By Mobbie Nazir
The prospect of time limits for teenagers as part of an eye-watering settlement could shake up social media. With passive attention getting harder to come by, We Are Social’s Mobbie Nazir says brands will have to work harder to earn it.
Meta’s $18bn legal settlement is not a sign that social media is dying. It’s a wake-up call for the whole marketing industry. Social is fundamentally changing for the better. It’s about to move past its awkward years and into maturity.
The platforms have dominated our lives, conversations and marketing budgets for the past two decades. With the changes set out by Meta in the US, along with governments globally moving to restrict teens’ access to social media, you can understand why this could be perceived as a huge threat. In fact, the opposite is true.
While this is undeniably a turning point, social media isn’t going anywhere. Brands that have relied on the drive-by attention that comes with passive scrolling will need to rethink their approach. That’s because what comes next for social is more creative, complex and interesting.
If similar protections become standard across the major platforms, we will start to see the rules of social media change more broadly. Less passive scrolling means less passive attention to go round, with the upshot that platforms and brands will have to work harder for the time people choose to give them.
Shift from attention to intention
Brands need to consider how to earn attention in a world where users might opt to scroll chronologically and spend less time on the platform overall. Social strategies must shift toward community-driven, search-optimized, and high-value content that users actively seek out rather than passively consume. Quality and strategy over quantity and tactics.
Algorithms will still dictate what younger users see in their two hours (the chronological feed is a choice, not a default) – so brands will need to double down on adding value, not just buying their way into the feed.
Brands don’t own their audiences on social, the algorithm does. While that’s always been true, it’ll become harder to ignore when passive reach gets harder to come by – and even more expensive to buy.
At the same time, people are becoming more deliberate about where they spend their attention. They follow niche creators and communities because they’re genuinely interested in what those people have to say and increasingly share privately in WhatsApp groups and Discord servers.
Strict data regulations and a backlash against artificial or over-polished content mean audiences will prioritize human connection, culture-led storytelling, and active participation over transactional posts. Again, social becomes more central to the marketing ecosystem than ever.
For brands, that means putting more value on the communities and audiences they can build and sustain themselves. Private sharing and dark social will matter more, but so will newsletters, memberships, loyalty programs and other owned channels that create a more direct relationship with audiences.
The opportunity is to use creators not simply to generate reach, but to help brands earn their way into relevant communities and build relationships that extend beyond the public feed.
Be worth discovering
The bigger question underneath all this is why someone should give a brand their time. Meta’s settlement highlights a number of distinct shifts that will encourage brands in the future to be more overt about the value they can provide.
There is the transition from the attention economy to the intent economy, where brands will have to actively earn both visibility and engagement rather than relying on screen time and passive reach.
High-intent interactions such as social search and direct messaging are going to take over from feeds that are flooded with generic content.
At the same time, social media is becoming a decentralized ecosystem of niche communities, DMs and opt-ins. Transactional posts are going to be replaced by human connection, culture-driven storytelling and active participation.
Succinctly put, being discoverable matters, but being worth discovering matters more.
Back to basics
Social media decides where we go on holiday, how to fix a shelf, where we discover brands, and what LLMs rely on as credible citation. And this is essentially all peer-to-peer communication, the oldest form of marketing.
Human beings have always valued the opinions of others, especially others like ourselves, and we will continue to do so. To stand out, brands now have to ensure their marketing is good enough for people to choose it; the creators and communities they work with have to make sense; and they need to know why they’re there and what they’re giving to people in return.
For years, brands have focused on building content and channel strategies. The next decade belongs to cultural insight, community, and ecosystem strategies. In many ways, that takes social back to where it started: a people-first medium built around communities, shared interests and connections.
Social is not a channel, it’s what makes us human: we all have an innate need to connect, share and belong. This predates the existence of social platforms and will never change. Brands that can tap into this deep human need are the brands that will continue to succeed in this next evolution of the marketing landscape.
By Mobbie Nazir
Mobbie Nazir is global chief strategy & growth officer at We Are Social
