How to craft an effective social media content strategy

The content you post on social media can turn your brand into a household name and your followers into fans. But that’s not all; a well-managed social media account gives you a one-to-one communication channel with your followers, and a means of tapping into niche communities where your brand can reach entirely new audiences.

This kind of impact only comes from having a solid social media content strategy. The best way to stand out on social media is to identify specific goals, create valuable posts that align with them and distribute the right content on the right platforms.

There isn’t one cookie-cutter social media strategy that’ll guarantee success. There are, however, specific ways to build a long-term plan that grows your brand and business. We’ll outline 12 steps you can follow to build a social media content strategy from scratch, including how to tailor it for the uniqueness of your brand and its audience.

The 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report

Download this playbook to break through on every network. The survey included consumers across the US, UK and Australia

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1. Identify and set goals

A common mistake brands often make when developing their social media content strategy is assuming that content goals only impact growth on socials. In reality, the most effective strategy is to align your social media objectives to wider business goals.

This doesn’t just include marketing, though building awareness, reach and new customer bases are all important aims. It also includes customer care, product feedback, driving sales and more.

Start by identifying which of your business objectives social media should support, then create measurable targets for each goal and platform.

This process involves digging into how social media contributes to your overarching company goals, along with some audience research. Think about how social can not only support marketing but also the wider business, such as customer care or product improvements for better customer satisfaction.

Leaders agree. According to the 2025 Impact of Social Media Report, executives believe social drives awareness, customer acquisition, loyalty and more.

For Le Creuset, they set the clear objective of building followers, engagement and reach alongside marketing a new product through this giveaway content.

2. Research your audience

You can’t create great social media content without knowing who it’s for. Having buyer personas for social—or representations of your ideal customers—will help guide your social media content plan. Create multiple distinct personas, and use them to guide you when you start creating.

With social intelligence, you can gather detailed audience insights across all your accounts. Social intelligence is the process of using social media data to learn more about your audience, and it’s gatherable in a few ways.

Social analytics offer you insights into current audience preferences, interests and other data points. These are accessible through each social network’s internal analytics tools, or a more comprehensive social media management solution, like Sprout.

Customer care feedback also gives you direct insight into customer opinions on products, care processes and more through your DMs and comments. Through social listening, using a dedicated tool like Sprout’s Social Listening, you can take insight gathering one step further by tapping into conversations and sentiments happening across channels.

All of this insight provides clarity on who your audience is, what they want and what they expect from you. It might also uncover new audiences to target. For example, LEGO operates several brands that appeal to different demographics. A recent TikTok video showcases their World Cup set and features football celebrities to speak to this niche market. This level of targeting is only possible if you fully understand your audience.

3. Analyze your social media competitors

To understand how your social media content strategy is performing, you need to look beyond your own data. A competitive analysis will help spark ideas for your content and create better benchmarks and goals for your strategy.

Identify who your competitors are by listing local/regional competitors, as well as global brands. Analyze these competitors’ social profiles to inform your social media plans by focusing on the following questions:

• How active are your competitors on social? What platforms are they most active on?
• What types of content do they publish?
• How would you describe their brand’s social persona?
• What are their audience engagement practices?

Remember to analyze across different platforms, as each has its own expectations and content styles. Some of your competitors might also be more prolific on certain networks, which will be useful data when you need to prioritize your own social accounts.

For quantitative data, the right competitive analysis tool will simplify the process of gathering insights from your competitors—such as average engagements, growth rates‌ and top content—by automating data collection. This helps you establish data-driven goals and strategies for creating better content.

4. Audit your current social content

Once clear on your audience and goals, it’s time to conduct a social media content audit.

A content audit is one of the best ways to know how to create a performance-optimized content strategy for social media. This will help you substantiate what you think is working well with quantitative data that shows you how each post performs.

Review which posts performed well, which didn’t‌ and what you shared on each platform during a specific reporting period. The metrics you present in your social media report should align with your content goals. For example, if one of your goals is to improve overall brand awareness online, focus on the posts that generated the highest and lowest impressions or reach on each platform.

You can analyze your data using a social media tool, or by exporting each platform’s analytics into a spreadsheet. Facebook, X, Pinterest Business and LinkedIn Business accounts let you easily export your post and page analytics directly from the platform.

Key audit insights to analyze include:

• Voice alignment: Does your underperforming content match your established brand voice?
• Audience relevance: Are you addressing topics your audience cares about?
• Resonance: Are you aligned with current user preferences, like prioritizing human content? Review the latest trends in Sprout’s 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report to see what audiences want to see most on each network.
• Platform optimization: Which platforms deliver your highest engagement rates?

Some posts serve to help you meet bigger marketing goals. But even promotional content should be on brand and true to your voice. Remember: Your audience began following you for a reason. Stick with your unique voice and style as much as possible and create content that authentically markets your brand. This example from Dr. Pepper shows how brands can speak to niche audiences through a well-realized brand voice.

If you’re not sure what your brand voice is, learn more about fine-tuning your brand’s social persona.

5. Choose the right platforms and content types

A winning strategy isn’t about being everywhere, it’s about being where it counts. Your audience and competitor research tells you which social media platforms matter most to your brand.

Focus your energy on the platforms where your audience is most active and engaged. This data-driven approach ensures your content reaches the right people, maximizing your impact without stretching your resources thin.

Platform	Best Content Types	Optimal Post Frequency	Key Features to Use
Instagram	Short-form video (<60 seconds), UGC, Influencer content	1-2 posts daily	Stories, IGTV, Shopping tags
LinkedIn	Text Posts: Professional insights, industry news, thought leadership	1 post daily	Articles, polls
TikTok	Short-form video (<60 seconds), trending audio	1-3 videos daily	Trending hashtags, effects, sounds
YouTube	Short-form video (<60 seconds), Long-form video (>60 seconds)	1 post weekly	Shorts
X (Twitter)	Short-form video (<60 seconds), Text posts	3-5 posts daily	Threads, polls, Spaces
Facebook	Short-form video (<60 seconds), text posts	1 post daily	Reels, Facebook Live

Remember that your choice of platforms should also be based on your brand’s uniqueness. Since they sell products used for creating videos, GoPro invests heavily in their YouTube account, where they have over 11 million subscribers, and tons of videos that regularly attract millions of views.

They prioritize this type of content over text posts or images (both on YouTube and across other networks) because it’s the best way to communicate their brand and products. YouTube is also where a lot of their audience, like video content creators and creatives, can be found. Base your platform choices on your own analysis of content performance, and what makes sense for your brand and audience.

6. Develop a social media content plan

This is where you can have fun with data-driven creativity. Develop your content plan based on the audience preferences and performance data you collected. For example, video remains the most popular method for most platforms, but not all of them, so make sure to adapt your plan to each network.

Change up the types of content you’re publishing, as well. According to the 2026 Content Strategy Report, consumers want brands to prioritize human-created content, personalized moments and social commerce more this year. Building audience engagement in small digital spaces, and collaborating with other companies, are also significant content trends in 2026.

Whatever you do, be sure to keep things fresh. Repetitive posts may turn fans away. So change up your content. Here are some examples in different areas:

Educational content:

• How-to tutorials and educational videos
• Industry insights and trend analysis
• Behind-the-scenes content showing expertise

Engaging content:

• User-generated content and customer stories
• Interactive polls, quizzes and Q&As
• Live streaming and real-time engagement

Brand-building content:

• Episodic/recurring content series
• Employee spotlights and company culture
• Community contests and challenges

As you develop your content plan, consider how each piece contributes to your overall owned media value. One effective approach is to build it around several core social media content pillars, which are the key themes you’ll consistently talk about.

The best way to know what content types and formats will work for you is to dig into your data. Looking at your most successful posts will help you decide what to create. For example, Sprout’s Post Performance Report enables you to analyze your most successful posts across all of your channels, sorted by your top metrics.

7. Build a content calendar

Once you’ve developed a plan, it’s time to build a social media content calendar. A calendar will let you take a big-picture approach to your social media content strategy without losing the details. It’ll help you visualize your ideas and organize them, making your strategy easier to execute. Your content calendar will be a hub for everything you post.

When deciding where to post what content, also consider what performs well on the platform based on your audit.

Utilizing a specialized social media planner can make your entire content strategy easier to execute across channels. Including keeping track of the best times to post on each platform.

If you want to make finding the right posting times easier, try Sprout’s Optimal Send Times tool. It collects data from your followers to tell you the ideal times to post to achieve the most reach.

Your strategy will involve the collective knowledge of a lot of different people within your organization. A content calendar makes it easier to collaborate on social media posts with different people across your company. This also aids in cross-team collaboration to create a more well-rounded plan.

Many teams find that starting with social media templates for common post formats helps maintain a consistent output while freeing up time for more strategic tasks.

Establishing a sustainable publishing cadence is essential not just for your brand’s reach, but also for preventing social media manager burnout among your creative team.

8. Integrate influencer partnerships

Influencer marketing remains one of the most important aspects of an effective social media content strategy. On Instagram, for example, influencer content is the second most likely content type to attract engagement after short-form videos.

Influencers don’t just offer you an opportunity to expand your brand’s reach. They also allow you to tap into authenticity—all influencers have curated their own brand and audience based on authentic collaborations and interactions with their audiences. By working with them, you can also speak directly to this audience, while understanding what makes them tick.

Influencers are also an effective way to approach niche communities, where you can speak to unique audiences with tailored content. An influencer campaign can instigate your interaction with a new community or bolster your connection with an existing one. Finally, they help your brand remain culturally relevant, both online and off.

It’s important that any influencers you work with are the right choice for your brand. They should align with your overall strategy, and your brand’s audience and key principles. Create a dedicated influencer marketing strategy, but make sure this is aligned with your wider content strategy. Look at how both strategies benefit each other, and align their goals.

The most successful influencer partnerships are two-way, long-term collaborations, where influencers can become ambassadors for your brand. Here’s a recent example from Haribo, which posted partnership content with the band Linkin Park during their recent tour.

This campaign gave Haribo an opportunity to market their products at key events across Europe. They didn’t just increase their physical presence in these regions; through creating collaborative social posts with the band they got four of their social media accounts in front of hundreds of thousands of potential new followers.

9. Promote and distribute your content

Your overall social media strategy goes beyond what you post on your social channels. A good strategy involves finding ways to actively distribute your content to maximize brand awareness. Here are a few ways to plan your distribution:

Schedule your content ahead of time

Social media tools, like Sprout’s scheduling and publishing features, make content distribution a no-brainer—especially if you post multiple times a day, like Netflix does on X. This helps you post at the right time, and makes your content calendar easier to manage.

Recognizing when your audience is active and sharing posts at the right time will help you reach more people. If you’re only posting on social media the minute content goes live, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to optimize your reach.

Encourage others to share your posts

Other people sharing your content is excellent social proof as well. Your social media content strategy should include responding to or reposting people who share your content. Encourage your audience to engage with your content by asking a question and encouraging them to share their answers, on social media or in the comments section of a blog post.

And leverage your company’s employees to spread the word. An employee advocacy strategy can drastically increase the reach of your company’s content. Employees are, in a way, “influencers” for your brand. A tool like Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform enables you to scale your program, and integrates your advocacy workflow into your social workflow seamlessly.

Use platform-specific features

Individual social media platforms have ways to help you maximize reach, as well. On platforms like X and Instagram, using hashtags is a great way to distribute your content further. Hashtags help you reach people who not only follow you but are following a specific trend or interest. On LinkedIn and Facebook, join groups related to your industry and share content when it relates to the conversation.

Repurpose content across networks

Repurposing your content is an effective way of managing social content across several networks at once. For content types like videos, look at how you can segment what you’ve created so it can be reposted in short-form across different accounts. This is an effective way of turning YouTube videos into Instagram or TikTok content, for example.

This means you don’t have to create entirely new content for every platform you’re managing. However, make sure you consider the unique audiences and network requirements of each account before you post. Tweak your content to appeal to these distinct audiences, and make sure to add accessibility features like subtitles.

10. Measure results

The last step to an effective social media content strategy is measuring the results. Proper tracking is vital to creating a strategy with longevity. Keeping detailed metrics will help you optimize your plan over time.

You’ll also want to focus on some of the most common metrics social marketers track regularly, which, according to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, include engagement metrics, conversions and follower growth.

Think about how you can link each metric to one (or multiple) business goals. For example, connect your conversion and lead generation rates to your company’s sales objectives. Or, ladder up the traffic your socials have sent to your website to your overarching website and digital marketing objectives. By linking these targets to other aspects of your brand’s marketing and business strategies, you can demonstrate how your social media content is benefiting the entire company.

You can also use your results to A/B test content, directly tracking and comparing the performance of content variations. This helps determine which content formats or topics are performing well for your brand right now.

Analyze your content every month to keep track of what’s working. Take a top-level view of how each piece of content performed and the variables that contributed to it. Assess how well the content supported the goals you set in step one.

If you’re using a social media management platform like Sprout Social, you can look at all of your social media data and analytics in one place. My Reports, part of Sprout’s Premium Analytics, lets you add multiple charts, tables and visualizations such as bar and line charts, to a single report, so you can compare performance across a number of networks and deep dive on the metrics that matter to you most.

11. Use free social media content strategy templates

When it comes to enhancing your strategy or building an entirely new one, getting started is the hardest part. So we have a number of social media content strategy templates to help you dive in right away.

Use these templates to grow your strategy:

Content strategy templates

• (Worksheet) Inspiration for your 2026 social strategy
• (Workbook) How to design your social search optimization strategy
• (Template) Creating a 30-day social media plan
• (Template) Conduct a Social Media Audit to strengthen your strategies
• (Worksheet) How to Conduct Social Media Market Research in 90 Minutes or Less
• (Checklist) 7 Steps to Launching an Employee Advocacy Program Your Team Wants to Participate In

Content templates

• Influencer Marketing toolkit
• A brand safety checklist for social media managers
• (Workbook) Maximize the Value of Your Social Media Video Content

Reporting and analytics tracking templates

• A social media scorecard template to keep your c-suite informed
• The Social Media Newsroom Model template kit
• (Template) The Social Media KPI Template + Guide
• (Template) The Social Media Analytics Spreadsheet for Paid and Organic Reporting

12. Putting it all together: Craft your social media content strategy

Effectively planning a social media content strategy is an ongoing cycle, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Plan your process with the ideas and resources above and stick to these essential strategic steps to develop great content.

By regularly leveraging your social intelligence from audience interactions, listening and past performance, you can start crafting content that resonates and deeply connects. Applying these steps regularly also keeps your brand relevant on social, because you’re staying tapped into your audience.

After following these steps, you’ll have a foundational content strategy you can keep building on as your brand and its following grows.

Create and manage your social media content strategy using Sprout Social

There’s one more tip that can help you create a detailed, reliable content strategy, and that’s using dedicated social media management tools. With a solution like Sprout Social, you can track all your accounts across a single interface, manage content calendars, schedule and post content, and surface social intelligence that informs your strategy and the wider business.

Streamline your entire strategy and set yourself (and your channels) up for long-term success by trying Sprout Social free for 30 days. From measuring content performance and optimizing content to collecting deeper audience insights, Sprout will help you manage and scale your strategy end-to-end.

The post How to craft an effective social media content strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

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How to use brand safety tools to protect your brand’s reputation

Brand reputation has the capacity to change quicker than ever before, and in 2026, there are more potential risks than ever before. Brand safety has traditionally been relegated to protecting brands from advertising on or near inappropriate content online, but it also now has to encompass monitoring your organic content and what people are saying about your brand on social, and scoping out other security threats.

Where once there were a limited number of news sources to monitor, this has ballooned and fragmented. There are now six networks where consumers get news at least once a week, and more conversations to be aware of than ever before across platforms. There are decentralized communities, content automation and platform rule volatility, plus the new threat of generative AI creating almost anything at the click of a button.

Keep reading for actionable ways you can use brand safety tools and examples of effective ones that will help you minimize risk on social.

What are brand safety tools?

Brand safety tools were traditionally automated solutions that protected your brand from threats on social media and other digital channels like your ads appearing alongside distasteful content. However, this definition has broadened to include tools that monitor online conversations, ensure brand-safe partnerships and recognize where potential threats exist that could negatively impact your brand.

With this intel on hand, you are empowered to respond to reputational risks before they become a full-blown crisis, and expand the breadth of your corporate communications strategy.

6 key ways to use brand safety tools to protect your reputation

From advertising safeguards to real-time risk detection, here are five ways you can use brand safety tools to protect your brand’s reputation online.

Platform-level control and advertising safeguards

Your first line of defense against your branded ads appearing alongside offensive content includes the in-platform tools that major social networks have. Factor them into your social media advertising strategy to minimize risk and maximize the impact of your campaigns.

Meta platforms: Meta offers several brand safety controls that work across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. These features allow you to choose the level of control over where your ad appears. Placements can be restricted by content topic, format and source.
X: X’s brand safety tools offer both technical and general advice on how to keep your brand safe on the network. These features allow you to keep X a safe place for your brand and community by offering keyword blocking and sensitivity settings, among other controls.
YouTube: YouTube’s brand safety features are consistent with those available through Google search and display ads.
TikTok: TikTok launched its Brand Safety Center to provide marketers with up-to-date news and recommendations on brand suitability within the network.

These network-provided safety tools help stop brand advertisements from appearing next to sensitive content, but it’s not all about paid any more.

Social Listening for real-time risk detection

To protect your brand’s reputation, it’s important to be aware of the full picture when it comes to conversation around your brand. This goes far beyond comments that mention your brand directly or on your owned posts, and extends into the broader ecosystem within which your brand exists.

For example, if you’re a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand, you’ll want to be aware of conversations about your brand, whether it’s about inflation or a narrower topic such as packaging sustainability. It’s crucial to monitor all of these adjacent topics as brands can be brought into these conversations, so understanding how that ecosystem works and any developing narratives is key.

Sprout Listening can show you key metrics when it comes to detecting risks. For example, track off-brand hashtags to see where risk emerges, or have a topic monitoring search for one of the scenarios above to see if there is any message spike in topics relevant to your brand.

If there are, you can then use sentiment analysis to discover what people are saying about any given incident, and whether that conversation is positive or negative so that you are armed with context when deciding to respond.

In conjunction with this analysis, NewsWhip by Sprout Social provides a layer of predictive intelligence on media coverage and social posts, identifying the narratives that are emerging across the social web to enable your team to make informed decisions about response quickly.

With real-time risk detection implemented, escalations and responses happen faster, protecting your brand equity from external threats.

Message monitoring and crisis triggers

Dashboard-level analysis is useful, but realistically, it’s impossible to monitor a dashboard all day, every day. That’s why automation needs to be a crucial part of brand safety.

Social inboxes are a more direct signal for measuring brand health. For the most part, an average volume of messages means things are business as usual. But an unexpected spike can be cause for concern. It could indicate a PR disaster is on the horizon or has already arrived. To monitor this, you can use tools such as Message Spike Alert notifications connected to Sprout’s Smart Inbox. When incoming messages across your social platforms exceed the hourly average, you immediately get email or mobile push notifications. Plus, you can customize the tool’s sensitivity settings to ensure the protocol is appropriate for your team.

Data security & regulatory compliance

Some brand risks stray into legal territory. For brands operating in regulated industries, such as healthcare or finance, there are strict rules when it comes to data privacy and the information that is put on social media.

Tools such as Guardian by Sprout Social add an extra layer of security on top of your normal efforts if you work in a regulated industry. Guardian enables you to control both input and output, including masking sensitive data automatically, securing forms and blocking keywords.

This gives you the ability to engage effectively while ensuring compliance, protecting sensitive data and maintaining brand integrity. This helps you retain trust with your customers by demonstrating a commitment to their security.

Influencer and creator safety solutions

Influencers are the new face of marketing for many brands, with the authenticity and loyal audiences they bring proven to be a valuable dovetail with more traditional marketing methods. According to our 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report, creator content is the third-most cited content that marketers plan to prioritize in 2026.

But with that authenticity comes risk. They are not your brand’s employees—that’s part of the value. They have their own audiences, a history of online comments and values of their own.

Before working with influencers and creators, it’s crucial to vet them, weigh up the risks and build customizable safety reports that help you align creators with your brand’s values. For example, Sprout Social Influencer Marketing automatically scans a creator’s past content for “red flags” like adult content, gambling or political controversy.

When you ensure that any influencers you work with are brand safe, you’re reducing the risk your brand will be pulled into any unsavory conversations or situations started by people outside of your organization.

Employee advocacy and internal safety gates

When employees share brand content, they amplify your reach and give you a powerful endorsement. However, even the most well-meaning employees can tip public favor against you by saying the wrong thing, or even just saying the right thing at the wrong time.

With employee advocacy, you can provide your employees with pre-approved social messages to share. These help maintain a consistent brand voice and enable your employees to easily and confidently comply with your brand guidelines. You’re also able to restrict the available social networks your content can be shared on,decreasing your risk of liability even further.

Best brand safety tools to consider

Here are some of the best tools for managing brand safety that you might want to consider when planning out your strategy.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a suite of AI-powered solutions for social media management and media monitoring that help you protect your brand. Our platform improves your brand safety on social with voice of the customer data, and automated tools and processes, including:

Publishing and compliance

Sprout’s messaging and approval workflows ensure that no content goes live without approval. This can include reviews by managers to any post that is set live, reviews by legal teams through a secure link (even if they don’t have a Sprout Social account) and added protections for regulated industries through Guardian.

You can also build a repository of pre-approved assets to make certain that everything posted on social media is brand-appropriate and vetted.

Monitoring & crisis management (proactive protection)

Sprout Listening and NewsWhip by Sprout Social give teams a sense of the broader landscape beyond mentions and messages. With Listening, you can monitor sentiment and spikes in interest around the web via keywords, brand hashtags and competitor mentions to gauge perception of any brand or issue.

NewsWhip offers media coverage monitoring of any topic via agentic AI as well as social media alerts to keep track of how news is spreading online. This predictive intelligence puts you ahead of any emerging narrative, and allows you to make an informed decision on whether your brand needs to be reacting to those changes in media and public interest. The Trellis monitoring agent will alert you directly to your inbox if anything changes based on your chosen keywords, brand and sensitivity thresholds.

This aids with institutional awareness of moments of potential reputational damage. Many crisis teams develop benchmarks of escalation to know what level of coverage and/or social sharing requires an escalation vs. it being something that can be handled by a smaller team.

Beyond agentic monitoring, traditional social alerts also serve a similar function for you to be alerted when a topic is trending.
The Trellis AI Agent also runs within Sprout Listening, which enables users to interrogate the data directly within the dashboard through the agent for deeper analysis of the reason behind changes in the dashboard.

Influencer safety

Sprout Social Influencer Marketing offers a number of tools to manage the potential risks of working with influencers. These include a brand safety tool that scans a creator’s past content for potential issues, and customizable safety rules that use AI to suggest and flag keywords or hashtags in an influencer’s history that don’t align with your values. There are also tolerance thresholds that enable you to set specific levels for safety rules (e.g., “flag if more than three posts mention a competitor”) to balance risk with opportunity.

Community and review management

Review sites and forums are another place where a crisis can begin, as customers voice their frustrations with negative experiences. With Sprout’s community and review management tools, you can:
Monitor and respond to reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, Glassdoor, and TripAdvisor from one place to address negative feedback immediately.
See in real-time when another team member is viewing or replying to a message, preventing “double-responses” that look unprofessional.
Monitor Reddit conversations about your brand or the adjacent industry and flag any risks that emerge.

Proofpoint

Proofpoint is a digital risk protection solution that fortifies brands, data and personnel against cyber attacks across the deep and dark web. This deep analysis ensures that your brand is protected in areas that you might not otherwise think to look.

You can use it to:

• Discover brand misuse, fraudulent accounts and executive impersonations across global social platforms.
• Scan the deep and dark web for compromised credentials, leaked data and physical threats.
• Receive alerts and orchestrate automated takedowns for risky accounts, phishing domains and malicious content.

Zefr

Zefr enables digital advertising effectiveness while ensuring brand suitability and safety values are upheld within the world’s largest networks.

They specialize in AI-powered brand suitability solutions that allow you to:

• Activate and measure brand suitability using pre-impression content avoidance controls.
• Enable precise advertising activation while navigating modern, complex content risks, including misinformation, deepfakes and unregulated AI-generated media.
• Eliminate misaligned impressions from false positives and unsuitable content.

ZeroFox

ZeroFox provides protection that scours the surface, deep and dark web to identify and dismantle external threats to your brand identity and personnel.

You can use it to:

• Identify and orchestrate the takedown of fake executive profiles and brand impersonators.
• Detect phishing campaigns and spoofed domains designed to steal customer credentials.
• Monitor the dark web for leaked company data, compromised credentials or targeted chatter.

Best practices for integrating brand safety tools into team workflows

There are a lot of ways to set up successful brand safety management. Below are key steps that ensure it’s embedded in the culture of your organization rather than an afterthought.

1. Establish clear ownership and escalation paths
There are several aspects to brand safety, from ads to content publication to influencer management, and each workflow might have different ownership. That’s why there must be clear ownership and a crisis plan if something does go wrong, whether that’s looping in the comms team or sending flags to stakeholders.

2. Embed safety checkpoints into content approval workflows
There should never be a single point of failure for content publication, which is why it’s important to have approval workflows. Use tools to let managers have final sign-off on posts before they go live to make sure brand safety is front of mind. This is particularly true in regulated industries, where you might want to set up a list of banned words to ensure compliance.

3. Automate alerts and threshold triggers
Nobody has time to monitor a dashboard all day, which is where alerts come in. Make sure you’ve set up automated alerts to let you know when things change, whether that’s message volume, media coverage or brand mentions.

4. Align safety criteria across paid and organic teams
Paid and organic teams need to be working from the same criteria, so make sure that everyone across both teams is aware of safety guidelines, banned words and escalation protocols.

5. Standardize influencer and partner vetting processes
However you choose to vet the influencers you’re working with, it’s crucial the process is consistent. Develop criteria and brand values that require alignment and stick to them.

6. Document response playbooks and SLAs
The most mature teams have crisis response playbooks and escalation guides that document everything needed to respond effectively to crises or potential crises. Make sure you have one too.

7. Integrate safety metrics into performance dashboards
Don’t keep brand safety in a silo, it’s something that affects everyone. Make sure safety metrics (whether that’s ad adjacency, a reduction in crisis escalations or negative news stories) are reported alongside other performance indicators.

8. Conduct regular audits and post-incident reviews
Just as it’s good to have a plan in place in case a crisis does strike, you should always be aware of past performance to improve future performance. If you do have an incident, go back and analyze where it started, what went wrong and how your team could have responded differently.

9. Train teams continuously
The internet is always evolving. Make sure your team is aware of all the new features in your tool stack.

10. Reassess risk as platforms and culture evolve
This last point applies to the business too. New risks will emerge as technology and online culture continue to evolve. Your business needs to have the tools available to manage this new reality.

Measuring success

Brand safety self-evidently has value, and like all things that drive value for a business, it’s important to measure how the teams involved are contributing to that value.

This will depend on your organization’s priorities and whether your focus is on organic, paid or earned media, but success often involves some or all of the following:

• Declining number of unsafe ad placements
• Less time to identify a brewing crisis
• Reduction in crisis escalations due to early action
• Fewer negative news stories
• Better sentiment around campaigns
• Benchmarking the impact of brand safety tools
• Integration of safety metrics into executive dashboards

However you decide to measure it, keep it consistent and regular, with ties back to business impact to demonstrate the importance of the work to the wider team.

Brand safety in 2026 and beyond

Incorporating brand safety solutions into your workflow will strengthen your brand and prevent reputational risks from morphing into serious business damage. But it’s no longer enough to be reactive when something goes wrong.

Like the internet, the risks to your brand can be exponential, whether that’s an ad appearing next to an offensive post, negative media coverage or an influencer going against brand values. The proactive management and reporting on those risks are the only way for a brand to truly stay safe online.

Start assessing your brand safety measures and take actionable steps to improve it with our brand safety checklist.

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PPR special edition: The best influencer marketing campaigns of 2026 (so far)

Welcome back to Post Performance Report—a series where we compile and analyze social media posts and campaigns inspiring us, and break down what makes them so genius. We don’t just examine the flawless creative execution of every post or campaign, but the brand impact, too.

This time, we’re deep-diving into the top influencer marketing campaigns of the year. According to a Q1 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey, most marketers say influencer content out-performs brand content in terms of reach, engagement and conversion, and another 65% are very confident in their team’s ability to demonstrate the ROI of influencer efforts.

When we scroll our feeds, it’s clear how many brands are betting on influencer marketing. It’s become the de facto advertising tactic on social—and even traditional marketing channels. But many of our favorite campaigns are led by micro-creators and the latest internet darlings, not the biggest influencers. Consumers crave relatability and normcore (with a healthy dose of aspiration), and are losing their appetite for over-hyped products, massive hauls and polished content.

Let’s dissect the campaign creative, performance metrics and points-of-view from the practitioners behind the brand handle, starting with Staples and the “Staples Baddie.”

Staples x The Staples Baddie: Let employees create

“The Staples Baddie”—aka creator Oblivion (@blivxx), who goes by Kaeden day-to-day—is a real employee of an East Coast Staples. She started posting about the brand’s capabilities on TikTok, videos that have amassed more than 10 million views.

Oblivion demonstrates how customers can create everything from custom stamps to printed mugs—while saving a lot of time and money. Commenters on her videos frequently say she has opened their eyes to a wide array of Staples products they never knew existed. According to Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social, Oblivion has an engagement rate of 23.4%—an impressive 23% higher than similar creators.

To be clear, the content she produces is employee-generated. But when Staples saw her going viral, they were quick to encourage her to keep posting, commenting on her posts, sending her a custom care package and speaking publicly about how much they love her content. The brand just announced their partnership, after her fans begged the brand to make it official.

As Bob Sherwin, Staples’ CMO, told the New York Times, “[It’s] been incredible to watch Kaeden’s content resonate so widely…[The company has seen] measurable increases in store traffic and meaningful lifts in categories featured in viral posts, including custom mugs and specialty print products.”

The play: The Staples Baddie is a potent reminder that employees can be influencers, too. Employees creators have influence in the communities they’re a part of online, and can be a vital part of your employee advocacy program.

While brands shouldn’t take a completely hands-off approach to employee creator content, they should give their employees space to express themselves naturally, like Staples did for Oblivion. When employees are given creative freedom and permission to build their personal brand, they bring diverse experiences, personalities and expertise to your brand content.

Midi Health x @JustBeingMelani: Promote your best influencer content

Midi Health is a telehealth organization that provides specialized care to women in midlife—a chapter the medical field hasn’t always treated with care or nuance. As a disruptor in the healthcare space, the brand has taken a social-first, digital approach to increasing awareness, which includes partnering with creators. Their most successful partnership to date is with Melani Sanders, known online as @JustBeingMelani.

The author and influencer describes herself as the “founder of the Do Not Care Club™,” which encourages women in perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause to give themselves more grace. She even wrote a book of the same name.

In her top post for Midi Health, Melani follows her standard post format, listing off all of the things women in the Do Not Care Club™ do not care about. The sponsored version of the post amassed over 150,000 engagements to date, and is how we came across the post earlier this year. The video outperformed the brand’s top Instagram content by tens of thousands. Per Sprout Influencer Marketing, the post engagement rate was 3.2% (higher than Melani’s average engagement rate of 2.1%) and the earned media value was nearly $362,000.

This success comes at a time when over a quarter of social users actively seek out wellness and self improvement advice on social, per the Q3 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey.

The play: As our algorithms become more niche, it’s important to build long-term influencer partnerships with those who already have credibility in your audience’s corner of the internet. Source influencers by researching topics they talk about—not just traits like audience size or location. And when an influencer post performs well, put additional paid spend behind it (with the influencer’s permission, of course). Magic happens when paid ads feel organic.

DoorDash x Rob Rausch: Tap into internet culture and fandoms

Rob Rausch is a snake wrangler, reality star and a budding influencer. After rising to fame on shows Love Island and Traitors, Rausch received offers for a variety of brand deals. DoorDash was among the first to snag a partnership, taking an unconventional approach. Users have commented in disbelief that the official DoorDash account is posting this content. Needless to say, the brand prioritized earning goodwill over pushing their service.

The strategy is led by Zaria Parvez, Head of Social. She told the Wall Street Journal the social-first genius behind it: “[The] traditional advertising world will prioritize a hero video, and then everything is extra if it happens. But the way that our team operates is these people are known to be on social and what the fans are excited about is if you give them something that they understand through the Easter egg lens, but it’s also a new piece of content. For Rob Rausch, it’s what is he going to say now? Or a new shirtless pic. We always build in six to seven ancillary pieces of content. That, to me, is actually more important than rights to a linear asset, for example.”

The non-linear approach has worked especially well for this partnership. According to Sprout Influencer Marketing, the top video from the campaign drove an 18% engagement rate on TikTok—a 50x engagement lift.

The play: Social has changed the way we consume TV, and because of that, the reality-star-to-influencer pipeline is well-established. For brands focused on building cultural relevancy, it’s critical to be part of fandom conversations happening on social. When partnering with these influencers, create internet moments, not glorified commercials.

KFC x @TurnUpTwinsTV: Co-create your brand identity

The TurnUp Twins, Minnie and Mattie, are the original brand jingle creators—going viral for creating an unprompted Crumbl Cookie jingle back in 2024, a video with 80+ million views to date on TikTok.

The sisters lent their infectious joy, harmony and sweet lyrics to a recent KFC collaboration to reintroduce the chicken fast food brand’s Twister Wrap. The video received over 15,000 engagements on TikTok and Instagram. According to Sprout Influencer Marketing, the video also received a 4% engagement rate when posted to the brand account—a significantly higher rate than the average engagement rate of similar brands (0.25%).

The TurnUp Twins’ video style has the same flavor of jingles in the early days of marketing. The nostalgia plays well for KFC, as the Twister Wrap was a 90s favorite.

The song has already become associated with KFC. In the comments section on TikTok, users wrote “Twist it! Twist it!” and pleaded for the tune to be turned into a commercial.

The play: Fast food companies, like many, are all competing for attention when it comes to releases. Instead of creating flash-in-the-pan moments, use influencer marketing to celebrate major milestones and build on your existing brand story.

Strava x local LA creators: Host IRL events

During the 2026 LA Marathon, activity tracking app Strava hosted an exclusive invite-only panel. The intimate event started with a two-mile shakeout run followed by breakfast, and was attended by athletes, creators and run club founders.

The panel itself was led by local creators, including Danielle Burnett, founder of size-inclusive run club Big Girls Who Run; Maya Leppard, creator of Bad at Running, a virtual club for new runners; Mariah Dyson, a Nike athlete and founder of female-focused GirlGangCrazy run club; and Marvin Garcia, founder of one of L.A.’s largest run clubs, Good Vibes Track Club.

The event was the latest in a series of pop-ups and meet-ups the brand calls “Kudos Collective,” a nod to the kudos feature in the app that allows you to cheer on other athletes. The brand knows that community is a top reason people use their platform, which is why they prioritize community-centered events over flashy sponsorships and campaigns.

As Melanie Jarrett, Director of Partnerships at Strava, told Glossy, “We specifically choose not to directly sponsor races [so we can continue to be] brand and platform agnostic. Part of what makes [our meetups] such a hot ticket is [many influential runners and run club founders] are actually never all in the same room together, because some [partner with] Hoka, and this one’s with Nike, and this one does Lululemon stuff—so there’s a certain magic where you see [influential runners] recognize each other, meet for the first time and share best practices around how they’re each growing their running communities in their local cities.”

The play: According to The State of Influencer Marketing Report, 80% of consumers are more willing to buy from brands that partner with influencers beyond social media content. Take a cue from Strava and build your community event (or event series) centered around meaningful connections, not just likes and engagements.

Cultivate creator-led community

That concludes this installment of PPR. Stay tuned for our next edition, and in the meantime, remember these key takeaways:

Post Performance Report Takeaways

• Genuine creators often outperform polished campaigns. Instead of over-directing, marketers should support influencers without stripping away the personality that makes them successful.
• Credibility within niche communities matters more than reach. Marketers should prioritize topic alignment and audience credibility over follower count, and amplify top-performing creator content with paid support to extend its reach.
• Cultural relevance comes from participating in the conversation. Rather than treating creator partnerships like traditional ads, marketers should focus on producing content that feels native to social platforms and expands the story across multiple posts, formats and inside jokes.
• Influencer marketing works best when it extends beyond the feed. Brands that involve influencers in real-world experiences, events or community initiatives can deepen audience relationships and drive stronger loyalty.

Read next: Delve into our guide that breaks down the top trends defining the future of influencer marketing.

And if you see a social post or campaign that deserves to be highlighted, tag @sproutsocial and use #PostPerformanceReport to have your idea included in a future article.

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How Gen Z uses social media and what that means for brands

Before the 1960s, young people were seen as an undesirable marketing audience and mostly ignored. Everything changed with Baby Boomers. They were the largest and most influential generation in the history of modern consumerism, yet their social movements and corporate distrust confounded advertisers who had to completely rethink their playbooks. Sound familiar?

Since then, marketers have been trying to reach a revolving door of youth generations—from Boomers to Gen X to Millennials, and now Zoomers and Gen Alpha. Reaching young people and penetrating trend culture has become a consistent hurdle.

Casey Lewis, social media consultant, author behind the After School newsletter and expert of social trends among younger audiences, sums it up like this: “Any brand not actively trying to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha is doing themselves a disservice. Even if you don’t care to be in the zeitgeist. They are our future consumers, so you need to have them in mind—even if you’re not trying to reach them today.”

After decades of consistently marketing to young people, marketers are again mystified by a new generation. Like Boomers before them, Gen Z represents a new kind of consumer: digital natives who are increasingly cynical, driven by ethical causes and are chronically online (or are they?) They are more discerning than their predecessors, which frustrates marketers trying to obsessively crack the code on how to effectively reach them without seeming indubitably cringe.

In this guide, we explain how Gen Z wants brands to show up on social media and what it takes to market to them the right way.

Gen Z social media usage

Gen Z has never known a world without social media or the internet. It’s enmeshed in their daily lives and serves as their go-to channel for information. According to the Q2 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey, social is now the #1 place Gen Z searches—even beating out popular search engines.

When we asked Lewis how she would describe the way Gen Z uses social, she responded, “A better question is how don’t they use social? They use it for everything and they expect brands to use it for everything, too—from customer service to commerce, discovery to community.”

Let’s break down which platforms occupy most of their time online and the types of content they engage with there.

Which platforms does Gen Z use and why?

According to The 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report, 80% of Gen Z social media users are on Facebook and Instagram, 74% are on YouTube and another 72% are on TikTok, making these networks the most popular for Zoomers. Gen Z mostly wants brands on these platforms to provide entertainment, but are also looking for customer service on Facebook.

Digging deeper into how they use certain platforms, Gen Z consumers report TikTok is their favorite channel to turn to for product discovery, closely followed by Facebook, according to the same report. The Q1 2026 Sprout Pulse Survey found that they are also most likely to use TikTok, Instagram and Reddit for staying up to date on the news.

What brand content does Gen Z engage with?

On their top two most-used channels, Instagram and Facebook, Gen Z is most likely to engage with brand posts that includes short-form video (less than 60 seconds), per The Content Strategy Report. This holds true for TikTok. Interestingly, they’re the only generation to prefer long-term video (over 60 seconds) on YouTube.

Lewis suggests all these channels and formats could be interconnected. “We all have short attention spans to go along with our preference for short-form video. But it’s interesting to see Gen Z podcasters uploading one to two hour-long episodes. Then they slice and dice, and upload videos across short-form platforms.”

Though Gen Z ultimately consumes all content on most platforms, the key is understanding the nuance and culture of each platform. That doesn’t mean completely recreating posts from scratch—and overtaxing your team’s bandwidth. It means, as Lewis illustrates, charting multiple points of distribution and connection, and prioritizing the platforms that matter most to this generation.

Regardless of format, Gen Z wants brands to prioritize educational content, memes and skits, and highly-produced episodic series, per the Q1 2026 Pulse Survey.

Gen Z is also most likely to say that brands should make interacting with their audiences their top priority on social media, according to the Q2 2025 Pulse Survey. What you publish matters, but for younger generations, how you interact is just as important.

Gen Z social media trends

Upfront warning: This is not a trends listicle that will inspire specific content ideas (for that read our top social media trends article).

As Gen Z has matured (the oldest members of the generation turn 30 this year) and they’ve spent more time under marketers’ microscope, throughlines have emerged that give us insight into how they think about social and its future. Brands are beginning to understand that keeping up with a lightning pace trend culture is not the key to their lasting loyalty, and Gen Z consumers want a break from being chronically online too (kind of).

These trends map out the future of Gen Z’s social media habits, and give clues that reveal what it takes to build lasting brand resonance.

Support brands that share their values

The surge of brands putting out “activist” content in the last six years largely backfired—especially with discerning Zoomers. Many brands were accused of getting it wrong, overwhelming their audiences or performing to bolster the bottom line.

Sprout’s 2019 #BrandsGetReal Report found that 70% of consumers then believed it was important for brands to have a public stance on social and political issues. The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ told a different story: Only a quarter of consumers said the most memorable brands speak about causes and news that align with their values.

But Gen Z doesn’t want brands to become completely agnostic. They want brands to be transparent about what they value, and they’re more likely to support activism backed up by action. Per the Q1 2026 Pulse Survey, 28% want brands of all kinds to take a clear public stand on all major issues and another 30% only want brands to take a stand if the issue relates to their product or industry.

Of all the generations, they’re most likely to say they frequently buy products to support a brand’s values, and one-third will stop buying a product if the company’s values clash with their own. The same survey found that Gen Z is just as likely to say influencers should take a clear stand on all major issues, which puts more pressure on brands to find influencers that are values-aligned.

Clearly understanding your Gen Z audience’s values is imperative for meeting their expectations and protecting your reputation.

Desire for more original content

To establish trust with Gen Z consumers, brands need to stand out in a saturated sea of sameness. Hustling to keep up with trends or just posting libraries of user-generated content won’t cut it. The best way to keep your audience coming back for more is by making ownable, helpful and entertaining content.

As mentioned, Gen Z is most interested in brand content that provides education about products and services. Their appetite for educational content is closely followed by a taste for originality and entertainment.

Lewis explains, “Where brands go wrong is losing sight of their own POV. An amalgamation of random user-generated content is simply not going to resonate; the brand’s voice still needs to come through. Similarly, there’s a misconception that engaging with online trends and memes is a silver bullet for brands when it comes to winning over Gen Z. It’s not! Chasing culture rarely works. It’s better for brands to focus on creating culture.”

Brands that eschew posting frequency in favor of recurring franchises and universe-building are most likely to capture (and keep) their attention.

Leading the social commerce charge

Every stage of the customer journey exists on social—and that rings even truer for Gen Z. This comes as little surprise, knowing that they’re most likely to turn to social for product discovery. Ninety percent of Gen Z say social media ads, influencer posts and organic brand content have inspired some percent of their purchases of the past six months, according to the Q2 2025 Pulse Survey. Three-quarters say they’re more likely to buy from a brand just because they partner with an influencer they like.

But there’s another distinction that sets Gen Z apart: Even the current economic climate doesn’t impact their social shopping. While 38% of all users across generations are now less likely to buy something they discovered on social, 43% of Gen Z are more likely to buy, according to the same survey.

These trends, however, don’t mean brands need to start going for the hard sell in their social content. First and foremost, marketers need to prioritize content that educates, entertains and makes audiences feel seen—with your products and services integrated into the story as relevant.

Lukewarm feelings toward AI-generated social content

Across the board, consumers of all ages are closely split on whether or not AI-generated content makes them more or less likely to be interested in a brand. According to the Q1 2026 Pulse Survey, about 40% of Gen Z are unlikely to interact with AI-generated content. Yet, 34% say they’re likely to like, comment and share it.

But engagement doesn’t equate to trust. Gen Z agrees that the top thing they wish brands would stop doing is posting AI content without clearly labeling it, per the same survey. Another 56% say they’re more likely to trust brands that are committed to publishing content created by humans, as we found in the Q3 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey.

Interestingly, Gen Z consumers are also split on AI influencers. The same survey found that while almost half say they aren’t comfortable with brands using AI influencers at all, 32% see no problem with it and 20% think it depends on the campaign.

While it might make sense for some brands to dabble in AI content creation, there will most likely be minimal returns from your Gen Z audience. The best AI use cases for brands are still increasing efficiency in areas like social listening, data analysis and customer care.

An overwhelming need to touch grass

A stereotypical image of Gen Z persists: an entire generation glued to their phones and tablets, suffering from loneliness at epidemic rates. No matter how many headlines or think pieces are written about this subject, the stats point to steady or increased social media use.

The Social Media Content Strategy Report found that 48% of Gen Z consumers plan to consume more content from companies in 2026—the highest of any generation. Yet, many in this generation are burnt out and suffering from the unhealthy impacts of social. Networks like Instagram are doing more to protect the most vulnerable members of the Gen Z audience, but many feel forced to set their own limits with social media detoxes. And a significant majority support social media bans for users under 16.

The Q1 2026 Pulse Survey found that 62% of Gen Z support a ban for under-16s, and another 18% are on the fence. The generation is also the most likely to want more tools for screentime management to support their mental health and wellbeing, per the Q4 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey.

While it’s highly unlikely that Gen Z will start leaving social media in droves, we do expect to see more take breaks from principal networks in favor of more time on community networks like Substack and Reddit. According to the Q1 2026 Pulse Survey, Gen Z social users say they prefer to create more content than they consume—a shift that could influence their relationship with networks overall. We also expect event marketing and IRL meetups will continue to appeal to Gen Z consumers craving a third space.

Brands Gen Z flocks to on social

As mentioned, Gen Z is a cynical generation. Overly promotional tactics, forced authenticity and glomming onto trends doesn’t win their favor.

Here are four brands who have mastered the art of Gen Z marketing, and found a way to breakthrough in a way that feels true to their image.

Marc Jacobs

Luxury brand Marc Jacobs is an unexpected Gen Z darling. The fashion brand is well-known for including Gen Z, TikTok-famous comedians and influencers in its content. But somehow these personalities all capture the essence of the brand.

As Lewis articulates, “Marc Jacobs takes trends and formats, and makes them their own. Sometimes you see someone’s presence and it feels stitched together and reactionary. Instead, their presence feels cohesive and has a unique Marc Jacobs stamp of approval.”

Give your brand a Gen Z glow up: Follow Marc Jacobs’ lead by keeping your content original and unexpected, yet completely on-brand.

Topicals

Skincare brand Topicals has mastered the art of brand trips and influencer marketing. Like their recent campaign #TopicalsInRio proves, the brand is in lockstep with their Gen Z audience and deeply understands their nuances.

“I’m interested in how brands are looking to their communities for insights and content. Brands like Topicals and other skincare brands are able to take action based on consumer feedback,” says Lewis.

Topicals has also built a positive reputation for listening to their audience’s product feedback and compensating creators and influencers. Lewis adds, “Topicals uses the TYB platform to engage with their community in a thoughtful way. The social, marketing and product teams are all co-collaborating on community management. They compensate people for UGC (giving them a tag is not enough), which makes sure it feels authentic and on-brand.”

Give your brand a Gen Z glow up: Take it from Topicals: When you reward your audience for their content and feedback, they’ll reward you with loyalty.

Puresport

Puresport, a UK-based wellness and fitness brand specializing in natural supplements, was founded in 2019 but has quickly earned a Gen Z fandom. The hype is due in large part to the brand’s social presence.

The brand partners with elite runners from around the world, producing cinematic looks into their journeys preparing for events like the British Championships. They extend their documentary approach on YouTube with the long-form Project Puresport series, with episodes showcasing the Puresport community at marathon events from Boston to Berlin and beyond.

On that note, Puresport believes in community with a capital “C”—hosting in-person run clubs and inviting audiences to connect with each other in their WhatsApp groups and on fitness app Strava.

Give your brand a Gen Z glow up: Gen Z’s social media behaviors aren’t limited to one particular platform. Identify where your youngest audience members spend the most time, and take advantage of each channel’s unique content formats to reinforce your brand’s distinct identity. And wherever possible, look for intuitive ways to bridge the gap between how consumers experience your brand online and offline.

ServiceNow

Software company ServiceNow isn’t your typical Gen Z marketing inspo. But the brand exemplifies a well-known Gen Z trait: subverting expectations in content. Like in the video where interpreted cringy corporate jargon.

Give your brand a Gen Z glow up: Gen Z content is often layered. It relies on both the creator and viewer having context for inside jokes and cultural touchstones. Even B2B brands like ServiceNow can use that to their advantage. Gen Z makes up a large portion of companies’ current and future employee base, so B2B brands have a vested interest in appealing to them.

Reaching Gen Z is crucial for long-term brand health

Each new generation brings its own set of challenges. Reaching Gen Z requires brands to rethink how they engage.

Brands who successfully reach Gen Z understand the generation’s unique values, preferences and nuanced behavior in the social media ecosystem. From platform choice to content style, Zoomers are looking for brands who facilitate genuine, community-driven interaction.

For social marketers, that doesn’t mean recreating every trend, but instead forging a distinct identity across platforms. That is the key to building trust and loyalty.

Looking for more insight into how each generation wants to engage with brands on social? Download The 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report.

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Why the Best AI Use Cases in Marketing Start with Intelligence, Not Creation

Generative AI is everywhere on social feeds right now, from LinkedIn influencers claiming it’s going to be the end of marketing as we know it, to genuinely interesting use cases for copy creation, data visualization and beyond. But there’s a tension in that ubiquity. While marketers are keen to make the most of generative AI to save time and increase efficiency, it does not align with what consumers actually want to see on social media.

Our 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report highlights that while marketers are focused on producing AI-generated content, consumers report that they’re looking for more human-generated content in their feeds. This is hardly a surprise, given the broad AI adoption and explosion in the content generated by it. Much of that content has been AI slop, leading to consumer fatigue where they simply crave something more human.

While we shouldn’t completely rule out AI-generated content, teams need to strike the right balance between using AI to refine and scale content production, while retaining a human touch. And there are a number of other ways to use AI in marketing that more consistently build trust and increase efficiency. Plugging AI into manual workflows (like data analysis) can give your teams time back to use toward crafting stronger human-generated content.

3 AI use cases in marketing that help brands build trust

Marketers can use AI to better understand their audiences, create content that resonates and optimize their content for different distribution channels, all while keeping a human in the loop for the actual creation process.

During our Q1 2026 Breaking Ground event, we shared how brands can incorporate AI in a way that actually builds trust with audiences, rather than alienating them. Think of it as a “Proof of Reality” flywheel for content optimization built off of social intelligence.

Using tools such as Sprout Listening, NewsWhip by Sprout Social and Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, your social team can use AI to determine exactly what your audience wants, create content that meets that need and then make sure it gets back to that audience.

Let’s take a closer look at what this flow looks like.

Better understand your audience with AI-powered social intelligence

The first step in improving the impact of your marketing strategies is to build an understanding of what your audience wants to see, interact with and share, and AI can help with that. Our Content Strategy Report found that real-time insights into what their audience wants to consume was the number one thing marketers said would be the most helpful for increasing the impact of their social media strategy.

AI removes the existing latency, with the ability to analyze large tranches of structured and unstructured data, and come back with answers in minutes rather than hours or days. This enables marketers to stop thinking reactively—working from past data—toward a predictive model of what their audience wants right now, or might want in the weeks to come.

Examples of where AI could be implemented here include social data analysis and sentiment analysis, among others.

Social media data is a treasure trove of brand and customer insights that AI tools effortlessly dig into to surface critical information. The State of Social Media Report found 95% of leaders look at social data to inform business decisions such as lead generation, product development and competitor analysis. Thus, social media data analysis is empowering not only marketing teams but also cross-functional ones.

AI tools can also extract competitor insights by using semantic search and other AI algorithms from social data. Sprout analyzes social data using named entity recognition (NER) to identify and analyze competing brands and their content, providing you with actionable insights that improve your brand performance.

Sprout digs into competitor content engagements, post frequency, hashtag usage and other key performance areas by using keywords and @mentions you determine, cutting through the noise of thousands of social conversations in seconds to give you actionable data.

Marketers have also long used sentiment analysis to assess the tone and sentiment expressed in comments, posts and conversations around their brand to determine whether they are positive, negative or neutral. This is a critical AI capability considering 44% of marketers, per The State of Social Media Report, use sentiment mining to understand customer feedback and improve how they respond to issues.

Analyzing sentiment in social chatter also helps brands spot early indications of negative sentiment and take proactive measures before a situation escalates.

Approaching audience analysis in this way, you can use the power of AI to understand what will resonate before you write it, and feed that into your content and social strategy.

Build human-validated content

Once you have an idea of what your audience wants, it’s time to create that content. But it’s important to not just hand this off to AI. Audiences are overloaded with AI-generated content, so creating something made by a human can have a positive impact on performance.

A lot of content at the moment feels too polished, and audiences want something that feels real, whether it’s a behind-the-scenes look, or a casual Q&A with a creator. They also might be searching for different things on different networks, so make sure you’re thinking about what’s resonant for traditional SEO, social SEO (SOSEO) and AI search (GEO/AEO).

AI search is encroaching on traditional search because of a fundamental behavior change. Instead of targeted keywords, users are now typing or speaking verbose, conversational questions, and search engines are pulling answers from real conversations on platforms like Reddit.

When someone asks, “Which skincare products are cruelty-free?”, the AI summary isn’t just pulled from a brand’s ‘About Us’ page. It cites real-time social conversations to form the recommendation.

Traditional search engine results are dominated by subreddits and YouTube videos. Whether it’s an AI overview or a list of links, the engine is increasingly prioritizing the ‘human signal’ over static web content to answer the prompt.

Showing up in those spaces with authentic content is far more likely to get you cited in search answers than AI content.

Tap into influence networks

AI can also help you amplify your campaigns, including doubling-down on influencer partnerships.

Authenticity matters more than follower count because influencers and brands no longer need millions of followers to reach audiences; relevancy is rewarded. As more social proof and videos pop up in search results, it has never been more important to find brand-safe partners who are naturally a good fit for your brand. But there are more creators than ever. AI-powered matchmaking helps you narrow that down.

You need to be able to identify creators based on the content they’re posting (and their performance), and not just the demographics of their followers.

This shift in matching with the right creators is crucial to your Proof of Reality strategy, because it’s only those creators who can show up authentically, add value and build trust. When creators weave your product into their content organically, it converts.

You can also use that social intelligence and data analysis strategy to better understand networks such as Reddit. It’s hugely influential in AEO answers and AI search, but Reddit has its own rules and norms of behavior on the platform. Reddit is all about utility, so if you can find a way for your brand to naturally add value without it feeling forced or spammy, then the strategy will naturally grow.

By implementing a social intelligence framework, you can understand how users show up in different communities, and figure out which ones make sense for your brand to join organically. This fits into the social-intelligence-driven flywheel strategy, as you can identify communities that are a good fit for your brand, and then also find influential voices to amplify within those communities.

How to start using AI more effectively

AI is a priority for leadership, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating. This three-step process can refresh how your company uses AI. First, audit your current usage, then optimize agentic workflows and finally retrain your team on how to get the most out of these new ways of working.

1. Audit AI usage

Churning out content at scale may seem efficient, but that’s only true if what you’re producing is resonating with your audience. There is little to no value in increasing output if it’s not having a tangible business impact, and it may even be masking a lack of audience insight as a result.

Marketers can use AI to make content better and smarter, not necessarily just faster. To do this, the first step is alignment. Often, teams have evolved their AI usage organically with no centralized guidance, so it’s important to understand where the gaps or potential points of failure are across the team.

Audit your processes and see where AI is currently being used and where improvements can be made. That might mean a change in process, in which human effort moves more towards refining content and ensuring resonance with your audience, while leaving AI to expedite analysis and research. Understand where it fits within your teams’ workflows, and make adjustments as necessary.

Once this audit is complete, you’ll know what processes to strip out and rebuild with AI and agentic workflows.

2. Invest in agentic AI workflows

AI agents function independently, working in the background on research, data analysis or alerting you when something has changed in a dashboard.

This is useful for marketing teams as it means they have an always-on teammate, alerting them to anything meaningful they might not otherwise have seen, including sudden spikes in readership, engagement or customer conversations.

It can also help with research tasks that would otherwise require continuous back and forth prompting or manual effort. With agentic AI, you can set the agent a task for research, whether on the open web or using proprietary data, and have it notify you when the task is complete.

This means less time spent on analyses and more time defining campaigns that will actually perform.

3. Training pivot

These new workflows will require training for your teams to use them effectively. Whereas the initial flurry of AI activity was about the best prompts for generating output, this new wave of AI leads us to more strategic thinking and cultivating a better sense of what good looks like. In a world of infinite creation, it’s better to spend more time refining an idea into new and better iterations, and to do that, it’s important to slow down and have time to think.

The teams that succeed in 2026 and beyond will have training in editing and prompt architecture, with a focus on incremental improvements and finding key insights that will have broader impact. Support your teams to achieve that goal by training them on how to best use agentic AI and the AI workflows being put in place.

Expand your horizons for AI use cases in marketing

The disconnect between leaders’ enthusiasm for AI efficiency and consumer fatigue with AI-generated content is a clear signal that we’ve been too short-sighted about AI use cases in marketing. By pivoting your AI approach from mass generation to strategic intelligence, you can build a “Proof of Reality” engine that fosters genuine trust.

Ultimately, the goal is to let AI handle the data-heavy backend of marketing that often gets deprioritized as we rush between tasks. This way your team can reclaim the time needed to craft the authentic, high-quality content your audience is actually searching for.

Ready to refine your team’s approach and build smarter workflows? Download our Social Media AI Prompts template to help your team move beyond basic generation and start using prompts that drive real business insights and impact.
 

The post Why the Best AI Use Cases in Marketing Start with Intelligence, Not Creation appeared first on Sprout Social.

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