Social Is Getting More Physical - and Brands Need to Think Beyond the Feed

For the last 15 years, we've been told that more and more of our lives are moving online.

Shopping moved online. Entertainment moved online. Communities moved online. And, somewhere along the way, experiencing something and posting about it became two fairly distinct parts of the same process.

You go somewhere. You take some photos and videos. You choose the best ones. You post them later.

But we think that distinction is starting to disappear.

Not because social media becomes less important, but because it becomes much more embedded in the world around us. Physical experiences become social content as they're happening, while the communities we build online increasingly spill out into real-world experiences.

The future of social might not live entirely on a screen.

The experience itself is becoming social

Smart glasses are probably the clearest example of where this is heading.

Love them, hate them or feel deeply uncomfortable about someone wearing them opposite you on the Tube, adoption is growing quickly. Smart glasses without displays grew 167% year on year in the first quarter of 2026, while more than seven million pairs of Meta's AI glasses were sold during 2025.

And the interesting bit isn't really the glasses themselves. It's what they do to the way we create content.

Right now, filming something is a conscious action. You take your phone out, open the camera, point it at whatever is happening and, for a few seconds at least, experience the moment through a screen.

Wearable technology removes some of that friction.

You can capture something from your own point of view without reaching for your phone. You can stream what you're seeing while you're seeing it. Suddenly, creating content isn't necessarily something you stop an experience to do.

The experience itself becomes the content.

Everyone at your event could become a broadcaster

For brands investing in experiential, that's a pretty significant shift.

Traditionally, if you invited 200 people to an event, you'd create an experience for those 200 people and then think about how to amplify it afterwards. You'd have photographers, videographers, a social team and a few creators tasked with capturing enough content to make everyone who wasn't there wish they were.

Increasingly, the amplification needs to be built into the experience from the beginning.

Those 200 people aren't just attendees. They're potentially 200 different cameras, perspectives and distribution networks.

That doesn't mean covering every wall in neon signs begging people to POST AND TAG US.

It means asking a better question: what would happen here that someone would genuinely want other people to see?

Because when capturing and sharing becomes almost frictionless, the brands creating the most interesting physical experiences have a huge opportunity.

The best brand experiences will be designed for two audiences

This changes how we think about experiential creative too.

You're no longer designing purely for the people physically standing in the room. You're designing for them and everyone experiencing it through them.

A product launch might have 300 guests but generate millions of social views. A pop-up might only exist in one city but become recognisable to people around the world. A creator event can become hundreds of pieces of first-person content rather than one glossy brand recap uploaded three days later.

Experiential marketing is already heading in this direction, with digital amplification becoming a bigger part of how physical activations are planned.

The opportunity now is to stop treating social as the thing you bolt onto the end of an event.

The event is the social strategy.

That means thinking about what the experience looks like from someone's point of view, where the moments worth capturing happen and whether something is genuinely interesting enough that people will want to distribute it for you.

But something else is happening at the same time

While technology is making it easier for physical experiences to reach enormous audiences, people also seem to be craving something much smaller.

We're joining paid Substacks. Patreon supports millions of paid memberships. Creators are building broadcast channels, private groups, subscriber communities and spaces where a smaller number of people can talk about something they genuinely care about.

After years of chasing enormous public audiences, there's something appealing about being in a digital room with fewer people.

And that creates an interesting contradiction.

Social is becoming more distributed, while communities are becoming more intimate.

We want content that can travel everywhere, but we also want spaces that don't feel like they're for everyone.

The future of community might be somewhere between online and offline

This is where things get particularly interesting for brands.

Because these smaller digital communities don't necessarily stay digital.

A Substack can become a supper club. A running creator's audience can become a real running club. A beauty community can become an event. A Discord group can become a convention. An online fandom can turn up somewhere together in real life.

And then everyone starts creating content about it, sending the physical experience straight back online.

The loop becomes:

online community → physical experience → social content → bigger online community

At that point, trying to separate “social”, “community” and “experiential” into three completely different marketing disciplines starts to feel increasingly outdated.

They're becoming different parts of the same ecosystem.

Smaller communities could become much more valuable to brands

For a long time, social strategy has been dominated by scale.

How many followers do we have? How many people did we reach? How many views did the campaign generate?

Those things aren't suddenly irrelevant. But if people increasingly spend their time in smaller, more specific communities, brands will need to think about depth as well as breadth.

A private community of 5,000 genuinely engaged people might be much more valuable than reaching 500,000 people who barely notice you.

And those communities can be incredibly specific. A particular sport. A neighbourhood. A fandom. A profession. A parenting stage. A niche fashion aesthetic. A very specific shared obsession that makes absolutely no sense to anyone outside it.

For brands, the opportunity is huge.

But there's a catch.

You can't media-buy your way into every community

Brands are used to being able to buy access to audiences.

Want to reach runners aged 25-34? There's an ad platform for that.

Want to reach people who are obsessed with a particular running club, know all of its in-jokes, go for coffee together every Saturday and have a WhatsApp group where they recommend products to each other?

That's a little harder.

Smaller communities tend to have their own culture, language and expectations. They also tend to notice pretty quickly when a brand has appeared purely because somebody spotted an audience segment on a media plan.

The brands that succeed here will be the ones that contribute something useful, entertaining or genuinely valuable to the community rather than immediately asking what they can extract from it.

Sometimes that might mean partnering with the people already trusted within the group. Sometimes it might mean creating experiences for them. Sometimes it might mean giving them access, expertise, funding or a space to meet.

And sometimes it might mean knowing when to leave them alone.

What does this mean for social strategy?

The biggest shift is probably that brands need to stop thinking about social as something that only happens on social platforms.

A brilliant social idea could be a pop-up.

It could be a dinner.

It could be a run club.

It could be a creator taking 50 members of their community somewhere unexpected.

It could be something designed for 100 people physically but experienced by a million people through their content.

The important thing is understanding how the physical and digital parts work together.

If you're creating an experience, ask what people will naturally want to capture from it. If you're building an online community, think about what could bring those people together offline. And if you're entering an existing community, work out what you can genuinely add before worrying about what you can post.

Our prediction: the feed is escaping the phone

We're not heading towards a future where people suddenly stop scrolling TikTok and spend every evening at intimate community dinners.

Let's be realistic.

But the distinction between “online” and “offline” is going to become increasingly difficult to make.

Wearable technology will make content creation more ambient. Physical experiences will be designed with their distributed social audience in mind. Online communities will increasingly create real-world moments, which then generate content that brings more people back into those communities.

So perhaps the future of social isn't one enormous public For You feed.

Perhaps it's thousands of smaller communities - some online, some offline and plenty somewhere between the two.

And for brands, simply turning up won't be enough.

They'll have to earn their way in.