Your Social Team Is Probably Stuck in 2019 — Here’s What Needs to Change (or Risk Getting Left Behind)

Social media is evolving at breakneck speed, and most internal brand teams haven’t caught up.

What used to work? A mix of polished Instagram carousels, a few influencer campaigns, maybe some TikTok content sprinkled in, and the occasional cross-functional brainstorm with the brand or performance team.

But that model? It’s already outdated.

If your social media team is still operating like it’s 2019, your brand is at risk of being disrupted—because social today requires a fundamentally different playbook, thanks to TikTok Shop and Social Commerce.

Let me break down what’s changing, what’s no longer enough, and where social teams must focus to stay relevant.

1️⃣ The role of the social team is no longer just to “do social.” It’s to help the brand be social.

Posting pretty content on Instagram is not being social. Running occasional influencer campaigns isn’t being social.

Being social means showing up where conversations are happening, and participating in culture—not just observing it from a distance.

Recently, I attended multiple creator matchmaking events run by TikTok Shop or other vendors. I paid close attention to which brands were in the room. The answer? 99% of the brands are in beauty and skincare

Why? Because those industries are among the most competitive, and they know that staying relevant means doing more than surface-level social media. They understand they need to be first-movers—finding new ways to connect with communities, activate creators, and build cultural relevance in real-time.

If you’re not in the room at events like these, you’re missing out on the relationships and insights that will drive the next phase of growth on social.

Whenever I bring up the idea of attending these kinds of events, I can feel how uncomfortable it makes most internal social teams—because it pushes them outside the familiar comfort zone of content calendars and campaign planning.

2️⃣ There are only two jobs for the modern social team: create viral content + activate creators.

Everything else is secondary.

👉 Viral content creation.
Your social team’s #1 job is creating content that travels. Not content that’s merely polished or “on-brand,” but content that people want to stitch, remix, and share. Content that sparks conversations, duets, reactions, and memes.

This requires a different creative muscle than the one that produced those perfect Instagram grids. It means rapid experimentation, an eye for trends, and a willingness to take creative risks.

Check out Bianca, director of marketing at Prime Bites, on LinkedIn

👉 Creator activation.
Creators aren’t just influencers who post once in exchange for a fee. The best social teams are thinking about creators as partners—brand fans, ambassadors, testers, and storytellers who help the brand feel authentic.

Your social team’s job is to identify creators who genuinely love the brand, activate them in meaningful ways, and help them tell stories that resonate with their audiences.

3️⃣ Social teams and performance marketing need to work as one (but most brands still run them in silos).

Here’s one of the biggest disconnects I see inside brands today:

The social team is focused on brand and organic reach. The performance team is focused on ROAS and scaling paid. And they rarely—if ever—sync.

This is a huge missed opportunity.

Your social team is sitting on a goldmine of insights:
✅ What’s trending organically
✅ What content formats are performing best
✅ What creators are driving the most buzz

That information should immediately inform your paid strategy. What’s working in organic? Amplify it. What’s flopping? Don’t waste budget trying to force it.

Yet in most companies, these teams are on opposite ends of the org chart, competing for resources or recognition. The result? Disjointed strategies, wasted ad spend, and lost momentum.

The future belongs to brands that break down these walls—and create a seamless loop between what’s working in organic and what’s worth scaling with paid.

❗ The hard truth: most internal social teams are not set up for this shift.

Here’s why:

✅ They’re stuck in an outdated model. Many teams were built during the Instagram era, with skill sets focused on curation, aesthetics, and brand guidelines—not rapid-fire creative experimentation or creator collaboration.

✅ They’re under-resourced for what matters most. Social teams today need creators, editors, trend-spotters, and community managers. Instead, they often have a couple of social media managers trying to do it all.

✅ They don’t have the right internal partnerships. Without tight collaboration with performance, product, and even operations, social teams can’t drive the full-funnel impact they’re capable of.

💡 So what’s the way forward?

If you want your social team to stay competitive (and avoid getting disrupted by more nimble, innovative brands), here’s where to focus:

🚀 Redefine the team’s mission.
Make it clear: the job of social is to help the brand be social—not just to post content. This means participating in culture, engaging creators, and creating moments people want to talk about.

🚀 Hire and upskill for the future.
Your next hires shouldn’t just be content schedulers or brand managers. You need people who live and breathe organic and social, who understand how to engineer virality, who can build creator relationships that go beyond transactions.

🚀 Break down silos between social and performance.
Create shared dashboards. Hold joint strategy meetings. Make it standard practice for social and paid teams to plan together—and to learn from each other.

🚀 Be where innovation is happening.
If your brand isn’t showing up at creator events, live shopping activations, or emerging platform betas, you’re falling behind. The beauty and skincare brands I mentioned earlier? They’re there. They’re learning, adapting, and building relationships that will pay off in the next wave of social commerce.