What Does Instagram Have to Do With ChatGPT?
The first job of organic social is to create content people want to watch, read, or share with a friend.
That doesn’t change.
But organic social is starting to have another role —> how brands show up in LLMs and AI search.
What we can see is organic social content being indexed more and more by Google.
Put it into practice:
- Type your brand into Google. If you have an active organic social presence, there’s a good chance you’re already seeing some of that content show up in the results.
If you have creators and influencers speaking about your brand, you may start seeing that content show up too.
And importantly, we’re talking about organic search results here. You can’t pay Google to rank that Instagram post higher.
And this is where it starts to matter for LLMs. AI search tools are increasingly pulling from the live web to answer questions. So the more useful, indexable information about your brand that exists online, including organic social, the more information these systems potentially have to understand what your brand is about.
That’s what we can actually see happening in Google today. But what does it mean for AI search? When we recently hosted Jane Phelps, CEO of the Know Agency and our Consigliere on all things AI, on our podcast, we talked about a lot of this.
One of the things she brought up was that brands should start looking at organic social as part of their overall AI-search visibility, instead of thinking about it as this completely separate channel.
And because of that, I wouldn’t be shocked if we start seeing slightly longer copy come back on social in certain situations.
Not every caption needs to become an essay.
But there might be a little more value in actually explaining something instead of writing three words and an emoji. Because that caption isn’t necessarily only for the person scrolling Instagram anymore. It’s another piece of information about your brand that can potentially be discovered through search and AI search.
Again, none of this changes the first job of organic social: make something people actually want to engage with. But there’s now a secondary benefit that I think we’re only starting to understand.
