welcome to late-stage social media

Hey,

I was an organic social media manager during what I still consider the golden age of social—2019 to 2021. Reach was high, building community was fun, and converting an audience felt almost too easy.

But every year since has felt progressively harder. Sisyphean, even. Eventually I lost the spark I once had for the discipline when a 6-digit reach or hundreds of comments stopped hitting my dopamine receptors the same way. Just being a social media user doesn’t feel as fun as it once was.

And I’m not alone. There have never been more think pieces about people opting out of social media altogether. Between AI-generated slop and an endless wall of paid ads, it’s hard to blame anyone for wanting out.

But that behaviour isn’t reflected in the numbers—at least not yet. Social media usage is still rising in the U.S., even if it’s flattening in places like Europe. People may be exhausted, but they haven’t fully left the building.

What we’ve entered is the era of late-stage social media, where the platforms aren’t dying so much as evolving into something else. And like every other part of marketing, organic social isn’t dead. It’s just shifting from:

• Broadcasting to the masses to micro-connection
• Building reach through algorithms to building reach through communities
• High content outputs to intentional content
• Trend-chasing to branded POVs
• Vanity metrics to value metrics
  
  
• Content replication to brand originality

I’d argue that organic social matters now more than ever—not as a whole-funnel engine or a conversion driver, but for its discoverability and brand-building power.

Over the years, organic marketers have been bastions of strategy, brand storytelling, community building, experimentation, cultural literacy, and iteration. They’re skilled at creating magic even with limited resources.

Everything they do has always been deeply and unmistakably human.

These skills aren’t going away with the rise of AI—they’re actually gaining in value and influence.

Because here’s the thing: while some people will leave social media entirely, the vast majority will stay, and they’re already rejecting AI spam and demanding content that feels human, intentional, and real.

81% of people say they respond better to human-made content because they value human creation more. If you needed a sleep-better-tonight stat, that’s the one, pals.

Not everyone on an organic social team will remain there forever—but the skillset transfers almost anywhere, especially into other owned media roles. Organic marketers are perfectly positioned to:

• Build brand stories across multiple channels
  
  
• Create ecosystems around a brand (think content, community, newsletters, product touchpoints, and IRL brand moments)
  
  
• Lead cross-functional brand strategy
  
  
• Rethink how discovery, loyalty, and community actually work
  
  
• Become the connective tissue between marketing teams because they understand how creative, content, customer experience, and brand work together
  
  
• Reclaim creativity

Marketing on organic social media has definitely become weird, but organic marketers built the last era of the internet.

And they’ll build the next one too.

Until next time,

Ines

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