Social Media, Influencers and the Algorithmic Internet

I have been working in social media long enough to remember when putting a brand on Facebook counted as innovation. We had tabs. We had walls. We poked people. And brands would say things like, “We need a Facebook strategy,” which usually meant somebody needed to make a Facebook page. It was a different time! (And yes, I worked on MySpace, too — but let’s not go back THAT FAR).

Today, social touches entertainment, search, shopping, news, customer service, identity, memes, creators, private messages, communities, recommendation engines, culture, and whatever TikTok has decided we are all obsessed with this week. So when someone asks me about “social strategy” today, I have questions.

Because social is now woven through how people discover things, talk about things, buy things, recommend things, make fun of things, obsess over things, and occasionally decide a brand is cringe before lunch. And I LOVE this stuff.

Welcome to the algorithmic internet

The original social media bargain was pretty easy to understand. You followed someone, they posted something, and you saw it. Cute!

Then the algorithms started making more decisions, and today a lot of what appears in your feed comes from accounts you don’t follow because the platform thinks you might care.

And wow did that change things!!!

A creator with 8,000 followers can suddenly reach 2 million people, while a giant brand can publish something approximately 17 people see. A two-year-old video can randomly come back to life, or a niche joke can escape one tiny corner of the internet and become mainstream culture a week later.

The feed has become a giant recommendation machine, which means attention is available to almost anyone, but nobody gets to keep it. Fun!!

You have to earn the reach EVERY TIME

Follower count matters, but it tells you less than it used to because every piece of content gets tossed into an algorithmic audition.

• Will somebody stop?

• Will they watch?

• Will they share it?

• Will they send it to somebody privately?

• Will they comment?

• Will they search for more?

• Will they make their own version?

• Will the platform decide more people like this person might enjoy it too?

This is why I get nervous when social strategy becomes a publishing calendar where Monday is Product Post, Tuesday is Engagement Post, Wednesday is Employee Spotlight, Thursday is National Whatever Day and Friday is please make it stop.

Platforms are systems AND cultures, so we have to understand how they actually work. What behavior does this platform reward? What formats feel natural here? Why are people using it? What makes something spread? Who is actually driving the conversation? What is everyone suddenly copying?

And one of my favorite tests is still: Would an actual human voluntarily send this to another actual human?

That question has killed a lot of mediocre ideas. Good.

Influencer marketing GREW UP

The early influencer model was often something like this: find person with followers, send product, ask for post, count impressions, put enormous number into PowerPoint, WE DID INFLUENCER MARKETING!!!

We can do so much more now because creators can be media partners, creative partners, subject-matter experts, hosts, reviewers, storytellers, entertainers, community connectors, sources of cultural intelligence, and sometimes the people who understand your audience better than your brand ever will.

The strongest work starts with a question we sometimes skip: Why does this person have influence?

Is it taste? Expertise? Humor? Access? Trust? Identity? Entertainment? A weirdly specific obsession with airport carpeting?

Influence comes from somewhere, so figure THAT out before you write the brief.

Audience fit beats spreadsheet math

I care a lot more about why people pay attention to someone than the theoretical maximum number of eyeballs attached to their follower count.

Sometimes the perfect creator has 5 million followers, sometimes they have 38,000, and sometimes they have 4,000 but happen to be the person everyone in a very specific community listens to. And sometimes the most influential person in that community would be horrified if you called them an influencer.

So we should be asking:

• Who trusts them?

• What do people trust them ABOUT?

• What behavior can they actually influence?

• Does this brand make sense in their world?

• Would the content still be interesting without the logo?

• What can they make that the brand could never make itself?

• Are we hiring them for their creativity and then immediately removing all of it?

That last one happens A LOT.

If we hire somebody because people love what they make, and then hand them six pages of mandatory copy, five talking points, three banned words and a request to “make it feel organic,” we may have created our own problem.

Culture moves through people

Brands LOVE talking about culture, but culture does not care about your marketing plan.

Increasingly, culture develops in millions of overlapping communities communicating through jokes, references, comments, videos, screenshots, sounds, memes, fandoms, Reddit threads, group chats and things that make absolutely no sense when you explain them to somebody who wasn’t there.

That’s part of the fun. Something can look MASSIVE from one corner of the internet and be completely invisible two communities over, which is why social listening dashboards only get us part of the way there.

Sure, the dashboard can tell you something is happening. Great! Now somebody has to understand WHY.

• Where did it start?

• Who actually cares?

• Why is it spreading?

• What does participating communicate?

• Is this an actual behavior or just 600 marketing people talking about it?

• Has the joke already peaked?

• Will everybody hate this by next Tuesday?

• Can the brand add something?

• Should the brand perhaps remain quietly seated?

Sometimes the smartest cultural move is NOT POSTING. Please put that in the deck.

Social and PR keep colliding, which is GREAT

I have never been very interested in the imaginary wall between earned media and social media because attention refuses to respect our org charts.

A journalist sees something on TikTok. A Reddit thread becomes a story. A creator creates a news cycle. A CEO LinkedIn post gets picked up by trade press. A brand social post becomes national news. A news article gets screenshotted, loses all context and suddenly has 12 million views on Instagram.

This is just how attention travels now, so communications strategy has to follow the attention.

A great earned story can fuel social, a social idea can earn coverage, a creator partnership can do both, and a cultural moment can become the creative brief. A journalist can influence creators who influence consumers who influence another journalist who writes another story.

WELCOME TO THE INTERNET.

And this is why I get excited about integrated work. The interesting question is rarely “Which department owns this?” The better question is, “How far can this idea travel?”

And then AI wandered into the party

Now let’s make it even messier.

Someone sees a product from a creator, then TikTok serves them three more videos about it. They search Reddit, read a review, get a link from a friend, Google it, and eventually ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or whatever comes next: “Should I buy this?”

From the consumer’s perspective, that is one journey.

And this is where social, influencer, PR, search, reputation and AI discovery start bumping into each other in VERY interesting ways.

I keep coming back to one model:

GEO helps you show up in the answer. Algorithms help you show up in the journey. And brands need both.

Social creates signals, creators create signals, PR creates signals, reviews create signals, owned content creates signals, communities create signals, and AI systems are sitting there trying to make sense of that whole giant, chaotic pile of internet evidence.

Hello, communicators! This is our problem now too. And I think that is VERY exciting.

So what should brands actually do?

A few things, to start:

• Understand each platform instead of treating them like interchangeable rectangles.

• Build creator relationships before the day you urgently need 47 creators.

• Give creators enough freedom to make something worth hiring them for.

• Pay attention to niche communities before they show up in the annual trends deck.

• Look for ideas that can travel across earned, social, creator, paid and whatever comes next.

• Experiment with new formats when the stakes are low.

• Watch what people actually DO.

• Measure behavior, not just enormous numbers that look impressive in a recap.

• Find the people inside your organization who genuinely like the internet and listen to them.

• Stay curious.

That last is actually the whole thing because platforms can be learned, formats can be learned and tools can be learned. Curiosity is harder to ingrain in your brand, your team (and yourself).

I’ve been doing this for A WHILE

I’ve spent a big part of my career across social media, digital strategy, PR, creative, influencers, emerging technology and all the weird places where those things collide.

And holy crap have things changed. The platforms, formats, logos, people in charge and algorithms have all changed, sometimes several times while we were busy making the strategy deck.

But the human stuff is remarkably durable.

People want to be entertained. They want useful information. They want to belong, discover things before everybody else does, get recommendations from people they trust, laugh, send something to the group chat and have stories worth repeating.

THAT is the part brands should obsess over.

Whatever social platform we’re all using five years from now will probably look different, but the human on the other side of it will still be human.

And yes, the algorithm will absolutely change again right after you finish the strategy deck.

Of course it will.

-Greg