Your team cannot absorb every development in social. Whether it’s a TikTok update, a change on Reddit or another rather obfuscating LinkedIn algorithm announcement. The social changes are endless. Each arrives with recommendations, often before you’ve had a chance to establish whether the previous change made any difference.
Some of those developments will matter enormously. But the leap from “this is happening” to “we need to do something about it” deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. Platform trends are signals to investigate. They are not instructions to follow.
The trouble is, you can end up like Sisyphus, constantly pushing the boulder uphill. Talented people spend their time accommodating another channel while more valuable work goes on hold. Budget gets divided again. Then the organisation is left trying to explain why social activity has increased without a corresponding return.
There is so much opportunity in social. It is maddening to see it diluted by the pressure to pursue all of it.
You know the saying about assumptions…
B2B belongs on LinkedIn. Gen Z means TikTok. Facebook is for older people. Keep the videos short.
These assumptions are convenient, particularly when you have to explain a recommendation to colleagues who don’t spend their working lives studying social behaviour. They draw on recognisable associations and can make a budget proposal easier to defend. Challenging them takes evidence, and sometimes more patience than anyone has available that week.
That gives familiar choices an advantage before their commercial potential has even been examined.
Take Gen Z. YouGov’s 2026 US research found that 62% of adult Gen Z respondents used YouTube daily, compared with 41% using TikTok. It is a useful challenge to an automatic TikTok recommendation, although daily use alone tells us little about where a particular brand could influence buying behaviour.
A generation is an enormous audience definition. So is “B2B decision-makers”. Within either group, people have different interests and responsibilities. Their reasons for using a platform can vary considerably, even when their demographic profiles look similar.
Choosing the platform first closes down questions that could lead to much more interesting work.
€38m in pipeline from an unexpected place
Audience research for a historical Fujitsu programme identified senior IT buyers active on Facebook. That opened up an opportunity which a conventional B2B channel plan could easily have overlooked.
The research informed both the platform choice and the creative approach. Expert interviews addressed subjects relevant to those buyers and were adapted for Facebook. Understanding where the audience spent time gave the work a route to them; understanding what would interest them shaped the content.
The programme recorded €38m in attributed pipeline over 12 weeks, with social contributing alongside other activity.
What makes this example valuable is how readily that opportunity could have been dismissed. A Facebook recommendation for senior technology buyers runs against a familiar view of B2B marketing. Without audience evidence, the discussion could have ended there.
This is one of the pleasures of research: discovering something that gives you a different way into a business problem. It creates room for a more imaginative approach, with evidence behind it. There is no need to be contrary for the sake of it when the audience is already giving you a reason to reconsider.
The result belongs to that programme and its circumstances. Its lasting relevance is the willingness to investigate a platform that category convention might have ruled out.
Platform membership is a starting point
Someone can use an app every day and have very little interest in hearing from your business there. Equally, they might visit less frequently but use it for a task in which your expertise would be valuable.
Our recent GWI analysis of UK financial-services technology buyers illustrates this. Around 25% reported using Facebook to research or consider new products and services, alongside 24% for LinkedIn. YouTube stood at 28%. The data covers research from 2024 and 2025.
Facebook and LinkedIn were effectively level in this audience cut. More interesting is the research behaviour occurring across platforms we tend to put into separate professional and personal categories.
The same buyer may need different things from a brand in different places.
A buyer might use an expert video to understand an unfamiliar technical problem, then look at professional discussion to see how peers are approaching it. Investigating those behaviours gives you a basis for deciding what each platform should contribute. It also gives the creative team a much more useful brief than a request to reproduce the same material in several sizes.
Social search adds another reason to look beyond feed consumption. Ofcom’s 2025 research found that 43% of UK online adults aged 16 and over reported searching through social media at least daily. Those searches encompass much more than shopping, but they make the question of what your audience is looking for especially relevant.
Your expertise could answer a question long before someone is ready to contact sales. Customer discussion might influence whether they believe a product claim. Both can matter commercially without immediately producing a visit to your website.
Audience research becomes invaluable when it changes the brief: the subject you address, the evidence you provide or the role you expect a platform to play.
A busy executive can still choose a long video
The Fujitsu work also challenged another assumption: senior executives wouldn’t spend time watching longer social videos.
The campaign included expert interviews lasting between six and eleven minutes. Its results report recorded 198,416 completed video views. These were reported completions rather than a count of individual executives, but they provide a substantial challenge to the blanket dismissal of longer content.
Being busy makes relevance more valuable. If the subject matters to an important business choice, a thoughtful explanation can be worth your time. Compressing it into a few seconds may remove precisely the detail that made it useful.
That is a frustrating creative loss. When every brief arrives with the format already prescribed, the team has less room to consider how best to explain the subject. An expert’s most valuable contribution might be the detail that gets cut to meet an arbitrary duration.
The question is how much attention the subject warrants and how well the content rewards it. Some ideas need very little explanation. Others deserve time. Audience behaviour should inform that judgement, alongside the complexity of what you’re trying to communicate.
“Video is growing” doesn’t tell you which of those situations you’re dealing with.
Another platform needs more than another login
An additional channel needs somebody to understand its conventions and make work that belongs there. Responses need attention. Approvals may involve colleagues whose availability is already a problem. Paid distribution, reporting and governance create commitments that continue well beyond the initial launch.
The cost becomes much more than money. The team’s attention is diverted as they learn how to make the new platform work. That may be a worthwhile investment, but it competes with existing priorities whether or not anyone records the trade-off in the plan.
This is where enthusiasm can leave a proposal incomplete. The potential gain gets discussed in detail; the work that will receive less attention barely gets mentioned. Whoever approves the expansion needs to understand both.
There is also a danger in calling something a test when nobody has agreed how it ends. Once a presence exists, stopping it can require more explanation than starting it ever did. The business begins to expect activity, and the team inherits an ongoing commitment before the original question has been answered.
A smaller commitment may be enough to assess the opportunity. Listening could reveal whether relevant conversations are taking place. A focused creator partnership or a limited paid test could establish whether the audience responds to a particular subject.
The scale of participation should follow what you need to learn or achieve. Establishing a permanent presence can come later, if the evidence justifies it.
Give the opportunity an audience test
An algorithm change can affect the cost or reliability of reaching people even when their behaviour has barely changed. An established platform therefore needs scrutiny too. Audience-led planning involves revisiting existing choices as well as assessing new ones.
Start with the people you need to influence and examine what the development changes for them, or for your ability to reach them. Evidence might come from audience research or search behaviour. Questions raised by customers can also reveal a need that your current activity is missing.
Then establish what useful business role your presence could play and whether it warrants the resources required. Keep audience behaviour at the centre of that assessment, with the platform development as the reason to investigate.
The possible outcomes are invest, test or watch.
Invest where the audience case and business purpose justify a sustained commitment. Where an important uncertainty remains, design a test around it. For example, a test of whether prospective buyers will spend time with an expert explanation needs evidence of relevant viewing and attention. Reach alone would leave the central question unanswered.
Agree the evidence that would justify continuing before activity begins. This makes the eventual assessment less vulnerable to whichever positive metric happens to be easiest to report.
If the opportunity isn’t ready for investment, identify what would prompt another look. That might be evidence of relevant customers beginning to research on the platform, or a change that makes reaching them more feasible. A scheduled review keeps the opportunity visible without making it an immediate demand on the team.
Before you add another platform
These four questions give the discussion a useful starting point:
- Who specifically are we trying to influence?
- How do those people actually use this platform?
- What useful business role could we play there?
- What would we reduce or stop in order to do it well?
The final question makes the resource implications explicit. If existing work is expected to continue unchanged, the proposal needs to account for the additional capacity. Otherwise, the team is being asked to absorb a cost the business hasn’t acknowledged.
There is plenty to be excited about. People keep finding different ways to use social, and research can reveal opportunities on platforms you thought you understood years ago. That possibility is worth making time for. It is also a good reason to protect the time needed to investigate, rather than committing it all to delivery.
When a development merits investment, audience evidence gives you something substantial to argue for. You can explain who the work should influence and why it deserves budget. That is a far stronger position than trying to keep pace with an industry that will have another recommendation tomorrow.
Related reading: The opportunity hiding in your social report
