The Takeaway
The Shelf team attended ADWEEK’s Social Media Week 2026 in New York City. Across sessions, the same realization kept surfacing from different angles: the brands losing right now aren’t losing because they don’t understand social media. They’re losing because they’re asking the wrong questions about their social media strategy. This post breaks down the seven most important things we unlearned, plus what we’re doing differently because of it. We’ll also share how this reframes our influencer marketing strategy and platform strategy.
We went to a conference about social media. We came back questioning half of what we thought we knew. Here’s the honest version of what happened, including how our audience-first social media approach shows up in practice.
I’ll be upfront: I walked into Social Media Week with a mild sense of “We’ll see.” Conferences about social media and social media strategy have a habit of confirming things everyone already believes, just with better slides.
I walked out with actual notes. The kind you take because something has shifted.
Here’s what we unlearned.
#1. We unlearned that the algorithm is the problem to solve.
For years the dominant question in rooms like this has been: how do we beat the algorithm? Which signals matter? What does the feed reward this week? How do we optimize for distribution?
It’s not a bad question. We ask versions of it constantly. But Social Media Week 2026 made something clear: that question is now the floor, not the ceiling. Algorithm knowledge is table stakes. The brands still treating it as a competitive advantage are optimizing for a race that everyone else has already entered.
The better question, the one that actually separates winners right now, is different: How do we show up for this audience, on this platform, in this moment? That shift sounds subtle. It isn’t. One question is about gaming a system. The other is about understanding people well enough that the system rewards you naturally. That’s the heart of audience-first social media.
At The Shelf, Market Intelligence exists precisely to answer that second question: who the audience is, what they actually care about, where they spend time, what conversations are already shaping how they think. That foundation is what makes creative perform within a coherent social media strategy. Not because it tricks the algorithm. Because it earns attention from the humans the algorithm is trying to serve.
#2. We unlearned that “we’re on every platform” counts as a channel strategy.
Metricool came to Social Media Week with receipts. Their 2026 Social Media Study analyzed real activity from over 1 million social media accounts and nearly 40 million posts across ten major platforms including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, X, and Google Business Profile. It is the largest study they have ever done, and the findings are a useful corrective to how most brands actually allocate budget.
A few things stood out:
- YouTube views per video grew 30% year over year, with weekly posting up 25% and comments up 7%, reinforcing it as one of the most reliable channels for depth and community building on social media.
- Instagram Reels, meanwhile, are in decline.
- Threads is gaining traction fast, delivering strong impressions per post for accounts that have been willing to show up there consistently.
- LinkedIn is growing but getting more competitive.
What this means in practice is that being present everywhere and being effective anywhere are completely different things. Every platform has a distinct job in how an audience moves from awareness to decision. YouTube builds depth. Reddit is where people validate what they already want to believe. Pinterest is where they plan. TikTok is discovery. Meta is scale. None of them are interchangeable, and none of them can be briefed the same way.
Platform strategy isn’t “which ones are we on.” It’s “what is each one actually for.” The brands spending real money to be in the wrong place, in the wrong format, for the wrong stage of the journey are everywhere in these numbers.
#3. We unlearned that a brief is where a campaign starts.
For a long time, the move was: build the influencer marketing strategy, write the brief, hand it to a creator. Clean. Efficient. And increasingly, wrong.
NéAndré Broussard’s session on cultural commitment made the case plainly and it landed. If you want to know what your audience actually wants, ask the people closest to them. Creators aren’t the last stop on the assembly line. They’re the ones who know what the comment section is about to say before the post goes live. They know which trend peaked three weeks ago. They know what feels forced before your brand finds out the hard way.
This is something we’ve been moving toward at The Shelf: bringing creators into planning earlier, using them as a read on what’s resonating and what’s going to miss, before the strategy is locked. Not as a focus group. As genuine cultural input. Bringing creators in after the brief is written isn’t a partnership. It’s a casting call. And the campaigns that result from that approach tend to look exactly like what they are. It’s a smarter influencer marketing strategy.
#4. We unlearned that virality is proof of anything.
Emma Grede didn’t come to Social Media Week to make friends with vanity metrics, and it was the best session of the week.
Grede, the founding partner of Skims and co-founder of Good American, laid out four principles for brands trying to matter on social. The one that hit hardest: trust is the actual asset. Not reach. Not a viral moment. Not a metric that looks impressive in a quarterly report.
“If you have an audience’s trust right now, I believe you have everything,” she said on stage.
She was equally direct about virality specifically. “From an investor standpoint, I would never look at a brand that is tracking on social and invest off of that basis.” Social virality is a signal that something could be interesting, she said, but marketers are at the whims of platforms and algorithm changes that can flip things overnight. “That is not something that you can control.”
And then the line that stuck with us most: the cues are in the comments. Grede said she spends time in comment sections of her business accounts every Sunday, “sometimes happily, sometimes very tender-hearted, because you better be ready.” She views it as critical business intelligence, not community management. “What we do in our businesses is really look at what is the sentiment and what decisions are we making within the business based on what we’re hearing, not the stories that we want to tell ourselves.”
At The Shelf, we’ve been building this into how we work: using comments, creator feedback, and audience sentiment as live inputs into campaign optimization, not just post-campaign color. The signal is there in real time. Most brands are moderating it instead of reading it. Treating comments as signal also accelerates community building on social media as part of our social media strategy.
#5. We unlearned that one great post is the goal.
Dhar Mann and Gap’s session on creator-brand storytelling was a useful mirror to hold up against how most campaigns are still being planned.
The Old Navy “Old Navy vs. Designer” format works because it keeps working. It’s a recurring premise with memory, familiarity, and room for the audience to come back, anticipate, and participate. One strong post earns a moment. A format earns a relationship and a signal-generating asset that gets smarter every time it runs.
The deeper insight here isn’t just “make a series.” It’s that a well-built creator format becomes ownable IP. It compounds. Each episode generates engagement signals that train the algorithm to find more of the right audience. Each iteration builds the kind of pattern recognition that makes the next post perform better than the last. That’s a fundamentally different return on creative investment than a one-off brief, and it’s how we’re thinking about format development for clients now.
#6. We unlearned that a bigger name means a better fit.
Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes session was the most fun case study of the week, and also one of the most instructive.
Rahma was direct about how he thinks about the show’s integrity. “I’ve been always pushing against changing the show, against any new variation of it,” he said on stage. “I’ve always been very aggressive about trying to keep the DNA of the show to be mostly independent comedians, independent writers, independent filmmakers.” He recently turned down a pitch from DJ Tiesto because he had no personal interest in EDM. He has a similar filter for brand partners: they have to fit the world of the show, not the other way around.
His co-presenter Reza Izad, co-founder of Underscore Talent, named what’s actually driving success: “Cultural relevance is really what you’re looking for in success. Are people sharing it? Are people engaging with it?”
The unlearning here is subtle but important. The strongest brief isn’t the most detailed one. It’s the one that defines what can’t change, and then gets out of the way. A creator’s format is also a signal-generating asset. The trust, native feel, and audience identity encoded in that format are exactly what the algorithm uses to scale it to the right people. Disrupt the format and you break the signal. The brand integration that tries to rewrite the show ends up suppressed by the same system it was trying to use. It’s a sharper influencer marketing strategy to protect the core and integrate natively.
#7. We unlearned that culture is something you can schedule.
This is the one that will linger longest.
There is a version of influencer marketing, and we have all seen it, that treats culture like a resource to extract. Find the trend. Book the creator. Ship the post. Report the impressions. It’s efficient. It also doesn’t build anything.
The through-line from Social Media Week was simple and a little inconvenient: culture is not a moment you borrow. It’s a relationship you build. Slowly. Consistently. With actual listening involved before the brief, during the campaign, and after the post stops performing. This is the core of community building on social media.
The brands winning on culture right now aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the fastest trend response times. They’re the ones who have done the work to understand the communities they want to reach, built genuine relationships with the creators who live inside those communities, and show up consistently enough that their presence feels earned rather than opportunistic.
That’s not a campaign strategy. It’s a compounding one. And it’s the only kind that holds.
What We’re Taking Back: 7 Moves We’re Making
1. Reframe the algorithm question. Stop asking “how do we beat it” and start asking “how do we earn attention from the people it’s trying to serve.” Market Intelligence answers that question before a single brief is written. That’s the backbone of a modern social media strategy.
2. Assign every platform a role. Map each channel to a specific job in the audience journey: discovery, depth, validation, planning, or conversion. Stop defaulting to Meta and TikTok as the whole plan. Call this your platform strategy.
3. Bring creators into planning before the brief is locked. Use them as cultural intelligence, not just execution. They know things about your audience that your strategy deck doesn’t. This strengthens your influencer marketing strategy.
4. Build formats, not just posts. Design creator concepts as recurring, ownable IP that compounds engagement and algorithmic signal over time rather than resetting each campaign.
5. Treat the comment section as a creative brief. Read sentiment as a live input into what the next piece of content should do, not just as a metric to report after the fact.
6. Protect the creator’s format. Write briefs that define what can’t change, and then get out of the way. The thing that makes a creator’s content work is also what makes the brand integration work.
7. Commit to community before you need it. Build creator relationships and audience understanding outside of active campaigns, so that when you do show up, it feels earned. This is how real community building on social media compounds.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)
What is Social Media Week?
Social Media Week is an annual conference presented by ADWEEK that brings together brand marketers, creators, and platform strategists to discuss trends, best practices, and the future of social and creator marketing. The 2026 edition was held April 14 to 16 at The Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City.
What were the biggest themes at Social Media Week 2026?
The biggest themes at Social Media Week 2026 were the shift from algorithm-chasing to audience-first creative, the importance of community building on social media over cultural opportunism, the growing value of owned audience channels like newsletters, and the move from one-off posts to repeatable creator formats that compound performance over time—supported by a clearer platform strategy.
What did Metricool present at Social Media Week 2026?
Metricool presented findings from their 2026 Social Media Study, which analyzed nearly 40 million posts across 10 major platforms from over 1 million real accounts. Key findings included a 30% increase in YouTube views per video year over year, a decline in Instagram Reels performance, and strong early growth on Threads. The study makes the case for assigning each platform a specific role rather than treating all channels as interchangeable.
What did Emma Grede say at Social Media Week 2026?
Emma Grede, founding partner of Skims and co-founder of Good American, outlined four principles for brand success on social: trust is the most valuable asset a brand can build, product quality matters more than marketing, virality is not a reliable signal of long-term strength, and the comments section is essential business intelligence. Her most quoted line from the session: “If you have an audience’s trust right now, I believe you have everything.”
What did Kareem Rahma say about brand partnerships at Social Media Week 2026?
Kareem Rahma, creator of the viral series Subway Takes, spoke about how protecting the format of his show has been central to its cultural success. He said he has consistently pushed back against changing the show’s premise for brand partners or high-profile guests. His view: brand partnerships work best when the brand integrates into the creator’s world rather than trying to reshape it. He even turned down a pitch from DJ Tiesto because it did not fit the show’s creative DNA.
Why should brands stop trying to “beat” the algorithm?
Algorithm knowledge is now table stakes. Every brand and agency understands the basics of what platforms reward. The real competitive advantage has shifted to understanding audiences deeply enough that content earns attention naturally. Brands still focused on gaming the algorithm are optimizing for a race everyone else has already entered. Refocusing on people-first content is simply better social media strategy.
What does it mean to bring creators into campaign planning earlier?
Bringing creators in before the brief is locked means using them as cultural intelligence: asking what feels timely, what’s going to miss, and what the audience is actually responding to right now. Creators have direct, real-time insight into audience behavior and platform dynamics that most brand strategy processes don’t capture until it’s too late to act on.
What is a creator format and why does it matter?
A creator format is a recurring, ownable creative premise that builds familiarity and engagement over time. Unlike a one-off post, a format generates compounding algorithmic signal with each iteration, making every subsequent piece of content smarter and better distributed than the last. It also becomes ownable IP that can define a brand’s presence on a platform over time.
How should brands use comment sections strategically?
Comment sections are a real-time source of audience sentiment and creative intelligence. As Emma Grede noted at Social Media Week 2026, the brands using them well aren’t just moderating, they’re reading comments as a live brief. What’s resonating, what’s missing, what the audience wishes the brand understood. That signal should feed directly into the next piece of content, not just a post-campaign report, and it supports community building on social media.
What is The Shelf’s approach to influencer marketing?
The Shelf is a data-first influencer marketing agency that combines Market Intelligence, creative engineering, and performance media into one compounding system. Rather than treating influencer marketing as a series of isolated posts, The Shelf builds influencer marketing strategy grounded in audience insight, platform behavior, and format-led storytelling designed to perform and improve over time.
The Shelf is a full-service influencer marketing agency that engineers creator-led campaigns for performance. We combine Market Intelligence, creative engineering, and paid media into one compounding system.