When I started in content marketing over a decade ago, I was an associate at a 600+ person company wearing way too many hats: writing blog posts, managing social media accounts, building email campaigns, the whole sprawl. I’ve since moved through SEO writing, to content strategy, and now I’m Head of Content at Bubble and I lead a team of four. In that time, I’ve watched my two loves — longform content marketing and social media — evolve on increasingly divergent paths.

These days, all the social platforms are clear about what they want: native content that keeps people scrolling. No external links. No sending users away. The algorithms reward content that lives entirely within their ecosystem, and they punish anything that tries to extract people from it.

Meanwhile, too many content marketing teams have stayed stuck in an old model. We miss the days when we could treat social as a distribution channel for content we create elsewhere. We wish we could still measure success by click-throughs and referral traffic, because it was way easier. And our leaders don’t understand what’s changed. So we’re still organizing our teams as if social media’s job is to point people toward the “real” content on our blogs.

I’ve had a front-row seat to this gap widening, both professionally and personally. For nearly 10 years, I’ve also run a book Instagram and Substack where I share reviews and my life as a reader. Nothing massive, just @deedireads and about 14,000 people who care about the same books I do. And I’ve learned firsthand that social-first content wins: when I post content that lives entirely on Instagram, it gets seen and shared. When I try to tease my Substack and ask people to click over, it dies. Every single time.

So when we brought our first dedicated social media person onto the content team at Bubble back in May, it wasn’t some bold experimental move. It was finally aligning our org structure with how these platforms actually work.

Social media is a content channel now, not a place to share your content.

Social media is a content channel now, not a place to share your content. A place where content lives and breathes and reaches people, full stop. Once you accept that reality, a lot of organizational decisions start to make more sense.

If social media is a content channel, then the person creating that content should be part of your content team. Not tacked onto someone else’s role as a side project. Embedded where content strategy happens, where brand voice gets defined and maintained, where you’re thinking about storytelling, where you’re planning out how to meet potential leads where they already are.

Before we made this change, social at Bubble lived on a different marketing subteam. It was only half of that person’s job, and they didn’t have the time or the desire to approach it as anything more than information distribution. New feature? Announce it. Blog post published? Share it. Design team didn’t have time to make something visual for Instagram? We won’t post it there. 

It’s no wonder that didn’t work; that model doesn’t respect how people actually use social media. When you take a blog post and turn it into a carousel with the “link in the first comment,” or “link in bio” you’re interrupting someone’s scroll to ask them to do extra work. Click here, leave the app, care enough about this teaser to invest more time and attention. Most people won’t. Not because your content isn’t good, but because you’re fighting against how they’re already using that platform.

What changed when social moved to the content team? Everything, actually. Before, we were waiting for blog posts to exist so we could share them. Now, our social media associate shows up to campaign kickoffs with ideas for native and user-generated content right alongside editorial plans. She knows what trends are moving, what formats are working, and she proposes deliverables that are designed for each platform from the ground up. She collaborates with our brand design team and video production manager, but she also creates a lot herself. The fundamental shift is that she’s not distributing content. She’s making it.

And we can see the difference. Content created platform-first gets engagement. Higher impressions. People actually share it because it fits naturally into their feed, into how they’re already moving through that space.

There’s something deeper here about respect that feels true to every good content marketer’s purpose. When you create content social-first, you’re acknowledging that your audience’s attention is finite and valuable. You’re not trying to extract them from their chosen environment to serve your needs. You’re showing up in their space with something worth their time, right there, no hoops to jump through. That’s a fundamentally different relationship than the old “please click through to our blog” model ever was.

There’s something deeper here about respect that feels true to every good content marketer’s purpose. When you create content social-first, you’re acknowledging that your audience’s attention is finite and valuable….You’re showing up in their space with something worth their time, right there, no hoops to jump through.

The measurement gets messier, of course. You can’t just track blog pageviews and referral traffic anymore. You have to look at engagement across platforms, add up impressions and shares and comments to understand what’s landing. It requires more manual work to see the full picture. But that’s the reality of how content works now, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.

I think about this through the lens of my own experience as a content creator. I know what works on Instagram because I’ve posted thousands of times and watched what happens. I know the difference between content that respects my followers’ time and content that asks too much of them. That knowledge is exactly what your social media person brings. And when they’re isolated on a different team, disconnected from broader content strategy and brand voice work, you’re losing something essential. You’re missing the chance to have someone who understands these platforms helping shape how your company tells its story, not just after the fact, but from the beginning. And frankly, that’s a very different skillset than writing longform content.

(Of course, that doesn’t even begin to get into all the ways social content feeds AI search. But that’s a whole different post.)

If we know that social media is where people are, where they’re consuming content, where real engagement happens — why would we treat it as anything less than a first-class content channel? Why would we organize our teams as if it’s still 2015, when the evidence of what works is right in front of us every single day?

What a relief it’s been to stop swimming against that current. I think you should, too. ■

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Deedi Brown is Head of Content, Social, and Education at Bubble, where her team gives people the tools to bring their world-changing ideas to life. Before that, she led content at Ellevest, an investment platform built by women, for women. By night (and very early morning) she also reviews books on Instagram and Substack @deedireads. Outside work, you can find her running or knitting Christmas stockings with an audiobook in her ear.