Rethink Your Social Data In 2026

TL;DR: Don’t hitch your brand’s success to social metrics that only prove you paid for visibility — quality notwithstanding. Use data as a guide to create content your audience actually finds helpful, relevant, and shareable. That’s how brands build longevity in an oversaturated space.

No reactions. No shares. No Comments. No Clicks, But ‘other engagements’ through the roof?

The Truth About Social Right Now

Social media is a direct reflection of our culture, so it’s no surprise it reflects two extremes:
Paid on steroids. Organic on life support.

Neither is sustainable for brands long term, and like most things, the answer is in the middle.

Since the induction of the algorithm in 2014, Meta has turned engagement into a funhouse mirror illusion and hooked brands on watching these metrics as barometers of brand success. Brand managers throw their entire social budget into paid “view” metrics that measure two-second watch time, and become beholden to a pay-to-play system. They buy into the belief that “organic is dead” and overcommit to buying impressions laden with bots, and vanity metrics while ignoring the communities that once made them (or could make) them relevant. They’re investing in expensive gas instead of fixing the car. The truth is, you need both on the road. One doesn’t work without the other.

When you set the right expectations inside your brand culture — when you know what social is supposed to do and how to use both paid and organic — you lift a huge weight off your team and position your brand to reach people who actually care about it.

Social’s next era is about rebuilding presence, trust, and connection.

Organic - Consider it like your house

Boosted - The invitation to friends to a dinner party in your house;

Paid - The full-on OPEN house.

Use paid metrics to inform content — what’s resonating and what’s not — instead of believing that if you just hand Meta another $100K, you’ll automatically break through to people’s hearts and homes.

Reset your expectations around what you’re measuring and why.

A Real-Life Example

A brand spends $200K per year on paid Meta campaigns. Organic engagement is negligible. Follower loss continues — yet paid engagements and “views” are through the roof.

How does that make sense?
It doesn’t. They’re just paying for numbers. That’s how pay-to-play algorithms work.

Another brand we worked with took a more holistic approach. They treated social as part of an ecosystem alongside web, shopper marketing, influencer, and paid/organic/boosted content. The result? A 22% increase in sales year-over-year.

Social and shopper were the only paid channels that year — proving the value of an integrated, long-game approach.

From Megaphone to Mirror

Ten years ago, social lived inside PR departments. It was about reputation. Then came creators, automation, and data obsession.

Now, as trust erodes, the future will belong to brands that treat social as both infrastructure and advertising. You need both.

• Reputation layer: proving you’re credible, consistent, and human. (TL;DR: use organic well.)

• Discovery layer: showing up where search, AI, and social intersect. (TL;DR: use paid well.)

• Community layer: connecting with the people who already care about you and giving them value to stay. (TL;DR: connect with people.)

The goal is to make your footprint findable — and to pass the “vibe check” for social researchers who come to your pages to decide whether to follow, buy, or trust you.

What to Do Now

1. Reframe the role of social — and your expectations of it.
Organic social is both the beginning and the end of the funnel. Paid represents the middle. Social is the mirror of your brand’s reality — what you post tells the world what you believe and whether you live it.

2. Balance the equation.
Paid should amplify, not fabricate. Paid buys reach; organic earns relevance. You need both, but the ratio should reflect values, not desperation. Use small boosts as a way to test what works organically.

3. Redefine success — for real.
Impressions and engagement are surface metrics. The real signals are:

• Comment quality (Are people asking questions or adding perspective?)

• Saves and shares (and to a lesser extent, follows — sorry)

• Brand search lift

• Partnership growth

• Message consistency across channels

4. Teach patience inside your brand culture.
Social is maturing, just like the web did. The next decade will reward brands that treat every post as a piece of their searchable, discoverable cultural footprint, not a daily dopamine hit.

Buying metrics instead of serving real people is wasteful. The future of social isn’t measured in impressions — it’s measured in impact, integrity, and whether your brand still feels real when the bloated metrics disappear.

How JBD Can Help (You Knew That One Was Coming, Right?)

At JBD, we help brands connect — for real.

We’re fluent in measurement, but we don’t chase vanity metrics. We help teams set the right benchmarks and use them to inform content that reaches people in meaningful ways.

Our work focuses on these things:

• Refocusing strategy: Helping teams unlearn old KPIs and rebuild social around credibility, community, and discoverability.

• Creating sustainable content: Storytelling that shows what your brand actually does for people — not what it says it does.

• Rebuilding measurement: Replacing hollow dashboards with frameworks that track real impact — search lift, referrals, sentiment, retention, and human feedback.

We build digital ecosystems rooted in reputation, relevance, and reality — because (we know you know this) likes don’t pay bills, especially not when you can buy them outright.

Next Up

The next post in this series will break down which metrics to monitor in 2026 — and which ones we should stop pretending matter.

xo, Jen

A slide from a JBD presentation about the role of paid vs. organic