Marketing Expert Says Brands Must Hire This Little-Known Role To Win Social Media In 2026
It could be the secret sauce your social media strategy has been missing.
This article was written and published by Annabel Burba, Editorial Assistant at Inc.com.
Adding one specialist role to your digital marketing team could make all the difference in 2026, according to social media expert Nathan Jun Poekert. It’s a job title that, at most companies, may not even exist yet.
“If you are a brand that wants to be culturally relevant,” you need to hire “a social listener,” Poekert said during a presentation on social media trends at the Bridge Summit, a media and entertainment industry conference in Abu Dhabi, last week.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Poekert—who serves as a chief marketing officer advisor and brand consultant to clients including Old Navy, Bogg Bag, and Soul Cycle—describes this role more specifically as a culture and social listening lead. By leveraging AI and social listening tools, he writes, these specialists can ensure that your brand keeps up with viral trends and online culture.
During his talk, Poekert outlined how this role could function within a marketing team by describing it as a triangle.
On one side of the triangle, “you have internal social art directors who are primarily focused just on social media,” he says. External content creators who can “make that fast turnaround content for you” are on another, he adds—“because, let’s be honest, not every employee wants to be front-facing for their brand.”
Social listeners make up the last side of the triangle, aiding both the internal directors and external content creators in producing on-trend, culturally relevant content.
“[B]rands are becoming more and more vulnerable to quickly falling into ‘okay sure grandma’ territory,” he writes on LinkedIn, “and the brands that can tap into their audience and the entire social media echo-sphere will stay ahead of everyone else.”
In response to Poekert’s prediction, social listening platform Hootsuite shared a fake job listing on LinkedIn to illustrate what a culture and social listening lead’s role might look like. It shows a salary ranging from $115,000 to $125,000 per year, and key responsibilities such as managing social media listing tools, tracking viral trends, and identifying which influencers to partner with.
