CEE media market 2025 – social media

Social platforms continued to reshape media consumption and advertising across CEE in 2025, with short-form video, creator-led content and performance increasingly defining the social media environment.

Video became a particularly important format. In Romania, TikTok reached an estimated 8.7 million adult users and became a mainstream channel for both content consumption and advertising. Short-form video on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts increasingly served as a source of news, entertainment and product discovery, particularly among younger audiences. Advertisers also moved from simply building audiences towards more efficient and measurable activity. Slovenia reported that social media advertising had reached a more mature stage, with greater focus on performance and optimisation. Creator-led content became increasingly integrated into media plans, while platform saturation and rising costs reinforced the need for efficiency. The dominance of the major global platforms remained clear. In Slovenia, around 65% of digital advertising investment went to Meta and Alphabet, highlighting the continued importance of large walled-garden ecosystems and automated buying. Social platforms also became increasingly connected to commerce and data. The experts point to growing social commerce and the wider shift towards first-party data as brands seek more personalised and measurable advertising experiences. Overall, 2025 marked a shift from social media as primarily an audience-growth channel towards a more mature, video-first and performance-driven part of the media mix.