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Why Narrow Targeting And Scalable Content Will Decide Who Wins On Social

• Evan Kirstel

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Tired of pretty charts that don’t change your strategy? We go straight at the hard truth: social media is evolving from follower-first tactics to value-first systems, and the winners are those who align a crisp ICP with content that solves real problems at scale. Emeric Ernoult is the Founder and CEO of Agorapulse, a serial entrepreneur with two decades of experience in social media and SaaS and breaks down how brands can prove impact, not just activity, and why AI is the lever that turns expertise into consistent output across formats.

We dig into the new playbook for 2025: narrow your audience, clarify the problem you solve, and let AI help you repeat your best ideas in fresh ways. From short videos and carousels to text posts and long-form explainers, the goal is a content spine that compounds trust. We talk practical moves like transforming raw transcripts into standout explainers, building a studio in your pocket, and using agentic workflows that shift you from doing tasks to approving smart recommendations.

Analytics gets a reboot too. Instead of handing your boss a PDF full of colors, use AI to extract what worked, what didn’t, and what to try next. We cover how small teams can operate like pros with a smart inbox, suggested replies, prioritization by sentiment and urgency, and reporting that actually prescribes action. Emeric also shares a peek at the 2026 roadmap: LinkedIn-first thought leadership for B2B, then expanding to visuals and video, all grounded in sharply defined use cases and personas.

If you care about making social media drive pipeline, retention, and brand equity, this conversation gives you a clear path forward—less noise, more signal, and a toolkit that scales quality without burning out your team. Subscribe, share with a teammate who runs social, and leave a review telling us the one insight you’re acting on this week.

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SPEAKER_01:

Hey everyone, favorite of topic of mine today on the future of social media analytics, publishing, community engagement, and more with a true thought leader innovator in the field from Agora Pulse. Emeric, how are you?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm great, Evan. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thanks for being here. Uh social media fanatic. So I've been tweeting and posting and otherwise for gosh, probably uh 20 years now. So really intrigued uh by this conversation. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and what's the mission at Agora Pulse?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. So my name is Emric. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Agora Pulse. And the mission that we founded, we co-founded this in 2011. So it's been around for quite a while. And uh our our our mission is that we want to empower brands to win on social media and see the value of their work and actually be able to show the value of their work and prove the value of their work to their peers, their boss, or their customers.

SPEAKER_01:

Brilliant. Sounds so simple. Of course, so much complexity behind that. So when you started out, what was the main problem or the main problem statement you were originally trying to solve? And how has that evolved over time?

SPEAKER_00:

That's very funny that you ask because first of all, we started with something we don't offer anymore, which was contests and promotions on Facebook, sweepstakes, photo contests, and and any kind of Facebook app that people were running to gain more followers on their page, which they called fans at the time. Um, and which was a fan page on Facebook. And um our early vision, the the thing we had in mind when we launched this was the fact that our software was allowing brands to connect an email address with a Facebook person profile and been basically connecting the dots between who were who was following them on Facebook, who was engaging with their content on Facebook, and who was in their CRM through the email. And with the Facebook apps, we were able to connect the dots between the identity on Facebook and the identity in the CRM. That was basically showing the value of all that engagement on social media by showing them, oh, that person is actually a prospect. That person is actually a customer. And the the baseline of our homepage in 2011 when we launched Agora Pulse was your Facebook fans aren't worth anything if you don't know who they are. And the idea of value and proving value was already ingrained within our DNA and it was already an obsession of ours. You may or may not know that what we promised in 2011 is impossible to do today because Facebook has changed the role of the games. Now you have hashed ID, so you don't you cannot connect the ID with an email when you do an app because you have an app hashed ID, which is the ID you get from an app is specific to this app, so you can't know who that person is. But so things have changed, the technology has changed, the landscape has changed, but the obsession is still the same.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. And um I'm sort of my own social media manager. I have about 700,000 followers across all the platforms. You can imagine I really have no life. Um, but you know, in the enterprise, how has the role of uh social media managers changed over the last few years? And how are you adapting and how are you asked to help?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, the the role has changed in many different different ways that are not necessarily better. And the first one you kind of touch, which is it's more and more overwhelm overwhelming, and it's more and more overwhelming because there are more and more platforms, and obviously you can ignore TikTok in the early days, you can ignore LinkedIn, or you can't, you know, there they are platforms you can ignore for some time, but it they will catch you back, which is at some point you got you you gotta have something on TikTok because now TikTok is leading the way of interest media and and and and and and and teenagers or even young adults, and so like Instagram, maybe you could have been ignored Instagram six years ago. It's quite hard to ignore Instagram nowadays. So you get more and more, which means more formats, more um um type of content, more tactics, like so. It's really more, it's always more, which is a challenge and is overwhelming for sure in terms of what you need to put to create and where you need to be present. That's the first the first issue. The second issue is that the the winning strategies are completely different in 2025 than they were in 2015, for example, or even 2019. What the winning strategy was back in the days, five, six years ago, was okay, I need to build a following. And then once I have a following, well, you have to do amazing content before that, but once I have a following, and in order to build a following, I create content that's going to be appealing to them. So that once that following is there, they're gonna start seeing my content, and then I grow the following, I grow the content production and both at the same time, and all in all, my my presence is is you know ends up being meaningful and significant and and and creating impact for the rest of the business. In 2025, the the things that have that have completely changed and switched is that you don't need to build a following anymore. You need to connect an ideal customer profile that you're targeting that's very narrow and very specific to a content strategy that's super duper helpful for them. Like you need to go very narrow and specific. I am targeting CEOs of companies of 500 and and 500 to 5,000 employees in North America in the tech sector. And I'm what I'm helping them solve is this through that kind of content. And that's the strategy you need to have. You need to be much more specific with who you're going after and what you're trying to solve for them and why this is going to be game-changing for them. And you need to produce content that be is built around this triangle at scale. And when I say at scale, it means a lot of that, a lot of it. And that's a real challenge. And when when you see when you see who is successful on social media in 2025, that's that's the strategy that they use. And you can really see that there is a massive volume of content, that content is massively interesting and appealing and value creating, and and it it it's produced at scale. And that's the challenge of 2026 and forward. It it's really what's gonna what's gonna make or break uh success on social media for businesses, and it's really, really, really hard to scale.

SPEAKER_01:

Amazing. And you know, AI is changing, reshaping everything in our industry. Uh, just anecdotally, me personally, it's increased, let's say it, it's about a dozen different AI tools for creation enhancement, reshaping content, increased engagement by about a thousand percent in 30 days over the last 30 days with some of the new tools for me personally. So I can only imagine the impact on businesses and brands. But how do you see AI reshaping the publishing side, the scheduling, the listening, the community management, all the things that Agora Pulse is known for?

SPEAKER_00:

Um first of all, I'm um I'd be very interesting to get to hear from you one of those use cases that you've used with AI in the past 30 days that worked really well for you. I have plenty of my own.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh I mean one is just uh Sora 2, um uh the the newest, hottest social media network, and not for wacky videos of my cat and my dog playing the piano, which I do have, of course, but actually using it for B2B content and educational content and really interesting, telling interesting stories using the uh Sora 2 framework, both within the app as well as uh through Chat GPT and the API, and the ability to put a production studio in my back pocket. I mean, that's just been the app has been out three weeks and it's it's been a game changer.

SPEAKER_00:

Here you go. Here you go. Do you use an avatar review or do you use something else?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, it's me. It's 100% me. And you know, it even fools my wife, kids, family. So it it really is uh uh phenomenal. And again, if people think it's all about uh silly cats and uh TikTok, they're kind of missing a trick. But I I interject. So we're back to your point of view.

SPEAKER_00:

Basically, what you're describing here is the vision for Agoropules at the end of 2026. So what we see on the market is that successful brands, successful people, professionals like you, like me, CEOs like personal brands, and successful businesses are gonna win at social media if they are able to create really great content at scale, even if they're not sure what what kind of interesting stuff they can say. And we want to basically, if you want to build a business at scale, you have to provide this solution to a lot of people, not only the most interesting ones, which are a few, and not only the ones that have a lot of things to say, which also are a few. You need to be able to help those who don't exactly know what they should be talking about, those who don't exactly know how what content they should be posting, those who don't really enjoy being in front of the camera or shooting, shooting camera with their iPhone, you know, three times a day, which which is the the the silent majority of people. The the creators, they're still the mean the minority. I forgot what's the percentage of people who are creating content on social and the percentage of people who are just consuming content, but it's overwhelming. It's it's probably 1%, 99%, or even worse than that. So if we want to build a sustainable business, a Gore Pulse as a social media management software, we have to provide solutions not to the 1% only. It'd be great if we do the 1%, but also to the other 99%. So with AI, I believe that's my vision, and that's what we're gonna build moving forward. I believe that anybody can create very interesting content for a very well-defined ICP at scale, even if they don't know yet. They don't know it yet. That is my belief. And that is because I think every successful business, and obviously, if you're an unsuccessful business, social media is not gonna save you, but every successful business has stories to tell, has expertise, and has things that they can share the world with the world, and the the world being their ICPs, the people they're selling to, or the ideal customer they're selling to, they have that to share with them. The problem is to surface it and format it in a way that it's consumable easily, seamlessly, on a on uh at scale by their ideal audience. And and the problem, they don't know how to do that. So I think AI can absolutely do that for you. And or help you do that in the early days, in two or three years from now. This this you, this avatar of you who is delivering amazing content on its own without with you sleeping or sipping a cocktail on the beep is totally happening. There's no doubt. And I think that's that's what that's what AI needs to do for social media pros. I mean, helping them extract the value they have and they don't know they have, or at least they don't know how to spit it out or how to format it. Format it in so many different ways: text, images, cargo cells, videos, short, vertical, horizontal, long-form YouTube, short form TikTok, whatever, and orchestrate that content distribution of already interesting IDs that were sourced and put in form with the help of AI. And then with the help of AI, you push it everywhere it should be pushed at scale, and you keep improving and and and reshaping. Funny enough, I do you know, do you know a guy named Alex Ramosi on YouTube? Have you have you ever heard of him? Sure. Yeah, very, very well known. I I I know him. I was in his one of his workshops two weeks ago in Vegas. And um, when you follow Alex and Leila, his wife, they're super successful, they're tremendous stars on YouTube, only posting about business content, which is amazing, having millions of followers just on creating businesses and winning at business. Um, when you look at their content, they're it's not that they're repeating the same things all the time, but they're saying the same things in different ways. Like there's a lot of, oh yeah, this is you should do more of the good things. And their content is not it's not novelty every day. The same concept keeps coming back, but they come back a little bit differently with a different angle, with a different experience, with a different story. And that's what AI can help you do at scale. Meaning we all we all limit ourselves, we create mental mental barriers. Well, I don't have that much to say. Well, you do have that much to say, it's just you're not seeing it in diff in different enough ways. So people I'm sorry, I'm rambling, but do you know uh um uh um what what what's the most important job of a company leader, a CEO, a CMO, CRO, and so on? It's to be a CRO, i.e. a chief repeating officer. And what we don't do enough as leaders is repeating ourselves, getting the message across again and again and again and again, our values again and again and again and again. And I think we underestimate how many times we have to say the same thing in different ways through different formats, through different channels, so people finally get it and understand it. And I think that's what allows for a lot of social media content, and AI will be amazing at that. This is the core message. Can help me share this core message in 10 different ways through 10 different videos. Boom. I'm pretty sure it's gonna do an amazing job at that.

SPEAKER_01:

And it does today. What a another uh bit of a tip or trick, a hack is to drop this video that we're recording uh now into Notebook LLM by There you are. Yeah, and um it will create probably the best explainer video info infographic video that you'll ever see. That's something that would probably cost you$10,000 to create and produce back a couple of years ago for free. So uh I'll do that after this this post and we'll see how good it is. And of course, for B2B, it's great because people want information, they want education, they want to be not just entertained, but informed. And um, this is a great tool to do that. But back to the grind of social media, it's not all fun and games. Things like reporting and analytics uh are a real grind. They're really difficult across platforms, and it makes every social media manager and influencer's light hell. But those are two areas of value add and differentiators for you at Agora Pulse. What kind of insights do they provide? And how can brands find value from those data analytics?

SPEAKER_00:

That's the thing where AI is an absolute game changer as well, because what social media management software such as Dart or Hootsuite or Sprout Social or all the big names in the space have done for many, many years, we've all done the same thing. We give you a great bar chart, a great pie chart, a great graph, lots of colors, they look good, they make you look good. Do you want a beautiful PDF you can serve to your boss that he or she will not understand? Here it is. But social media reporting, the same way as any kind of reporting, if you want my opinion on reporting in general, was a beautiful visualization of results that you didn't really understand what they meant in terms of impact and in terms of insights. What AI does with all this, you still have that because people want that, they still want to PDF them and send them and share them and so on and so forth. But what AI does, it goes behind this and it gives you the actual insights. What actually worked? What you should what should you do more of or less of? And that's what a business analyst or a data analyst should have done with those graphs, but nobody was doing that because nobody was doing data analysis on their social media reporting. Nobody ever, never did that. Maybe in some Fortune 500 company, there were a dozen of guys doing that. I'm not even sure. But the the 99.99% of other businesses, they were not doing data analysts on that. And now you have a data analyst at the tip of your finger. You can press a button and say, okay, tell me what do I need to know about my social media results? What do I need to do more of? What do I need to do less of? What is actually successful and what is actually not. And for example, now in our reports, we have a uh AI summarizer. You go in your reporting and you click summarize with AI, and AI is going to tell you this is what worked in that time frame that you you you exposed to me, this is what didn't work, and this is what you should be doing instead. And and and that is the power of AI, which is the the the it's not it's not giving you raw data that you don't know you don't know what to do with anything about, and and and it's giving you what you should do about it. And uh, and that's the value of analytics, in my opinion. And and before AI, this was impossible. The cost of analyzing analyzing that data was so high that nobody was doing it. Now the cost is sense, it's nothing. And so people are going to tell you, oh, you're you're destroying the environment, and we have all these hosting centers and your chat GPT requests. Yeah, sure, but we can do so much with that that was impossible before. That that's game changing. On the United States side, that is the game change. It's it's the insights behind the graph.

SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. The other trend I think we're all seeing is doing more with less, in particular, social teams are often stretched, uh, very thin. Um, even the most junior people tend to be assigned to social media, which always shocks me, you know, is uh working with global 2000 brands and the size of their social teams. I mean, one or two or a few people. It's it's just amazing. How do you help them, you know, these teams work smarter, um, not just harder?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, smarter, no, just harder. It's is the the core value prop of of our industry, which is we're gonna help you uh reply faster by suggested replies, by uh um pre-built replies by prioritization engine in your inbox. I think we've built the best inbox in the market. We were the first one uh building a social media inbox in 2014, believe it or not. In 2014, nobody was providing you with incoming social content in an inbox format. It was all a bunch of columns. Uh, you probably remember TweetDeck or HootTweet that were hitting the pack back then. It was a bunch of columns, sometimes dozens or hundreds of them. When you wanted to manage your incoming comments, reviews, DMs, PMs, you had dozens and dozens and dozens of columns to go check. We invented the social media inbox thinking that this is overwhelming, this is not right, they should behave like an email. And uh, you know, Sprout Social copied us in 2016, and Hootsuite copied us in 2019, and now everybody, everybody and their sister has a social media inbox. But we kept improving it, and our social media inbox can be completely customized, you can decide exactly what you want, you can filter by sentiment, by by you know, urgency, like all sorts of stuff that makes the inbox the absolute uh uh absolute weapon to save time and just get to what needs to be done and let let let automation uh handle the rest. So automation now AI on top of automation is 10xing automation because now automation is smart before it was dumb. If you see this word, then do this with AI. So it goes way beyond this and way above that. So that's gonna be game changing as well. It's already game changing, but it's gonna get better and better and better. On the engagement piece, on the content posting piece, um the social media schedulers or social media, like they they build their business model based on that. Oh, instead of going on Nito's those platform and click, click, click, click, click and post, post, post, post, schedule everything, spend two hours, and then you're done for the week. So that value prop is still there. But but with with the new the new generation of social tools, and especially what we're gonna what we're gonna build in in 2026, that is gonna be not only a time saver, but also uh uh like more quantity without having to be on social all the time, but also much better quality. But I think I think the the the innovation is not gonna come for from this the ability to schedule, which is already there, and that that cannot be completely changed. It's gonna be from the ability to do it at scale with super high quality of content. That I think that's gonna be the change. Today, if all you if all you want to post on social media is amazing short videos with uh overlaying text and emojis and fun stuff and music and this and this and that, the amount of time and editing you have to do on Capcut is is is uh is overwhelming. With AI, that is gonna be saved. So that that's that's where the the the savings are gonna come from. Um what I think is going to happen in social in general is that agents are gonna do your work and they're gonna ask you to validate your work, the work that they've done. So you're gonna be a boss and not a worker B anymore. Anybody working on social media is not gonna go and reply or use that save reply or confirm that that that that proposed reply from from AI. It's gonna be about here are all the things that happen on your social accounts since you last you last logged in. This is what I'm advising you to do confirm, infirm, modify, next. And the UI of the products are gonna change because doing this requires a completely different user experience than going in and clicking through a bunch of buttons and and doing a bunch of actions within a software interface. So I think slowly we're gonna see our the interactions between us and our users change drastically from let me do the work to let me control the work that the machine has done for me.

SPEAKER_01:

Hallelujah. Can't wait for that vision to come into reality. You mentioned what's next. Uh what can you give us the peek into your roadmap or what's next? What can users expect in 2026?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, first of all, we already have a bunch of AI everywhere, but they uh if you ask me, to me, they look more like proof of concept here and there that we've added, like the one we have on our reports, uh the suggested replies, we have our in our inbox. Um, we have uh an AI assistant to help you improve the content you've already created, the the the text-based content you've already created. And if you look at the industry, everybody has done the same thing. It's we have an MCP where you can connect Cloud or Chat GPT and query, query your social data and say, okay, what's what's going on with my accounts? Please tell me, give me the answer, what should I do? Like all that can be done uh through ChatGPT or Cloud. So and and you look at everybody's in our space, AI, strategy, and plan, they all look the same, they all feel the same. So I think someone has to take the lead and and lead the pack and and and and and be uh uh uh um an agent of change when it comes to AI and and what we do. So what we already have coming at the beginning of 2026, so towards the end of the year or the beginning of the year, is um very focused on LinkedIn, B2B, and and thought leadership, uh thought leadership on LinkedIn for B2B companies, um, because we are the persona. So we said if we are doing if we're gonna do something, why not be the main beneficiary of that? So that's gonna come very early in 2026, which which is going to be the ability to create amazing LinkedIn posts, thought leadership posts at scale on the very topic that you want to be recognized as a thought leader for as a business or as a CEO or as as a as a creator. So that's coming very early on, and then we're gonna start expanding that. Um it's gonna be text first in the in the in the early days, and we're gonna start expanding that to visuals, uh, carousels, and um and videos, and then we're gonna start expanding that to other social networks. What I really want to nail in 2026, I want to nail use cases. So, first the first use case, thought leadership on LinkedIn for CEOs or C levels and and businesses, because because I can go to a business and a CEO and say, I want to help you do this because you are that. Does that make sense? And I want them to say, Oh yeah, it does. I understand what you're trying to solve and what you're trying to um um um give me as a value. Let's go and let's do that. If I go to any CEO and I say, I want to help I want to have AI help you be better on social media, I'm probably gonna have like, eh, what does that mean? So I I want the I want the use cases to be very, very narrowly defined. The personas to to for whom those use cases are designed to be also narrowly defined. So when we approach the persona with a use case, they're like, oh yeah, give me more. I want that. And so that's that's the approach that we're gonna have.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, fantastic. Well, so exciting, the most exciting time in our industry for sure. And congratulations on the amazing success so far on onwards and upwards.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much, Evan. It's it's a lot of work, but it's worth it.

SPEAKER_01:

It's it's it is indeed. It sounds it. Can't wait to watch it uh uh unfold. And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode. Be sure to check out our TV show now on Fox Business and Bloomberg TV at techimpact.tv. Thanks, every thanks everyone.