How Samsung Got Its Groove Back (HBBIP #78)

Each week, we'll bring you select insights from our newsletter, How to Build Brands and Influence People (HBBIP). To have all of these insights delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe today! 

By this point, you’re used to these blog posts being variations on the same theme: uninterrupted, up-and-to-the-right style growth for our feature brands. Bar charts getting taller, line graphs climbing higher. There’s a lot of negativity in the world right now—why add to it? Why not focus on the positive, for a change? Also, brands don’t really like it when you write a newsletter about how they’re not doing so well. (Sometimes they don’t even like it when you write a newsletter about how great they are, but I digress.)

But today, I’m bringing you something a little different. Don’t worry: there’s still that good good growth, and a brand still comes out looking squeaky clean. But this time, it’s a bit of a redemption story—a reminder that we all falter sometimes, but if we double down on what works, we can achieve greater heights than ever before. Granted, it helps to be a multinational electronics mega-corporation, but hey, if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: multinational mega-corporations—they’re just like us.

So check your watch, silence your phone, turn off the TV, recognize that they were all manufactured by the same company, and settle in for the fall and rise of…

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Samsung

I probably don’t need to tell you what Samsung is. What might be helpful context, from a scene-setting standpoint, are a few things that I didn’t know about Samsung until I began researching this blog post, just to let you know who we’re dealing with here:

• Samsung was founded in Korea in 1938 as a trading and textile company.
• The company pivoted to electronics in the 1960s, and construction plus shipbuilding in the 1970s, because when you’re going to vertically integrate, you might as well go all the way with it.
• Samsung is the largest of South Korea’s chaebols, family-run conglomerates that influence all elements of business and day-to-day life in that nation.
• Per Brand Finance, Samsung is the 5th most valuable brand in the world as of 2024, behind just Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, all of which I have also heard of.

Okay, so rises and falls are relative when you’re talking about a brand of this size. Nonetheless, the last seven years of Samsung’s social media presence here in the U.S. do make for some differently-shaped graphs than usual:

Samsung EMV: 2018 - 2024

More of a checkmark than a steadily rising slope, Samsung’s 2018 EMV was actually higher than any year until 2024, when the brand saw a big surge that carried it to new heights. This total represented a roughly 3x expansion from Samsung’s local nadir in 2020.

We also see this general pattern, but to an even greater extent, when it comes to Samsung’s post count:

Samsung Post Count: 2018 - 2024

In this case, Samsung actually saw a higher content volume seven years ago than it did in 2024: 65.3k posts versus 63.5k posts. This is nearly unprecedented for a brand that’s still managed to grow over that time period—we’ll dig into how exactly this dynamic played out.

But EMV and post count are the starkest examples of this growth pattern. Across other metrics, other growth patterns emerged. For example, take creator count.

Samsung Creator Count: 2018 - 2024

Here, the mark that Samsung set in 2018 was met in 2021, and exceeded every year thereafter. Despite generating fewer posts about Samsung than 2018, Samsung’s creators were more effective in hyping the brand. Sorry to be such a tease, but we’ll once again get to the reasons for why this is the case later. (Teaser: it has to do with both social platforms and community dynamics.)

For further proof of the effectiveness of Samsung’s creators, check out the patterns we see for both the brand’s engagements…

Samsung Engagements: 2018 - 2024

…And impressions:

Samsung Impressions: 2019 - 2024

For engagements, we see a less sharp drop in engagements after 2018, and an acceleration from 2020 to 2021. Meanwhile, Samsung’s impressions stayed pretty flat from 2019 through 2021 before taking off thereafter. In both cases, Samsung saw its biggest spike between 2023 and 2024.

Alright, no more teasing. What’s going on here? What was behind Samsung’s drop-off circa 2020, and how has the brand come roaring back?

First, let’s look at that big spike in 2024, because the factors driving it are emblematic of Samsung’s progress more broadly. The brand totaled 6.5B impressions, an 81% YoY spike. When we look to where those impressions were coming from, a clear pattern emerges:

• YouTube: 2.9B impressions, 73% YoY growth
• TikTok: 2.0B impressions, 159% YoY growth
• Instagram: 1.3B impressions, 40% YoY growth

The bulk of Samsung’s impressions, and overall social media presence, stem from YouTube, but TikTok is rapidly gaining traction. This balance is especially striking when you consider the relative size of the creator cohorts on each channel:

• YouTube: 650 creators, 20% YoY growth
• TikTok: 1.3k creators, 85% YoY growth
• Instagram: 5.6k creators, 26% YoY growth

Samsung’s YouTube contingent is small but mighty, and while it may not be expanding as quickly as the brand’s cohorts on other platforms, those YouTubers are still doing the bulk of the brand’s heavy lifting. 

To be fair, that’s what happens when Mr. Beast starts posting about you in September 2023. The YouTube megastar proved one of Samsung’s most impactful creators on a per-post basis, driving $1.6M EMV across just four YouTube videos offering fairly detailed shoutouts of Samsung products in their description text. However, Samsung’s most faithful YouTube advocates from March 2024 to February 2025 were posting a good deal more frequently than Mr. Beast:

EMV and Number of Posts

In other words, Samsung’s top EMV-driver, political commentator Roland Martin (who encouraged followers to download his content app on their Samsung TVs), mentioned the brand only a marginal 3,172 times more often than Mr. Beast. But who’s counting?

Typically, these YouTubers were tech, pop culture, or lifestyle creators who mentioned their favorite Samsung gear in their video descriptions, though they did also tout Samsung in a more detailed capacity. (Generally, the fewer the posts, the more substantive/creative the mentions from the creator in question.)

Compare this to Samsung’s 2020 pit: that year, the brand saw mentions from just 298 YouTube creators, who collectively generated less EMV ($49.9M) than Samsung’s top 10 YouTubers shown above ($61.9M EMV). Moreover, with the exception of the ever-faithful Rhett and Link and Digital Trends, none of the top 10 YouTubers seen above were posting about Samsung in 2020. That’s a major point of pride for Samsung’s creator outreach and discovery program.

Plus, as seen from the data, since 2020 TikTok also emerged as a key platform for creators hyping up their favorite Samsung products, typically Galaxy phones, like this example from tech and lifestyle creator Braedon Sheppard. These quick-hit, paid partnership posts helped expand Samsung’s share of the conversation among younger consumers—all while driving more impressions and engagements.

So there you have it: thanks to the shifting landscape of the creator economy, which has seen YouTube emerge as a major media hub and TikTok emerge as a popular (and powerful) staging ground for paid partnership campaigns, Samsung has fully recovered from its pandemic-era social slump. Maybe it’s fitting that in the end, a technology brand leveraged emerging technology to its advantage. Though I for one remain more a fan of the brand’s textiles.

To get all of these stories, plus much more, delivered to your inbox weekly, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.