Social Media Got Louder. It Didn’t Get More Social.

We reviewed 117 million social comments from January through June of this year. Of the questions people asked brands in those comments – not comments in general, actual questions – 94% never got an answer.

Sit with that for a second. Someone raised their hand. Asked where to buy the thing, whether it comes in their size, why their order hadn’t shipped. And nine times out of ten, nothing came back.

That number is one of the reasons we sat down with Christina Le, Head of Marketing at Slate. The session was called Bringing Social Back to Social Media, and the argument underneath it is simple: 

The social media industry has gotten very good at the media half, but somewhere along the way, we quietly lost sight of the social half.

The barrier to entry went down. The bar for excellence went up.

Christina’s framing of how we got here was the sharpest part of the conversation.

Every year, she said, the industry conversation has been about volume. More content, more often, more channels. Then AI removed most of the friction from producing it, starting with captions, then images, now video, and the floodgates opened.

Her read on what that did: 

“The barrier to entry has gotten lower, but the bar for excellence has gotten significantly higher.”

Both halves of that matter. Making content can be almost free now, which means everyone is making a whole lot more of it. But audiences got correspondingly better at skipping it. 

Attention was the one input AI couldn’t manufacture more of, so the cost of earning it went up exactly as the cost of producing content went down.

Most brands responded to that squeeze by making more content. Which is roughly like responding to a crowded room by talking louder.

Nobody likes the person who only shows up to announce something.

Here’s where the conversation turned practical.

If content is no longer the (primary) differentiator, the thing that happens after you post is. And most brands treat that as a reactive task: clear the notifications, answer the questions your boss sent you screenshots of in Slack, move on. Not because they don’t care, but because most teams simply don’t have the team or tools to engage at scale. 

Christina pushed back on that hard. Reactive engagement isn’t a strategy, it’s a queue. A real community strategy means being present and proactive both in your owned channels and in conversations you didn’t start, on posts that aren’t yours, before you need anything.

She quoted Christina Garnett on this (a longtime community and advocacy strategist), and it’s the line from the session most worth stealing: nobody enjoys hearing from the person who only runs to the town square when they have something to say.

The counterargument she anticipated, that brands shouldn’t barge into conversations they weren’t invited to, she handled with an analogy we’ve been thinking about since. You don’t walk into a room of strangers mid-conversation and immediately start talking. You listen for a while. You figure out where you actually fit. Then you say something worth saying.

The brands doing this well aren’t louder. They’re just there more often, and with better timing.

The noise problem is real, and it’s measurable.

There’s a structural reason engagement feels impossible even for teams that want to do it well.

Of those 117 million comments, roughly 1 in 14 across social media is spam. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a meaningful share of every comment section a social manager opens, and it sits in the same feed as the genuine questions, purchase intent signals, and customers with actual problems seeking support.

So the job isn’t just “reply to comments.” It’s find the comments worth replying to, inside a stream that’s actively working against you. Often manually. Usually as one person, and across more platforms than one person should own.

The stakes aren’t only reputational. 47% of consumers hold a brand accountable for what’s sitting in its comments, including under the paid social ads that brand is paying to distribute. And silence under a paid post is a more expensive silence, directly impacting brand reputation, ad conversions, and return on ad spend.

AI’s actual job

We spent the last stretch of the session on where AI fits, and Christina drew a line we endorse without reservation:

“I don’t like AI replacing creative work. The reason we bring AI on is to free up more time to focus on the creative work I actually enjoy.”

That’s the whole distinction. Sorting thousands of comments, flagging what needs a human, surfacing the buried question under 200 fire emojis…that’s work nobody trained for, and nobody misses. Handing it off is a clear win.

Having the idea is not that. Neither is the sensitive reply, the crisis response, or the moment a customer needs to feel heard by a person.

The teams getting this right aren’t using AI to make more and more content. They’re using it to spend their human hours on the parts that were always the point.

What we didn’t get to here

The back half of the session went somewhere we can’t compress into a blog post, mostly because the answers were specific and hard-won rather than quotable.

Christina laid out the minimum viable social team for 2026. The four roles, and a blunt rule of thumb about how many platforms one social media manager can actually own before it becomes impossibly overwhelming. Most teams reading this are past that number.

She also walked through how she vets creators (follower count doesn’t make her list), what she’d do in the first 90 days walking into a brand with chaotic social, and how she builds the business case for tooling as the person who signs off on the budget.

And she made a case for running a brand voice and tone exercise before you need it… for the celebratory moment, the ordinary Tuesday, and the crisis, with a customer story about a baby formula brand that’ll stick with you.