“A common mistake brands make is settling on a permanent social media strategy. The medium is ever-changing, which means your social presence needs to remain flexible.” — Likeable Team, 2014
That sentence opened our Top 10 Social Media Predictions for 2015. Twelve years later it has aged better than any individual call we ever made on this blog—and we made hundreds. After roughly three years away from publishing on this blog, the most honest next step is to assess the track record of our predictions.
We considered starting with a more technical article, describing all the work involved to revive the website and make sure the blog was working and optimized after yet another site migration. Ultimately, however, that is a project for another day. Today, we rate ourselves.
We sorted what we found into three buckets: the calls that aged like wine, the ones that aged like milk, and the ones where the grade depends on an asterisk. We mined more than just the predictions-titled posts (the most interesting forecasts on this blog have always been the ones smuggled inside campaign critiques and platform write-ups), and we tried to be honest even if it stung a little bit.
The Hall of Fame
Predictions that aged like wine
Our oldest surviving post called out a million-dollar bet (November 2007)
The first thing ever published on this blog was Dave Kerpen’s critique of an ambitious agency campaign called the Million Project: “Brilliant Idea, but a One-in-a-Million Shot at Actually Working.” Dave argued that big-bet, single-shot social campaigns rarely connect at the scale they’re sold at and he was right. The big swing-for-the-fences campaign keeps making a comeback every few years; it continues to have the same hit rate. Our founding-era position of “smaller, more frequent, more responsive beats one big idea” has held up across the entire history of social.
Short-form video would eat the world (December 2013)
Our 2013 short-form content recap called the year a “golden year for short-form” and bet that brands learning to “connect with consumers during in-between moments” would carry that into 2014. The shape was right; we just had the wrong logo on the icon. Vine died in 2017. Six-second ads gave way to fifteen-second TikToks gave way to ninety-second Reels. The format won, but the platform changed.
Leadership statements would matter more than company statements (October 2014)
Buried in our 2015 planning post, we instructed brands to draft a “just in case” document outlining who would speak when leadership needed to take a public stance. A decade later, every brand crisis is a CEO-statement crisis, every quiet-quit is a vibes story about the founder, and every IPO comes attached to a personality. We were six years early to a CEO-as-spokesperson world.
Marketers with a psychology background would matter more than marketers with anything else (October 2014)
We nailed this with our 2015 planning post. The shift from demographics to psychographics, from “woman, 35” to “the sort of person who buys a sleep tracker and then resents it,” is now the default vocabulary for the entire industry. The post called this years before it was a meeting topic for most clients.
Absurdist humor would outperform safe brand humor (December 2014)
In our Top 10 Predictions for 2015 we wrote that brands were starting to win with ridiculous, swing-for-the-bizarre creative—“posts get more attention and engagement than subtle humor.” The decade since brought Wendy’s, Duolingo, Ryanair, MoonPie, and Steak-umm, a six-pack of brand absurdists at full tilt. We called the lane.
Brands should step back from Twitter (December 2022)
Our 2023 predictions said: “We don’t suggest heavily investing your time or resources into a Twitter profile for at least the first half of the year.” In 2026 that call looks even better than it did. The only honest hedge is the one we still tell every client: be there for customer service. People will still tweet at you with a complaint, and answering that complaint is still the cheapest, most defensible reason to keep a presence on the platform. The bigger story—that Twitter was no longer worth a dedicated content investment—was right then and is more right now. (Compare and contrast with our 2019 “Why We Still Love Twitter”.)
The Hall of Shame
Predictions that aged like milk
Google+ as a “helpful tool”, not a Facebook rival (2014)
In February 2014 we published “5 Reasons Brands Should Be Using Google+”. Ten months later we doubled down in our 2015 Top 10: “In 2015, instead of thinking of Google+ as a Facebook rival, start thinking of it as a helpful tool that increases presence, not social chatter.” Google+ shut down in 2019. We hold no grudges; ideas come and go. But this is a repeated prediction that aged twice as badly as a single one would have.
Periscope and Meerkat as the future of live (2015)
In “Why Use Live Streaming Apps Periscope and Meerkat?” (October 2015) we made the case that the live-streaming-apps category was the next big thing in social. Both apps are dead; Periscope shuttered in 2021 and Meerkat pivoted, then disappeared. We were right that livestreaming would become important, but we were wrong about which platform would lead the way
Snapchat Spectacles, the wearable camera (2016)
In November 2016, when Snap launched Spectacles via vending machines around New York, we wrote “Should You Buy Snapchat Spectacles? The Likeable Media Edition,” a survey of our team’s reactions. Several of us said we’d wait three to five hours in line for a pair. Snap took an estimated $40 million writedown on unsold Spectacles inventory the next year. Two later versions came and went. We were not alone in our enthusiasm—every credible tech outlet got this one wrong—but we wrote it on this blog with our names on it.
Stories as the future of social media (2019)
In “Are Stories the Future of Social Media?” we made the case that the entire social feed was about to become a Story. The opposite happened. Snapchat itself is now a small share of total Stories consumption; Instagram Stories are pushed for sharing, not feed; and TikTok’s vertical video format ate most of the cultural oxygen. Stories were a product, not a future.
Social audio, especially Clubhouse (2021)
We were very, very bullish on social audio. We published “So, What’s the Deal with Clubhouse?” in January 2021, Dave Kerpen’s “Generational POVs: Clubhouse” in May, and “How Vistaprint Found Its Voice on Clubhouse” in October—right around the time the platform started to stall. Three posts on Clubhouse in nine months is a level of commitment that, in retrospect, was earned by approximately none of the data. Clubhouse downloads went from 9.6 million a month at peak to under one million a quarter later. The pattern—audio platforms swelling during sit-still moments and receding when life moves again—was clearer in real time than we wrote it. Twitter Spaces, Spotify Greenroom, Discord stage channels: all the audio bets of 2021 settled into the same outcome.
NFTs as a permanent shift in artist economics (April 2021)
Our NFT explainer didn’t go full crypto-evangelist, but it did frame NFTs as something that “could fundamentally change the way artists profit off of their own work.” NFT trading volume cratered roughly 95% from its 2022 peak. A few artists kept the upside. Most didn’t.
It’s Complicated
The asterisk section
Hyper-targeting (right, then mostly wrong)
In our Top 10 Predictions for 2015 we begged marketers to stop asking for things to “go viral” and bet they would shift to hyper-targeting on Facebook ads instead. We were right about the early mood. We were wrong about the long arc.
Two things happened. iOS 14.5 and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency scrambled the targeting graph for everyone outside Google’s walled garden. And separately, the platforms pivoted hard toward machine-learning-driven “broad” targeting (Advantage+, Performance Max, smart bidding, etc.) where the algorithm picks the audience and the marketer picks the budget. The granular hyper-targeted approach we predicted in 2014 has been growing more niche steadily for years, not just since 2021. The “go viral” era ended; what replaced it was less the spreadsheet of demographic combos we imagined and more a black box that punishes you for trying to over-specify the audience. Half-credit, at best.
Live streaming wouldn’t stick post-pandemic (July 2021)
Our “which pandemic trends will stick” post said live streaming would return to its pre-pandemic levels. Half right. Twitch grew and TikTok Live became a real live-shopping channel in the US, a much bigger one in China. The miss was on magnitude, not direction—the lesson is to never bet against a behavior that already has a natural home in entertainment categories before it has a natural home in commerce.
Two Patterns That Repeat
1. Every year is the year of video.
We declared 2015 the year of video. We re-declared it in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2022. The honest read is that video has been winning steadily for a decade and the “year of” framing is a tic, not a forecast. When a trend has been correct for ten years running, it is structural, and structural calls aren’t predictions.
2. AR/VR is always next year.
In our 2022 conversation with Honey Cantrell she said it best: “I’m always fascinated with VR/AR news because I do see those technologies shaping the digital communities of our future.” Always. Fascinated. Future. We’ve been writing some version of that sentence since 2014. Apple Vision Pro has not changed the curve materially. The right way to think about VR/AR predictions is as a recurring beat, not a turning point—at least as of now.
What 16 Years Tell Us
The 2014 quote at the top of this post is our most important prediction and best reflects how we think as an agency. If there’s a lesson here, it’s not that predictions should be perfect, it’s that strategies should be adaptable. Getting a platform wrong is rarely what hurts; refusing to adjust when the landscape changes is. So we’ll keep making forecasts, keep testing our assumptions, and keep holding ourselves accountable when the results come in. It won’t be another three years before we dust off a fresh batch of predictions and see which ones deserve a victory lap—and which ones belong in the Hall of Shame.
Looking to discuss the big picture of social and how it relates to your brand? Get in touch.
