The New Year is well underway as business leaders and observers look ahead at what’s to come for 2026
As part of our annual Three Trends series, we asked industry leaders to share their key takeaways.
Next, we speak with Aniket Shah – Co-founder & Business Head at Social Tweebs.
Aniket looks ahead to what the future holds in the coming year, reflects on a favorite trend from the past year, and shares his favorite campaign of 2025.
Looking Ahead:
What are three trends to look for in the coming year?
Influencer marketing in India is entering its maturity cycle. For years, expansion concealed inefficiency. Platform growth, creator abundance and algorithmic generosity allowed brands to equate activity with impact. That margin has narrowed. Doomscrolling has compressed attention into reflex.
Creator economics have shifted leverage. Distribution has fragmented across language, platform and professional ecosystems. Influence can no longer be managed as execution. It must be architected as an advantage.
Three structural forces are redefining the landscape:
1. Attention is engineered, not inherited
In an infinite feed, attention is not gradually built. It is instantly granted or denied. The opening moments of content now function as a cognitive filter. Relevance must be signaled immediately, not narrated into existence.
Aesthetic polish alone no longer suffices. Platforms reward behavioral friction.
Pause signals, rewatches, saves and dwell depth now determine amplification. In a doomscrolling environment, scroll resistance is the true performance metric.
For brands, this demands rigor. Creative must be calibrated for immediacy, cultural precision and contextual sharpness. Influence now begins at the micro-moment of interruption.
2. Creator leverage is recalibrating access
The emerging cohort of Indian creators operates with economic optionality. Revenue diversification across subscriptions, affiliate ecosystems, advisory models, communities and intellectual property has reduced dependency on brand partnerships.
This independence recalibrates power. Selectivity increases. Credibility compounds. Influence stabilizes.
The strongest partnerships will be built on narrative continuity across formats and platforms, not episodic activations.
For brands, the implication is clear. Follower volume is insufficient. Momentum is volatile. Durable authority is the strategic variable. The strongest partnerships will be built on narrative continuity across formats and platforms, not episodic activations.
Technology is accelerating this compounding effect. A single strategic insight can now proliferate across short-form, long-form, regional adaptations and platform-specific executions without dilution. Brands that embed into these ecosystems intelligently will benefit from cumulative credibility rather than transient visibility.
3. Influence is evolving into layered infrastructure
Influence in India is no longer confined to consumer-facing creators. It is expanding into systemic distribution layers.
On the consumer side, AI-enabled production and voice adaptation are enabling linguistic precision at scale. In a country defined by dialectal nuance, this is not a novelty. It is competitive insulation.
On the B2B side, employee-led content is emerging as authority infrastructure. Engineers, product leaders and founders are shaping consideration within buying committees through expertise-led narratives, particularly on LinkedIn. When amplified strategically, this becomes pipeline acceleration rather than social signaling.
- Human creators provide cultural fluency.
- Technology enables scalable localization.
- Employees embed institutional credibility.
When orchestrated cohesively, these layers create compounding influence.
The next phase of influencer marketing in India will not reward amplification alone. It will reward design discipline. In a doomscrolling economy, attention must be captured with precision. In a creator-led ecosystem, credibility must be respected. In a fragmented market, distribution must be intelligently layered. Influence is no longer a campaign lever. It is a structural capital.
Looking Back:
Your favorite trend of 2025:
My favourite theme of 2025 was the rise of beautifully irrational internet moments turning into mainstream cultural currency. A random truck driver clip would surface and within hours own the timeline. “Prashant Croissant” would distort pronunciation across the country. “Rs 10 ka biscuit kitne ka hai ji?” would become a national catchphrase without a media plan in sight. Nano Banana edits would miniaturise identities and flood feeds with collectible alter egos. None of this was engineered. That was precisely the point.
What fascinated me was how something completely unfiltered, almost accidental, could hijack collective attention mid-doomscroll and evolve into a participatory movement. These weren’t trends born in boardrooms. They were cultural glitches that the internet adopted, remixed, regionalised and amplified at scale. Snackable, screenshot-worthy, hyper-shareable and dangerously addictive.
2025 rewarded persona over polish, unpredictability over perfection. The content that travelled wasn’t the most aesthetic. It was the most interruptive. The most oddly specific. The kind that makes you pause, smirk and forward instantly. In a feed engineered for infinite scrolling, randomness became the ultimate retention strategy.
If you could sum up 2025 in one emoji:
🔁
If I had to sum up 2025 in one emoji, it would be 🔁
Because this was the year ideas didn’t just go viral. They looped.
A random line became a meme. The meme got remixed. The remix got reposted. And suddenly, the repost outperformed the original. Attention is compounded through repetition. For brands, relevance wasn’t about being first. It was about entering the loop at the right moment. In a doomscrolling economy, repetition built dominance. 🔁
One of your favorite campaigns of 2025:
One of our most defining campaigns in 2025 was launching Neurogum in India, a completely new category in a habit-driven market.
This was not an awareness play. It was perception engineering. When chewing gum is traditionally impulse-led, introducing it as a cognitive performance tool requires cultural decoding. We adopted a content first approach, using data & insights to identify relevant creators with rthe ight audiences within high focus cohorts such as fitness, founders, working professionals & performing art communities. Every narrative was a use case driven, built to feel intuitive rather than imported.
Instead of usual noise, we built contextual credibility. Highly relevant creators. Snackable, doomscroll-resistant content designed to compound across platforms.
Launching a new brand in India is not about reach alone. It is about earning mental availability through repetition, relevance and precision storytelling. Neurogum reinforced our core belief at Social Tweebs. New categories do not scale on volume. They scale on insight, narrative control and distribution intelligence.
What was your 2025 New Year’s Resolution, and did you keep it?
I have never been one for New Year’s resolutions. I believe in taking deliberate, incremental steps every day to sharpen my skills and expand my horizons. In 2025, AI captured my curiosity and I dedicated the year to exploring it deeply, learning, experimenting, and weaving it into my work wherever possible.
