The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Brand Social Strategy

By: Niko Pappas

Turn on your radio right now and you’ll hear Progressive Insurance, a local mattress store, and The Weeknd — all on the same platform, all trying to earn your attention. But no brand ever built a media strategy on the assumption that radio listeners were tuning in specifically for their ads.

On social, we forget that completely.

Somewhere along the way we started acting like the audience showed up for us. Built calendars around it. Hired teams around it. Reported on it every quarter. The assumption was buried so deep in the strategy it stopped looking like an assumption. 

Marketers decided people love brands. What they actually feel is loyalty, and treating those two things as the same has led strategy in the wrong direction for years.

Loyalty is an equation: values alignment + cultural fit + product consistency. 

That emotional work matters, and it’s non-negotiable. Most audiences expect it before they’ll give you anything. But loyalty is habitual, and habit is quiet. According to SAP Emarsys, over half of brand loyalty 53% is classified as silent loyalty, characterized by passive, habitual purchasing behavior with little visible engagement attached. It shows up at the point of purchase. It shows up in the conversation someone has with a friend. It does not show up as an audience refreshing your profile waiting for your next post.

The moment we started using the word love, we started building strategies for an audience that doesn’t exist.

It’s not hard to see how we got here. Early social-native brands like Wendy’s, Duolingo, and Chipotle achieved massive cultural visibility by behaving online in ways brands never had before — entertaining, responsive, self-aware. It felt surprising and deeply human, so audiences responded. The problem is the industry tried to turn a temporary cultural moment into a repeatable strategic blueprint.

We’re now at a point where behavior that once felt surprising is expected. Kantar’s Media Reactions 2024 found that the share of people who say social content captures their attention dropped from 43% to 31% in a single year. Brands are boring people.

Which leads to the question most marketers aren’t willing to ask: what if organic social was never meant to be a sales engine?

Organic social works the way a billboard does. It keeps you present so that when the moment of need arrives, your name surfaces first. 

That’s a legitimate and valuable job — but it’s a very different job from the one most brands have designed their strategies around. 

The real work happens in the conversation, not the posting. Brandwatch found that brands initiate less than 1% of brand-related conversations. The other 99% is already happening without you, in threads, comment sections, subreddits, and replies.

Participation has replaced publishing as the real unit of social currency. Slim Jim is a prime example. Their feed is deliberately nuts, but they show up in conversations that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with their customer. The result is a brand leading brand-social conversation. 

Most brands spend 90% of their effort on what they publish and 10% on how they show up in other people’s conversations. That equation needs to flip. 

According to Sprout Social, the cost of getting it wrong is measurable: 73% of consumers say they’ll buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t show up and respond on social. Not if they don’t  post —  if they don’t respond.

Here’s why nobody wants to take this back upstairs: a comment in the right thread doesn’t show up cleanly in a report. Participation, unless it goes viral, is a harder sell. The reason most brands stay locked in the content calendar is because the feed is measurable and participation isn’t. We built accountability structures around what we could track, and we fell into line.

Your feed is still worth having. Think of it as a mural — it tells people who you are when they come looking.

But the brands that win won’t be the ones who perfect their publishing rhythm. They’ll be the ones who understand that presence in culture is built through participation, and then structure their effort and measurement accordingly.

Niko Pappas is Associate Director of Strategy at The Infinite Agency, an integrated full service creative and media agency based in Dallas, TX.

Source: The Infinite Agency

  Brand Strategy, Niko Pappas, Opinion Piece, The Infinite Agency