Brand Lore: How Brands Build It on Social Media.

Brand lore is the backstory an audience finds when it scrolls back through a brand’s account: the characters, the running jokes, the old posts that new ones refer to.

Sprout Social has named “lore” its 2026 social media word of the year, and the lesson for a social team is that lore cannot be bought in a campaign. It builds up from a content system, or it does not exist.

That makes brand lore a question of Content strategy before it is a creative one. It is decided when the content pillars are set, not when a campaign is briefed.

What Sprout actually measured

Sprout’s second annual Social Media Dictionary, published on 14 October 2026, is built from public social posts across the major platforms over the year. “Lore” topped it with more than 10 million mentions.

Sprout defines the word as “the backstory, history and context behind a person, brand, joke or trend on social media.”

Sprout ties the rise of the word to a shift in what audiences want: away from surface-level content and towards content rich in context, history and narrative.

Another of Sprout’s top words of 2026 points the same way. “Slop” picked up 8.8 million mentions, which Sprout reads as pushback against low-quality, mass-produced AI content.

The number that matters for planning

The figure a head of social can take into a planning meeting comes from a separate Sprout survey. In its Q2 2025 Pulse Survey, Sprout asked more than 2,000 social media users around the world what they wanted brands to prioritise in 2026.

57%, more than half, said posting original content series. That answer was nearly tied with the top response, interacting with audiences.

We read those two answers together. What people most want from a brand account is a reason to come back and a sense that someone is there. Both are habits a team keeps, not assets it commissions.

Why a campaign cannot manufacture lore

Lore is accumulated. A backstory only exists if there were earlier posts for this one to refer to, and a running joke only lands if the audience saw it run.

A campaign works the other way. It is planned as a burst, built to stand alone and retired when it ends. Even a very good one leaves nothing for the next post to call back to, because it was designed not to need anything before it.

So the useful question is not how to make lore. It is whether the content plan produces anything that can accumulate.

What lore is made of

In our view, brand lore comes from four kinds of content decision, and all of them belong in a team’s content pillars rather than in a campaign brief:

• Recurring characters: a person, mascot or voice the audience learns to recognise across posts.
• Running jokes: a bit that returns often enough that the audience is in on it.
• Callbacks: new posts that point to old ones, which rewards the people who have been watching.
• Serialised formats: numbered episodes or a fixed weekly slot, so there is always a next one.

None of these needs a bigger budget. They need someone to decide in advance that they exist, and someone to keep a record of what has already been said so the callbacks are right.

If your content pillars name none of them, the plan is producing disposable posts by design.

The McDonald’s lesson: borrow lore that already exists

The clearest brand example in Sprout’s dictionary is McDonald’s, and what it did was not invent lore. It borrowed some.

The Backrooms began as a 2019 post on 4chan and grew into an internet horror genre of endless yellow hallways and empty office spaces. A24 adapted it as a film, which premiered in cinemas on 29 May 2026.

On the same day, McDonald’s posted “You’ve Been Here Before”, a two-minute walk through an abandoned, distorted McDonald’s PlayPlace, with Grimace peeking out of a doorway at the end.

By Sprout’s count, the campaign earned more than 16.6 million views and 744,000 engagements.

McDonald’s was not alone. Minecraft, Scrub Daddy, Plants vs. Zombies, IKEA and Mountain Dew all made Backrooms parodies around the film.

Why borrowing worked, and where it stops

The Backrooms already had years of backstory behind it. McDonald’s did not have to explain any of it. It only had to show it knew the rules, and the reward came from the audience recognising the reference.

That is the cheapest route to lore, and also the most crowded. With at least six brands in the same territory, the reference quickly stops marking out a brand that is paying attention and becomes something everyone is doing.

Borrowed lore also belongs to someone else. It gives a brand a good week, not a backstory of its own. The McDonald’s video went further than most because it brought one of the brand’s own characters into it: the payoff is Grimace.

The trade-offs a head of social has to make

Funding a series or a recurring character is a commitment, and it carries costs a campaign does not:

• A long runway. The first episodes have no backstory at all, so early numbers will look weak next to a campaign burst.
• Continuity. Someone has to own the characters and the record of what has been said, or the callbacks start contradicting each other.
• Permission to repeat. An approver used to campaigns may reject the third version of a joke as stale, which is exactly when it starts to work.
• An exit plan. A series that stops halfway leaves lore that ends in silence.

The common mistake is to judge a series on the same short window as a campaign and cancel it before anything has had time to accumulate.

If you cannot tell whether your current plan produces anything that builds over time, a social media audit is the quickest way to find out.

What good looks like

Imagine a homeware brand with three content pillars. Two are ordinary: product and customer stories. The third is a weekly format with a recurring host, a numbered episode count and a standing joke the comments are allowed to shape.

Six months in, a new follower who scrolls back finds a history worth reading. That is lore, and it came from a planning decision, not a campaign.

In practice, a plan that can build lore usually has:

• At least one pillar that is a recurring format with a fixed slot.
• Characters and running jokes written down, each with an owner.
• Regular posts that call back to something older.
• A series judged over months, not weeks.

For the build itself, our guide to building a creator-led social series sets out the steps.

How NBK thinks about brand lore

We treat lore as an output of a social operating system, not a creative brief. A team that publishes at volume with no record of what it has already said will never have lore, however good each post is.

A team that plans recurring formats, owns its characters and keeps a running log will build it as a side effect of doing the job well.

Next step

If your team is posting regularly but nothing on the account builds on what came before, NBK can help find the constraint in the system.