CIM Midlands kicked off the day with a breakfast session at the Michael Page offices in Birmingham, built around a question every marketer in the room is quietly wrestling with: while everyone's competing for attention on the same handful of big platforms, where is engagement actually happening?
Our speaker, David Liberati, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Ecorys, made the case that some of the richest engagement today is happening away from the mainstream feeds - in smaller, hyper-specific communities built around shared interest rather than scale.
Reddit: built for purchase intent
David opened with Reddit, home to over 100,000 hyper-specific communities spanning almost any topic imaginable. Its merit-based upvote system means only genuinely valuable content rises to the top - content people actively choose to engage with, not scroll past. That makes it a strong signal for pre-intentional purchase behaviour, not just conversation. Reddit's advertising tools are still relatively young, having only launched a few years ago, but they're maturing quickly and starting to close the gap with the more established platforms.
Snapchat: communication, not broadcast
Particularly strong with Gen Z, Gen Alpha and audiences in their 30s, Snapchat's defining feature - content that disappears after viewing - makes it feel closer to real-life conversation than a permanent public record. It was also the first platform to pioneer AR filters for engagement. Crucially, it isn't built around public follower counts; it's a platform for closed-circle communication, which changes how brands need to show up there.
Pinterest: the vision board with a long memory
Pinterest was positioned as a visual search and planning engine rather than a social network. With 512 million monthly active users, most of them female, its strength is capturing intent early - often at the very start of the funnel. Unlike most social content, a pin has a long life: it keeps working as a seed for engagement long after it's posted.
BeReal: raw over polished
Born in Paris, BeReal was described as a European success story built around unfiltered, authentic sharing with a close circle of friends. The two-minute posting window leaves no time for editing or filters, and the platform deliberately removed follower counts - stripping out the comparison dynamics that shaped so much criticism of Instagram, and replacing them with something closer to genuine connection
The zero-click reality
The session closed on a theme with implications well beyond social: zero-click search, where customers use AI to find answers without ever clicking through to a brand's website. David pointed out that platforms are tightening the walls around this - Meta, for instance, only allows public profiles and pages to be crawled by Meta AI, and most major platforms now restrict AI access to their own tools (Google to Gmail, YouTube and its own domains; Meta to Meta AI, and so on). For marketers, it's a reminder that genuine engagement increasingly depends on where - and by whom - your content can even be seen.
Thank you to David Liberati for a genuinely thought-provoking start to the day, and to everyone who joined us in Birmingham. It's exactly the kind of session CIM Midlands exists to bring to the region - a space to challenge assumptions about where engagement really lives.
About the Author - Reena Patel
Reena is the Founder of You and Your Story, a marketing consultancy focused on helping businesses build strong brands.
With over 20 years of experience across multiple industries she has developed a strong understanding of different audiences, commercial environments and the importance of aligning marketing with wider business objectives. She is also the host of the Marketing Ninja Unleashed podcast designed to make marketing more accessible and effective for business owners and marketers alike.
Reena is Vice Chair, Communications for CIM Midlands