Coming into 2026, I’ve been thinking a lot about where social actually rewards attention versus where brands keep spending out of habit.
The bets I’m making this year share a theme: stop treating social like a broadcast channel. The mechanics that work right now reward something different: recurring presence, real relationships, and showing up where conversations already are.
Here are the two I’m putting my chips on.
Bet #1: Outbound engagement, paired with social listening
Most brands only play defense. They respond to comments on their own posts. They reply to DMs. They monitor mentions. That’s all good, but it’s reactive.
The bigger opportunity is sitting in conversations that aren’t tagged to your brand at all.
A few examples of what I mean.
When we audited Cold-EEZE (a cold and flu remedy you’ve seen on Walgreens shelves) we found something nobody had flagged. Every day, people post on Instagram about being sick. Hundreds of them.
They’re not tagging Cold-EEZE, but they’re talking about exactly the problem the brand solves. And no one from the brand was showing up.
That’s an open door, and most brands don’t walk through it.
On the Carnival account, one of our community managers found a video of a guy breakdancing on one of their ships. He hadn’t tagged Carnival. She noticed he was from Texas and left one comment: “Holding it down for Texas.” Six words that took maybe 45 seconds of work.
That comment got over 11,000 likes.
You can’t buy that kind of engagement with ad spend.
The reason I’m doubling down on this in 2026 is that social listening tools have finally caught up. We can systematically surface conversations where brands belong—at scale—and then put humans on top of them to engage with judgment, not scripts.
Most agencies will tell you to avoid this work. It’s hard to scale, hard to track in a dashboard, and requires actual humans paying attention.
Which is exactly why it works.
Bet #2: Series-led creator content, not one-off promo posts
The default creator strategy still looks the same as it did five years ago: pay a creator, get a sponsored post, measure the impressions. Move on.
That model is getting tired. Audiences see it coming. A one-off “I tried this product” video lands as wallpaper between everything else in the feed.
What’s working now is series.
Same creator, same brand, recurring format. Maybe it’s a weekly check-in. Maybe it’s a multi-part build. Maybe it’s a season of episodes following a story arc.
A series compounds in ways single posts don’t. The algorithm rewards completion signals, so once viewers watch one episode, the platform pushes them the next.
And the creator’s audience starts to associate your brand with their world, instead of an interruption to it. And you get to tell something that resembles a story instead of a 30-second pitch.
This is a bet because it’s harder than the old model. It requires longer creator partnerships. More upfront creative thinking. Slower to show ROAS. Most brands won’t have the patience for it.
The ones that do will be building actual audiences in 2026, not just renting attention from other people’s.
Both bets come down to the same shift: social rewards brands that show up like they belong, not brands that show up to sell.
That’s where I’m putting my chips. What’s your biggest bet for 2026?
