#105 Social Isn’t A Channel Anymore

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Most of the industry is still marketing like it’s 2019, and the operators who couldn’t afford to be lazy have already lapped everyone else.

Unilever spent a century getting very good at working out where a marketing pound produces another pound. When the company that sells soap and tea bags to eight billion people quietly pushes its social media allocation past half of total media spend, it isn’t chasing a trend. It’s telling you where the compounding lives. And when you look across our own industry (talk to operators, affiliates, providers, CEOs, anyone with a marketing line in their budget), the same channel keeps winning the argument, regardless of who you ask or where they sit in the business.

That’s not really the interesting part, though. The interesting part is what happens once you accept it. Because most of the industry has agreed, in principle, that social matters more than it used to. Almost nobody has updated what they think “doing social” actually requires.

Everyone’s Still Playing 2019’s Game

Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time understanding the social game while building Menace Media. But when looking at how many operators run things, they’re still running a five-year-old social playbook without noticing. Post three times a week, boost the best-performing one, track follower count, call it a strategy.

The platforms didn’t wait around. Formats change every few months. Distribution algorithms reward completely different signals than they did eighteen months ago. And AI has thrown petrol on the whole thing, content that used to take a studio a week to produce now gets generated, tested, and iterated in an afternoon, which means the volume everyone else is publishing at has roughly tripled while most marketing teams’ processes haven’t moved at all.

Social has quietly become one of the hardest disciplines in marketing, not one of the easiest. It rewards genuine craft, fast iteration, and platform-specific fluency that shifts under your feet every quarter. You either put in the hard yards to understand it at that level, or you find people who already have. Pretending your intern with a phone and a TikTok account has this covered is how good brands quietly disappear from a channel that’s now carrying half the marketing budget. As brands have increased their spends, the level of sophistication has increased.

I don’t say this to put you off, because socials are a necessity. But to prepare you for the road ahead.

The old markers of success don’t even measure the right thing anymore. For example, follower count actually matters very little now and is more of a vanity metric than ever. Yet the number of followers is still the first question many people in our industry ask.

Constraint Built The Best Operators In The Game

Here’s the part that should make you uncomfortable: the operators who’ve actually mastered social aren’t the biggest ones. They’re the ones who had no other option.

Crypto casinos and heavily restricted brands got locked out of the conventional playbook early: no easy paid search, no mainstream sponsorship, no straightforward app store presence in half their markets. Every door a regulated operator could casually walk through was closed to them. So they got inventive with the one door still open. They built personalities instead of banner ads, communities instead of landing pages, content people actually wanted to watch instead of odds boosts nobody remembers by Tuesday.

That’s not an accident, and it’s not really about crypto at all. It’s what happens whenever a business loses its easy channels and is forced to compete for attention instead. Constraint doesn’t excuse weak marketing. It tends to produce the sharpest marketing in the category because comfortable operators never develop the muscle.

Mark Ritson has spent years making a version of the same point about brand-building generally: the businesses that protect and grow share of voice with real discipline are the ones that compound, while everyone spreading the same tired budget thinly across nine mediocre channels slowly gets outcompeted by whoever actually commits. Social right now is the clearest live example of that principle in our industry. The businesses treating it as a real discipline are quietly pulling away from the ones still treating it as a box to tick.

None of this means every operator needs to become a crypto brand or hand the keys to an agency. It means being honest about which category you’re in. Are you one of the teams putting in the actual hours to understand this channel at the level it now demands, or are you still running the version of social that worked when Instagram Stories were new? The gap between those two groups is where market share moves next, and it’s moving faster than most budgets currently admit.