<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6877701b88030d58f11ac053/6a870d2a89d1a7fdf4c77964_3rd%20September%20Image.jpg" alt=""></div> <div class="gn-hero__head"> <span class="gn-kicker"><span class="dot"></span>Expression</span> <h1 class="gn-title"><em>Playback:</em> The Reach Reality: How Brands Are Rebuilding Their Social Strategy When Organic Isn't Enough</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>3 September 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>10 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <figure class="gn-fig gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-fig__media"> <div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1223996460" title="Playback: The Reach Reality: How Brands Are Rebuilding Their Social Strategy When Organic Isn't Enough" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe></div> </div> <figcaption>Playback: The Reach Reality: How Brands Are Rebuilding Their Social Strategy When Organic Isn't Enough</figcaption> </figure> <h2>Organic Reach Has Collapsed. That Doesn't Mean Organic Is Dead.</h2> <p>The GO Network hosted a panel of Sue Rizzello, Director at Remedy Marketing, Sally Hawkesford, Director at SHC Digital, and Bethan Gibson, Business Director for Media at Space &amp; Time, to give an honest read on the state of organic social in 2026 and how brands are rebuilding their strategies around creators and paid amplification.</p> <p>The starting numbers set the tone: Facebook organic reach sitting around 1.3%, Instagram around 7.6%, and Meta's algorithm now openly favouring creators over brand accounts. The session asked the obvious follow-up. At what point does a brand's organic programme stop justifying its resource cost?</p> <p>Bethan Gibson's answer was that the question is the wrong shape. The risk of not investing in organic is harder to quantify but arguably greater than the cost of running it, because organic still builds the credibility and trust that every other channel depends on. Her advice wasn't to cut organic but to reallocate it: a lighter touch on Facebook, sustained investment in the platforms where community and credibility still compound, and a shift in mindset from treating organic as a lead-generation channel to treating it as trust infrastructure that makes every other channel work harder.</p> <h2>The Content Plan Is Dying. Nobody Has Replaced It Yet.</h2> <p>Sally Hawkesford's view was blunt: most brands are still filling content calendars with a quota mindset, "we need to post three times a week," rather than asking whether what they're posting is actually saying anything. "If you've got nothing nice to say, then don't say anything at all," she said, borrowing her mother's rule. Posting for the sake of a schedule is what causes reach to fall off a cliff, not a change in the platforms themselves.</p> <p>Her read on where brands are getting it right pointed to Curry's and M&amp;S, both of which have moved toward employee-generated content, effectively creating their own in-house creators rather than relying entirely on external ones. Hawkesford was candid that nobody has a finished answer yet. "I think the content plan, in a sense, is slightly dead, but I don't have an answer to what is replacing it yet," she said, landing on a working principle instead: identify the storytellers already inside the business and build content around them rather than around a rigid calendar.</p> <h2>Why Creators Are Winning: It's Not the Content, It's the Trust</h2> <p>Sue Rizzello traced creator-over-brand algorithmic preference back to a longer trend: declining trust in institutions generally, evidenced by two decades of the Edelman Trust Barometer and a G2 study that found distrust of supplier and brand claims had tripled in a single year. Generative AI, she argued, is accelerating that decline further by making it harder for people to tell what's real. The net effect is that trust is shifting toward people rather than messages, toward faces that talk to you rather than websites that require reading.</p> <p>That reframes what brand content needs to learn from creators. Hawkesford's answer was to stop treating "creator" and "brand" as opposite categories and start thinking in terms of content type: agency-made UGC, employee-generated content, and creator content proper, where the goal is genuine earned reach rather than a polished hero asset cut down for social. Gibson agreed, adding that the specific failure mode to avoid is misalignment: content that borrows a creator's native tone but doesn't match what the brand actually pushes out elsewhere erodes trust faster than posting less would.</p> <h2>A Good Story Beats a Big Budget</h2> <p>Rizzello made the case with two deliberately unglamorous examples: perfume ads and car ads, the category everyone remembers as beautifully shot and nobody can name the brand behind. A good story, she argued, performs regardless of production value, and can be made quickly and cheaply rather than requiring a multi-million-pound campaign.</p> <p>Hawkesford backed this with two real examples from retail: a piece of content on how to put tracks on curtains, born out of what she called "the most boring meeting" with a buying department, which became one of the brand's top-performing pieces of YouTube content because nobody else had answered the question well. A similar result came from a guide on folding a fitted sheet. Neither idea was creatively ambitious. Both worked because they answered something people were actually asking. Her advice for finding these stories: talk to customer service, the most underused source of content ideas in most businesses, and sit down with the departments that feel too dull to bother with.</p> <div class="gn-reveal" style="background:#45ac62; border-radius:12px; padding:20px 28px; margin:34px 0; text-align:center;"> <p style="margin:0; font-size:15px; color:#ffffff;">Rethinking your brand's social strategy? <a href="https://www.thegonetwork.com/book-a-call?tab=1" style="color:#ffffff; font-weight:700; text-decoration:underline;">Book a call with our team</a></p> </div> <h2>When Should Organic Content Get Paid Support?</h2> <p>Gibson's framework for the organic-to-paid decision came back to objective, not a fixed rule. If the goal is reach and awareness, paid amplification is the right lever. If the goal is community and ongoing conversation, the content can sit in the organic library without needing a media push. There's no universal tipping point, she said, only a clear read on what a specific piece of content is actually for.</p> <p>The same logic extends platform by platform. Hawkesford pointed to TikTok and Instagram as where growth and credibility currently sit, and where she'd personally weight brand investment, while flagging that audience makeup should always override a generic platform ranking: an older demographic still lives on Facebook, and B2B still belongs on LinkedIn. Rizzello added a platform most panels skip: YouTube, which she argued is quietly building toward becoming a major social platform in its own right, helped by its search integration with Google, and which behaves differently enough from TikTok that brands need a distinct approach to it.</p> <h2>TikTok Shop Wants 400 Pieces of Content. No Brand Can Make That Alone.</h2> <p>Hawkesford raised a genuinely underappreciated operational problem: TikTok Shop's GMV advertising wants around 400 different pieces of creative within a single ad group, and if a brand's settings aren't managed properly, the platform will happily pull in stale content, last year's Valentine's assets, that's no longer relevant. No single brand team can realistically produce that volume alone, which is precisely where she sees the agency role: not replacing in-house teams but supplying the platform expertise and production capacity that makes a channel like TikTok Shop actually usable.</p> <h2>LinkedIn's Creator Marketplace Is Coming. Learn From Instagram and TikTok Now.</h2> <p>With LinkedIn's creator marketplace already live in the US and expected in the UK and Europe soon, Rizzello walked through what the platform is building: paid creator partnerships that connect directly to LinkedIn's Thought Leader Ads, which let a company fund the amplification of an individual's personal posts rather than its own corporate page. Personal profiles already significantly outperform company pages on LinkedIn, and this formalises that advantage into a paid product. Access to the marketplace is by invitation, based on a creator's existing track record, specifically designed to exclude low-effort AI-generated content.</p> <p>Her advice for brands preparing for it: take the lessons already proven on other platforms, the explain-and-show format that works on TikTok, the role micro-influencers played on Instagram, and apply them through LinkedIn's own version of small-but-relevant voices. Her one warning: don't import the parts of other platforms worth leaving behind, particularly engagement-bait posting designed to provoke any reaction at all costs.</p> <h2>Where AI Actually Helps, and Where It's Quietly Doing Damage</h2> <p>Rizzello's take on AI in social was pointed: most of the current excitement is aimed at the wrong use case. Brands are fixated on AI-generated content and AI avatars when the real value sits in speed, scale and efficiency across both organic and paid workflows. Her caution: AI still depends entirely on a skilled operator, and audiences are increasingly able to spot and actively turn away from obvious AI generation, making a visible "AI-generated" label a minimum requirement rather than a solution. She noted that under the EU AI Act, her own agency is now legally required to label AI-generated or AI-modified content, with different tiers of disclosure depending on how the content was made.</p> <p>Hawkesford was more direct about the risk: a recognisable AI aesthetic, the same font, the same over-processed look, has already become a negative signal within months, one she can understand a low-budget community group reaching for out of necessity, but one she sees no excuse for a brand with real resources adopting. Gibson agreed that most brands currently treat AI purely as a cost-saving tool without weighing the long-term trust damage it can cause, predicting that Q4's Christmas advertising cycle, following the substantial backlash to fully AI-generated ads over the past two years, will be a real test of how far audience tolerance has actually shifted.</p> <h2>Who's Getting Social Right in 2026</h2> <p>Closing the session, each panellist named the brands they'd point to. Hawkesford highlighted Curry's for its employee-generated content and M&amp;S for its use of an internal personality to bring audiences inside the brand despite a difficult few years commercially. Gibson pointed to Gymshark and Varley, both of which have built recognisable in-house faces rather than leaning on external creators, giving their content a native feel without ever outsourcing it. Rizzello's answer looked to B2B: the major consultancies, PwC, Deloitte and McKinsey, for their mastery of repurposing a single piece of research across a genuinely multi-platform strategy, while noting they still have room to make their subject matter experts feel like individual voices rather than corporate ones.</p> <p>Across the session, the panel's shared position held together without contradiction: organic reach has genuinely declined, but the credibility and trust it builds haven't stopped mattering. The brands succeeding in 2026 aren't the ones abandoning organic for paid or creators. They're the ones treating organic, paid, and creator content as one connected system, built around a story worth telling in the first place.</p> <div class="gn-reveal" style="background:#45ac62; border-radius:12px; padding:20px 28px; margin:34px 0; text-align:center;"> <p style="margin:0; font-size:15px; color:#ffffff;">An agency looking to get in front of the right briefs? <a href="https://www.thegonetwork.com/download-intro-to-membership" style="color:#ffffff; font-weight:700; text-decoration:underline;">Download our intro to membership</a></p> </div> </div></div>