What paid social covers
Paid social is the part of digital advertising bought inside social platforms: Facebook and Instagram through Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Reddit. The ads appear in the feed, stories or short-video surfaces alongside organic posts, and brands pay per impression, click or result. It is a subset of paid media, which also includes search, display and TV.
The opposite is organic social, the posts a brand or creator publishes without paying to promote them. Many campaigns use both: an organic creator post tests the idea, and paid social puts budget behind the version that worked.
Why paid social runs on creator content
Social feeds reward content that looks like it belongs there. Polished brand ads often get skipped, while a person talking to the camera feels native, so paid social teams buy large volumes of UGC ads from creators. Creative also fades fast at high spend, which means a steady supply of new videos matters more than any single great one.
Creators can be involved in two ways: delivering video files that run from the brand's account, or authorising ads that run from their own handle, through whitelisting on Meta or Spark Ads on TikTok.
What a paid social team needs from creators
Volume and variety: several hooks per concept, multiple creators per product, and versions in the platform's preferred vertical format. Clean files without baked-in music that could be muted, captions as a separate layer when possible, and raw clips for editors.
Rights in writing. Paid use is a separate permission from an organic post, so the agreement should state the platforms, the duration and the fee for running the content as ads.
How it's used
Paid social is 70 percent of our budget, so we need twelve new creator videos a month just to keep frequency down.
Can we whitelist your post for paid social for 30 days, running from your handle on Instagram?