In this op-ed, Bread Agency co-founder Amaury Treguer says the days of engagement metrics being a marker of success on social media are over. But is it time to welcome back ‘views’.
Watch someone replying to an online message, and you’re likely to see a familiar pattern. They open it, skim it, hover over the keyboard for a second, then hit the thumbs-up emoji and move on.
Welcome to 2026, where our attention has become so scarce that even a polite response feels like an extravagance we can’t quite justify.
Across every platform, every channel, every screen, competing for a slice of our consciousness, people are making the same calculation. Is this worth my focus? Can I get away with less? And increasingly, the answer is: barely acknowledge it and keep scrolling.
Facebook interactions are down 80 per cent from their peak. TikTok’s brand engagement has halved, and Instagram is barely in the running. People haven’t stopped using these platforms, but they have stopped giving brands their attention in measurable ways.
Your audience hasn’t disappeared. They’re still there, still consuming, still paying attention. They’re just doing it on their own terms.
Your audience is watching – they’re just not engaging
Right now, half of TikTok’s userbase never posts anything. Not a single video. They watch, they consume, they’re influenced by what they see, but they don’t engage in any measurable way that makes a marketing dashboard light up green.
Also, 92 per cent of all interactions are passive views. People aren’t leaving comments or even double-tapping. Instead, they’re watching and moving on, leaving barely a trace that they were ever there.
Instagram story completion rates now outpace comment rates. And Pinterest’s silent inspiration model drives 89 per cent of purchase decisions, all without a single like or comment to show for it.
However, consumption hasn’t dropped as much as engagement has.
Think about your own day. You wake up to notifications from three group chats, two work Slack channels, your personal email, your work email, and approximately seven apps trying to tell you something urgent happened while you slept. Before you’ve had coffee, you’ve already made 20 micro-decisions about where to direct your attention.
Our social language has adapted accordingly. “Let’s connect soon.” “I’ll check this out.” “Getting back to you tomorrow.” Micro-promises designed to fit inside a 24-hour window because that’s the only timeframe that feels real anymore.
Call it survival mode. When McKinsey analysed attention across 20 major media formats, they found that consumers in the top quartile for focus spend twice as much as those in the bottom quartile. But the more we’re spread across mediums, the less attention we have to give to any single one.
You’re not imagining that everyone seems distracted. Everyone is distracted. We’re all trying to do five things at once while pretending we’re fully present for each.
Why every brand is desperately playing bestie
You thumbs up your colleague’s email because the relationship demands it. You reply, “I’ll check this out” in the group chat because people expect something. These micro-responses happen in spaces where some attention is owed.
Brands don’t operate in those spaces. When the content comes from marketing rather than mates, people don’t even bother with the emoji. They scroll past, consume in silence, and offer nothing back.
This is why every brand on social media is currently attempting to be your bestie. The closer a brand can get to feeling like someone in your group chat, the more likely they are to clear the attention threshold required for even the most minimal engagement.
But is that where real engagement lives now?
Instagram announced a few months ago that viewing metrics are now the primary indicators for measuring success.
Views matter more than likes. Shares matter more than comments. And DMs, those intimate one-to-one conversations that happen off the public feed, are where the real value lives now.
When 78 per cent of users prefer private communities over public feeds and Discord’s user count tripled in a single year, the message is clear: people still want to engage. They just want to do it on their terms, in spaces that feel more like conversation.
The opportunity ahead
We’re not going back to the days when everyone had time to comment on everything. What we have instead is an opportunity to build something better.
Your audience is still there and still watching. They’re just being more selective about where they invest their limited focus. And that selectivity means what you do get is more valuable than ever.
So here’s what winning looks like now.
Create content so valuable or relatable that it overcomes the default mode of passive consumption. Build Instagram Broadcast Channels, Discord servers, and WhatsApp communities where real conversation happens in private spaces.
And shift your measurement framework to treat watch time as currency, prioritising view metrics over engagement metrics, and stop tracking brand mentions when you should be tracking shares.
The brands that thrive will be the ones that meet their audience where they actually are, measure what actually matters, and respect the reality of how people engage now.
In a world where everyone’s attention is stretched thin, the brands that adapt to that reality are the ones people will remember.
