In day-to-day life, it’s easy to get swept up in the tide of digital trends or the pressure to ‘be everywhere’. However, the latest IAB Spain Social Media Study helps bring us back down to earth: the digital ecosystem in Spain has reached structural maturity. Users have become extremely selective, their expectations are higher than ever, and they no longer give their attention away to just any brand.
The keys to how to lead the conversation in this space such a fast-changing environment according to the study can be summarised as;
The user is digitally literate, but their attention span is limited
Although most of us are familiar with around nine different social media platforms, the reality is that in our day-to-day lives we only actively log in to and use about five of them each month. There is a growing gap between the public recognising an app and deciding to integrate it into their daily routine. Therefore, forcing a presence on every emerging channel for fear of being left out is a misjudgement; the key today is not inertial reach, but achieving relevance within the select group of platforms that truly capture the audience’s daily attention.
The shift away from more traditional networks
The percentage of users who say they have completely stopped using a social media platform has risen sharply in just one year, from 33% to 42%. The platforms leading this exodus are X, with 11%, and Facebook with 10%, as 40% cite lack of use, 23% a loss of interest, and 21% openly admit to being fed up with the saturation of political debates. Certain long-standing platforms are losing the ability to sustain constructive conversations. Facebook, for example, suffers from a huge disconnect: whilst maintaining a high frequency of visits, it lags behind in time spent on the platform (47 minutes a day), making it effective for quick, wide-reaching impact but not for retaining users’ attention.
The cornerstone of corporate positioning
In contrast to the volatility of entertainment channels, the professional sphere has established itself as an extremely robust platform. When analysing exclusively the corporate strategy and commercial use by organisations and businesses (an approach very different from that of the average user), LinkedIn stands firmly as the number one professional network and the top priority for the business community. With 44% usage, it ranks as the second most widely used platform globally by organisations, behind Instagram, which tops the business rankings. This corporate focus far exceeds the presence of brands in mass-market environments such as YouTube (27%) or TikTok (19%). With a clear positioning based exclusively on employment and work, this channel is the ideal platform for projecting an organisation’s identity, allowing the company’s thought leaders and the teams themselves to act as spokespersons to build credibility in the market and decision-making circles.
Less corporate monologue and more interactive activities
There is a very common internal contradiction in content planning, as 59% of the content published by organisations focuses on conveying the brand’s values and positioning. However, it is participatory campaigns, accounting for 41% of output, that truly engage the audience by generating twice as many interactions (26%) and web traffic (26%) compared to flat institutional content, which barely achieves 12% interaction and 15% traffic. The public rejects one-way communication. If the real objective is to build engagement and drive users to the organisation’s own web assets, content strategies must shift from merely disseminating messages to designing experiences where the community is part of the narrative.
The prescriber’s paradox: credibility under scrutiny
Almost half of internet users (46%) actively follow influencers, a practice that is overwhelmingly concentrated among women and young people. The problem is that the trust they generate hangs by a very fine thread, as despite this, 38% consider these creators to be credible, compared to 40% who perceive their comments as being purely promotional. The use of third parties to endorse a brand no longer operates under rigid or purely commercial frameworks; if advertising persuasion stifles authenticity, the user disengages, so collaborations must be based on a genuine alignment of values and creative freedom to safeguard trust.
The ethical imperative of AI: transparency or punishment
Advances in artificial intelligence in content creation pose a significant challenge in terms of perception, as most users admit that they find it difficult to distinguish between real and synthetic content, particularly older users. This is fuelling a climate of widespread mistrust that is intensifying severely in highly sensitive corporate or news-related areas such as current affairs, politics or health. In light of this, there is a unanimous and cross-cutting demand for the explicit labelling of all AI-generated content. Processing tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini are fantastic allies for optimising internal workflows, structuring ideas or analysing performance data, but when it comes to the public, honesty is non-negotiable, and attempting to release automated creative content or final messages without warning exposes organisations to an unnecessary erosion of their credibility and strains trust with their audience.
The real priority of the ecosystem
When professionals who manage the digital landscape are asked about their organisations’ priorities, the consensus is clear: the top objectives are improving search rankings (72%) and increasing brand awareness (65%), clearly outstripping immediate conversion goals such as direct sales, which stand at just 38%. Social media functions, above all, as a platform for reputation, trust and public perception. In a mature market, the success of a strategy does not lie in making more noise or dominating more screens, but in understanding the codes of each channel, respecting users’ demand for transparency, and accepting that the value of intelligent entertainment is the only real price the public is willing to pay to pay attention to us.
