Too many brands are still creating social content like a media placement, but in feeds shaped by algorithms, creators and culture, the traditional brand post is starting to look increasingly out of place.
For all the conversation around social-first marketing, a surprising amount of brand content is still being created using a very traditional media mindset. The campaign is developed, the messaging is agreed, the hero assets are produced and, somewhere towards the end of the process, the question becomes ‘what are we posting on social?’
What follows is usually an exercise in adaptation. The campaign film becomes a shorter video, the key visual gets resized for Instagram, the messaging is condensed into a caption and suddenly a piece of creative originally designed to communicate a brand message has become “social media content”.
Technically, it is content on social media. But that doesn’t necessarily make it social content.
That distinction matters more than ever because the environment brands are publishing into has fundamentally changed. Social feeds are no longer dominated by content from the accounts people have consciously chosen to follow. They are increasingly recommendation engines, serving an endless mix of creators, entertainment, opinions, memes, conversations and niche interests based on what is most likely to hold someone’s attention.
And sitting amongst all of that is the brand post.
Perfectly polished, carefully approved, completely on-message, and very easy to scroll past.
Key takeaways
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Content on social media isn’t automatically social content. Resizing a campaign film or key visual for Instagram puts it in the feed, but it rarely gives anyone a reason to stop.
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Brands now compete with everything in the feed. Creators, memes, recommendations and niche entertainment all sit alongside branded posts, and audiences don’t separate them.
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Algorithms have broken the link between following and seeing. Recommendation-led feeds mean every piece of content has to earn its place on its own merit.
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Polish is fine; assuming polish is enough is the problem. High production values can perform brilliantly when the idea is built to spark curiosity in the first few seconds.
- Social-first thinking has to start earlier. Bringing social teams in at the idea stage, building repeatable formats and treating performance data as creative intelligence turns social from distribution into an editorial discipline.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
Social media isn’t a collection of advertising spaces
The media placement model makes sense when a brand is buying access to an audience. There is a defined space, a defined format and a reasonable expectation that the creative will appear in front of the people it was designed to reach.
Social media works differently because appearing in the feed is only the beginning. The hard part is earning enough attention for somebody to actually care.
A person scrolling TikTok is not mentally separating the branded content from everything around it. Your beautifully produced campaign video might appear immediately after a creator telling a brilliant story, a niche joke that feels specifically made for them, a product recommendation from someone they trust or a video they have already watched three times.
That’s the competitive set; it means brands are no longer just competing with other brands in their category. They’re competing with everything that person could choose to spend the next few seconds watching. Yet many social media strategies are still built around what the brand wants to publish rather than what an audience might actively choose to consume.
That’s where the traditional brand post starts to fall apart, the feed has changed, but the creative process often hasn’t. The idea of a “brand post” made far more sense when social platforms were built predominantly around the social graph. People followed an account and, broadly speaking, saw content from that account.
Building an audience of followers therefore gave brands a relatively dependable route into people’s feeds, which is why early social media marketing focused on follower growth, publishing frequency and maintaining a consistent stream of branded content.
Today, discovery works very differently. Recommendation algorithms have made the relationship between following and seeing much less straightforward, while platforms increasingly surface content based on what they believe someone will find interesting, regardless of who created it.
For brands, that changes the creative question completely. Being followed is no longer enough to make somebody interested, and having a recognisable logo in the corner does not give a piece of content any special status once it enters the feed.
Every piece has to justify its place there. That means the starting point for social media content strategy cannot simply be, “What do we need to tell people this month?” It has to include, “Why would they be interested?”
Polished content isn't the problem
There is a tendency to interpret “social-first” as shorthand for making everything look like it was filmed quickly on a phone, but that misses the point.
There is nothing inherently wrong with high production values. Beautifully shot, carefully art-directed content can perform brilliantly on social, just as something captured in thirty seconds can fall completely flat.
The difference is whether the creative idea understands the environment it is entering. A traditional piece of brand creative often has a long list of jobs to do. It needs to introduce the product, communicate the proposition, show the branding, land the campaign message and perhaps finish with a call to action, all while staying within a carefully controlled visual identity.
Social content has a different challenge. Before it can communicate any of those things, it must create enough curiosity for someone not to move on. Sometimes that might come from a recognisable creator. Sometimes it is an unexpected observation, an interesting question, a useful piece of information, a strong opinion or simply an opening that makes you want to know what happens next.
The point is not to make brands look less professional. It is to stop assuming professionalism is enough to make something interesting.
Social-first content starts earlier
One of the reasons so much branded social content feels like advertising is that social is brought into the process too late.
By the time the social team sees the campaign, many of the important creative decisions have already been made. The message is fixed, the assets exist and the job becomes working out how to distribute them across different platforms.
A genuine social-first approach brings platform thinking into the idea much earlier. Instead of asking how an existing campaign translates onto TikTok or Instagram, the team can think about the behaviours, conversations and formats that already exist there, then work out how the brand can participate in a way that feels credible.
The same applies to LinkedIn. A beautifully designed carousel containing six approved brand messages may technically tick every box, but an interesting perspective from someone inside the business could be far more effective because it gives people something worth responding to.
Stop filling calendars and start building formats
The traditional brand post has also shaped the way social teams plan. Open enough content calendars and you’ll still find the same fundamental structure, a certain number of posts per week, organised around campaigns, product moments, awareness days and whatever else needs communicating that month.
The pressure becomes keeping the calendar full. But consistency of output is not the same thing as consistency of interest. A stronger social media content strategy starts to look less like a collection of individual posts and more like a set of recognisable formats that can develop over time.
That might be a recurring series built around the expertise of people inside the business, a creator format that can respond to different briefs, an ongoing way of answering community questions or a distinctive perspective on what is happening within the category.
Formats create familiarity without requiring every piece of content to be identical, and crucially they give brands the opportunity to learn. If people consistently respond to a particular person, subject, opening or style of video, that should influence what comes next. The content strategy becomes something the audience helps to shape rather than something planned three months in advance and executed regardless of what happens.
That is much closer to how creators operate, and brands can learn a lot from it.
Being recognisable doesn't mean looking the same
Moving away from the traditional brand post can understandably make brand teams nervous about consistency. If every asset does not use the same template, colour treatment, typography or graphic system, how will people know it comes from us?
But social media gives brands far more ways to be distinctive than visual identity alone. People can recognise a brand through its sense of humour, the people who appear regularly in its content, the topics it has permission to talk about, the way it responds to comments, the references it makes and the perspective it brings to a conversation. In other words, consistency can come from behaviour as much as aesthetics.
This is particularly important as brands try to create content that feels native to different platforms. An Instagram Reel does not need to look identical to a LinkedIn post for to feel unmistakably part of the same brand.
Social strategy is becoming an editorial discipline
Perhaps the biggest shift is that successful social media marketing increasingly looks less like campaign distribution and more like running an editorial operation. There are still campaigns, launches and commercial messages to communicate, of course, but around them sits an always-on need to understand what audiences are interested in, what conversations are moving, which formats are gaining traction and where the brand has something genuinely worthwhile to contribute.
That requires different instincts. Social teams need enough freedom to respond rather than simply publish, enough proximity to the audience to understand what is changing and enough creative confidence to know that not every post needs to begin with the campaign message.
It also means treating performance as creative intelligence, rather than something that appears in a report once the campaign has finished. If a format works, develop it. If a person resonates, bring them back. If the comments reveal a more interesting angle than the original post, make something from it.
Social media gives brands a good amount of information about what audiences actually care about. The smartest strategies use it.
Is the brand post actually dead?
For brands, that makes the opportunity much bigger than finding better ways to package campaign messages. It means thinking about what kind of presence people might actually choose to spend time with. Brands will keep publishing on social media. What has died is the idea that publishing alone is enough.
Building that kind of presence is what our social media team does every day, from shaping social-first ideas at the very start of a campaign to developing formats, creator partnerships and editorial thinking that audiences genuinely want to follow. If your feed is full of posts that look great and go nowhere, get in touch and let’s build something people choose to watch.
FAQs
Social media content is anything a brand publishes on a social platform, including resized ads and campaign assets. Social content is created with the platform and its audience in mind, built to earn attention in a feed full of creators, entertainment and conversations.
Platforms increasingly use recommendation algorithms to decide what people see, so following an account no longer guarantees its posts will appear. Branded content now competes with everything else in the feed, and polished posts designed mainly to deliver a message are easy to scroll past.
Involve social teams at the start of the creative process, build recurring formats that audiences come to recognise, let people, personality and perspective carry brand consistency, and use performance data to shape what comes next. Treating social as an editorial operation helps brands create content people actively choose to spend time with.
