Social media 101: earning a place in feeds that algorithms run

Social media marketing is the work a brand does on platforms where people post, watch, share and talk: Meta's Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Snapchat and others. It has two sides. Organic social is what a brand publishes and the conversations it takes part in, at no media cost. Paid social is advertising bought from the platform and shown in the same feeds.

• What it is: publishing, conversation and advertising inside feeds that each platform ranks for each person.
• Who runs it: the platforms own the feeds, the rules and the data; the brand owns its content and its community.
• Reach: DataReportal counted 5.66 billion social media user identities in October 2025, 68.7% of the world's population¹; Meta alone reported 3.60 billion daily active people across its apps in June 2026³.
• How it is priced: organic costs people and production; paid is sold through auctions⁴.
• Best for: brand awareness, community building, launches and social commerce.
• Weak for: anything that needs a guaranteed audience on owned terms; the platform can change the feed at any time.
• As of: October 2026.

The feed. Every platform decides, person by person, which posts to show and in what order. TikTok has explained that its For You feed is driven mainly by user interactions (what people like, share, comment on, follow and create) and by information about each video such as captions, sounds and hashtags, with device and account settings such as language and country given less weight⁵. In practice this means a post is not shown to all your followers: it is shown to the people the system predicts will engage, and its reach grows or stops with what they do.

The ad auction. Paid social uses the same predictions. On Instagram, Meta says its systems compute a "total value score" for each ad from three factors: the advertiser's bid, the estimated action rate (how likely this person is to take the action the advertiser wants) and ad quality⁴. The ad with the highest total value wins the impression, not simply the highest bid⁴. A relevant, well-made ad can therefore reach people at a lower price.

Community management. The other half of the work is conversation: answering comments and messages, handling complaints in public with care, and moderating. This is where social becomes customer service and where community and word of mouth start.

Key terms. Reach is the number of different people who saw something; frequency is how often each saw it; CPM is the cost per thousand impressions. A lookalike audience is a set of people the platform judges similar to your customers, and retargeting shows ads to people who already interacted with you.

Brands were present on social networks early, but social advertising as a system dates from November 2007, when Facebook launched Facebook Ads with business Pages, social ads and an analytics tool for marketers; more than 100,000 Pages launched that day⁶. In June 2020 TikTok published how its For You recommendations work⁵, a sign of how far feeds had moved from "posts from people you follow" to "posts the system predicts you will like". In September 2023 TikTok Shop launched fully in the United States, with shoppable videos and live streams in the feed⁷.

Since then, rules have shaped the discipline as much as products. The European Commission published guidelines in July 2025 on how platforms should protect minors under the Digital Services Act¹⁴, Australia's minimum age of 16 for social media accounts took effect in December 2025¹¹, and a US joint venture for TikTok, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX among its investors, was set to close in January 2026¹⁵.

Social media is global, but which platforms matter changes by market and by age.

• Worldwide: DataReportal counted 5.66 billion user identities in October 2025¹ and 5.79 billion, 69.9% of the population, in its mid-year 2026 update². It warns that identities may not represent unique individuals¹.
• Americas: in Pew Research Center's 2025 survey of US adults, 84% said they ever use YouTube, 71% Facebook, 50% Instagram, 37% TikTok and 32% WhatsApp⁸. The Reuters Institute found that, for the first time, more Americans got news from social and video networks (54%) than from TV (50%) or news websites and apps (48%)⁹.
• Europe: the Digital Services Act bans adverts based on profiling when the platform is reasonably certain the user is a minor¹³, which changes how youth audiences can be reached.
• Middle East and Africa: Snapchat reports more than 26 million monthly active users in Saudi Arabia and says about 90% of Saudis aged 13 to 34 use it, making the kingdom one of its most important markets¹⁰.
• Asia-Pacific: in Australia, platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok and YouTube must take reasonable steps to keep under-16s from holding accounts¹¹¹².

• Brand awareness: reach and frequency at scale through paid social, with organic posts that give the brand a voice.
• Community building and advocacy and referral: groups, comments and user-generated content that turn customers into a visible community.
• Product launches and event promotion: short video, live streams and countdowns.
• Conversion and social commerce: shoppable posts, product showcases and live shopping, as TikTok Shop offers⁷, for retail and e-commerce and FMCG brands.
• Reputation and crisis: social is often where a problem first becomes public and where the first answer is expected.
• Employer brand: especially on professional networks such as LinkedIn.

Organic social has no media cost, but it is not free: people to plan, produce and publish, to answer messages and moderate, and the tools to schedule, listen and report.

Paid social is sold through auctions. Advertisers choose an objective (awareness, traffic, leads, sales), an audience and a budget, and usually pay per thousand impressions, per click or per result, depending on the objective. The price is not fixed: the total value score combines your bid with the predicted response and ad quality⁴, so the same budget buys more when the creative is relevant. Prices also move with demand across the market. In the second quarter of 2026 Meta reported that ad impressions across its apps rose 14% year on year and the average price per ad rose 12%³.

There are no public rate cards to quote. Set budgets from the objective and test, and judge results with brand lift studies and conversion experiments rather than with platform-reported clicks alone.

This is a summary, not legal advice.

• Advertising to minors (EU). The Digital Services Act prohibits platforms from showing adverts based on profiling to users they are reasonably certain are minors¹³; the Commission's July 2025 guidelines set out what platforms are expected to do to protect minors¹⁴.
• Minimum age (Australia). Since 10 December 2025, age-restricted platforms must take reasonable steps to stop under-16s having accounts, with civil penalties of up to A$49.5 million¹¹¹².
• Ownership and access (United States). Under the deal reported in December 2025, TikTok's US business moves into a joint venture in which Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each hold 15% and ByteDance keeps 19.9%¹⁵.
• Fake engagement (United States). The FTC's 2024 rule bans buying or selling fake indicators of social media influence, such as bot followers or views, for commercial purposes¹⁶.
• Paid partnerships. Content a creator is paid to post is advertising and must be disclosed; see influencer marketing.
• Data protection. Targeting and measurement use personal data, so the GDPR in Europe and each country's privacy law apply alongside platform policies.

• Rented land. The platform owns the feed and can change ranking, formats or rules overnight; keep a direct line to customers through first-party data such as email and CRM.
• Followers are not reach. Because feeds rank by predicted interest⁵, a large following no longer guarantees views; and followers can be bought, which is why the FTC banned the trade in fake indicators¹⁶.
• Vanity metrics. Likes and views are easy to count and weak evidence. Tie paid social to outcomes and test incrementality.
• One message for every platform. Each feed has its own format and culture; adapt the execution, keep the idea (see consistency and adaptation).
• Comments are customer service. Unanswered complaints in public cost more than the post earned.

• More regulation of youth audiences. Australia's government says the list of age-restricted platforms is not fixed and will change as services evolve¹¹, and the EU guidelines on minors are being applied under the Digital Services Act¹⁴.
• Platforms keep growing. DataReportal's count of social media identities grew 5.4% in the twelve months to April 2026², and Meta reported revenue of $60.80 billion for the second quarter of 2026, up 28% year on year³.
• Commerce in the feed. Shoppable video and live shopping are now standard formats on TikTok⁷; expect social to carry more of the path from discovery to purchase.
• News and creators. The Reuters Institute's 2025 report documents the rise of personality-led news on social and video networks⁹, a sign that individual voices compete with brands for attention.

Choose social when your audience is already there, when the brand benefits from conversation, and when you can produce content for each platform. Pair it with influencer marketing for borrowed trust and with search to collect the demand it creates, and map it on the customer journey. See the social discipline page and which mix for which objective.