The dream job of the social media minded youth is coming to an end.

(Yes, hyperbole (and, yes, not actually the dream job. That status is reserved for influencers and YouTubers))

Organic social media for brands is dead. And it has been for a while. The platforms want you to pay for attention (and they don't want to send people off-platform, so you need to pay for that too).

Of course, brands aren't going to stop posting. It's free! (Except for that salary. And the cost of any content creation needs.) These platforms have massive reach! (Unless you're a brand posting organic content.) Look at Wendy's Twitter! (Are you posting like Wendy's? They're a 1-of-1.)

I think this role will soon be well and truly dead, thanks to AI.

Ok, not really dead dead. But much different.

It will become a Social Media Editor. Or Algorithm Herder.

A role requiring expertise in each relevant platform's algorithm and how to create the best content for it, expertise in the generative AI algorithms and how to get passable stuff out of them, and the internal clout to act as a magazine editor for social.

Magazines print bylines and use freelance writers, they're aren't monolithic content creation engines. Branded social accounts will start to look more like magazines and less like PR departments.

AI deals in averages. It pumps out average content that resembles the average of the internet for that content type. But plenty of brand content already looks like that.

Get a generative AI model trained on your brand data (tone of voice guides, previous (well performing) social posts, blog posts, other writing, etc. (please make sure the model isn't public)) and then the Editor prompts it for more content based on their high-level content calendar.

The real gold of brand social content should come from the employees. Curate and share the content they share to their own profiles. This is pretty much exactly what LinkedIn tells you to do.

Or get ready to actually embrace the Wendy's strategy and get weird.

Everything is going to feel the same. That’s going to lead us to create something unique and different.

-Samir Choudtry

The true social media use case for brands now is customer service. These are the channels customers want to talk to you via. Your customer support/service/success team should have access to answer comments and messages.

Like most of marketing, the Social Media Manager role is about to change. Thanks to the death of brand organic social content performance and the rise of AI. This means, former Social Managers will morph into:

• Algorithm whisperers: using algos to create content optimized for algos
• Editors: collecting and curating content from other team members and amplifying it via the brand accounts
• Creative directors: creative is the primary lever we can pull in these platforms now, these roles may blur
• Customer Success Champion: the days of 1 support inbox are long gone

Oh yeah, and AI-powered chatbots via in-app messaging. But that's a post for another day.

Marketing is changing, it’s time to adapt.

the era of traffic—chasing scale of anonymous pageviews—officially came to an end.

The models that have worked in the past are not the ones that will work going forward. The ease of distribution that publishers had at the time is going to get significantly harder now that the biggest platforms are resistant to sending their traffic off platform.

Traffic as a unit of currency simply won’t matter anymore. We will need to develop new ways of acquiring and retaining audiences.

And this isn’t a bad thing

The quantity of people may be smaller, but they will more likely be seeking out the information you have.

Do you use data, or get used by it?

“Advertisers prioritize cost over value, sometimes to their own detriment. They chase cheap CPMs.”

Metrics like CPM are outdated, unless you somehow get paid for impressions.

Using only one metric to make any decision is a trap. Use multiple metrics and trends to uncover the story behind the data.

And prioritize value over cost. Digital ads cost more when you’re doing it better (by more I mean compared to optimizing for volume above all else.)

The dawn of the age of the ideapreneur

Okay, so access to tech won’t differentiate you and prompt engineering won’t differentiate you. What will? Your ideas
…
The ideapreneur is someone who has learned to harness and control their creativity, to generate better ideas that they can then ask machines to bring to life. That’s the differentiating skill, the X factor – your ideas beget your machines’ output, and the better your ideas are, the better your machines’ output is.

LinkedIn announced AI-powered automated ad campaign creation that “will recommend an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimizations to reach the right B2B audience with engaging creatives, which marketers can adjust and fine-tune before they launch their campaign.” But a few days later the documentation link is a 404, so maybe it’s a thing and maybe it isn’t?

You can still use AI to create a predictive audience based on your pixel data.