September 3, 2025
Twenty years ago, I started saying ‘social is the oil in the marketing engine’. Not the fuel. The oil. It reduces friction, carries signals, and makes everything run better. Back then it felt like a hunch. Today we can prove it.
If you tune your social properly, you lift search, you show up in AI discovery, you raise attention and recall, and you even warm up your email. Below I’ll show you what’s new, what matters, and the tweaks I’d make this week.
Social primes search you can bank
Before the evidence, a quick story. A few years ago we launched a new product. Paid social led the charge with short, clear creative that named the problem and the product in the first three seconds. Within 48 hours, branded queries spiked, organic traffic climbed, and Google CTR on our brand term jumped. Nothing in the search account had changed. It was social, priming intent that search harvested. That pattern has repeated for two decades.
Here’s the proof…
- Meta’s search lift at scale. WPP analysed 24 Search Lift studies on Meta in 2024. Brands exposed to Meta ads saw a 25% rise in total searches and 16% rise in paid searches. Causal, not correlation. Facebook
- YouTube Search Lift is built in. Google’s Search Lift measures incremental branded and category searches among exposed versus control groups, reporting a relative lift figure. If you are running video, switch it on.
- Social content is now visible in web search. Google’s Perspectives surfaces creator posts and forums in results, which pulls your social beyond the feed. blog.google
- Instagram indexing expands the bridge. In July 2025, multiple outlets reported that public posts from professional Instagram accounts are becoming indexable in Google, while Instagram’s historic help text noted it generally asked engines not to index. Treat this as a rolling change, and optimise your profiles. Forbes PPC Land
What to do this week
- Treat hero social as search seeding. Put the problem and the product name on screen, then repeat in captions and alt-text.
- Run Search Lift on major launches and protect your brand term bidding during peaks. If you do one thing, do that. Google Help
- Track share of search quarterly. It is a predictive proxy for demand that correlates with future market share movements.
The rise of social search
You can feel it in your own habits. Increasingly, people start with TikTok or Instagram when they want a how-to, a recipe, a product tour or a place to eat. That is search, just not in a browser. Google has responded by bringing more human voices into results and, lately, by letting Business Profiles sync timely posts from social. The walls are coming down between social and search.
- Behaviour is shifting to social surfaces. Regulators and researchers note a steady rise in people using social platforms to discover information and news, particularly under 35s in the UK and US. www.ofcom.org.uk
- Google is meeting users where they are. Perspectives elevates social and forum content. Google Business Profiles now pull timely promos and events, with optional auto-sync from Instagram, Facebook or X. That is social activity shaping what appears in classic search. The Verge
- Instagram says search will matter more. Adam Mosseri has talked about improving Instagram’s SEO inside the app and externally on Google, which lines up with July’s indexing reports. Business Insider
Practical stuff you can do
Write posts like answers to real searches. Use the question in the first line, place the key entities early, and add alt-text. Publish short clips that match how people phrase the query.
Social feeds AI discovery and trust
When I say social carries signals, this is what I mean. Modern feeds are not dumb pipes. They read meaning across text, audio and video, map creator graphs, and reward clarity.
At the same time, buyers trust people more than platforms. The combination is potent if you put real experts in front of the camera and structure your posts so machines and humans can parse them quickly.
- LLM-era recommenders favour structured, meaning-rich content. AI-infused systems increasingly understand topics and intent across formats, which boosts clear, well-labelled social posts.
- People trust networks over search or AI. LinkedIn’s 2025 study finds your professional network is the top trusted source for decisions, ahead of search engines and AI. That is your cue to activate SMEs, employees and creators. LinkedIn News
What to do this week
- Publish answer posts from named experts that start with the buyer question you know they type. Keep it plain. Add definitions and on-screen text for scanners.
- Back your brand handle with employee voices and creator partners in the same narrative. You are trying to win the network, not just the algorithm.
- Have a read of “search starts on social”
Social is the oil that warms email and CRM journeys
You know that feeling when an email lands and you already recognise the story. That is social doing the warm-up. The honest bit, there is no universal stat that promises higher open rates after social. The right way is to prove it quickly with a clean design, then keep doing what works.
Design the test and randomise a holdout that gets email only. Prime the test group with a social teaser 6 to 24 hours earlier. Compare unique opens, click to open, on-site depth and conversion.
Full-funnel planning still outperforms channel silos. Nielsen’s 2024 report underlines the importance of balancing brand and performance to maximise ROI, rather than worshipping last click.
What to do this week
- Tease the big email reveal on social with a 15-second expert clip and a pinned comment promise. Then deliver the payoff in inbox.
Social buys attention that sticks
If you want memory, you need attention. Creator content consistently holds attention longer, which shows up later as better recall and cheaper response. That is your brand equity compounding.
Influencer content holds attention ~2.2x longer than standard branded digital ads by Kantar’s measurement of skip time. More attention, more recall. Exchange4media
What to do this week
Put creators to work on memory jobs. One strong asset per stage, a 6-second distinctive cue for awareness, a 15-second explainer for consideration, a 30-second proof for conversion.
How to set your engine up
Before the checklist, picture this. A buyer clocks your creator clip on Monday, searches your brand on Tuesday, sees your category comparison on YouTube on Wednesday, then opens your email on Thursday because the subject line feels familiar. None of that is an accident. It is sequence, designed.
1) Write for readers and robots
Short sentences. Key terms early. On-screen text. Captions that answer the search in plain English.
2) Sequence, do not spray
Plan bursts, social awareness, then search capture, then email nurture, then retarget with creator proof. Prove it with Search Lift and holdouts.
3) Measure like a grown-up.
- Outputs: cadence, coverage, attention.
- Outtakes: brand lift, share of search, search lift.
- Outcomes: qualified sessions, MQL quality, pipeline.
- Impact: incremental profit via contribution analysis or lightweight MMM. Nielsen’s guidance on full-funnel ROI still holds. Nielsen
Where I’m a bit spiky
- If your social has no point of view, AI will treat it like packing peanuts. The systems reward meaning and structure. So do people.
- If you are not measuring search lift and share of search, you will keep under-valuing social’s role in demand creation. The money will drift to the harvester, not the maker.
Social is not a silo. It is the oil that makes every other part of your marketing engine work better. It sparks demand that search can harvest. It carries meaning to AI systems that decide what we see. It warms people up so your email lands with context. And it earns attention that lasts longer than a banner ever will. The tweaks above are simple, but they compound.
If this hit a nerve and you want the playbook tuned to your category, let’s talk. We can scope a two-week test with lift and share-of-search tracking so you can take a clean, confident story to the board.
Further reading I rate this week: Programming Insider on how modern AI is changing discovery, and MarketingTechNews on social sitting at the centre of 2025 plans. programminginsider.com Marketing Tech News