Meta invited a handful of social strategists and creators to its headquarters to hear what really works in organic content today. One of the invitees was the British strategist Keira Penney, and her notes from the event read like a short operating manual. They contain no news about the algorithm and no official platform metric. They do contain something more useful for a brand that spends on social media while also trying to build its own audience. They show how organic content has split into two distinct jobs.
Broadcast channels as a measure of closeness
The first note pointed to Instagram broadcast channels. Meta launched them in 2023 as a public tool where only the creator sends messages and followers respond or vote in polls. It is a direct line to people who have already said yes once.
According to Penney, Dan Biddle said at the event that strong creators have a broadcast channel equal to 5 to 10% of their follower base, while for most brands and creators it is only 1 to 2%. The figure comes from a participant’s notes, not from official Meta data. Treat it as a rough guide. The underlying point stands, however. A broadcast channel measures depth of relationship. It shows how many people are willing to receive messages from you directly, outside the main feed and its ranking.
For a brand director, this is less romantic than it sounds. An own channel to an audience means a relationship that does not disappear with the next algorithm change. But the same spot on the phone is contested by newsletters, WhatsApp channels and other direct formats. The broadcast channel is one way to keep that closeness, not the only one.
Reach among strangers comes through sharing
The second job of organic content points the other way. It wins over people who do not yet follow you. According to Penney, the event heard that if a brand or creator aims for fast growth on Instagram, their reels should be seen by people outside their audience 90% of the time.
This matches how the platform thinks today. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has repeatedly said that the most important signals are watch time, sends per reach and likes per reach. Sharing in private messages is in fact the strongest signal for getting content to strangers. When someone sends a reel to a friend, they are telling the platform that the video is worth recommending.
For a brand, this leads to a concrete brief. Content that is meant to grow has to be good enough for one person to send to another in a private message. That sharing opens the door to new viewers. Collecting likes from existing fans changes little.
Performance and organic are not rivals
The most practical point of the event concerned the relationship between paid and organic. According to Penney, Giselle Boxer and Alice Bugeja spoke about it. Paid campaigns and organic content have traditionally competed for budget and for the team’s attention. The event heard that they should be aligned on what each channel is for. Paid campaigns serve conversion, organic serves relationships.
For a European brand such as Notino or Rohlík, this division is the most valuable sentence from the whole event. It ends a false dispute in which the performance and social teams fight over the same money and the same numbers. When each channel has a different job, it stops making sense to measure organic content by immediate return and paid campaigns by the number of comments. Organic builds the reason someone chooses you. Performance closes that choice.
Niche and owned IP
The remaining two notes belong together. According to Penney, Grace Andrews stressed the importance of a niche and of a clear decision about what a person wants to be known for. Leon Harlow of the agency YMU spoke about how, for longevity, a creator today needs to own their IP, whether as a podcast, a TV show or a book.
Behind those two sentences lies the whole shift in the market. Ben Woods, an analyst at MIDiA Research, wrote in December 2025 that more diverse audience engagement leads to more diverse income. Each new layer of owned IP, he says, reduces dependence on a single platform. The social network turns from a single source of income into one of several engines. Woods also warns that platforms risk becoming mere distribution channels if they overlook creators’ shift towards their own formats. As examples he cites MrBeast with his streaming show, a line of chocolate bars, a theme park and an animated series, and the podcast franchise Goalhanger, which has grown into books, live events and a festival.
Niche and owned IP are two sides of the same thing. The niche says who you are useful to and for what. Owned IP is the container in which that usefulness is stored, so that no one can switch it off by changing the algorithm. This is exactly where a creator or a brand becomes something closer to a company than to an account on a social network.
One question for every channel
One practical filter remains from the whole event. Each channel a brand runs either serves to make people choose it, or to get them to complete a purchase. Broadcast channels, niche and owned IP belong in the first column. Paid campaigns belong in the second. Reels can sit in both, depending on whether they aim at sharing or at immediate sales.
A European brand reading this on the way to work does not need to take away a specific number. One question for each channel is enough. If the team cannot answer it, it is measuring the wrong thing.
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