Why do publishers struggle to find their social voice?

Publishing week in focus: Opinion

Every time a platform changes its algorithm, publishers ask the same question: “How do we get our reach back?”

I think we’re asking the wrong question. The real challenge isn’t distribution. It’s relevance.

For years, publishers have treated social as a marketing channel for journalism. We took articles, cut trailers, resized images, added captions and hoped audiences would click through to our websites. It made sense when referral traffic was plentiful, and social was primarily a distribution engine. That era is over.

Your competition isn’t other publishers

People don’t open TikTok, Instagram or YouTube because they’re looking for publishers. They open them because they’re looking to be entertained, inspired, informed or simply distracted for a few minutes. If our content feels like it belongs somewhere else, they’ll scroll past it without a second thought.

The publishers that will win on social won’t be the ones with the biggest audiences. They’ll be the ones that are most relevant to the audiences they serve.

That’s a very different challenge.

The industry has become obsessed with formats. Should we be making more Reels? Longer YouTube videos? More carousels? Should every journalist become a creator?

Those questions matter, but they’re tactical. They’re not strategic.

The more important question is this: why should someone choose to spend time with your brand when there are millions of creators competing for the same attention?

Social media has fundamentally changed what it means to be a publisher. We aren’t just competing with other newsrooms anymore. We’re competing with comedians, chefs, football fans, travel creators, podcasters and every other person capable of making someone stop scrolling.

That’s uncomfortable for traditional media, but it’s also an opportunity. Because publishers still have trust.

In a world increasingly filled with AI-generated content, recycled opinions and misinformation, trusted editorial brands should have an advantage. But trust alone isn’t enough if audiences never stop to engage with your content in the first place.

Trust still matters. But on social, attention is the price of entry

At Time Out, I’ve learned that success on social doesn’t come from asking how we can promote our journalism. It comes from asking how audiences want to experience it. That same thinking has shaped our wider brand.

Our research has shown that anticipation plays a powerful role in how people experience joy. Social isn’t just where we tell people what’s happening in the city – it’s where the excitement begins.

Sometimes that’s a creator-led street interview. Sometimes it’s a long-form on YouTube. Sometimes it’s an Instagram carousel that saves someone twenty minutes of searching. The journalism doesn’t change. The way it’s experienced does.

That’s the shift I think more publishers need to embrace.

The challenge isn’t that established media brands have history. It’s believing that history alone is enough to succeed on social. Every legacy publisher is wrestling with the same question: how do you stay recognisable while feeling native to platforms that didn’t exist a decade ago?

The answer isn’t to abandon your brand voice or simply “make it more casual”. It’s to find a social-native expression of the same brand. One that feels authentic to the platform without losing what made audiences trust you in the first place.

Success won’t come from trying to sound more like creators. It will come from making your brand feel native to the platform without losing what made people trust it in the first place. That’s when social stops feeling like another marketing channel and starts becoming part of the product.

That’s why i believe that community is becoming a more valuable metric than reach.

Reach can disappear overnight because of an algorithm update. Relevance is much harder to lose because it’s built on understanding your audience, showing up consistently and creating content people actively choose to spend time with.

Know. Like. Trust.

The way I think about social is through a simple funnel: know, like and trust.

First, people discover you. That’s where entertaining, platform-native content matters.

Then they start to like you. They recognise your tone of voice, your perspective and the consistency of what you create. They come back because they enjoy spending time with your brand, not because an algorithm happened to recommend another video.

Only then do they trust you.

Ironically, this is where publishers have the greatest opportunity. Trust has always been our biggest asset, but we’ve spent years optimising almost exclusively for awareness.

We’ve celebrated impressions while paying less attention to relationships. More and more we’re seeing the rise in expert influencers (the likes of Grace Beverley and Emma Grede) who are really knowledgeable in their fields, they are cutting through the noise and this is exactly where our editorial content belongs.

The future belongs to publishers that invest in both.

That means social teams need to stop thinking like distribution desks and start thinking like producers, storytellers and community builders. It means editorial teams should create with platforms, not simply publish onto them. And it means success should be measured not just by views, but by whether people choose to return.

The publishers that succeed over the next decade won’t be the ones chasing every algorithm update.

They’ll be the ones that build brands people actively seek out, communities people want to belong to and content that’s impossible to mistake for anyone else’s.

Publishers don’t have a reach problem. They have a relevance problem.

Chanté Piette-Valentine is the head of social and video at Time Out Media