Is organic social media dead? Key takeaways and highlights from our CIM Social.

In an ever-evolving social media landscape, is there still a place for organic social media? Joined by industry leader Luan Wise, our recent CIM Social in Birmingham aimed to connect like-minded marketers and discuss how we can unlock our social media engagement in 2025.

During the session we had chance to network, catch-up, share ideas, and gain valuable insights from Luan. The event was full of rich insight which is why we’ve compiled our key takeaways to help you grow your engagement in 2025.

You can't hack it!

In a world obsessed with algorithms and trying to beat the system to reach our desired results, we’ve lost focus on what really matters: our audience. Instead of trying to hack the algorithms we need to switch our focus back to our audience and how we can engage their interests. By creating original content that resonates, we will in turn receive quality engagement that adds value and helps us deliver our goals.

However, there are some handy tricks to remember…

Each platform, and their different streams, work in different ways. For example, Instagram has feeds, stories, and reels, but they all have different audiences. Your feed is visible to everyone, but stories are only shown to people who already follow you. It is important to create a plan for how you can reach your desired audience and ensure content is tailored.

Top tips:

• Instagram now allows 20 images to be added to carousels – that means 20 more chances to view. Utilise carousels to increase the amount of times Instagram can push your post.
• Videos get 1.4x more engagement on LinkedIn and can positively impact your dwell time.

Social media: a key place for discovery

Though we often think of search engines and now AI for search, social media is increasingly becoming a key player within the space. When designing content think about the top of the funnel and how you can become more discoverable. For example, add in keywords to your captions, embrace trends, and if using LinkedIn, accompany your videos with a 50-word post!

Dark social

There has been an increase in sharing through private channels, often referred to as “dark social”. As consumers start to share in different ways, often through ways we cannot track such as direct messages, we need to worry less about the numbers and focus on the behaviours we are seeing.

Engagement – making it easier

One thing we do know from algorithm studies is that engagement such as dwell time and responses go a long way in expanding your reach – but do we make it easy to engage? Though there are some studies that suggest that including a link in your post can be seen negatively by the algorithm, by posting a link in comments this can easily get lost. For example, if somebody shares the post, the comments aren’t visible, and therefore the link is lost. We need to focus on making it easier for our audience to engage rather than focussing our attention on reach and (going back to our earlier point) hacking the algorithm. And don’t forget, you don’t always need a link. Instead of directing readers to your website to read a case study why not upload the full case study in the post – this will also improve dwell time giving a further boost to your post.

Be social ourselves

As we seek engagement and community involvement, we need to ensure we are proactively doing the same. Are we encouraging employees and leadership to share content? Are we involved in communities and groups? Are you engaging in conversations and connecting with your network? By immersing ourselves within the social media landscape we can grow our reach and build our profile. In a recent update by LinkedIn, you can now see impressions on your comments (from personal and company profiles), so you can see the impact of your engagement within your LinkedIn community.

Accessibility

We should always be thinking about accessibility in whatever we do as marketers: website design, videos, brochures, and social media is no exception. One common cause of inaccessibility is emojis. When used to replace words or used as bullet points, they do not transcribe well when using a screen reader. Image captions and alt text are also really important and are a great way to get keywords into your post (linking back to our search strategy!)

In summary, there is no hard and fast way to hack social media. Focus needs to be on our audience and providing original content that entices, entertains, and educates. One thing is for sure, organic social media is far from being dead, it’s just evolving.

A special thank you to Luan Wise for being our guest speaker and to Hays for being our wonderful hosts.