep happening. Like AI generated video content, AI generated written content, like by ChatGPT or Claude, other services like that. That's only gonna keep increasing. And I'm not against AI at all. I love AI. AI can be my best friends. I don't use it to necessarily write for me. I don't use it to replace my voice. And I here's the thing I think about you guys. I'm like, imagine if ChatGPT wrote this podcast. You'd be like, no, thanks. Like, why would you even need to get the information from me at all? At that point, I'm just the middleman, you know, you wouldn't want me to just recite what CHAT GPT wrote. You're here because you want my voice, my ideas, my experience. So what I will do is I'll use ChatGPT to summarize my podcast at the end to. To write my show notes. Or I'll be like, hey, pull a powerful quote that I can use on social, a social media graphic. But I am creating this for you from my brain, my ideas, my predictions, everything that I think. And I think there will be more and more business owners and creators who have hard stances against AI moving forward and who will say, like, I don't use it in my business. And I think there will be more and more and more who do fully embrace it. And on this day and time, I feel like I am kind of somewhere in the middle. Like, like, I love AI. I love ChatGPT. I use it daily. But like I said, I don't let it be my voice. I don't let it be my ideas. I want to keep using my brain every single day. But here's the shift that I think really happened this year. I think audiences got a little disconnected. I think their eyes started to glaze over a bit. I think business owners started using AI or things like ChatGPT to write their content and write their emails for them, and their heart and soul started missing from it. The connection with their audience was missing, the depth was missing. They were missing from their content because a robot wrote it. And I think the audiences felt that. I think there is this flavor of. You didn't even spend time writing this, so why would I spend time reading this? I know I felt that way sometimes when I would start reading an email or I would start reading a caption and I could just tell there were certain words or sentence structures and I just knew that ChatGPT wrote it. So it's like if I saw one more piece of content telling me, like, you're not broken. We're talking about momentum or vibes or unleashing. I'm like, okay, ChatGPT wrote this next. I do think this is going to get like, more undetectable as just AI gets better. Which also is a prediction for the year and just for years forward. But at the same time, people are getting more selective with who they trust, with who they follow, with who they spend money with. Audiences are just getting smarter in general. So my prediction is people just want more of the real you. They want to know you wrote it. It's if they're going to spend their time following you, subscribing to your emails, listening to what you have to say. They want to know it's the real you that you put your time and energy and heart and soul into creating it. Especially if they're going to put their time and energy into reading it. And if they're going to buy from you, I think that's a fair trade. They want to know what you have to say, your thoughts, your beliefs, how you can help them, your processes, your original ideas and. And how you would say it. I think this is actually an incredible opportunity because more and more people will continue to rely heavily on AI and actually start using their brain less. And then there are the people who are going to keep using their brain and keep thinking about their clients and keep problem solving, keep thinking about how they can be original and different, keep. And how they can stand out locally, how they can be that local, go to person and that person is going to win. They are going to beat everyone else just because they Keep their own brain engaged. Because every if everyone else is just using AI to crake out content, I think it's going to just put everybody else on an even playing field. Everyone is going to start sounding the same. And that's something that has really happened over the past year. Everybody's just kind of level right now. Anybody can go to ChatGPT and get an email written or get a post cranked out. It's all very generic. Everybody's just kind of on the same level now. But you're here because you want to be the local top choice, and that's just going to require more of you, the real you. So the second prediction I have is that viral trends on social media will die out and original content will win. I think trends will start to die out. And when I say trends, I mean things like everyone creating the same video over and over and again. Those who create something unique, something original, a new idea, something we've never seen before, that's going to keep everyone's attention. It's going to get everyone's attention. I think those business owners and creators who rely on viral trends or rely on what everybody else is doing to create content will start to fall behind. As a consumer, I personally started feeling this shift this year. Like, as a consumer of social media, I could tell I was getting fatigued as I was scrolling on social media and seeing the same trend, the same post a hundred times. When I'm just on the app and when you're mindlessly scrolling in bed and you've seen the same song, the same dance, the same hand motions, the same little silence skit, you kind of start to hate yourself a little bit. Like, questioning, what are you even doing with your life right now? Like, why am I watching all of this? To me, like, it personally drove me off the app. I was like, okay, I'm done. Like, I've seen this over and over. I have to put my phone down. Like, how many times can I watch the same thing be done over and over and over? There has actually been a social media usage decline globally, specifically among Gen Z and millennials. There's been a 10, been about a 10% decrease in usage every year since 2022. And there are many reasons for this. Like mental health coming out of a pandemic, desire for just real human connection, like we talked about, but also like a platform fatigue. I think people are bored. Like, we're bored and we pick up our phone to scroll and then we're bored from scrolling because we see the same things over and over. Nothing feels new anymore. And we're craving something original. We're craving something new and different. And again, as a business owner, as a creator, I think this is a pivotal moment. As our audiences get smarter and as they get more selective, as they see the same generic things over and over, they will start to see who the real experts are. I think we're approaching a time where it will be easier than ever to stand out locally, to position yourself as that expert, to bring in clients. Just because you start creating something different, you stop blending in, you stop creating what everybody else in your industry is creating. You stop creating every single trend and you just truly become an original. Original people with original ideas and original content will stand out and rise to the top. In 2026, it will be easier than ever. Mark my words. All right, number three. My third prediction is social media is just no longer aesthetic. And this has been happening for a while, but years ago we were all about the curated feed. Like things needed to feel pretty and perfect and branded and just look a certain way. And this just doesn't exist anymore and will continue to not to exist. Social media has gotten very messy. Like if you look at Instagram, text is like all over the place. Like, we have text on top of reels, we have carousels that are not like so perfectly designed in Canva anymore. We have FaceTime type of video content, no filter. It's just like less curated, more real life, less scripts. And again, I think this is going back to like, we're just craving human, we're craving connection. And when things, things feel over polished, over scripted, too perfect, we're not connecting to it. And I think this is great news for us as business owners because I know I work with a lot of people who tend to be very perfectionistic with their content. We, we want to spend a lot of time in Canva designing super perfect graphics or we think we can't post something if it doesn't look a certain way. And I think we're just going to get further and further away from that. So as business owners, we will start saving ourselves time and we can just produce content a lot quicker because we don't have to be worried about it looking super high quality or like overly branded. Like, it really is just like, can I get this out to connect with my audience and show them that I can help them? The fourth prediction I have is that there will be more private engagement on social media. Like overall in 2025, engagement was down. There were, there were significant dips in the amount of likes and comments on platforms like Instagram. In 2025, users have just changed the way they engage with social media. Overall, there was a bigger shift on engagement metrics like shares and saves and watch times this year versus like how many likes you, how many comments. People just engage differently now and I predict that will continue and your audience, like your local clients, will continue to engage with you in a more private way than publicly. So yes, that means people will save your content, they will share your content, but also they'll be DMing you more on social media to get more information or they'll be using all automations like mini chat where they comment a keyword or they DM a keyword and get more information from you. I think there will be more private conversations, more personal touch points with customers and we'll use these types of private things to track our engagement versus looking at the traditional vanity metrics like likes or comments. The fifth prediction I have is, is that SEO on social media is just more important than ever. I mean, I have been shouting this from the rooftops for a while. In the past, we've always talked about SEO search engine optimization for websites. And this is like someone goes to a search engine like Google and they type in keywords and ideally your local business, your website pops up in the results. And there was a major update in 2025 that allowed all public posts on Instagram to be indexed by Google. So this means even when people go to Google and they search for something now, individual Instagram post could rank and show up in the results. So your Instagram could get discovered off the actual platform. But even beyond that, more and more people are just bypassing Google altogether. They are going straight to social media to search for products, services, information, topics, whatever they need. I've told y' all this before, but this is how I found my wedding photographer and florist. I went straight to Instagram and searched for Baton Rouge wedding photographer, Baton Rouge florist. This is how I found my physical therapist. We planned a trip to Fredericksburg, Texas last week and I never went to Google to search for things to do. I searched within Instagram and found a ton of reels and content sharing like local guides of things to do, restaurants to eat at, breakfast spots, coffee shops, wineries to visit, hotels, tours, literally everything I needed. I planned our entire trip through Instagram, through Instagram search. And it's not just Instagram. People are going straight to TikTok, people are going to Facebook, people are going to YouTube. I was doing research for this episode. I didn't go to Google and type in social Media Trends for 2026, I went to YouTube. I wanted to see what everybody else's predictions were and compare them to my own. See if I was leaving anything major out that I was like, you guys need to know this. So the point is, if you're post are not keyword optimized, you are missing people. If your profile is not optimized, you are missing people. If people can't find you when they search, you are missing people. The best news ever is I have a really quick mini course called the Local Instagram Formula and I'll walk you through this. I help you optimize and localize your profile. I tell you exactly what to put, where to put it, so it takes all the guesswork out of it. So when people search Instagram for what you do, you'll show up. And I teach you how to use keywords effectively so people can find you, they can hire you, because I guarantee there are people searching for what you do in your city. So go click the link in the show notes. Join the local Instagram formula. This is one of the most important things you can do going into 2026. We've got to get you optimized for search so people can find you. And so the social media platforms you're on know who to show your content to. There was also a huge shift this year with people having more control over their algorithm. Towards the end of this year, Instagram even let people start selecting what they were interested in, what topics they wanted to see more of. We already have the ability to even like hide certain things we don't care about. When we see certain posts, we can be like, this is not relevant. Hide. I think we're going to start seeing even more and more of that. People are going to start having more control over the type of content they see. So it's important that the platform you're on knows what your content is about so they can show it to the people who are interested in it. And that is all SEO. All right, my friends. So those are my social media predictions for 2026 and the trends that I think we will see. I would love to know if you have any of your own. So come find me on Instagram. I'm at Leslie Preston. I'm going to link that in the show notes as well. And just come let me know. I would love to hear from you. Hey, if you enjoyed today's episode, I want to invite you to check out my program, the LocalPreneur Academy. This is the only program for small business owners who want to become the local go to in their industry with a steady stream of clients. You can find more information@lesliepressnel.com and I'll see you inside.