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Is your new year’s resolution all about scaling back your social media habit? The Duchess of Sussex, it seems, will be taking the opposite approach in 2025. On 1 January, Meghan unveiled a brand new Instagram account, complete with a straightforward but somehow slightly grandiose mononymic username, @meghan. And in doing so, she appeared to inaugurate the next stage in her post-royal career. Welcome to Meghan Markle’s influencer era, which will see the Duchess taking us behind the scenes of her Montecito life, not just on social media but also with a glossy Netflix show that will “reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming”.
Her debut post, on her first personal account in six years, was a brief, ever-so-casual video clip, which we can probably assume was workshopped by a whole load of social media experts throughout the last quarter of 2024 (an Instagram launch is no trivial matter). It shows Meghan with her luxuriant hair flowing, clad in a loose white shirt and light jeans. She jogs barefoot towards the sea with all the joie de vivre of a quirky romcom heroine in an uplifting montage sequence, but stops short of the water. Then she bends down to write “2025” in the sand with her finger, a moment of perfectly rehearsed spontaneity; she grins, before jogging off once more.
If this seems like a relatively low-key way to announce a big Instagram comeback, that’s entirely the point. Meghan is a savvy enough operator to know that on social media, authenticity (or at least, some curated, glossy version of authenticity) is king. This short video snippet feels worlds away from the more staid official “content” she’d have had to put out to the world had she and her husband Prince Harry remained part of the royal family: the photos of handshakes with dignitaries, the earnest to-camera addresses, the formal portraits… you know the drill. Instead, it says, or tries to say: “I’m like you, just with a designer wardrobe and better access to the California coastline.” It’s aspirational without being too much. A bit smug, but not so much as to alienate its viewers. It was a perfect way to roll out the red carpet for her big Netflix launch, giving us a hint of the sort of tone we can expect.
The duchess’s inevitable pivot to influencing makes a lot of sense. It comes after a long string of lacklustre ventures from the no-longer-royal couple. There was the foray into podcasting, then the parting of ways with audio giant Spotify. Prior to the announcement of With Love, Meghan’s launch, their much-vaunted Netflix deal had resulted in a hotly discussed tell-all documentary and a handful of projects that were far less warmly received. Then came the protracted launch of Meghan’s lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard, which seemed to boil down to an(other) Instagram launch, a few jars of strawberry jam being sent out to famous friends, then radio silence.
In December, the American site The Cut, which Meghan previously selected to publish one of her first big post-Megxit interviews in 2022, bluntly declared that “Harry and Meghan’s projects can’t stop flopping”.
In other words, it was about time Meghan shifted gear, ideally to a field in which she already had a strong track record. Her two main options, then, were acting and social media. Acting feels out of the question thanks to her outsize fame: she is now far too recognisable to disappear into a role. The latter, meanwhile, moves faster, is more reliable, consistent and, let’s face it, has far fewer gatekeepers and presents fewer obstacles to success. It also goes hand in hand with the sort of upmarket lifestyle-based reality-ish show that she is set to launch.
What is Meghan’s social media “track record”, you ask? Long before she met Prince Harry, back when she was “that woman off of Suits”, Meghan was a dedicated Instagrammer, not just on her own personal account but as a way of promoting her lifestyle blog, The Tig. The now-defunct website was described by the duchess as “a hub for the discerning palate – those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion and beauty”; it was shut down in April 2017, a sign that her relationship with Harry was serious.
My former life as a women’s magazine journalist circa 2016 to 2018 (ie the pinnacle of Markle’s royal-adjacent years) meant that I spent an inordinate amount of time looking back at both The Tig’s account and Markle’s personal Instagram profile in order to glean little nuggets of insight about Prince Harry’s new love. I can therefore attest that Meghan was very good at Instagram (or, perhaps more accurately, very good at fulfilling what we wanted from Instagrammers at the time). She had an eye for a motivational quote, a piece of grid-worthy feminist street art, or a striking tablescape. She loved taking pictures of her food and her holidays. She had a penchant for wearing what I can only describe as “blogger hats”.
When she started dating Harry, though, her posts dried up, and she shut the account down for good in January 2018, shortly after the couple announced their engagement; later, they posted Instagram updates under the handle @sussexroyal, but stopped using it in 2020 when they announced their decision to leave the royal family.
Her natural Instagram aptitude won’t be the only factor underpinning this career move, though. As celebrities, Meghan and her husband occupy an unusual, perhaps unique space. They have left the royals well and truly behind them, but their profile and status are still largely contingent upon their links to Harry’s family. Hence their immediate post-royal projects – the Oprah interview! The Netflix doc! Harry’s wildly successful, scorched-earth autobiography! – focusing largely on dishing palace dirt (and doing so deliciously).
By now, though, we’ve all heard their story over and over again; at some point over the past couple of years, Prince Harry started to seem a bit like a very posh Ancient Mariner, destined to forever travel the world finding new opportunities to tell his tale of woe. Their royal years have been fully exhausted of any potential tell-all opportunities; there are probably very few bombshell anecdotes left in their arsenal. One potential way forward is to use that candour in a different way, by sharing (and possibly monetising) the day-to-day minutiae of their lives, sharing their present rather than their past. In a way, it would be the ultimate riposte to the royal family, who still like to keep the palace doors very much closed.
If she wants to succeed, she might have to rein in her inner millennial
So what will Meghan’s next step be, and what direction will her online persona take? With Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire reportedly on the wane, there might be a gap in the market for a celebrity lifestyle guru. Tabloids are already speculating that Meghan could earn around $1m (£810,000) for a sponsored post. If she wants to succeed, she might have to rein in her inner millennial. I’m not entirely sure Tig-style posting will cut it these days, as that modus operandi is probably a bit too “live, laugh, love” for the TikTok generation (we’re talking about the woman who posted a photo of two smiley-faced bananas hugging around the time that her relationship with Harry first became public knowledge).
She’ll also have to contend with the extra dose of criticism that opening your life up online inevitably invites: she’s already being told off for keeping the comments switched off on her video, a move that seems pretty sensible given that she has faced extensive and vicious trolling in the past. For every user who presses “follow” in good faith, you can guarantee there’ll be another who is only keeping tabs on her to build up more ammunition to attack her with. These are the sort of people who view everything Meghan does, like getting out of a car or wearing a short-sleeved dress, as some sort of devastating attack on “royal protocol”.
A “hate follow”, though, is still a follow, and even if people are checking in on Meghan’s posts in order to scrutinise them rather than straightforwardly celebrate them, she’ll still be able to capitalise on that obsession (platforms like Instagram and TikTok can’t differentiate between users who are following in good faith and those who are not). Social media offers the potential to make money from her detractors – it might just give Meghan the last laugh after all.
