How to Win at Social Media in 2025 (and Why Old Posts Still Matter)

“Are we getting the most out of social media?” It’s no secret that developing a social media strategy, identifying target personas, and then matching a content strategy to these personas while also keeping up with all the daily news, events, case studies, and emerging topics is no easy task and quite time-consuming.

Social media has evolved from a ‘nice-to-have’ to the heart of what we do and where we do it. And just when we felt like we had it all figured out, AI changed the rules of the game once again. As a result, platforms are changing how, when, and why content is seen. Not to mention, as the rules around search change, too, we’re seeing website referral sources become increasingly social, with LinkedIn, Reddit, and more cracking the top five sources. Something we recently explored in our “why is my website traffic down?” post!

Here’s what’s working now and what brands should be doing to turn social media into a brand-building machine, not just a box to check.

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The Engagement Revolution: Polls, Video, and Real People

Want reach and engagement? Interactive polls and video are your new best friends. According to Metricool’s 2025 LinkedIn Study, which analyzed over 577,000 posts, polls now deliver 206% more reach than average content, and video watch time has increased by 68% year-over-year. Even better, video posts have increased by 53% overall.

We’ve seen this firsthand: campaigns that lean into human stories and video, such as our “Day in My Life” series for Arbella Insurance, become top performers in terms of shares, likes, and engagement, especially among younger audiences.  

This isn’t about high-gloss perfection; it’s about authenticity and relevance.

Algorithm Changes: Why You’re Seeing Old Posts (and What It Means for Brands)

If LinkedIn feels a little stale lately, you’re not imagining it. In June 2025, LinkedIn introduced an algorithm update that now displays older posts at the top of your feed. The aim? To balance recency with relevance, ensure you don’t miss big updates or valuable insights, even if they’re a few weeks old.  

This means that the shelf life of a great post has never been longer, but it also changes how and when your content performs. As Business Insider reports, the algorithm now looks at a mix of timeliness, your activity history, who’s important in your network, and actual expertise, not just likes or watch time.  

AI and Narrative Control: Why Social Profiles Are Now Your “First Impression”

Here’s the big shift most brands haven’t realized: AI engines (including Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google’s SGE) pull directly from LinkedIn and other public profiles to answer questions about you and your brand. If you’re not actively shaping your digital narrative, you’re leaving your brand’s story up to the internet. It’s critical to ensure your descriptions and content on LinkedIn (and similar sites) accurately reflect your brand and messaging.

To help brands appear in generative AI results, we’re embedding structured, AI-friendly metadata and summaries in all press materials, a practice now often called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

Paid Social: Outperforming the Industry

A strong, creative message tailored to your audience can deliver standout results. For IDEA’s annual conference, our targeted LinkedIn campaign helped drive 295 first-time attendees, generated over 80,000 impressions, and tripled LinkedIn’s average CTR at a cost-per-click just one-third of industry averages. (Our campaign CTR: 1.58%, compared to LinkedIn’s 0.44–0.65%. Average CPC: $1.97 vs. the LinkedIn average of $5.58.)  

Visuals: Less Branding, More Real People

What wins now? Not stock images or heavy logos, but subtle, human-centered visuals. High-quality shots of leaders at events and employees in action build genuine connections. For CorVel, shifting to more video and authentic graphics grew impressions by 4.5%, engagements by 15.5%, and followers by 39.5% YoY.  

From SEO to GEO: How AI “Finds” Your Brand

We advise brands to:

• Add a Share of Model (SoM) metric to your measures of success. This refers to how well a brand is represented and perceived by LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. In today’s GenAI world, it’s critical to shift the perception and quality of returns. To best measure success, we need hard metrics and a solid benchmark – something we do with our Marka+ AI offering.

• Keep LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google Business, and review sites up-to-date with strong, consistent descriptions.

• Audit .edu, .gov, and key partner sites—AI trusts and surfaces content from these sources so make sure your brand description is accurate on any partner sites.

• Use structured content (listicles, clear brand/category language, summary boxes) that’s friendly to both humans and generative platforms.

• Embed AI-ready summaries and metadata in all owned and earned content.

Human-First Lead Generation (with a Little AI Assist)

AI tools help us optimize and scale, but the secret sauce is still human understanding. Our recent MIT campaign – built on storytelling and quick responsiveness (not just automation) – generated 62 high-value employer leads at the lowest end of LinkedIn’s average cost per lead, because we listened, adapted, and connected person-to-person.  

In the Age of AI, Social Media Is Still About People

Emojis and em dashes? Sure. Use sparingly, but as you can see from this post, I don’t. It’s the way I write! Audiences are savvy, and they want the human, not the bot, and they’ll be able to tell the difference. Posts with energy, opinion, and personality outperform anything that feels “AI-generated.”

So, if your social media doesn’t reflect your team’s real voice (and faces), it’s time for a refresh.

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Ready to build a social strategy that works today and is ready for tomorrow? Let’s connect!

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