🦅 Where to Bet Your Time in 2026

In this issue, you’ll find:

• How to win 2026 without setting a single goal

• News creators should know

• Get ready for Hypefury’s 7-Day Growth Challenge

Where to Bet Your Time in 2026

You cannot be everywhere. So I did the research. I looked at the data, the trends, and where the real opportunities are emerging.

Here are the three platforms that actually deserve your time this year.

1) Threads

Threads hit 400 million monthly active users and 150 million daily active users. It grew from 100M to 150M daily users in about 10 months, a 50% jump!

Meanwhile, 𝕏 sits at around 600 million monthly and 250 million daily. The gap is closing fast. Social Media Today predicts Threads will overtake 𝕏 in total users sometime in 2026.

Here is what makes Threads interesting right now: most creators are still ignoring it.

They are focused on 𝕏, TikTok, or YouTube. That means lower competition for the same eyeballs. Mark Zuckerberg reported a 10% increase in time spent on Threads in Q3 2025. The platform is getting stickier while attention from creators lags behind.

The success stories on Threads have not been written yet. And that is exactly why it is the opportunity.

What to do:

1. Claim your handle now if you have not already

2. Repurpose your best 𝕏 threads to Threads

3. Focus on conversation (reply to others, join discussions, do not just broadcast)

4. Use Hypefury to cross-post your best content without manual daily posting

2) LinkedIn

LinkedIn is no longer a job board. It is a creator platform.

1.1 billion members. Thought leadership posts get 6x more engagement than job-related content. And here is the stat that matters most: LinkedIn is responsible for roughly 80% of all B2B social media leads, with a 2.74% visitor-to-lead conversion rate (3 to 4 times higher than Facebook or 𝕏).

If you are a B2B creator, solopreneur, or thought leader, LinkedIn is not optional anymore.

Charlie Hills started posting on LinkedIn in January 2024 while still working a day job. Less than two years later, he reached 180K+ followers, quit the 9-to-5, built six-figure businesses, and partnered with top brands. His approach was simple: consistent posting and thought leadership content that actually said something.

What to do:

1. Post daily (consistency matters more than perfection)

2. Lead with opinions, not job updates

3. Use Hypefury to maintain a consistent LinkedIn presence alongside your other platforms

4. Treat LinkedIn like a content platform, not a resume

3) YouTube

YouTube is the only platform where content compounds. A video from two years ago can still drive traffic today. For creators thinking long-term, nothing else comes close.

2.74 billion monthly active users. But here is what most people get wrong about YouTube: they assume you need an existing audience to grow.

Today, YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes engagement over traditional view metrics. The platform analyzes over 1,000 signals per video. Every new upload gets a real shot at discovery, even if you are an absolute nobody online.

Having an audience helps. But one well-made video can break through regardless.

What to do:

1. Focus on long-form content (the monetization is significantly better)

2. Mix in Shorts to drive discovery, channels using both formats grow 41% faster

3. Prioritize watch time and engagement over views

4. Think in years, not weeks

The Wild Card

A new player could emerge in 2026 that cracks the code on integrating AI into social in a way that actually helps creators or improves the experience of the regular users. No one has figured this out yet. But someone will. Worth keeping an eye on the space.

Remember:

You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be in the right places, consistently. That is where the growth happens in 2026.

Anthropic Brings Claude Code's Power to Everyone With New Cowork Feature

Anthropic just launched Claude Cowork, a new general-purpose AI agent available to Max subscribers through the Claude Desktop app. The tool is essentially Claude Code repackaged with a friendlier interface and built-in filesystem sandboxing, making powerful automation accessible to non-developers. In testing, Simon Willison had it search through 46 draft blog posts, cross-reference them against his published articles, and identify which were closest to being ready for publication. While Anthropic warns users about prompt injection risks, the sandboxed environment offers more protection than running Claude Code with unrestricted permissions. This signals a new wave of general-purpose AI agents that Gemini and OpenAI will likely rush to match.

→ Find out more

Software Engineers Face an Identity Crisis as AI Takes Over the Keyboard

The latest wave of AI coding tools has crossed a critical threshold, with models like Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 now capable of generating nearly all the code that developers used to write by hand. Engineers who once prided themselves on typing out solutions are finding that prompting an AI agent gets the job done faster. The shift is forcing a rethinking of what makes a software engineer valuable, as skills like prototyping and language specialization become commoditized. Some developers are pushing code to production entirely from their phones, while others admit they no longer bother reading the code AI generates. The profession is undergoing a seismic transformation, and adapting quickly has become the new survival skill.

→ Find out more

Instagram Now Lets You Tell It What You Actually Want to Watch

Instagram is expanding its "Your Algorithm" feature to all English-speaking users worldwide, letting people manually add or remove topics that influence their Reels feed. The controls, accessible via a slider icon in Reels, also let users preview what types of videos fit each interest category. Users can even pick three top interests to guide their Reels experience for 2026. While the feature offers a sense of control, history suggests most people prefer to just scroll and let the algorithm do its thing.

→ Find out more

Join Hypefury’s 7-Day Growth Challenge

We’re organizing 7-Day Growth Challenges for all the major platforms:

• Threads

• LinkedIn

• Instagram

• 𝕏

• Bluesky

Let’s start 2026 with a blast!

Last poll: Which Platform Will Be the Best Place to Grow an Audience in 2026?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 𝕏 (28.57%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 LinkedIn (28.57%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ TikTok

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Instagram

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A new AI-native social media platform

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss some more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury