This post is part of a series highlighting the chapters of our Top Franchise Digital Marketing Trends 2026 report, designed for franchise executives, marketing leaders, and agency partners to anticipate what’s next and act on it. If you would like to download a FREE copy of our report, please click here.
Be sure to check out the other posts in our series:
- What to Expect from AI in Franchise Marketing in 2026
- 2026 Playbook for Franchises: AI as a System
- AI-Powered Search & Discovery: The New Search Paradigm
- 2026 Playbook for Franchises: Competing in AI Search
- AI-Powered Digital Advertising & Personalization: The Rise of Intelligent Media
- 2026 Playbook for Franchises: Building an AI-Powered Advertising Engine
- Voice Search: The New Interface of Discovery, Decision, and Transaction
- 2026 Playbook for Franchises: Becoming a Voice-Ready Franchise
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check out our blog – 2026 Playbook for Franchises: Activating Social Commerce – to read alongside this post.
Social Media Becomes the Storefront
Social commerce is quickly becoming one of the dominant forces shaping how people shop. What began as a collection of digital spaces where brands could share updates and build awareness has evolved into a fully integrated ecosystem where customers can discover, evaluate, and purchase without ever leaving the platform.
According to Statista’s 2025 Global Social Commerce Report, more than two billion people are expected to make purchases directly through social platforms in 2026, contributing to a market value exceeding $1 trillion US dollars. The strongest growth is occurring in North America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, which are regions where consumers spend significant time on social platforms and demonstrate high trust in creator-led recommendations. What was once a secondary engagement channel is now one of the fastest-growing frontiers of digital retail.
For franchise organizations, this evolution represents a profound opportunity. Franchise systems have always thrived on community presence, local relationships, and customer familiarity. Social commerce amplifies those strengths by allowing each local operator to build a direct connection with nearby audiences while staying aligned with national brand identity. Instead of relying solely on traditional advertising or external marketplaces, franchise systems can now convert interest into transactions within the very platforms where their customers spend the most time.
This convergence of content, community, and commerce means that every post, story, and video has the potential to drive sales. A restaurant can showcase daily specials through a shoppable reel that allows immediate order and pickup. A fitness brand can host live-streamed classes where viewers purchase passes in real time. A beauty franchise can partner with local creators to demonstrate products and offer instant checkout through integrated storefronts. The traditional boundaries between awareness, engagement, and purchase have all but disappeared.
However, succeeding in this environment requires more than posting attractive content. Franchise systems must rethink how their marketing, operations, and data infrastructures connect. Seamless checkout, accurate local inventory, clear fulfillment processes, and real-time customer service are now essential components of social-commerce readiness. The franchise head office must coordinate data flows and creative assets while empowering individual franchisees to act locally with authenticity and agility.
Equally important is the integration of creator partnerships and community influence. Customers place greater trust in peer recommendations and authentic storytelling than in conventional advertising. By developing structured creator programs that connect national campaigns with local influencers, franchise companies can humanize their brand while generating scalable social commerce revenue.
The next phase of franchise marketing will not be about where customers see your brand, but how easily they can act on that inspiration. Social commerce transforms social media from an awareness tool into a transaction engine, one that rewards immediacy, authenticity, and local relevance.
What To Expect in 2026
Scale and Share of Voice Deepen
Social commerce is changing how customers discover and buy, which is driving new revenue growth. A recent study from The Business Research Company estimates the global social commerce market at $764.49 billion US dollars in 2024 and $872.71 billion US dollars in 2025, which reflects a compound annual growth rate of 14.2% over that period.
In the United States, the market is on a similar growth path. A Research and Markets report projects that United States social commerce will reach $114.70 billion US dollars in 2025. The same source notes an 18.1% compound growth rate from 2021 to 2024, with a projected 10.4% compound growth rate from 2025 through 2030.
At a global level, social commerce is growing both in absolute terms and as an increasingly large share of digital retail overall. Grand View Research reports that social commerce is on track to reach $1.5 trillion US dollars in 2025 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 36.4% from 2025-2033.
Social platform innovations are accelerating this shift from discovery to purchase. TikTok Shop has scaled rapidly, with The Washington Post reporting that TikTok is pacing to sell $15 billion in merchandise to Americans in 2025. In its third quarter alone, TikTok Shop sold $19 billion worth of merchandise globally, which is only slightly below the $20.1 billion eBay sold in the same period.
Going into 2026, we expect social commerce to shift from an emerging growth category into a meaningful digital retail channel that directly influences how consumers make purchasing decisions. The acceleration of integrated shopping experiences across major social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest will make it possible for consumers to move from inspiration to checkout in seconds. eMarketer projects that by the end of 2026, nearly one in five U.S. online shoppers will make a purchase through social media at least once a month, illustrating the normalization of this behavior within mainstream commerce.
This expansion will not only be driven by product discovery but also by new monetization formats such as shoppable live streams, creator storefronts, and in-app loyalty programs. In China, widely considered the most mature social commerce market, live-stream shopping alone accounted for roughly 17% of all e-commerce sales in 2024, totaling more than $500 billion U.S. dollars, according to Statista. Western platforms are replicating these models with rapid adoption. Instagram’s Checkout and TikTok Shop, for example, are expanding their integration with Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud to enable direct-to-consumer fulfillment.
The next phase of social commerce growth will also be powered by creators. A 2025 Deloitte Digital survey found that 64% of global consumers had made at least one purchase influenced by a creator or social recommendation, and 38% said they preferred buying through a creator’s curated storefront rather than a brand’s own website. This reliance on social proof demonstrates that influence and authenticity are now currency in the social shopping economy.
Discovery-to-Purchase Flows Accelerate
Consumers are increasingly discovering, researching and purchasing within social platforms, often without ever leaving the environment to go to a brand website. In the U.S., for example, Capital One Shopping reports that 30% of digital consumers say they have bought something in response to an influencer or creator’s post on social media. At the same time, targeted ads on social platforms are outperforming organic brand posts in product discovery. According to Electro IQ, 49% of shoppers say they locate the “right product” via targeted ads, compared with 40% who find it through organic posts from brands.
This accelerated flow from discovery to purchase signals a deepening shift in consumer behavior. What once required a sequence of steps (seeing an ad, clicking to a website, researching details, deciding, then purchasing) can now happen entirely within the feed, story or live-video environment. Shoppable posts and ads, embedded checkout, and creator-led product links shorten friction and blur the boundary between engagement and conversion.
Social platforms now serve not just as inspiration or browsing grounds but as full transaction ecosystems.
Young consumers in particular are driving this behavior. The Pew Research Center found that 50% of women aged 18-29 reported purchasing something after seeing an influencer’s post, compared with 28% of men in the same age group. This shows that social commerce is not evenly distributed across demographics, and marketers need to tune their strategies to age, gender and platform context.
Implications for businesses in 2026:
- Discovery now happens in the social app. Brands and locations must build content optimized for native feed, video, and in-platform shopping behavior rather than simply driving users out of the app.
- Research is dissolving. Social media has overtaken search engines for discovery among Gen Z and Millennials, according to eMarketer. Many users make purchase decisions directly within a story, live stream or influencer clip without visiting the brand site, meaning that the brand site is no longer always the centre of decision-making.
- Purchase happens locally or globally within social. For franchises, this means linking local inventory, store availability, or service slots into social commerce workflows so that the location nearest the consumer can fulfil the purchase without friction.
- Measurement must evolve. Traditional metrics such as click-throughs from social to site or time on site are no longer sufficient. Instead, the path of discovery-to-purchase inside the social ecosystem needs to be tracked.
- Creative and targeting need to be optimized for social commerce conversion rather than pure brand awareness. Because targeted ads show nearly 49% effectiveness in product discovery compared with 40% for organic brand posts, it is clear that promotional content with direct commerce hooks is increasingly important.
Creator Commerce and Micro Influencers Scale
In 2026, social commerce will increasingly shift from broad brand campaigns to creator-driven initiatives that are driven by influencers, micro-creators, and local ambassadors. According to PartnerCentric survey data, 67% of consumers indicate that authenticity and unbiased opinion from creators drives their purchase decisions more than branded content.
According to Collabstr’s 2025 State of Influencer Marketing Report, the global influencer marketing industry is projected to reach approximately $22.2 billion US by the end of 2025. Collabstr has also forecasted that the broader creator economy will expand from $191 billion US in 2025 to $528.4 billion US by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, more than 80% of marketers view influencer marketing as a highly effective strategy in 2025, with nano- and micro-influencers (typically those with fewer than 100,000 followers) dominating the creator base. Influencer Marketing Hub also reports that nano-creators accounted for nearly 75.9% of Instagram’s creator pool in 2024.
The convergence of creator trust, local relevance, and conversion capability means that engaging micro-influencers is no longer optional.
In 2026, the shift will accelerate from awareness to financial outcomes. Creators will increasingly be evaluated on direct sales, local bookings, lead generation and lifetime value rather than just reach or engagements. As creator markets mature, micro- and nano-influencers will scale because of their high trust levels and cost efficiency.
Measurement, tracking and attribution capabilities will become more sophisticated. Tracking creator content to local-store conversions, such as in-app purchases, local bookings, or online reservations tied to a specific location will become standard. Companies that embed UTM-tagged creator links, affiliate tracking and location-level funnel analytics will gain a real advantage.
Implications for Franchise Companies
Many franchise organizations have a strong local customer base that actively engages with their brand on social media. This affinity and visibility can be turned into tangible sales through a social commerce approach that combines corporate guidance with local autonomy, enabling each franchise owner to operate as both a digital and physical conversion node.
Local Operators Become Micro-Merchants
Through social commerce, franchise locations can evolve into fully functioning micro-merchants within the larger ecosystem of the franchise brand. However, be aware that consumers’ expectations around convenience, immediacy, and personalization have never been higher. When a customer interacts with a franchise brand on a social platform, they increasingly expect that the product or service featured can be purchased, reserved, or picked up from a nearby store within a few hours. This expectation requires every franchise location to operate with the agility, visibility, and data sophistication of an independent online retailer, supported by the infrastructure of the franchise organization.
This shift carries significant implications for how franchise systems operate. It changes the role of the local operator from one focused primarily on physical product or service delivery to one that integrates digital and in-store commerce. The modern franchisee must manage real-time inventory synchronization, localized pricing, and social-triggered fulfilment, ensuring that social engagement translates into local revenue. According to Accenture, brands that deploy real-time location-level inventory information in social commerce campaigns see a 26% increase in conversion rates compared with those using only national-level offers.
The implications extend beyond marketing into how franchise organizations structure accountability and incentives. If the power of social commerce lies in immediate local conversion, then franchisees should be measured not just on traditional in-store metrics like foot traffic or sales per square foot, but also on digital engagement-to-conversion ratios and fulfilment efficiency. A study by Deloitte’s 2025 Global Powers of Retailing Report found that omnichannel retailers who align store performance goals with digital interactions achieve revenue growth rates up to 10% higher than those treating digital and physical channels separately. For franchise systems, this suggests that financial alignment between the franchisor and local franchise owners should evolve so that social-commerce conversions benefit both parties equitably.
National Brand Infrastructure Must Enable Local Activation
The rise of social commerce and the broader transformation of digital marketing make it clear that franchise success in 2026 will hinge on how well national infrastructure empowers effective local activation. As digital ecosystems continue to merge with local retail environments, franchise companies can no longer rely on a purely top-down model of marketing and customer engagement. Instead, they must employ systems that deliver efficiency, consistency, and scale while empowering franchisees to tailor communications and offers to their unique communities. This hybrid approach of national direction with local execution will define the next era of franchise competitiveness.
Franchisors are no longer simply brand stewards; they are technology enablers.
The implications for franchise organizations are significant. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Marketing Trends report, 77% of high-performing organizations state that brand consistency across markets drives measurable business value, yet 62% also acknowledge that customer engagement improves when local managers are given flexibility to adapt national assets to local conditions. This tension between control and creativity has always existed within franchise systems, but the rise of social commerce intensifies the need for balance. Platforms such as TikTok Shop, Instagram Checkout, and Facebook Marketplace thrive on content authenticity and speed. A national campaign that cannot be localized quickly enough will lose relevance in a feed dominated by community voices, influencers, and regional events.
At the same time, national infrastructure remains vital to sustaining brand equity. Research by Forrester Consulting found that 71% of consumers consider consistent brand presentation across all touchpoints to be a key driver of trust and purchase intent. For franchise systems, this means that while local operators must have the freedom to engage authentically with their communities, they must do so within a structured environment that protects the brand’s visual, tonal, and promotional integrity. Without a strong central foundation, such as templated creative assets, pre-approved offer frameworks, and unified data systems, the risk of fragmented messaging increases, undermining consumer trust at scale.
From a performance standpoint, the integration of national and local marketing systems directly correlates with commercial outcomes. A McKinsey & Company 2025 study found that organizations aligning national campaigns with local market data achieved a 12% higher marketing ROI compared with those running disjointed local initiatives. The same study highlighted that brands providing local marketers with centrally designed assets and analytics dashboards generated faster campaign deployment times and more consistent results across territories. In a franchise model, where execution quality varies by operator experience and local market conditions, this infrastructure becomes indispensable.
The national office’s primary role increasingly revolves around maintaining shared digital platforms that unify commerce, marketing, and analytics. According to Gartner, 68% of retail organizations have either implemented or are actively developing centralized “brand-to-local” platforms to coordinate digital campaigns, manage local inventory data, and automate compliance checks. For franchise systems, this kind of infrastructure not only improves efficiency but also ensures that each franchise location can act quickly when local opportunities arise, such as a regional event, a community sponsorship, or an emerging trend on social media.
In 2026, the franchise companies that thrive will be those that build strong, technology-driven foundations at the national level while empowering local operators to act with agility and authenticity. Franchise organizations must view local marketing not as a deviation from the national message but as the mechanism that gives the brand life in every community it serves. When national infrastructure enables local activation effectively, the franchise model evolves from a network of stores into a synchronized ecosystem of micro-merchants, each contributing to a unified and profitable social commerce strategy.
Creative & Offer Templates Must Be Modular and Localized
In 2026, franchise systems will need to rethink how creative and promotional offers are structured. The era of one-size-fits-all national campaigns is fading as consumers increasingly expect messages that reflect their local community, cultural nuances, and personal needs. For franchise organizations, this shift carries profound implications: national marketing must evolve from static brand directives into dynamic frameworks that allow each location to adapt creative assets while maintaining brand consistency.
The implications of modular creativity extend beyond marketing efficiency. They directly influence customer engagement, conversion, and brand perception. According to Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Trends Report, localized digital content generates up to 32% higher click-through rates and 20% greater engagement compared with generic national posts. This reinforces the importance of giving franchisees the tools to customize assets with regional imagery, store-specific details, and local offers. When consumers see content that feels native to their community, such as familiar landmarks, local staff, or relatable customer experiences, they are more likely to engage and take action.
However, the implications for franchise systems go far deeper than engagement metrics. The move toward modular creative structures redefines how national and local teams collaborate. National offices must establish governance frameworks that protect brand standards while empowering local franchisees to personalize content responsibly. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Marketing Trends Report found that 64% of marketers cite “balancing brand consistency and local relevance” as their top operational challenge in multi-location organizations. This highlights the growing strategic importance of centralized systems that provide approved creative modules such as imagery, slogans, video assets, and promotional layouts that can be tailored to individual markets without compromising brand integrity.
Localized digital content generates up to 32% higher click-through rates and 20% greater engagement compared with generic national posts.
The financial implications are equally significant. Personalized marketing consistently outperforms generalized messaging. A McKinsey & Company report on personalization in marketing found that businesses achieving advanced personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than their average peers.
Creator-Led Amplification Becomes More Important Than Branded Ads Alone
As social commerce continues to expand, the credibility and effectiveness of creator-led content are surpassing traditional branded advertising. For franchise organizations, this evolution presents a fundamental shift in how audiences are reached, influenced, and ultimately converted. Franchise systems that rely solely on brand-produced advertising will struggle to keep pace with those that integrate creators into their communication ecosystems.
The data supporting this transition is compelling. According to Deloitte, 61% of consumers say they trust recommendations from influencers and creators more than brand advertising, while only 38% express similar trust in traditional ads. The same report found that creator partnerships are among the top three drivers of digital engagement growth in the retail and franchise sectors. Similarly, a Nielsen analysis reported that influencer marketing generates a return on investment 11 times higher than standard digital banner advertising.
For franchise companies, this shift holds deep implications for how brand authority is built and maintained. Traditional franchise advertising models have long relied on uniform creative assets distributed from head office to all locations. While this approach ensures brand consistency, it often fails to resonate within diverse local markets where authenticity and cultural proximity matter most. Creator-led amplification fills this gap by embedding brand storytelling within trusted community voices. A 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer study found that 63% of consumers view “people like me” as a credible source of information, compared to only 44% who trust brand-owned channels.
The growing preference for creator content also reshapes media economics. Paid advertising costs continue to rise while engagement rates decline across major social platforms. eMarketer reports that global social ad spending will increase by 12% annually through 2026, yet average engagement rates are down 7% year over year. In contrast, creator campaigns often outperform paid placements at a fraction of the cost, particularly when the creator’s audience aligns with a local franchise market.
In 2026, the franchise companies that outperform their peers will be those that reimagine their marketing mix. Creator-led amplification will not replace traditional advertising, but it will augment its impact and efficiency.
