As Marketing Against the Grain’s social media lead, the two things I'm most focused on in the back half of 2026 are AI and the creator economy.

Every time I scroll LinkedIn — and I spend a lot of time scrolling LinkedIn — a C-Suiter is talking about AI. But I hardly ever see anything about how marketers are actually using AI as a tool in their day-to-day. 

Friday Feature

Where AI is being wasted

HubSpot’s just-released State of Social report found that marketers are using AI mostly for brainstorming (43%) and writing captions (42%). That’s great, but there’s so much more you can be using it for.  

The HubSpot social media teams regularly use AI outside of ideation and writing, but we’re in the minority. Only 14% of our survey respondents use it for social listening and trend monitoring, and just 10% for brand voice auditing. 

Here’s an AI use case that I think most teams are sleeping on: On the MAtG social team, we've been using a Claude artifact that optimizes our carousel posts. It grades our carousel copy for brand alignment and flags when something doesn't feel quite right for the brand, so we can adjust before it ever goes live.

It's a small but meaningful shift in how we work, and it's kept our content tighter and more on-brand than ever.  

The creator economy is shifting 

User-generated content (UGC) is a cornerstone of many a marketing strategy. And if you’re like most marketers, when it comes to creator selection criteria, follower counts lag behind creators’ content quality, engagement rate, and authenticity. 

Brands are prioritizing mid-tier and micro influencers, and they’re outperforming the big creator names.  

For MAtG, our focus in Q3 and Q4 is on working with creators who have built genuine niche communities — not just creators who can put our name in a caption, but people who can speak to their community in a way that feels natural, specific, and real. The kind of creator whose audience trusts them because they've earned it. That's the partnership model we're building toward, and I think it's where the best results will come from.

Authenticity beats slick production values, according to 77% of our survey respondents. And honestly? I’m glad to say goodbye to the era of expensive and overly polished content. It wasn’t a proxy for credibility when I started in social media over a decade ago, and it’s not a proxy for credibility now. 

Case in point: The highest performing piece of content we've published in the last year wasn't a carefully produced episode breakdown or a polished graphic.

It was a video we filmed at the Smooth Media office in New York. Unpolished, real, and entertaining. It has the highest view count of anything we've put out. Authentic and entertaining content is where it's at, and the numbers back it up.

Don’t confuse volume with strategy  

We’re not trying to out-post anyone on the Marketing Against the Grain socials. I’m paying close attention to what performs. 

The algorithm isn’t rewarding how much we post, it’s rewarding watch time, saves, shares, and repeat engagement. So even though the MAtG brand produces, between the newsletter and podcast, an embarrassment of content riches, some weeks I might only post three things.

I want to be more recognizable, not louder.