Beyond “Just a Post”: Why Organic Social is Having a Comeback

Speakers: Katie Flynn, Zach Frost

We are going to talk today about some of the topics that were included in our newsletter yesterday, also named The Flynn Effect. But that goes out on LinkedIn every two weeks. And I don’t remember if I said this the last time that you were with us, but Zach is the procurer of all of that content and author.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s yours truly.

I know. Obviously, you work in a professional capacity as a media person. But how have you liked doing the newsletter?

I’ve enjoyed it. I really liked it. It kind of brings out the creative side of it.

It does. Bring a nice tone to it.

Thank you.

Nice and light and conversational, but some jokes. You got jokes. You guys got jokes. I tried to throw it in there.

Got to make it interesting to read.

A couple of emojis.

Yeah.

I love it. Emojis every now and then. Well, yesterday’s newsletter was quite interesting. Obviously, there’s some current events in there. But in particular, the first story, which we’ll get to in just a second, is something we’ve already started talking about with clients. So figured, why not just repurpose the content and have a quick discussion about it?

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, cool. Well, then we are going to drive– well, what are we going to do? We are going to dive right in with story number one. So Instagram content is now searchable on Google. And this just started July 10. So today is the 24th, a mere two weeks ago.

So public content from Instagram business and creator accounts are now being indexed by Google, which means reels, carousels, photos, captions, and even alt text can show up in organic search results. Super interesting to me because I feel like for the past two years when clients or partners or whatever have been asking about organic search, I’ve been like, it’s not really worth your time right now because there’s a 5% reach for organic. This kind of changes the game, no?

Yeah, it definitely does. And I think we had a newsletter article, I think the previous one, talking about social search and just how

Z in particular are using TikTok and different social platforms to do searches, especially in local areas. If they go to a new city or a new town, they’re looking up coffee shops, restaurants, and using social to do that.

Yeah, I do that.

Yeah, and so I think it’s moving in the way that people are consuming content more, which is mainly through video. Whether that’s discovery, whether that’s education, they’re moving towards video type content to consume that information. And when they’re searching, they want to see that information too. So I think it’s kind of following that trend. And like anything in our industry, it was kind of tested before they rolled it out. So I believe it’s been over in Europe for a little bit.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. This isn’t brand new. I feel like it was Italy, I think, where it’s been running for a bit.

Yeah, so Italy was one of the test markets, countries, if you will.

And now they’ve seen that Instagram is accounting for about 11% of search results in Italy.

That’s kind of major.

It’s primarily indexing Reel’s content. So again, video content, whether that’s short form or kind of in that storytelling fashion, where people can look something up based on the search result. And they’re getting video content where it’s answering questions or serving its purpose from an educational standpoint.

It’s so interesting to me. And we have always said to clients, even if it’s not really going to be your main business driver, it’s good to have a presence from an organic perspective. You don’t want somebody to go to your Instagram page and be like, do they even exist? They haven’t posted in three months.

But I feel like this gives that much more reason for people to be treating it like an SEO strategy, right? Like keyword rich, headlines, alt text, descriptions, all the things.

Yeah, alt text is going to make a huge factor in kind of how search engines are indexing that content. They’re saying that captions are kind of the headline.

So as you’re writing captions, kind of think like you would write a headline for a search ad or anything like that.

Do you happen to know– oh, so we’re actually talking about the Instagram caption. But question related to video.

lot of times, I know at least when I load up to YouTube for these episodes, it auto generates the captions. I don’t have to load up a transcript.

Will you be at an advantage, I guess, if you add captions to video content? Do we know that yet? Is it able to crawl that?

I think TBD, I haven’t heard or seen anything specific on that. I would have to think that if it’s indexing that content, that it’s trying to read or scan anything and everything that it can pull to turn back the most relevant search and content for– So interesting.

And so now, because for a while, I’m not really on Instagram that much anymore because I’m kind of a TikTok girly.

However, when I was on Instagram, I was like a stories person. I just only clicked through those, not through posts. But now, it kind of seems like from a business perspective, if you are trying to get your posts to index, that stories are probably not going to be the impactful post type anymore for this purpose.

Yeah, yeah, definitely emphasis on reels. So again, video content, different format in that space for Instagram. So yeah, real content. But I mean, it can be carousels. It can be single images. It kind of just depends. But it does seem that video content is kind of the bigger push in what they’re indexing the most, at least right now.

Makes sense. We’re all so lazy. Like, I don’t want to read. I just want to watch the video. I want to be entertained at all times.

Yeah, get what I need to know and move on.

Yeah, in terms of best practices, we already mentioned all text for photos or videos. Anything else that we know of now that’s helpful to include?

I think just, again, when you’re developing content, specifically from a description or a caption standpoint, think about it in a way that if you’re looking at it from a search result standpoint,

what is the headline that you want to read there and what’s going to get consumers to either click or be interested in engaging with whatever that content is?

I’d be interested to know, too,

and maybe we’ll just have to look at some examples of how this is starting to pull through. But how much, like how many characters pull through? Because obviously, from a paid search perspective, we’re really careful with character accounts because there are limits. So sometimes people are abbreviating words or leaving out words. It sounds very truncated.

But I wonder if it’ll just be the first five words of an Instagram caption, truncated or something.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s very interesting because I think maybe not 10 years ago, but five to 10 years ago, organic social was a really big deal. You had to have a presence. You had to engage people, get people to your page, gain a following. That was the name of the game. And in some ways and in some industries, it still very much is. I think now with this update, it’s going to become a much bigger thing

you’re not just going to see some brands do it and do it well. I think you’re going to see a lot of people having to adapt this type of strategy.

Yeah, totally.

So I think it’s no longer–

I hate to say this, but it’s no longer just a post. When you think of organic social, a lot of times it’s like, well, it’s just a post. We’ve only got 5,000 followers. So let’s just make sure that we maintain a presence to your point, have something where if people go to the Instagram page, it’s reliable content, and they can see that we’re actively posting. But I think there’s going to be a lot more thought from brands, agencies, marketers that are putting into their organic social strategy now.

Yeah, I totally agree. And actually, that just made me think. So for example, I have a private Instagram because I don’t need to share anything more widely than that. I assume if you have a private account, that’s not happening. It has to be publicly available.

Yeah, so no private accounts.

No personal accounts in the sense of URI, business accounts, business accounts, and creator accounts.

OK, that makes sense? Well, very interesting. I mean, I’m interested to see where it goes for our clients because now we’ve got traditional SEO on the website, the SEO component that is kind of still TBD for AI. How are we getting into summaries there? And then now Instagram, too.

Yeah, it’ll be interesting. I know, obviously, from the website side, there used to be keyword stuffing. And you had to make sure that you indexed properly. So I hope it doesn’t go that far.

Yeah, send your keywords six times.

Yeah, I think maybe early on, I think you may see that a little bit. And then I think people will understand, well, that’s probably not the right way to go about it.

I feel like the algorithms have gotten better, too, from a quality scoring perspective. So hopefully, it’ll get a little better. And I thought I saw, too, that TikTok is angling for the same thing, trying to have Google index their content as well.

I think you’re going to see more of those walled gardens maybe open up from that perspective. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook’s not far down the road, obviously owned by Metal, same company.

Yeah, that seems like– It’s almost confusing that they just didn’t do that at once.

And Reddit’s been showing up for years,

kind of giving any content that they have on any topic.

Big Reddit user, too.

So I think we’re going to see more of that, because they know that it can be useful.

All right, awesome. Well, up next, four PPC trends to monitor closely in the second half of 2025. So I’m just going to quickly rattle them off, and then maybe we can talk about one or two of them, if you feel like any are the strongest. I don’t know if these are in particular order. But one, CPCs are rising, but so is opportunity. I think we’re seeing this a lot with our clients and having those discussions right now about CPCs. There’s a lot in terms of AI driving, buying, bidding strategies. But obviously, you are a person who works right alongside with AI and makes sure that you’re still in the driver’s seat.

Privacy stuff and cookie stuff is certainly changing the landscape.

And then also, control is fading, so less visibility into targeting. We actually have been having a lot of conversation about that the last couple of days, because of something that we’re seeing on YouTube.

But it means you’ve got to double down on creative testing and measurement. So where would you like to start? Any in particular piquing your interest?

Yeah, I think the overall theme or takeaway that I got from that particular list was really a theme that we’ve been seeing across platforms for the past year or two years, is that Google, Meta, these platforms are pushing all of their chips into one basket, which is trust us. You don’t need some elaborate target audience. You don’t need some elaborate creative. We know what the audience wants and how to best serve it, which on one hand, that’s great. I think everyone likes customization. I think we’ve seen that personalization in advertising can work well when it’s right. I think the issue is that it’s not smart enough yet. It’s just not to the point where you can blindly trust those systems to do what you need it to do. And I think that’s the biggest issue.

During that learning period, you could end up wasting a lot of your spend.

Exactly.

So especially where clients maybe have smaller budgets, or they’re trying to learn before they scale, it’s very critical to make sure that maybe you’re testing a few of those features from an AI perspective, but I don’t think you can just fully dive in and trust it. There are some things that you need to do within the platforms to make sure that you’re following brand safety guidelines and that it’s not just pulling random copy from your website to add to an ad, because maybe that’s not relevant or useful for what you’re trying to do.

So I think that’s the major theme of it, is obviously as we get more and more familiar with AI and just the tools that we have available in those platforms, I think the trust will come. I think right now it’s kind of 50-50.

You trust a little bit, but again, you’re not ready to dive all the way in.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think a great example of that is there was a study cited in this article that up to 85% of Google Ads spend maybe wasted on hidden search terms. So I know we go into accounts all the time and go through negative keywords, positive keywords, because the system continually adds there. And sometimes you’ll find things that you’re like, I see how you got there, but that totally does not apply to what we’re talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as a media team, we sat in on Google’s big conference just to see what they were rolling out for the next year and kind of where they’re going just as a company, specifically in the paid search space. And again, their whole focus was all of these AI-driven campaigns and formats and kind of putting trust into those, which again is great.

But the way that the platform operates right now is even from a basic setup standpoint, they’re kind of automatically opting you into that stuff. So unless you’re very careful in going through and kind of unchecking those boxes,

you’re automatically opting into those. And then you run a campaign or start a campaign and you’re wondering why you’re not driving the goals that you’ve set. And that’s probably why.

Yeah. Those tools are so helpful, but you have to be paying very close attention.

You do. You do. There’s a lot of different settings, features, that again, Google kind of just tries to force you into,

which in certain cases can be problematic.

And again, depends on the brand, depends on what you’re trying to do. But I would say in most cases, they are not as helpful as you want them to be right now.

Yeah. They’re a little self-sending. Spend more money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I think the other thing that’s interesting, just going back a little bit to what you said around audience targeting is we have some clients who, yes, there’s obviously an ideal audience, right?

However, we have a client that has literal age restrictions. You cannot qualify for this product unless you are of a certain age. And it’s getting more and more difficult to target in multiple platforms around that. So I’m interested to see what the solutions end up being in those types of spaces.

Same. Yeah. Bob and I were just talking about it yesterday about Meta and Advantage Plus. And again, Advantage Plus in cases works very, very well. We’ve had those opportunities in those campaigns where it has performed very well. But in certain cases where you have a product or a service that is age restricted or anything like that, you obviously need a little bit more control. And I think these platforms are moving in the direction where, unfortunately, they’re taking some of that control out of our hands. So we’re having to find ways to gain that back, which I think is the battle right now, particularly on Google, on Meta. It’s finding ways to almost work around the systems that they’ve put in place from an automation standpoint, which is supposed to be helping advertisers.

But again, depending on what you’re doing in the brand, it’s not helpful. So you have to find those avenues where it’s– maybe you’re using automation, but you’re still achieving what that campaign is trying to do, whether it’s a certain age or demographic or certain parameters from a health care or financial standpoint. A lot of the industries that are a little bit more heavily regulated is, as well as I do, that’s where you run into those issues. So it’s finding ways to work with the system, but also still accomplish what you need to.

Yeah, totally.

Well, we shall see where it will go. It changes every day, it seems.

It does. It sure does, yeah.

That we work in. All right, last thing. So the TV up front, were they recently, or was this just a recent round up?

This was a recent round up.

OK, OK. That’s what I thought. But some interesting things– and one thing, this is more entertaining than it really is about streaming platforms. But a big trend is streaming is here to say. It’s become very mainstream. People are very used to it. The content needs to be super high quality, because the content that’s on streaming platforms is now super high quality.

But I think everybody gets a kick out of this whole HBO, HBO Max, Max, HBO Max thing. But I was reading an article that actually made it make a lot more sense that they were trying to get away from HBO for a while, because people thought of it as premium content, premium cost. And so they were like, no, I don’t want to pay for HBO, even though it was still a streaming service. And then they couldn’t get people to stop saying HBO Max. And then they realized that HBO actually was associated with the idea of premium content. And that’s what people are seeking out more of. So now we’re back.

No, yeah. We came full circle.

Yeah, I guess that’s a really good case for some market research. I guess they got some in-market research for sure. But I can’t imagine that was a cheap transition and transition back.

It couldn’t have been, no.

Man. Anywho, so from a streaming perspective,

some trends around ad-supported tiers.

What are your thoughts around that?

Yeah, so I think a lot of these services came out and kind of launched a freemium model, where you could access the content for free. So 2B, different things like that.

Now you’re seeing those platforms become ad-supported. And that’s where they’re seeing the growth.

So that free model has plateaued. So there’s still a user base there. But where they’re seeing the growth on the streaming side is people either converting to an ad-supported model or new adoption of the ad-supported model. So again, that is definitely here to stay. And to your point, it’s kind of become mainstream. And if you think about all of these services, the more content that they get– and you see it on Peacock. You see it on Hulu, Prime, Netflix.

A lot of them have their own content that they’re putting out that has a huge following–

shows, movies, whatever it is. And the more content that they push over there, I think the more you’re going to see that grow. We see it in the live sports space. So the Olympics being on Peacock,

football, Thursday night being on Amazon Prime. So it’s, in a way, kind of forcing users to where if they want to watch that, they have to go through some sort of model, whether that’s–

And advertisers, right?

Yeah, and advertisers, too.

But the fact is, it’s definitely moving more premium content into those avenues that were otherwise on cable or even broadcast television.

Yeah.

Wait, speaking of premium content on streaming services,

have you watched Department Queue?

I have not. We’re on a big– Oh, you got to. Summer I turned pretty kick right now.

Wait, but aren’t there only– wait, am I behind?

I think there’s three episodes out. We just watched the most recent one last night.

OK, then I got to catch up because I watched the first two last week.

I don’t know if I’m Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah yet. I’m still confused.

I think I’m Conrad.

I’m a little more Conrad.

Yeah.

You know? He seems a little bit more humble. Although– Yeah.

It’s tough. It’s tough decision. Well, Department Queue is a complete departure from the Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s like a British crime show. There’s only one season so far, but it was really good. And we finished Mobland last night, which I can’t remember what network that was on.

What’s Department Queue on?

That’s on Netflix.

Netflix?

OK. Yeah, and Mobland was like Tom Hardy.

Can’t remember any of the other actors. Oh, Pierce Brosnan. I think like Helen Mirren. It’s a star-setted cast. But that’s also like a British crime show.

OK, cool.

Kind of on that kick. So if you have any other recommendations, just let me know.

Will do.

Well, anywho, that’s really all we got today. Any other pieces of wisdom you’d like to impart on our viewers?

Not right now. Like, no, I got nothing. I think I’m good. Yeah, a little early. The brain’s still kicking in.

But yeah, I think on the streaming side, just last thought,

it’s been a little bit of a slow process. I think early on, again, 10 years ago-ish, I think you used to see a lot of people using pre-roll video in the CTV space, where they would just repurpose the video.

Now that mindset, and it has been for a number of years, has completely shifted to, this needs to be well-produced, TV-like advertising. Totally. It can’t be pre-roll video content.

The same 15-second video seven times in one show.

Yeah, there’s obviously ways to modify it. If you only have pre-roll video or short-form stuff, and it wasn’t necessarily made for TV, sure, you can adopt it and make it fit. But I think the notion is now is that when you’re creating that kind of stuff, you need to create it in the same way and same fashion that you would for TV.

Yeah, for broadcast. No, it makes total sense. The quality’s got to be there. The intentionality’s got to be there.

Yeah, but yeah, so we’ll see what happens. Again, it’s been a story ever since I’ve been in the industry. It’s like, oh, here comes connected TV. It’s going to overpass TV. And now I think we’re at the point where it’s at least a 50-50 split in most markets, if not across the country.

And I imagine that continuing to probably rise.

Me too. Me too. Nobody wants that big dish on their house anymore.

Yeah, the big dish. The days of the big dish are done. It’s kind of nice when you can just cancel if you need to and then pick it back up.

Yeah. Got a tough month coming.

Yeah. Turn it off. YouTube TV, you just pause.

Yeah.

Did that during COVID for six months?

That’s smart.

Because there was really no live sports.

I’m a big YouTube TV fan. I think– I mean, I started– I was a cord cutter or whatever early when that whole thing started because I was like, it makes complete sense to me. If I could still have access to the same stuff, why would I not just switch over?

Right.

Yeah.

I think it’s a bit generational. It’s interesting. Obviously, you’ve still got the set-top box users.

Yes.

I think location plays a big part into it too, right? If you’re more rural versus urban, things like that will play a role.

You’re trust in internet reliability too.

Yeah.

Because my husband’s got extenders all over the house and stuff. So it’s not like we’re cutting out.

Right. You want Wi-Fi on the deck when you’re grilling.