Social media is now an algorithmic system, not a channel

For a long time social media marketing was taught as broadcasting with extra steps. Build an audience, post regularly, reply to comments, and the people who chose to follow you would see what you published. That model described the early platforms reasonably well. It describes the current ones poorly.

Ranking, not following

On most major platforms, what a person sees is decided by a ranking system that predicts engagement. Following an account is one signal among many. A post can reach people who have never heard of the brand, and miss most of the people who have. Marketers who plan as if the audience they built is the audience they will reach are planning for a platform that no longer exists.

This changes what good work looks like. Content has to earn distribution post by post. Communities matter because their members interact, and interaction is what the ranking systems read. Creators matter because they have already learned how to hold attention on a particular platform, and a brand that works with them borrows that knowledge along with the reach.

Commerce and agents

Two further changes are arriving at once. Social commerce shortens the path from seeing a product to buying it, so a post can be a shop window and a checkout together. And AI agents are beginning to act on social platforms: answering customers, moderating communities, drafting replies and in some cases transacting. Each of these raises the stakes of getting the system right, because errors now happen at scale and in public.

Law follows the same path. Endorsements must be disclosed, consent rules apply to electronic messages, and children are protected by rules that a brand cannot set aside because a platform allows something technically. A strategy that ignores the legal frame is not bold; it is unfinished.

The social media chapter of Digital & Social Marketing: The Agentic Era covers platforms, algorithms, communities, creators, social commerce and AI agents, with Canadian law throughout, so that students learn to plan for the system as it actually works.

Further reading: Digital & Social Marketing: The Agentic Era: A Practitioner’s Textbook for the AI-Enabled Marketer

Drafted with AI assistance for the Y Academy Press editors, in line with the Press's Generative AI policy.