Meghan's influencer era will mean she has the last laugh

As the former royal launches a brand new Instagram account, Katie Rosseinsky looks at why it could be the way forward for the duchess, whose social media credentials are pretty sound

- Katie Rosseinsky

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.

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.