The Jet2s and Duolingo’s of the world have driven social media success that has made their brands part of the zeitgeist. The masses of likes on the big green bird’s TikToks and the festival goers screaming along to ‘nothing beats a Jet2 holiday’ prove that when done right, brands can leverage social media to become part of the fabric of British culture. It’s no surprise that other brands try to mimic this model, with varying degrees of success.

In a world of media proliferation, brands and consumers are actually closer than ever. Audiences understand that there are people behind a business, and they want to engage with those who share in their values or sense of humour. Social media has become a tool to forge brand consumer relationships at a time when people are expecting more of brands. 

Reactive social media is a quickfire way to show that brands are up to date and in on the joke. Yet be too slow or tread where you don’t belong, and favour can quickly turn. Is Brat summer cool if brands are tweeting about it? Do we want our cereal to weigh in on the Beckham drama? While the CEO is signing off on your 2016 post, the tides have changed and social media is on to the next.

We asked the industry, do brand leaders need to get real about how much consumers care about reactive social?

We’ve had some brilliant success stories from reactive social with millions of organic views so it absolutely has it’s place, but only when it is driven by quality social listening and a creative team who understand the unwritten conventions of a trend and refuse to compromise. Consumers are savvier than ever and they can smell the desperation of a marketing department.

To actually pull it off, the moment has to feel like it naturally matches your brand's established vibe. If you have to sacrifice the unwritten rules of a trend just to shoehorn the brand in, you've already lost. Sometimes, staying silent is the most powerful creative choice.

Jumping on a trend is a much blunter instrument than we realise. Consumers respect a straightforward, crafted ad far more than a brand awkwardly pretending to be their mate in the comments.

Granted, it depends entirely on the brand. Reactive hits can work well as part of a healthy, mixed content feed, provided you are actually taking the time to mix in original storytelling of your own.

But forcing a corporate brand into a trending meme is like being the guy who whips out an acoustic guitar at a 3 AM kitchen after-party. Nobody asked for it, everyone is quietly cringing, and we really just want to eat our cheesy chips in peace.

Reactive social isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about being part of a conversation. That’s what draws people in – and that’s why reactive social really comes alive in the comments.

The smartest brands aren’t just posting; they’re prompting conversations. A well-crafted reactive post invites audiences to co-create the narrative, turning comment sections into high-velocity engagement engines. Because reach isn’t the only metric anymore, it’s about the depth of interaction.

We’re seeing a shift where the comment becomes the content itself. Creators like Clara Batten have mastered this, building entire videos around audience responses, using green screen formats to spotlight community voices. This behaviour trains audiences to get involved, knowing their input could become the next post.

For brands, the opportunity is simple: design for replyability. Look at Unwell Beverages – their strategy is all about unfiltered, risqué, and high-speed comments that mimic the energy of a private friends group chat. It’s how we ended up with 478,000 likes on a single Lipton Ice Team comment, taking them from #9 to #7 in talkability, according to a global Brandwatch study.

So, respond with personality. Elevate standout comments into follow‑up content. Build a feedback loop people actually want to be part of. Because reactive social today isn’t about keeping your audience watching… it’s about keeping them talking.

Why react, when you can provoke

Let’s be honest: it has never been harder to be a brand. There is more content than ever and attention is more scarce than ever. Where brands once competed with a handful of players, they now compete with an infinite stream of content from creators, startups and anyone with a smartphone. The result is not just noise, but fatigue. Audiences are overwhelmed, increasingly sceptical, and starting to disengage from the very platforms brands have spent years optimising for.

Despite this truth many brands remain reactive. They chase trends, mimic formats, and contort themselves to fit the algorithm in pursuit of short-term visibility. But this is a losing game. Ask people to name two or three brands that jumped on the latest trend and most can’t. And even if they could, they wouldn’t remember what those brands stood for. This has become a race to be the fastest social team, not the most memorable brand. Platforms win. Audiences get a brief hit of entertainment. Brands get impressions without recall. While spikes in views that look good in a deck, in reality they do nothing for a brand’s growth. 

The brands that are winning understand a different truth: in a world of infinite noise, the goal isn’t to react, it’s to provoke. Distinctiveness comes from having a clear, confident point of view that shapes original work people choose to engage with. Liquid Death get this and shock up the conventions of category, producing entertainment thats call out the bullsh*t of the bottle water category. Duolingo has created a brand world that feels more like an unhinged video game, than a tech education platform. And ELF Beauty creates entertainment that feels a million miles away from the boring category formula of beauty. 

So in a world where too many brands react, you should find a way to provoke instead. 

If you spent any time online in 2019, you probably came across the phrase “Silence, brand.” It became a shorthand way of expressing a growing impatience with brands inserting themselves into every cultural moment as if mere presence were a form of relevance.

That impatience mattered. For a while, reactive social was treated as an obvious good: move quickly, join the conversation, sound human and the audience will reward you. But the meme suggested something more complicated. Consumers were not rejecting brands on social altogether. They were rejecting brand participation that felt unearned, formulaic, or simply too eager.

That is the point brand leaders need to confront. Reactive social is rented attention, not owned affinity. A clever post may generate visibility, but visibility is not the same thing as trust, memory, or preference.

The lesson of “Silence, brand” is not that brands should stay quiet. It is that they should be more selective about when they speak and what they add. Culture rewards brands that contribute, not brands that merely appear.

The real question, then, is not whether a brand can react. It is whether it has anything distinctive to say. Without that, reactive social is just performance, and consumers are increasingly good at spotting it.

Reactive social has become a marketing reflex. When a major cultural moment happens, there’s instant pressure on brands to respond quickly to stay relevant and visible.

But the question isn’t can brands react quickly, it’s whether those reactions are creating real, measurable brand value.

In a crowded social landscape where audiences are exposed to thousands of messages every day, simply joining a trending conversation doesn’t guarantee attention, nor guarantee impact. The brands that cut through are the ones that understand whether their activity is genuinely shifting brand perception, rather than just generating short-term engagement.

What’s changing today is not just the pace at which brands communicate, but their ability to understand the impact of what they put into market. Traditionally, measuring brand impact has helped brands assess overall performance post-campaign and refine future waves of communication. Complementing this with real-time measurement unlocks a new level of agility, enabling optimisation directly within media planning. This is particularly valuable in fast-moving environments like social media, where relevance is fleeting and every impression counts.

This dual approach is reshaping how strategies are built, activated and optimised. In that sense, reactive social should not just be about speed of response. The real advantage comes when brands combine speed with understanding. When they can track brand impact as it happens, they move from simply reacting to culture to actively learning from it and continuously optimising their strategy in real time.

I don’t think the question should be for industry leaders… the question is for the audience. 

And brands are asking the audience this question every day by posting reactive content, and the audience is answering through views.

For some brands, the answer is a resounding yeeeeessss. For many, it’s a big skipping thumb-off.

If you’re a brand like Betway, operating in fast moving, culturally relevant spaces like sport, where reaction is part of the product, then yes, yes, yes.

If you’re not, you’re probably just adding to the noise. And that’s not helping anyone.

Reactive social is only truly effective when it’s intentional. The issue isn’t whether brands should show up in cultural moments, but whether they deserve to be part of them.

When done well, reactive content can showcase creativity, cultural awareness, and personality. But in an oversaturated landscape, too many brands are prioritising speed over substance. Jumping on every trend in a way that feels forced, repetitive, or disconnected from their audience is when it stops adding value and starts adding noise.

There’s a reason some people say, “it’s funny until a brand does it.” Often, brands miss the nuance that made the moment resonate in the first place. But when a reaction is authentic, aligned to the brand, and genuinely relevant to its audience, it can cut through brilliantly.

The key is restraint. Not every trend is an opportunity, and not every moment requires a brand response. There’s real power in holding back. Brands that are selective, who wait for moments that truly fit their voice and community, are far more likely to stand out when they do engage.

Ultimately, reactive social should be audience-first, not trend-first. If you understand your audience deeply, you’ll know when to show up, how to show up, and, just as importantly, when not to.

We unquestionably live in an oversaturated social landscape, full of brands jumping on any trend in a bid for cultural relevance. But it’s not right to say that consumers don’t care about reactive social, it’s an incredibly powerful tool, when done well. What consumers don’t care about are brands showing up on social with nothing to say.

Brand leaders know how important being involved in cultural conversations on social is. Simply, if you don’t have a cultural social strategy in 2026, you’re being negligent. Because of this many leaders fall into the trap of believing its more important to just be present in all social conversations, rather than selecting ones that say something meaningful about their brands.

Take the recent trend of editing the poster for Wuthering Heights. I've seen 5 different food retailers on Instagram, including Lidl & Aldi, make the same “Wuthering Bites” edit. These scream of a desire to be present, without knowing what to say.

So how do you make reactive social consumers will actually care about?

1. Get clear on your brand’s message. When Loewe try the ‘Wall Friction Trend’, its all in service of “Reinventing Craft”

2. Define the cultural spaces that you’ll appear in. Lidl’s surrealist platform allows them to create a trolley handbag, and a ‘penguin edit’

3. Choose the right voices. Want to react to a new product drop? Be like Apple and get Jake Schroeder to sing about it.

4. Say something original! Ryanair’s original social approach worked because it wasn’t like anything else.

In my opinion it just adds to the noise

Because let’s face it, social media is weird, isn’t it? full of opportunities, chaotic, and it moves fast, really fast. But just jumping on viral moments isn’t the way to play it. Chasing every trend makes your brand feel like a nomad, hopping from one moment to the next with no place to call its own.

For many brands, reacting to trends has just become the default. But here’s the thing: when consumers see brands jumping on every trend, it loses its magic. For many, it’s a sign that it’s time to move on.

But what if your brand could stop wandering and build something truly unique? Something as wild, chaotic, and weird as the internet itself? Something that resonates because it’s authentically yours, not just following the latest hype.

Here are 3 things to keep in mind:

1. See social as culture: Stop only chasing viral moments and build something that lasts and adds to the conversation.

2. Embrace the weird: The internet thrives on unpredictability. Stop overthinking and embrace the randomness.

3. Ease up: Flexibility is key; take risks, experiment, find what works for your brand and own it.

The social media landscape thrives on chaos and randomness. If you can tap into that and make your brand stand out, you'll own your space.

So maybe it’s time to settle and leave the nomad’s day behind.