The most innovative companies in social media for 2025
- Veronica Irwin
- May 11
- 10 min read
Fast Company’s 2025 list of the most innovative companies in social media includes Duolingo, Bluesky, the Boston Celtics, Yelp, and more.
03/18/2025
This past year has been one of revivals. Low-rise jeans are back in style, digital cameras are the new favorite way to filter photos, and several cellphone companies even pushed us to buy flip phones again. The trend has been true for social media, too.
Partiful, a revamped e-vite platform, quickly became the go-to way to organize special events. Polyamory-focused dating app Feeld used the way so many people are reimagining romantic relationships as inspiration to make the dating app format more flexible and fun. Strava rethought the run club, transforming the typically local, in-person activity into one which allows users to connect with their friends and favorite creators across the country. Microblogging site Bluesky finally filled the bird-shaped hole in our hearts, and Planoly made social media monetization as much an aesthetic pursuit as a money-minded one.
Other companies harnessed social media to expand their reach in novel, unexpected ways. Sesame Workshop launched a social media campaign that pulls at adults’ heartstrings. Pinterest has shown the world that diversity has a place in the “vision” inspiring our vision boards. Yelp, long the go-to spot for consumers to evaluate and review the companies and services they use, launched a suite of features to meet similar needs for business customers. The Boston Celtics turned basketball promotion into art.
Then there’s Duolingo, which had an absurdist take on social media that not only catapulted the language-learning app into the mainstream discourse but turned digital marketing as a whole on its head. Cómo se dice, “Glow Up?”
1. DUOLINGO
For finding a common language
Over the past year, the Duolingo owl, known as Duo, has transformed from an app icon to an internet main character, commanding attention from all corners of the digital world thanks to the company’s loose and playful marketing. The company’s “dead bird” stunt in February—where the owl icon on users’ phones appeared dead with social media posts suggesting he had been killed by a Cybertruck—had fans, celebrities, and even other brands jumping on social media to make sure he was coming back. Duo and the other mascot-like characters in the owl’s multiverse keep popping up on TikTok (16.7 million followers), YouTube (5.8 million), Instagram (4.4 million), and even LinkedIn (690,000) in offbeat, slightly unhinged videos and comments. Today, Duo has layers of lore and motivations, which build him into a compelling figure on socials, in the app, in brand partnerships, and even in the real world.
Duo is taking flight just as the language learning app reaches new heights. It’s branching out beyond language learning and applying its popular streak-based gamification model to other subjects, like math and music. And the company is leaning into generative AI through a partnership with OpenAI, which has allowed it to add an AI-powered subscription tier, create new course content in less time, and launch a video call feature that allows users to engage an animated chatbot in a “spontaneous, free-flowing conversation” in whatever language they’re learning. The chatbot takes the form of an eye-rolling emo girl named Lily, a character in the Duo universe. Duolingo has more than 116 million monthly active users and 9.5 million paying subscribers. It ended 2024 with $748 million in revenue, up 41% year over year.
Read more about Duolingo, honored as No. 10 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025.
2. BLUESKY
For freeing social media from the algorithm
Did you partake in the great “Xodus” of 2024? If you did, you probably already know about Bluesky. The “Xodus,” or mass migration of users leaving Elon Musk’s platform X, has brought thousands of new users to X look-alike Bluesky, a company originally developed in-house at Twitter by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey starting in 2019 and formally launched in 2021. The platform, which had only 215,000 users at the start of this year, had welcomed 25 million users by the end of 2024, and has more than 31 million today.
The app was created to be a “decentralized” microblogging site, giving users the power to make the changes they want to see. They can take advantage of the nearly two dozen choices at their fingertips to hide, warn about, or enable posts that contain things like sexual content, threats, impersonations, and even rudeness. Developers, too, can use Bluesky’s underlying technology to create customized moderation services for users. Today there are more than 50,000 third-party, niche-specific feeds on Bluesky that users can adopt and scroll through. A developer in Berlin is currently building an Instagram competitor called Flashes.
Bluesky’s features appeal to people disenchanted with the way Musk has altered X’s rules and regulations to support his own beliefs. A Bluesky offering that allows users to follow or block entire lists of people has won fans, and users also appreciate how easy it is to build their followings on the platform—or rebuild them, as the case may be.
Read more about Bluesky, honored as No. 17 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025.
3. BOSTON CELTICS
For translating an NBA title run for the internet
When the Boston Celtics won the 2024 NBA title last June, it marked the storied franchise’s first championship since 2008. But as the players were on the court racking up wins, off the court the digital and social media team was skillfully scoring hearts and minds far beyond Beantown. From artful highlight edits on TikTok that resemble short films or music videos, to the first-ever episodic sports docuseries exclusively on social, the Celtics showed what championship-level digital and social content looks like—and racked up almost 1 billion video views along the way.
The social team succeeded by loosening the creative reins and taking some chances. Last year, the team launched Los Celtics, a Spanish-language social and digital feed, with a goal of growing it to 25,000 followers; it ended up with more than 150,000. The team has also launched a Portuguese feed, and has a third, yet-to-be-revealed, non-English content feed in the works. The crown jewel of the past year for head of marketing and content Nicole Federico was the All In: The Boston Celtics docuseries, produced in partnership with FanDuel. Not only did it open up new avenues for commercial partners, but it pushed the team to think beyond its previous capabilities to produce a show that brought fans closer to Celtics players. “It was really raw and really real,” says Federico. “People found value in seeing something like that when they’re used to seeing funny stuff of guys walking down the arrival runway, and quick-hitting social stuff. To see those deeper conversations, feelings, and emotions was huge.”
4. PINTEREST
For turning collages into a site-wide group project
Pinterest has long been the holy grail mood board platform. But this year, Pinterest released features that ensure it can showcase anyone’s vision. “Body type ranges,” an AI-powered tool that allows users to filter results for different body shapes, compliments existing filters for skin tone and hair pattern. Refining content using these tools doesn’t only make users feel validated and part of a community—it also makes the platform more useful for professionals, such stylists putting together looks for a specific client, or makeup artists working on a new foundation campaign. Creators who have a unique look are taking to online forums to share how much they love it, too, saying that it’s helping them get discovered more easily. Users taking advantage of the body type filters had a 66% higher rate of engagement per session than those who didn’t, while monthly searches filtered by skin tone doubled from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024.
Pinterest also introduced a “collage” format this year, allowing users to collaborate on each other’s images and download immersive videos to post across social platforms. The format has been such a hit that Instagram launched a copycat feature. All of this has paid off handsomely, with 2024 revenue up 19% year over year to $3.6 billion and monthly active users growing 11% year over year to 553 million.
5. PARTIFUL
For bringing party planning into the social media age
Emails are for work things, and Facebook is for family. The way we use various social media platforms has become increasingly specific, and yet there was no perfect spot for planning parties. Partiful, launched in 2020, fills that void, enabling party planners and attendees to direct-message each other, comment on events, share photos, and “boop” each other (a feature eerily similar to Facebook’s “poke”).
Now Partiful is seeing exponential growth. The company reports that user activity was up 600% in 2024, following the release of a slew of new features. Users can now customize event invitations with a variety of fun and colorful design templates, including animations, cover images, backgrounds, and fonts. They can poll their guests to figure out what time is best for everyone, so that their parties don’t flop just because they picked the wrong Friday night. And just in case an attendee forgot to get their new bestie’s phone number before heading home, they can still easily connect via the platform. Plus, users can now exchange party pics easily—no text thread required.
6. YELP
For facilitating a range of vital services
Yelp has for years been known as the go-to destination for restaurant, shopping, nightlife, and entertainment reviews. In recent years, the company expanded far beyond this realm into services. Last year, it ventured even further. In July, the company launched a version of its successful nine-year-old “Request a Quote” feature—which lets business customers solicit estimates, communicate with service providers through text and video, archive and sort old projects, and even engage with professionals via SMS in one easy-to-use platform—to help multi-location brands with lead generation.
Meanwhile, the company has bolstered its service-related features for customers as well. “Request a Quote” is now available through Apple Maps, making it effortless for people to begin the complex research process involved in projects like electrical work, plumbing, or other renovations. “Yelp Guaranteed,” which launched nationwide in July 2024, gives customers up to $2,500 back if the work that was done wasn’t up to par, making Yelp-backed services more reliable than those that users may find on their own.
These examples are just a fraction of the 80 total features and updates Yelp implemented in 2024, which also include AI-powered business summaries, third party platform integrations, stitched videos, and Yelp Assistant, a chat assistant that connects consumers with pros. Request-a-Quote projects rose nearly 25% in 2024, primarily as a result of improvements to the request flow, with 30% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. Yelp’s annual net revenue increased by 6% in 2024, to $1.41 billion.
7. SESAME WORKSHOP
For asking us how we’re feeling
Sesame Workshop is not a social media company, but the nonprofit has used social media in novel ways this year. It started in January 2024, when Elmo tweeted, “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?” The post went viral, accruing more than 222 million views on X to date, and prompted a surprisingly vulnerable discussion about mental health. Public figures ranging from Chance the Rapper to President Biden weighed in amid the replies.
Sesame Workshop maximized the moment by expanding what was supposed to be just one post into an adorable mental-health-focused series in which various muppets ask open-ended questions akin to those you might get from your therapist. The characters also sit down with celebrities in touching (and similarly viral) videos, such as one in which Elmo chats with Andrew Garfield about losing his mother. According to the nonprofit, the viral campaign has reached more than 330 million people.
8. PLANOLY
For forging an Amazon partnership that improves creators’ lives as well as their livelihoods
Planoly has long been the go-to app for managing social media content. It is known for its easy-to-use planner, which helps coordinate all the colors and textures a creator needs to get a perfectly aesthetic Instagram feed. But over time, Planoly has expanded from a simple feed-planning app to a robust social media management platform, allowing users to schedule their posts and sync them with their business strategy across Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, and Pinterest.
In 2024, the company significantly simplified monetization options for creators by beginning to integrate Amazon links—by far the most popular way for influencers to make money from their followings—into the planning process. Instead of externally linking to Amazon, creators will soon be able to auto-post directly to Amazon Posts and watch their product suggestions reach shoppers through organic shopping feeds. Planoly also in 2024 acquired Snipfeed, a tool which allows creators to aggregate merch into an online store, allowing creators to unlock even more revenue streams. As a result, Planoly’s mobile app usage grew more than 600% in 2024. Snipfeed users earned 25% more per order than they did in 2023, with the top 10 creators drawing in over $1 million in earnings through the tool.
9. FEELD
For understanding that relationships can be multifaceted and making life safer for the polyamorous
Ten-year-old app Feeld has had a large cultural impact over the past year despite being powered by a small, 100-person team. The only truly successful dating app for polyamorous people and play partners, Feeld manages to make fringe romance feel accessible, safe, and welcoming.
The app has achieved snowball-like momentum this year because of an innovative marketing strategy and creative social features. Feeld even collaborated on and helped produce a 2024 off-Broadway play about social media influencers experimenting sexually called Pretty Little Lives that exposed new audiences to the platform, which appears in the play. The aim was to make people feel less like they’re falling for a marketing ploy and more like they’re joining a community. Additionally, a new feature called “Constellation” allows users to link multiple partners to their account, encouraging network-effect growth. An app like Feeld can also attract a certain type of creep as well, but Feeld has devised an impressive holistic trust and safety approach that utilizes unique controls to remove fake and predatory accounts successfully without dinging users for expressing themselves.
People who utilize the Constellation feature are notably more engaged, sending and receiving approximately 15% more likes and making over 20% more connections. Altogether, the app has seen 50% year-over-year growth. Users are also getting more out of the app, connecting with others 25% more than before.
10. STRAVA
For exercising strong new safety and social muscles
Outdoor fitness tracking app Strava could have let organic growth do the work this past year. Fitness influencers are more popular than ever, and “Strava influencers,” who cross-post their runs and bike rides to other social platforms, have grown tremendously too. But Strava took advantage of that organic growth in significant ways in 2024. It introduced “creator challenges” that serve as prompts to encourage creators to engage with their audiences. The “Move with Kate Mackz” challenge, for example, had users competing to win a bib to run in the New York City Marathon. The company also smoothed out its sharing functionality, especially over messages, making it easier to brag about workouts with friends.
The company also made key changes to keep its users safe. People can see which tracks nearby are used most at night, for example, if they want to stay in a more populated area after dusk. The company also instituted a “quick edit” feature that made it easier to make workouts private after posting, and disconnected data sharing with third-party apps that would show that data to more than the individual user. App usage has increased 26% year over year, according to Business of Apps.
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