Everything Social, September 2026: Applause was never the point

TL;DR

The old scoreboard said, “Lots of people liked it.” The new one asks, “Did anyone send it, search for it or stop to read it?”

Instagram uses sends to help decide which posts to show people who don’t follow you.

Before you post, ask yourself: “Who would send this, search for it or stop for it?”

September was the month the easy signals lost their shine. Hearts, ticked boxes, hashtags and “thoughts?” all still exist. They just buy less than they used to. Four stories from our first week of Insights, and what each one asks of the next post.

Applause is cheap. Recommendations travel.

Think of the last five Reels you sent someone. You remember the person, not whether you liked it first. Adam Mosseri has repeatedly pointed to sends as an important signal, particularly when Instagram decides what to show people who don’t already follow you. Likes are applause. Sends are recommendations, and recommendations travel. Every post has two audiences: the person seeing it, and the person they might send it to.

Read: Sends beat likes. Design for the DM.

Before the next post goes out, finish the sentence “Someone will send this to [who] because [why]” and rewrite it if the blanks stay empty.

The checkbox became a discount

Media buyers used to keep spend off Audience Network by unticking a box. For some Sales and Leads accounts, that box is disappearing from ad sets. What replaces it is a Value Rule, which can bid a placement down by as much as 90% but not to zero. Exclusion has become suppression. One hard switch survives, at account level under Placement Controls, and it covers every campaign in the account.

Read: Meta killed your placement checkboxes

Sort every exclusion you run into performance or principle, then move the principled ones to account level and the rest into a Value Rule.

Search is a shop window, not a casino

Scrolling says “entertain me”. Searching says “help me choose”. Adobe Express found that 49% of the US consumers it surveyed in January 2026 have used TikTok as a search engine, up from 41% in 2024. Google still wins on preference, so the honest reading is that search now has several doors. TikTok and Instagram index what you say, show and write. Most creators pour their effort into hashtags instead.

Read: Your next customer searched TikTok first

Pick one real query from the TikTok or Instagram autocomplete, then say it in the first three seconds, put it on screen and open the caption with it.

LinkedIn pays for the pause

“Thoughts?” used to buy a cheap tap. LinkedIn’s new feed model, a Generative Recommender, is trained to predict long dwell alongside likes, comments and shares. Long dwell is a named training target, judged relative to format, and nobody has published a universal threshold in seconds. Reactions are winks. Long dwell is a receipt.

Read: LinkedIn pays for dwell. Not for “thoughts?”

Read your next post aloud and time it; if it takes under 15 seconds and holds no concrete example, add one.

That is September. The common thread is that platforms keep swapping signals you can fake for ones you have to earn. October is already busier.

Mila D.

Social Media Researcher | Haba