The role of social communities and how to maximize their impact

Why do we refer to them as "Followers"? I suppose it's the fault of the platforms for making us think that people — our consumers, our communities — "Follow" us. The year is 2026 and I'd like to challenge that the role of those people, that stat, that label, could not be further from a follower. They are in fact the real influencers of social media.

They always have been.

If you consider what we did before the emergence of social media, marketers and brand leaders were obsessed with testing and researching. Finding out from their prospective customers whether or not their work would resonate. As a facility, social and creator agencies have undone decades upon decades of that work by pedalling the message that influencers can really shape the way people think, feel and act towards a brand. It's true to a certain extent. If you're a brand selling a $5 skincare product, the chances are an influencer post will get those followers to act as intended — buy your product, wear it a few times — before they scroll a little bit longer and find something better. But, say that follower buys your $5 product, tries it and realises it's not worth the packaging it's mailed in. The next time they see an influencer post about the product they leave a comment.

"Tried this. Not worth it. My friends commented on how weird I looked."

Then, it turns out they're not the only ones.

The single comment encourages a pile on. All of a sudden your $5 product is worth $0.

You see, it's not strange to consider that followers have something in common. There's typically thousands of them and one of you. I believe the power of the brand is unfathomable. But in 2026 it's time to realise that these people aren't followers. They are the ones who decide your fate and the amazing thing about social media is you've never been closer to them.

The numbers tell the story brands don't want to hear

This isn't just a feeling. The data backs it up.

The BBB National Programs' Influencer Trust Index ¹ surveyed over 3,700 consumers and found that only 5% of people trust influencer content completely. I've spent close to a decade in the influencer marketing space, and I'm actively bringing this stat to your attention. So let's just let that sit for a moment. A $24 billion industry built on influence, and that study suggests 5% of people fully trust it. The same study found that influencer content is now trusted less than general advertising — 74% versus 87%. Our industry spent years telling brands that influencer content was more trustworthy than ads. Well this study seems to suggest the audience disagrees.

It's not the only study. Morning Consult's 2025 Influencer Marketing Guide ² shows trust in influencers dropped 5 percentage points year-on-year. Not a blip. A trend. And the reasons consumers gave for losing trust are exactly what you'd expect: 80% said the biggest trust killer is influencers who aren't genuine or transparent. 71% pointed to content that promotes unrealistic lifestyles. 64% cited failure to disclose brand relationships ¹. So from this I'd hear that there is still a lot of potential in influencer marketing as long as you're working with influencers who are credible and trustworthy. And honestly, a quick check of their comments and engagements can tell you what you need to know.

One thing that remains integral to the whole 'influencer marketing' conversation is the role of reviews. 47% of shoppers now say user reviews on retailer websites are the most influential content when researching products. Influencer posts? 10% ³. Yikes. Your community is almost five times more influential than your creator roster when it comes to the content that actually drives purchase consideration. That's not an incremental shift, it's a complete reversal of the hierarchy brands have been operating on. Now, I want to stop for a second and highlight that influencers, regardless of whether people trust them or not, are an incredibly important way of driving awareness of your product or brand. The difference is what encourages a sale versus what gets someone's attention.

The thing about trust is, it is the biggest contributor towards influence. If you don't trust, you don't act. That's not unique to social communities, it's engrained in our entire industry. You could say the industry did this to itself. Inflated view counts padded with audiences from countries the brand doesn't even operate in (I've seen that happen). Agencies pocketing leftover spend as margin without telling the client. Results bought through paid amplification and dressed up as organic performance. I've written about this before. The model was built on a lack of transparency and now the trust isn't there, amongst communities, amongst agencies, amongst brands. We made our bed. Now we have to lie in it.

The direction of influence has flipped

So if trust is the currency and communities hold the balance, let's talk about where influence actually comes from now.

For as long as I can remember, the model has looked like this: brand devises campaign, creator delivers the message, community receives it. Brand > creator > community. Top-down. Linear. Clean on a strategy deck.

The problem is that's not how culture moves anymore. Culture doesn't start with brands. It starts in communities — Discord servers, Reddit threads, comment sections, group chats, niche corners of TikTok that most marketing teams don't even know exist. Creators don't manufacture culture, they translate it. They pick up on what's resonating within their communities and amplify it outward. The best creators have always known this. The ones worth working with will tell you as much.

The direction of influence has reversed. It's community > creator > brand. And the brands still briefing top-down — handing creators a script and hoping the audience doesn't notice — are playing a game that ended several years ago.

Let's consider what community members can actually do for your brand when you stop treating them as a number on a slide. They influence through engagement — a single comment thread can shift perception faster than a paid campaign. They share reviews and experiences that carry more weight than anything a creator can post. They advocate off-channel, in conversations you'll never see and can't buy your way into. And they provide insights and development opportunities that no brief or focus group can replicate.

That's not a follower. That's a stakeholder.

Where are you actually looking for them?

My next question for any brand leader reading this: where are you looking for your communities? TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Yes, yes. All very predictable.

What about Pinterest? Sure. What about Reddit?

Oh yes, we've heard about Reddit. You're probably not investing enough energy into it. Fospha's State of Retail Commerce 2026 report found that revenue influenced by Reddit grew 257% in 2025 ⁴. Businesses that scaled their investment saw cost per purchase improve by 34%. Reddit now sees a 40% year-on-year increase in high-intent shopping conversations, and 84% of Reddit shoppers say they feel more secure in their purchases after researching products on the platform ⁵. That last stat is the one that should keep you up at night. Your consumers are already going to Reddit to validate whether or not to buy your product. The question is whether you're part of that conversation or completely absent from it.

What about Discord? Or WhatsApp. What about Messenger or Forums. What about hosted events.

The social community is the modern-day epitome of "word of mouth". So anywhere your consumers are using that power is where your brand should be spending a portion of its time. Not always engaging in conversation, but watching, listening and learning.

What brands can actually do about it

Here's where I think most articles on this topic fall short. They diagnose the problem, tell you communities matter, and then leave you with a vague instruction to "be authentic". That's not helpful. So let me be specific about what I think brands should be doing.

Listen before you speak

Before you try to activate a community, understand it. What are they talking about? What language do they use? What do they care about that has nothing to do with your product? (this is easily done with tools). The brands that get community right are observers more than they are reactive creators.

Set up social listening across the platforms your audience actually uses — not just the ones your agency reports on. Monitor Reddit threads, Discord servers, TikTok comment sections, niche forums. You're not looking for mentions of your brand. You're looking for the conversations your brand should be part of but isn't. The intelligence sitting in those spaces is more valuable than most consumer research you'll commission. It's unfiltered, it's in real-time, and it costs you nothing but attention.

Build spaces for your most dedicated advocates

Not every customer is a community member and not every community member needs the same level of access. Identify your most engaged advocates — the people already talking about your brand without being asked — and give them a reason to keep doing it. Early access to product launches. Input on upcoming campaigns. A direct line to someone at the brand who actually listens. Most brands already do this through CRM, but why aren't more doing it by utilizing the tools that can further enhance their social presence.

This doesn't need to be a massive investment. A private WhatsApp group, a dedicated Discord channel, an invite-only event. The format matters less than the signal it sends: we see you, we value your opinion, and you're shaping what we do next. When advocates feel ownership, they don't just stay loyal — they recruit. That's a fancy way of saying they'll tell their friends about you. And that kind of organic growth is worth more than any paid campaign you'll ever run.

Commission community intelligence, not just social audits

Here's a challenge for the next time you brief an agency. Don't ask them for a social audit. Ask them for a community intelligence report. The difference matters.

A social audit tells you how your channels are performing. A community intelligence report tells you where your audience actually lives, what cultural tensions exist within those spaces, what language they use when they talk about your category, and — critically — where your brand is completely absent. At Ardent we find it helps brands think differently about the purpose of their social presence. It maps the ecosystem beyond the platforms you own. It should tell you which subreddits are discussing your competitors, which Discord servers your core demographic spends their evenings in, which TikTok comment sections are shaping perception of your category, and what's being said about you in spaces you've never thought to look.

Most agencies don't offer this because most brands don't ask for it. But if you're serious about communities being a strategic lever, this is where it starts. Make it a paid deliverable. Make it quarterly. And make sure the agency doing it is actually spending time in those spaces — not just pulling data from a dashboard.

Change what you measure and your agency will change what they prioritise

This one is on the brands. If your agency KPIs are built around views, impressions and follower growth, that's exactly what they'll optimise for. And you'll keep getting the same results — big numbers on a report that don't correlate to anything commercial.

Add community metrics to the scorecard. Comment sentiment — not just volume, but what people are actually saying (check out Siftsy as a tool that does this for you). Advocacy rate — how many of your community members are recommending you unprompted. Repeat engagement — are the same people coming back, or are you churning through new eyeballs every campaign? (Laborious but valuable) Off-platform mentions — is your brand being discussed in spaces you don't control, and if so, what's the tone?

These are harder to measure. They require more nuanced reporting. And they force the agency to actually engage with the community rather than just broadcast at them. That's the point. The agencies that resist this conversation are the ones still selling you the old model. The ones that lean into it are the ones that understand where this is going.

Use your agency to operationalise what your community is already creating

Here's something that consistently surprises me: brands will spend tens of thousands on creator content while their community is producing content about them for free. Not all of it is usable, obviously. But some of it is better than anything a paid creator will ever make — because it's real. I posted on LinkedIn recently about a viral post about a date being set up on Hinge, multiple brands were in the comments section but Hinge was nowhere to be seen. Criminal if you ask me.

Your agency should be running a systematic process to identify the best community-generated content, secure permissions, and deploy it across your paid and owned channels. Not as an afterthought. As a core part of the media plan. A customer unboxing video that gets genuine reactions in the comments is a more powerful ad than most things that come out of a creative brief. The Dr Pepper theme tune, that was just a community piece of content that went viral thanks to the platform's algorithm and got picked up by brands. The community created it because they wanted to, not because they were paid to. That distinction is everything when trust is this fragile.

The agency's role here shifts from production to curation. They become the filter between what the community is creating and what the brand amplifies. That's a fundamentally different skill set to managing creator partnerships, and it's one that very few agencies have built. If yours hasn't, it's worth asking why.

Brief for community participation, not just content consumption

Most creator briefs are designed to produce content that communities consume. Watch this video. See this post. Scroll past or engage. The interaction model is passive. The community is the audience.

Flip the brief. Ask your agency to design activations where the community is a participant, not a spectator. Challenges where community members create content that feeds back into the brand's channels. Product naming polls where the winning entry gets credited. Co-creation initiatives where community input directly shapes the next launch. Reddit AMAs where the brand actually answers hard questions instead of dodging them.

The specifics will depend on your brand, your audience, and what feels natural. But the principle is the same: when people participate in something, they feel ownership of it. And when people feel ownership of a brand, they become its most powerful marketing channel — one that no amount of paid media can replicate. Your agency should be designing for participation, not just distribution. If they're only bringing you content plans, they're solving last year's problem.

The opportunity is right there

Communities have always been the real influencers. We just spent a decade calling them followers and treating them like an audience when they were actually the engine.

The brands that will win from here are the ones willing to reverse the flow. Let communities inform creators. Let creators inform the brand. Build products and campaigns that reflect genuine cultural intelligence rather than broadcasting a message and hoping it lands. The influence is still there. It's just not where most marketers are looking for it.

Is that a harder model to operationalise? Yes. Does it require brands to give up some control? Absolutely. Will every brand do it? No. But the ones that do won't just run better campaigns — they'll build brands that communities feel ownership over. And a brand that people feel they own is a brand they'll fight for.

That's not marketing. That's influence.

There’s a lot of ‘—’ in this article, no it wasn’t written by AI. But Claude certainly helped check for spelling errors and grammatical issues. Thanks Claude.

Sources

¹ BBB National Programs / The Benchmarking Company, The Influencer Trust Index: Consumer Insights 2025 — bbbprograms.org

² Morning Consult, The 2025 Influencer Marketing Guide — pro.morningconsult.com

³ Hootsuite, Complete Guide to User-Generated Content (UGC) in 2025 — blog.hootsuite.com

⁴ Fospha, The State of Retail Commerce 2026, as reported by Yahoo Finance, March 2026 — finance.yahoo.com

⁵ Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, Reddit's Purchase Influence is Growing, April 2026 — sbecouncil.org