Editor’s Note:
This article is part of a Digital Summit Collective series where we’re turning standout live sessions from recent Digital Summit events into actionable, on-demand insights for our community. Each piece is adapted from a real stage presentation—capturing the ideas, examples, and strategic thinking that resonated most with attendees.
Jim Tobin has spent nearly two decades in social media marketing, and when he opened his session at Digital Summit Raleigh, he didn't begin with predictions. He began with pressure.
Budgets are rising. Influencer spending has surged. AI is embedded in advertising platforms whether marketers actively adopt it or not. Measurement remains inconsistent across channels. And despite all of that change, many brands are still optimizing for metrics that stopped being predictive years ago.
Tobin's argument wasn't that social media is broken. It's that most marketers are still operating under assumptions built for a different version of the platforms.
Followers once mattered. The social graph once dictated reach. Organic scale once felt attainable. That environment no longer exists.
The question now isn't whether the landscape has shifted. It's whether your strategy has shifted with it.
The Entertainment Graph Replaced the Social Graph
For years, platforms like Facebook mapped relationships—who you knew, what pages you liked, what brands you followed. Distribution was proximity-based. If you had the audience, you had the reach.
Then TikTok rewrote the rules. Content wasn't shown because of who you followed; it was shown because of how long you watched. Engagement behavior replaced social connection as the organizing principle. Shortly after, Meta followed suit.
Today, reach is increasingly determined by performance within an entertainment-driven feed. Content competes not just against competitors, but against everything else that holds attention.
Tobin's agency tested the implications directly. They analyzed 65 influencers hired across campaigns and ran a correlation analysis between follower count and actual video views. The result wasn't weak correlation.
It was none.
Follower size did not predict performance. Facebook even removed follower count from its API last month—a signal that the platform itself no longer considers it meaningful.
For brands still reporting follower growth as a primary KPI, the misalignment isn't subtle—it's structural.
Exposure Outperforms Chaos
The instinctive reaction to the entertainment graph is to assume brands must become louder or stranger to compete. But Tobin cautions against copying tone without understanding the underlying mechanism.
The real driver is not chaos. It's exposure.
The "mere exposure effect," identified in the late 1960s, shows that familiarity alone increases preference. People develop affinity for things they've encountered repeatedly—even subconsciously.
Duolingo's growth is often attributed to viral content. But when the brand leaned into its unconventional strategy, it already had significant scale. The content amplified familiarity; it didn't create the foundation. When Duolingo started the unhinged content strategy, they had $370 million in revenue and 40 million monthly active users. This year, they're approaching $1 billion in revenue and 116 million monthly active users. That growth didn't happen because every TikTok taught someone a new language feature. It happened because millions of people saw the owl enough times to think, "Oh yeah, Duolingo. I know that app."
The lesson is less about personality and more about repetition. Social content does not need to convert in a single interaction. It needs to accumulate recognition over time.
For brands uncomfortable with theatrics, that's good news. Consistent, high-quality visibility still works.
Measurement Requires Tradeoffs
Few topics generate more frustration than proving social ROI. Tobin was candid: measurement frameworks vary dramatically depending on what you sell and how you sell it.
One approach his team implemented was geographic isolation. A national campaign for a CPG client was deployed in only three test markets, with comparable control markets used for comparison. During the campaign, test markets saw a 7.6% lift in sales. Two weeks after the campaign ended, sales were still up 6.9% in the test markets.
The clarity came at a cost—national reach was temporarily sacrificed for measurement confidence.
Brand lift studies offer another path, but they require investment. The brand lift study Tobin's team recently ran cost around $20,000. Sophisticated measurement isn't free, and not every campaign budget can support it. His team also explored a foot-traffic study for a retail client that would have tracked whether people who saw influencer content actually walked into store locations. The cost to run that study required a minimum media spend of $450,000. The campaign budget was $50,000. They didn't run the study.
The takeaway isn't that measurement is impossible. It's that it requires intentional design—and a willingness to balance the cost of knowing versus not knowing. If social is being evaluated under different standards than other marketing channels, the issue may be expectations—not performance.
Organic and Paid Work Better Together
Another persistent misconception is that organic reach is dead, and therefore organic content no longer matters.
Tobin's view is more nuanced. Organic reach may be limited, but organic content is certainly not.
Many organizations separate organic and paid teams entirely. Organic creates content hoping something breaks out. Paid runs promotional creative that never appears on the brand's actual feed.
Tobin recommends a more integrated model: use organic performance as a filter. When a piece of organic content resonates, allocate paid budget behind it. In some cases, his team has driven leads at 25% of the cost of traditional display ads another agency was running for the same client. The organic content wasn't just cheaper—it converted four times better.
Organic content isn't just a publishing channel; it can be a proving ground.
AI and Search Are Reshaping Discovery
AI is already embedded in platform ad systems, optimizing creative placement and targeting at scale. Meta has 4 million advertisers already using generative AI tools. Early results show things like 28% increases in campaign effectiveness.
But there's a cost: control and visibility.
Meta's Advantage Plus campaigns let the platform generate creative and place ads wherever it thinks they'll perform. The problem? The AI will ignore your demographic targeting. It will serve ads to 64-year-olds because, as Tobin put it, "apparently 64-year-olds click like lunatics." You can override it, but you have to actively turn off age groups you don't want. The AI assumes you want reach, not precision.
Tobin's caution is clear: AI excels at processing scale. It does not replace strategic thinking.
He shared examples of using AI to analyze hundreds of competitor videos to uncover performance patterns. The technology surfaced correlations that would have taken months to identify manually. Strategy, however, remained human-led.
At the same time, social platforms are increasingly functioning as search engines. Keywords in captions, spoken dialogue, and on-screen text influence discoverability. Content structured around real questions stands a better chance of being surfaced in feeds and conversational AI tools.
Discovery is no longer accidental, it's increasingly engineered.
Here's What to Do Right Now
If you're reading this mid-year and wondering whether it's too late to recalibrate your strategy, Tobin's session made one thing clear: it isn't. These aren't abstract shifts for next year's planning cycle. They're operational decisions you can implement this quarter.
Social strategy is no longer about defending what worked in the past. It's about adjusting to how platforms actually function now. And that adjustment doesn't require waiting for next year's planning cycle. It requires starting with what's already in motion
Watch the Full Session
This article was adapted from the live session Your 2026 Strategy Starts Now: Top Questions Brands Have About Social in 2025 – And Their Answers presented by Jim Tobin at Digital Summit Raleigh 2025.
Watch the full video:
https://resource.digitalsummit.com/resources/material/your-2026-strategy-starts-now-ral25/