In our latest More Bang for Your Buck conversation, Morag spoke to Tom Prentice about why brands need to rethink how they show up on social - from creators and commerce to AI, trust and relevance. You can listen to the full conversation here. 

One theme that particularly stood out was the risk of brands treating social as though it is still just another communications channel. Whilst brands are not necessarily missing social; some are missing what social has become. 

Social is no longer simply a place where brands communicate. It is where people discover products, seek recommendations, build trust, compare options, and increasingly make purchases. The customer journey that once happened across multiple touchpoints can now happen within a single platform. 

That changes the role of social. And it changes what brands need to pay attention to. 

The Signal Brands Often Miss

Many brands still treat social as a distribution channel. A campaign is created elsewhere, then adapted into social content. But the brands performing well are not just putting campaigns into social, they are creating for the platforms, communities and behaviours they want to engage with. And that distinction matters. 

Social is not a smaller version of advertising. It has its own pace, language, formats, and expectations. People are not just passively consuming content. They are reacting, filtering, sharing, buying, and deciding who they trust.  

As Tom highlighted, there is no such thing as a perfect social strategy. Platforms change. Algorithms change. Cultural conversations shift. Consumer expectations move. No brand has perfected social. 

The brands that are doing it well are often simply the brands learning the fastest. 

Why Creators Matter More Than Influencers 

This is where creators become strategically important. 

Influencers are typically bought for reach. Whilst creators bring something more valuable: understanding. 

Their value is not just that they have an audience. It is that they understand that audience. They know the language people use, the formats that feel natural, the conversations people care about, and the ways ideas need to show up to feel relevant. And that makes creators far more than a media placement.

Increasingly, creators are part of the purchase journey itself. They can help move people from discovery to trust to action. In some cases, they are becoming a brand’s storefront. 

But this only works if brands treat creators as strategic partners, not just content suppliers. 

Brands still need to provide direction, commercial objectives, and clear guardrails.  Yet creators need enough space to translate those ideas in a way that feels credible to the communities they serve. 

The thing brands often miss is that the value is not just in the creator’s reach; it's in their read of the room. 

Relevance Beats Frequency

A lot of social activity is still driven by the belief that more is better. More posts. More formats. More assets. More always-on content. However, more content does not automatically create more attention. 

People are becoming increasingly selective about what they consume. They are filtering harder and paying greater attention to content that feels useful, relevant, or worth their time. The brands succeeding on social are not necessarily posting more. They are posting with more relevance. 

One piece of content that resonates will often outperform multiple posts that simply become fodder for the endless scroll. 

This is another place where brands can mistake the visible metric for the meaningful one. Frequency may create activity. It does not necessarily create attention, trust, or action. In a world where attention is increasingly scarce, relevance is one of the few sustainable competitive advantages.

Social as a Learning System

The brands performing best on social are not necessarily creating the best content from day one. Instead, they are using social as an ongoing learning system. 

They experiment with formats. They test different creative approaches. They learn which messages resonate, which formats drive engagement, and which content drives action; then they adapt. 

This learning mindset is crucial because social is never finished. 

What worked six months ago may not work now. What works on one platform may not work on another. What feels fresh today may quickly become invisible. 

The brands pulling ahead are not the ones with all the answers; they are the ones paying attention to what people are showing them and adapting quickly enough to respond.

The Takeaway 

Social is no longer just where brands communicate. It is where people discover, evaluate, trust, and buy. 

Winning in this environment requires a different mindset. It means creating specifically for social rather than adapting content from elsewhere. It means working with creators as strategic partners rather than treating them as media buys. It means focusing less on volume and more on relevance. 

But most importantly, it means looking beyond the obvious signals.

Followers, impressions and posting frequency can all be useful measures. But they do not tell the whole story. The deeper value lies in understanding what people are paying attention to, who they trust, what feels meaningful to them and why certain content earns a place in their world. 

The brands making the most progress are not simply chasing algorithms or producing more content; they are paying closer attention to meaning. 

And in social, that is the thing that too many brands are still missing.

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