Why Large Consumer Brands Should Invest in Organic Social Media

Most consumers are not actively shopping for your product today.

They may not need it, they may not be thinking about the category, and they are unlikely to pay much attention to a message about your product features, benefits, or latest promotion.

But they are spending time on social media. According to NP Digital’s 2025 research, Gen Z spends an average of 84 minutes per day on TikTok, while Instagram users across generations spend approximately 32 to 37 minutes per day on the platform.

This is why large consumer brands should invest in organic social media: it gives them a way to earn attention before the next purchase occasion arises.

Direct-response paid media campaigns, email promotions, retail promotions, and paid search ads are effective at capturing demand when a consumer is ready to act.

Organic social media can play an earlier role. It can make the brand familiar before the consumer is standing in front of a shelf, browsing a retailer’s website, choosing where to eat, or deciding between several options.

Because the goal is to build familiarity before an immediate buying need exists, the content should not behave like a traditional advertisement.

It should not focus exclusively on product features, benefits, promotions, or reasons to buy. Instead, an organic social media strategy can take an audience-first, branded entertainment approach.

The brand can entertain, educate, or inspire within the space it wants to occupy in the consumer’s mind. That space may be connected to a particular interest, lifestyle, subject matter, cultural niche, or set of values.

The objective is not to remove the brand from the content. It is to give people a reason to spend time with the brand before they are ready to purchase.

Over time, consumers may begin to recognize a recurring personality, series, style, or point of view.

That familiarity matters.

When the buying moment eventually arrives, the brand is not starting from zero. It is already known and therefore more likely to be noticed, remembered, and considered.

This is the opportunity we have seen through our work at Dreww.

With Les Restaurants Lafleur, the goal was not simply to publish more photos of hot dogs, fries, and poutine. The brand was already well established in Quebec. The opportunity was to make Lafleur relevant to a new generation by giving people a reason to engage with it even when they were not deciding where to eat.

To do that, we created Lucie, a fictional Lafleur cashier who became the central character in an ongoing series of short-form videos. The stories focused on her personality, opinions, interactions with customers, and everyday life behind the counter.

The restaurants and food were always part of her world, but the videos were not simply advertisements asking people to buy a hot dog or a poutine. They were designed first to entertain, with Lafleur naturally embedded into the story.

This approach generated more than 50 million views, 2.1 million engagements, and 100,000 followers for the brand.

We have taken a similar approach with Natrel, although the creative direction is very different.

For Natrel, we chose to lean into a hopecore content style centred on optimism, generosity, kindness, and human connection. This direction aligns naturally with the brand’s values and its tagline, “Generous by Nature.”

Rather than focusing every post on product features, pushing a specific product, or relying heavily on recipes, the strategy allows Natrel to create content around the values and emotions it wants to represent. The products can still appear naturally, but they are not always the main subject.

The result has been 30 million video views, 267,000 engagements, and more than 10,000 new followers.

In both cases, the product remains present, but the content has a reason to exist beyond selling it.

The same principle applies across consumer categories.

The role of organic social media is not to generate an immediate sale from every post. It is to reach consumers consistently enough that the brand becomes familiar before the next buying occasion arises.

Because of that, direct sales attribution and short-term return on investment should not be used as the primary measures of success.

A consumer may watch a brand’s content for months before making a purchase. They may later buy the product in a store, through a retailer, or during a promotion without clicking a trackable link or taking any action that connects the purchase back to the organic content they previously watched.

The influence is real, but the path is rarely direct or fully measurable.

Trying to assign every organic post an immediate revenue figure would mean evaluating the channel against a job it was not designed to perform.

Organic social media builds attention, familiarity, and future consideration. Its success should therefore be measured by whether it reaches the right audience at scale and whether people choose to watch, share, save, follow, and return to the content.

Sales and business performance still matter, but they should be assessed over time and alongside the rest of the marketing mix, rather than attributed to individual organic posts in isolation.

For a large consumer brand, the goal should be to generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of relevant views per month.

A brand cannot become widely remembered without first being widely seen.

That is the strategic role of organic social media: to earn attention today so the brand is more likely to be chosen tomorrow.

The next question is how a brand earns that level of organic reach.

The answer is to create content for the audience first, rather than publishing exclusively about the brand and its products. That is what I explain in my next article, “Why Successful Organic Social Media Must Be Audience-First.”