Erin Storm || VP Social
I started my career in PR when social media was still the shiny new thing everyone was trying to figure out.
Back then, the job was pretty simple: get the brand on Facebook, post a photo, write a caption, and maybe convince someone in the room that this “social media thing” was worth paying attention to.
Fast forward to now, and social is not just where brands post. It is where people discover what to buy, decide what to trust, get entertained, find community, fall into rabbit holes and kill time when they should absolutely be sleeping.
And yet, somehow, the industry still loves to treat social like a channel.
Too often, social is still viewed as the place where the campaign gets distributed after the real idea has already been made. It is where the TV spot gets resized, the key visual gets cropped and the “social extensions” show up somewhere near the end of the deck.
That mindset is outdated.
Social is no longer sitting neatly at one point in the funnel. It is shaping the entire brand experience, from discovery and consideration to influence, trust, commerce, culture, customer service, community and loyalty.
That means the question can no longer be, “What should we post?”
The better question is, “How do ideas earn attention, build trust and keep moving in a social-first world?”
This is not a list of platform updates or algorithm hacks. It is a look at the bigger shifts reshaping how people discover, engage, buy and believe, and what those shifts now demand from brands.
Shift 1: Social got less social
People are not opening social just to see what their friends had for dinner anymore. They are opening it to disappear into the feed.
The data makes that undeniable. Over the past decade, fewer people say they use social to keep up with friends, meet new people, or share opinions. More say they use it to follow their favorite creators and fill spare time. On TikTok, many users saw more than 100,000 videos in just six months. This is not simply checking in anymore. That is full-blown media consumption.
And on Facebook, a platform that was literally built on connecting friends and family, tells the same story. Unconnected reach jumped from 17.6% in 2024 to 41% in Q4 2025, while friend reach fell from 30% to 14%.
For brands, the takeaway is clear: your audience is no longer defined by who follows you. It is defined by whether your content earns a place in the feed.
Shift 2: The feed is a chaos factory
Brands are no longer competing only with other brands in their category. They are competing with everything the algorithm thinks someone might care about in that moment, from a game highlight or creator hot take to a random video they somehow watch six times.
I love a visual Rachel Karten shared through her newsletter, Link in Bio, because it captures how dramatically campaign distribution has changed. The old model moved in a straight line: teaser, launch, announcement, behind-the-scenes, influencer, employee and sustain content, all organized around one key moment. That worked when feeds were chronological and people generally saw content when brands posted it.
Today, ideas move through a network. A campaign can surface through the brand account, creators, employees, podcasts, earned media, comments, screenshots, reshares or communities. Sometimes those secondary expressions travel further than the original launch.
The goal is no longer simply to publish a campaign in the right order. It is to create enough compelling entry points for the idea to keep moving. This is also why social thinking is becoming bigger than social. Social teams have spent years navigating fragmented attention, nonlinear distribution, creator ecosystems and cultural nuance. Increasingly, that is not channel strategy. It is brand strategy.
Shift 3: Entertainment is being rebuilt around social behavior
For years, social platforms borrowed from traditional entertainment. Now traditional entertainment is borrowing from social.
Disney+ is investing more in short-form after its Verts feed reportedly drove deeper engagement. Netflix launched a mobile short-form feed and a feature that lets viewers save 15-second clips. Google TV is bringing personalized YouTube Shorts to the home screen. The rise of microdramas helps explain why. Audiences are getting increasingly comfortable discovering stories through vertical, episodic and algorithmic formats.
At the same time, social creative is moving upmarket. Many are calling it “Instagram Premium”: higher-production, more cinematic content that still feels native to the feed. Brands like DSW, Burberry, Tory Burch and Nike are creating work that feels more like a mini film, trailer or documentary than a typical social post.
The key is that social-first does not have to mean lo-fi. It means the idea is built for how people watch, share and engage. That is what makes organic social so exciting right now. A brand with 250 followers can still reach 1 million people organically if the work earns its way into the feed.
When brands fund braver creative, make content people genuinely want to share, and stop treating platform best practices like rigid rules, that is usually where the best work starts. Social cannot remain the final stop for campaign cutdowns. It needs to shape the idea earlier.
Shift 4: Expertise needs distribution
Expertise used to live primarily in places brands controlled, including websites, white papers, sales decks, research reports and PDFs that took six months to produce and six people actually read.
That model is breaking down.
Meltwater analyzed 9.5 million citations across AI-generated answers in B2B categories and found that LinkedIn was the second most cited platform, behind YouTube. That alone should change how every brand thinks about thought leadership. Buyers, journalists, peers and AI systems are learning from videos, social posts, newsletters, community discussions, creators and individual experts, not only corporate websites.
Expertise can no longer exist exclusively inside a gated PDF. Brands need to break their thinking into distinct, useful ideas and distribute them across the places where people and machines are already looking for answers.
The brands that become known for something will not necessarily be the ones with the most expertise. They will be the ones that make their expertise easiest to discover, understand, reference, and share. A point of view without distribution is ultimately still an internal document.
Shift 5: The old influencer model is losing relevance
Influencer marketing is not dead, but the old model is getting tired.
The traditional approach was relatively straightforward: find someone with a large following, pay for a post and count the impressions. Today, follower count is losing ground to trust, specificity, creative ability, and conversion potential.
Brands are becoming less interested in renting generalized reach and more interested in accessing a creator’s relationship with a particular community. That requires a more sophisticated evaluation process.
Instead of asking only how many followers someone has, brands need to understand why an audience trusts that creator, what role the creator plays in the community, and whether they can make content people genuinely want to watch. They also need to determine whether the creator’s work can perform beyond their existing following.
Most importantly, brands need to be clear about the job they are hiring the creator to do. Distribution, creative development and borrowed credibility are different sources of value. They should not be briefed, compensated or measured as though they are interchangeable.
Shift 6: Creator content is becoming paid media
Influencer marketing spending is still growing. eMarketer projects that U.S. brands will spend $13.7 billion on influencer marketing by 2027. The more meaningful shift, however, is happening around amplification. eMarketer also forecasts that U.S. spending to amplify creator content will match creator sponsored-content revenue at roughly $14.15 billion in 2027 and surpass it in 2028.
That changes the role creator marketing plays inside the broader media plan.
For years, the primary challenge was finding the right creator. Now the job is to find the right creator, develop the right concept, negotiate the right usage and determine how the work will be distributed across organic and paid environments.
The creator fee is only one part of the investment. The content itself needs to be treated as an adaptable creative asset that can be tested, amplified, sequenced, retargeted and evaluated against business outcomes.
Shift 7: The feed is becoming the store
Social used to be where discovery happened, while the transaction happened somewhere else.
Estimates vary depending on how social commerce is defined, but the direction is clear. The global market is already measured in the trillions and is projected to grow significantly through 2030. TikTok Shop alone is forecast to surpass $20 billion in annual sales and continue climbing.
The takeaway is not that every brand needs to open a TikTok Shop tomorrow. It is that discovery, validation and conversion are increasingly happening inside the same environment.
The feed is becoming a storefront, search engine, recommendation engine, review section and checkout counter at the same time. This changes the role of creative. Product content cannot only explain what something is. It needs to generate desire, answer objections, demonstrate social proof and make the next action feel obvious.
Social commerce is not e-commerce with a social link added. It is a different purchase behavior, built around entertainment, creators, community proof and algorithmic discovery.
Shift 8: AI is turning paid social into a creative market
The biggest change in paid social is not simply better targeting. It is that AI is taking on more of the work involved in matching people, placements and creative.
Meta describes Andromeda as its next-generation ad-retrieval system, designed to select more relevant ads from a much larger pool of possible creative. Its newer recommendation systems are moving toward an increasingly detailed understanding of individual preferences and intent.
That has significant implications for creative strategy.
As platforms make more decisions about who sees what, the advertiser’s advantage increasingly comes from supplying the system with genuinely different ideas. That does not mean 20 minor variations of the same ad. It means distinct concepts with different hooks, tensions, formats, visual worlds, voices, use cases and reasons to believe.
A new headline is not necessarily a new creative idea. Neither is a cropped version of the same asset or a different call to action attached to an otherwise identical execution.
Paid social is becoming a creative marketplace. The brands that win will not simply have the largest budgets. They will have the strongest systems for producing, learning from and iterating genuinely different creative ideas.
Shift 9: Community is becoming infrastructure
Community used to be difficult for brands to see. It happened inside group chats, comment threads, Facebook Groups, Discord servers, private messages, subreddits and niche forums. And now, that behavior is becoming more visible and more influential.
Meta has continued investing in AI-powered search across Facebook Groups, positioning years of community conversations as a source of searchable knowledge. Reddit, meanwhile, reported more than 126 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2026 and describes its archive of more than 25 billion posts and comments as one of the internet’s largest information sources.
Reddit’s growth makes sense. People have spent years adding “Reddit” to the end of searches because they want the unvarnished version. Best stroller Reddit. Best CRM Reddit. Best running shoes Reddit.
They are not simply looking for information. They are looking for information shaped by people’s experience.
Community is no longer just a brand-engagement tactic. It is becoming part of the discovery and decision-making infrastructure. The opportunity for brands is not to invade every conversation or manufacture fake participation. It is to listen, identify the questions people actually have and become genuinely useful inside the ecosystems where trust already exists.
Shift 10: Human perspective became premium
AI has made content radically easier to produce. It has not necessarily made content easier to care about.
The feed is already filling with synthetic videos, interchangeable captions, automated comments and content that is technically competent but emotionally empty. As production becomes more accessible, recognizably human qualities become more valuable.
Taste, judgment, specificity, cultural fluency, lived experience and a clear point of view are becoming meaningful differentiators. AI can help generate options, but it cannot determine which ideas are actually worth pursuing. It can replicate the conventions of good content, but it cannot guarantee that the content contains an original thought.
This is the tension every platform and brand is now navigating. Everyone wants the efficiency of AI, but no one wants the feed to feel like it was generated by a committee of robots.
The strategic opportunity is not to avoid AI. That would be unrealistic and shortsighted. It is to use AI to make the work faster without allowing it to make the work flatter.
As content becomes easier to manufacture, perspective becomes the scarcity. The premium will not be on production alone. It will be on discernment.
What brands should remember
Brands are no longer the center of the conversation. Algorithms shape what gets seen. Creators shape taste. Communities shape trust. Customers shape the story in public.
The brands that win will know how to participate without trying to control every outcome. They will stop treating social as the final execution layer and start treating it as the place where discovery, entertainment, reputation, commerce, and culture are being shaped in real time.
They will build for the feed, bring creators in earlier, and stop confusing more versions with more ideas.
Because in a world where almost anyone can make more content, volume is not the advantage. The advantage is having a sharper point of view, stronger storytelling, smarter distribution and a much better answer to the only question the audience really cares about: Why should I care?