Social in 2026: Why attention will be the battleground that brands can’t ignore

Every year, social media shifts just enough to keep marketers on their toes. But 2026 feels different. But the change on the horizon for 2026 feels more fundamental. It’s less about keeping up with platform trends, and more about a complete rethink of how social proves its value. 

For the first time in a long time, senior marketers are treating social as a channel that should prove its value just as robustly as search, TV or any other major investment. And that shift is already changing the conversations we’re having with clients. 

Because the real question for 2026 isn’t “How do we get more impressions?” It’s: “How do we earn and measure attention?” 

The end of surface-level success 

For years, the industry has largely settled for soft measurement on social. Likes, comments, follower growth, view counts; all useful surface indicators, but rarely the real story. In 2026, we see this changing rapidly. 

Brands want to know: 

• Who actually watched beyond the first three seconds? 

• Which content genuinely resonated, and which just filled space? 

• What happens once someone leaves the platform? 

• And crucially: what did social contribute to revenue? 

It’s no longer enough for social to look good. It has to ‘wash its face’ in the numbers. 

And that’s where attention comes in; the most honest signal we have of whether content is truly working. View-through rates, completions, saves, shares (especially private ones), repeat exposure; all the things you can’t inflate and all the things that matter when feeds get noisier than ever. 

The consumer doesn’t see your silos, so why do we plan like they do? 

One of the most interesting shifts we’ve seen is how brands are finally starting to treat paid and organic media as parts of the same ecosystem. Consumers don’t distinguish between them. They don’t label your post “organic media” or “paid media”; they just see a brand trying to earn their attention. And yet inside organisations, these worlds often operate on different objectives, different timelines and even different definitions of success. 

In 2026, that becomes a growth limiter. 

If you want social to work harder, paid and organic media need one story, one audience strategy and one commercial direction. When that alignment clicks, and when content is built with the whole journey in mind, we see performance lift across the board. 

But how you get there? That’s where things get interesting. 

The auction is harder to win but more rewarding when you do 

The “lowest Cost Per Mile (CPM) wins” era is gone. Platforms reward quality, attention and expected engagement just as much as they reward budget. This means that brands need to think differently about creative. Not bigger budgets but smarter ones. More honesty. More platform nuance. More relevance. More testing. More iteration. More humanity, especially as AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from high-end production. 

It’s a fascinating, messy, challenging space and one with huge upside for marketers who can bring together audience understanding, creative discipline and data science. 

The measurement question every CMO now asks 

Attribution is getting more sophisticated. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) is finally making space for social. Brands want one source of truth, and they want the numbers behind social to hold up. 

We’ve spent a lot of time exploring how Heads of Marketing can join up: 

• in-platform attention metrics 

• off-platform behaviours 

• attribution pathways 

• MMM’s long-term view of contribution 

And what’s surprising is not how difficult that is, but how transformative it becomes when it’s done properly. Because once you can prove the impact, you suddenly have permission to be braver, more experimental and more audience-led in your creative and media planning. 

We’ve only scratched the surface 

The conversations we filmed for Predicting the Future of Social in 2026 explore the reality of what this all means for marketers:  the mechanics behind attention; the reality of winning auctions; building sticky communities; brand safety; the rise of private sharing and how marketers can design social strategies around human behaviour rather than platform trends. 

Watch the series