Keen to venture outside our own bubble and keep across developments from all corners of the marketing world, members of the Loom team Vicky and Vikki headed for a day out in Shoreditch at the dedicated social media conference, Social Day.
Despite Social Day’s branding, this was a conference not siloed around writing the perfect Instagram caption or optimising for the Tik Tok algorithm, but the wider concerns of the marketing world and the increasing need for a synchronised digital presence. It’s clearer than ever that social media is not a standalone channel you can afford to ignore. Its very existence has fundamentally collided with search, data and paid marketing strategies.
Here are our main takeaways from Social Day 2026.
SEO – Search Everywhere Optimisation?
If you’ve been staying across the Loom blog, you’ll be aware of how quickly and significantly AI is transforming search. Through the prevalence of AI search features such as AI Overviews, optimising for search engines and social media platforms is rapidly merging into one single discipline, defined by a need to get your brand cited on LLMs.
AI Overviews now appear in over half of all Google searches, actively drawing on human-driven content to answer user questions, with social platforms such as Reddit being a primary source. Throughout the conference, we heard the message; search is everywhere and optimising for SEO means optimising your social channels.
What does this all mean?
- Treat social platforms not as broadcast channels, but as an extension of your integrated search strategy
- Social media captions are valuable text indexable by search engines. Optimise your posts with targeted keywords to serve as crucial discovery signals, rather than relying on outdated hashtags
- Your format choices matter. LinkedIn Articles and Newsletters are massive drivers for AI citations, offering compounding SEO value that feeds directly into broader search engine visibility
Building trust and combatting AI ‘slop’
You’ve noticed the change, you’ve read the comments, you’ve even seen the AI ‘slop’ content first hand. Marketing, and primarily social media, is facing a massive trust shortage powered by oversaturated feeds of highly polished, recycled and AI-generated content. It’s crowding out genuine information making it difficult for brands to connect with users.
Throughout our time at the conference, we spoke to marketing professionals who’d experienced first hand how this diluted, frustrating social media experience was impacting user engagement. Buyers tend to turn off when they detect performative vulnerability or overly produced corporate ads. Instead, imperfection is the new perfect.
What does this all mean?
- User-generated content that showcases genuine customer experiences is far more effective at driving traffic than hyper-stylised, influencer-led experience
- Reject AI and prioritise raw, human content. DIY-style videos have significantly more market trust than studio-produced, hyper-polished brand content. Show what makes your brand human, even if it is just wacky sock day in the office
“The brands winning on social media right now are not the most polished. They are the most believable. When everything looks too produced, people lose trust.” Vikki, Paid Media
Is that a B2B vibe shift?
Despite some marketers perceiving social channels as a space defined by influencers and consumers, there was a significant B2B marketing presence across Social Day. Throughout the talks we attended and our conversation with people across agencies and brands, we heard of an impending B2B ‘vibe shift’ across social media.
What does this look like? B2B content, whether made for social or simply shared there, needs to adopt the native look and feel of consumer content. Whether you’re a 20-something using Instagram to find your new favourite fashion brand or a head of procurement tasked with identifying cheaper suppliers, you want to feel like you’re engaging with real people who care about what they do from stage one of the journey.
That means content that feels as accessible, authentic and culturally fluent as everything else on their social feeds.
Tactics like leveraging niche micro-creators to build community trust are strategies that B2C brands have historically excelled in, and B2B is only just now catching up. In B2B in particular, 70% to 80% of the buyer journey now happens before a customer ever contacts a sales team or fills out a lead form.
What does this all mean?
- Swap rigid corporate templates and humanise your formats with a casual, high-engagement styles that wouldn’t look out of place on an Instagram feed
- Expand your circle and look to partner with micro-influencers or key industry voices to validate your brand’s authority
- Ensure B2B content strategies are focused first and foremost on the actual humans making the purchasing decisions
“Encourage your founders and internal experts to post real, unpolished insights on their own LinkedIn profiles rather than just relying on the corporate brand page. A selfie-style filmed video is going to generate more trust than a slick studio podcast-style video.” Vikki, Paid Media
Ditch the vanity metrics for meaningful data points
Whether it’s SEO or paid advertising, recent algorithm updates have forced a re-evaluation of what counts as success across the digital space to one that favours relevance and citation. This demands an evolution in how we report and the metrics we use to define digital success.
In the case of social media, this means follower counts and likes don’t carry the same weight they once did, and are instead seen as vanity metrics that can mislead brands into a false perception of visibility and engagement. Instead, Social Day was awash with speakers and marketing experts signing the praises of high-intent actions such as saves and shares, stating how these should be the analytical focus of reporting that highlights genuine use consideration going forward.
This echoed what fellow Loom paid media expert Hollie heard during her recent trip to the south coast for BrightonSEO.
Simran Harichand’s talk, “Why people ignore most ads and how yours can be different”, looked to tackle the age-old problem of consumer ad blindness, and how untrustworthy content was further amplifying this. Simran focused on why users subconsciously tune out the vast majority of digital advertising and how brands can tweak their copy, images and targeting to break through a wall of indifference. Vitally, it also dug into an industry-wide shift away from traditional vanity metrics, championing POAS (Profit on Ad Spend) over the standard ROAS (Revenue on Ad Spend).
What does this all mean?
- Social media success should be based on saves, shares and dwell time, rather than superficial likes or follower counts
- Re-think your reporting and align it with commercial outcomes like POAS
“Most social reporting tells clients how their content performed but a good data strategy tells them how their business is performing. The shift from channel metrics to commercial outcomes such as Share of Voice and cost efficiency are boardroom-ready indicators to how social is driving success.” Vicky, Head of People
Maximise your digital channel presence with Loom
From organic rankings to social shares, visibility across the web is no longer a case of managing siloed activity. To capture today’s buyers during the messy middle of their journey, brands must break down the walls between search and paid channels to create an integrated strategy that succeeds cross-platform.
At Loom we strive to keep pace with the evolving digital landscape, whether that’s our continued efforts to keep across developments in SEO or dipping our toes into the social media waters. Our teams across organic, paid media and multi-channel marketing are here to help drive measurable business growth for your brand. Get in touch today.
