AI Is Changing Social Media: What It Means for Business

Author: Cathy Mellett, Founder and Managing Director, Net Branding Status: Ready for review. Placeholders marked in square brackets must be filled before publication.

You are posting the same way you always have. Same effort, same quality, probably better quality than a year ago. So why are fewer people seeing it?

It is the question we get asked more than any other at the moment, usually by somebody who has been running their own social media for years and is quietly wondering whether they have lost their touch. You have not. Something did change, and the platforms did not send you an email about it. Most business owners find out the way you probably did, by looking at the numbers on a Tuesday afternoon and thinking, hang on, what happened here?

Now, before you read another word, let me say something. Almost everything written about AI and social media right now is designed to worry you. It does not need to. The changes that matter are mostly free to make, most of them take minutes rather than days, and everything you already know about your customers still counts for a great deal.

What changed is not how much your audience likes your content. It is how your content reaches them in the first place.

The technical term is a recommendation system. In practice it means the platform is constantly forming a view about two things: what each of your posts is about, and what each individual user wants to see. Then it tries to match them.

Followers are still useful. They are a signal of interest and they give your content a warm start. What they no longer do is guarantee delivery.

So what does that mean for you day to day? It means this. If the system cannot work out what your post is about, it cannot match your post to anybody. Unclear content does not get judged harshly. It just gets shown to fewer people, quietly, and nobody tells you.

Here is the whole shift in one view.

Most business owners have not been told this, and it changes how you write a post: the systems reading your content are no longer only reading your words.

For years the working assumption was that the caption was the part the platform understood and the image was the part people looked at. That assumption is out of date. The term for what changed is multimodal understanding, which simply means the systems now interpret images, video, audio and text together rather than treating the caption as the only readable part.

In practice, the platform is forming a view about what is in your photograph, what is happening in your video, what text appears on screen, and what is being said out loud. It combines all of that with your caption to work out what the post is about.

So which parts of a post are being read, and what should you do about each one?

We use video a lot at Net Branding, on the site and across social, because it is the fastest way for somebody to work out whether they want to deal with us. And when the platforms started reading video properly rather than just the caption sitting under it, we had to look honestly at our own material.

What we found is probably what you would find. The videos were good. The information was all there. But a lot of it was spoken rather than written, the subject often arrived thirty seconds in, and the on screen text was doing design work rather than telling anybody what they were watching.

So we changed three things. We say what the video is about in the first few seconds, out loud and on screen. We put the words on screen rather than assuming the audio does the job, which helps anybody watching with the sound off as much as it helps the system. And the caption underneath now stands on its own, so somebody who never presses play still knows what it was about.

None of that cost anything. It is the same video, described properly.

Sounds like a lot to think about, doesn’t it? It really isn’t, and here is why. Both of your audiences want exactly the same thing. Somebody scrolling wants to know within two seconds what this is and whether it is for them. The system needs to know the same thing before it can distribute it. Nobody is asking you to write for machines instead of people. They are asking for the same clarity, which makes this one job rather than two.

None of this costs anything, and none of it needs software you do not already have.

Write the caption so that somebody reading only the words, with no image in front of them, still gets the point. If your caption says “so pleased with how this one turned out”, neither your audience nor the platform learns a thing from it. Say what it is, who it was for, and what problem it solved.

Alt text takes about fifteen seconds per image and most businesses skip it completely. Describe what is actually in the picture, in plain language. It helps people using screen readers, which is reason enough on its own, and it gives the platform a clear signal at the same time.

For video, put text on screen. Not decorative text. Text that says what the video is about in the first few seconds.

Industry shorthand is the quiet killer here. If your posts describe your work in language only your competitors would use, you are asking both audiences to guess.

Run this checklist against your last ten posts:

• Does the caption make sense with the image removed?
• Is it obvious what the business actually does?
• Is the location mentioned where it is relevant?
• Would somebody outside your industry understand every term used?
• Does the first line say something, rather than warming up?

If most of your posts fail two or three of these, do not panic. That is one quick afternoon’s work with a real return on it. And it is worth repeating that none of it needs us, or any other agency, or anything you have to pay for.

Answer this one honestly. If somebody read your website, your Instagram bio and your LinkedIn page, would they conclude they were looking at the same business?

For a surprising number of businesses, the answer is not quite. The website says one thing, the profiles say something slightly different, and the posts describe the work in a third way. Each version is accurate. Together they are blurry.

So why does that hurt you now, when it never used to? Because the systems interpreting your content are trying to build a consistent picture of who you are, what you do and where you operate. That consistency has a name, entity clarity, and it is becoming one of the quieter deciding factors in how confidently a business gets recommended. When your own material disagrees with itself, the picture stays vague, and vague businesses get recommended less confidently.

The fix is unglamorous and it works. Decide how you describe your business in one sentence. Then use that same description, in the same words, on your website, in every profile, and in the way you talk about your work in posts. Same business name, same service language, same location.

There is a technical layer to this too, called structured data, which is code on your website stating these facts in a format machines read directly, using the shared vocabulary published at Schema.org. Worth doing, and a job for whoever looks after your site. It is not a prerequisite for anything above.

I started Net Branding in Auckland in 2008. Since then I have watched search change more than once, mobile rearrange everything, and social platforms rewrite their own rules repeatedly, usually without warning anybody.

Every one of those shifts arrived with the same soundtrack. Everything you know is obsolete, adapt immediately, buy this tool. And every time, the businesses that came through it well were not the ones chasing the newest tactic. They were the ones who were clear about who they were and consistent about saying it, because that clarity kept working after the mechanics underneath it changed.

This shift is no different in that respect. AI is not replacing good marketing. It is being noticeably kinder to businesses that were already communicating well, and less forgiving of the ones that were not.

So if your reach has dropped, the answer is probably not to post more. It is to be clearer.

If you are not sure how your content reads to either audience, we are happy to take a look and tell you plainly what we see. No obligation, and if the answer is that you are already doing this well, we will say so.

Be seen. Be heard. Be found, trusted and cited online.

Probably because distribution changed, not your content. Platforms now decide who sees a post based on what each person seems interested in, rather than simply delivering it to your followers. If the system cannot tell what a post is about, it cannot match it to anybody, and the post quietly goes to fewer people. Clearer captions and clearer visuals usually win a decent share of that back.

Both, and that surprises most people. The systems now interpret images, video, audio and text together. So the platform is forming a view about what is in your photo, what happens in your video, what text sits on screen and what is being said out loud, then combining all of it with your caption. Alt text and on screen text simply make that job easier.

Using AI is not penalised on its own. What performs badly is generic content, no matter who or what wrote it. When passable content costs almost nothing to produce, passable content stops being worth much, and audiences have got quick at spotting it. AI is genuinely useful for drafting and for scale. The knowledge of your trade still has to come from you.

Using AI is not penalised on its own. What performs badly is generic content, no matter who or what wrote it. When passable content costs almost nothing to produce, passable content stops being worth much, and audiences have got quick at spotting it. AI is genuinely useful for drafting and for scale. The knowledge of your trade still has to come from you.

No, and spreading yourself thin usually makes everything weaker. Because distribution is interest based rather than follower based, a clear consistent presence on one or two platforms where your customers actually are will beat a vague presence on five. What matters more than the number of platforms is saying the same thing about your business across all of them.

No, and spreading yourself thin usually makes everything weaker. Because distribution is interest based rather than follower based, a clear consistent presence on one or two platforms where your customers actually are will beat a vague presence on five. What matters more than the number of platforms is saying the same thing about your business across all of them.