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What 5.5 Million Followers Taught Her About Brand Social

Second Nature May 15, 2026

About this episode

Maren Hamilton ran global social at The North Face — building and executing a strategy for 5.5 million followers, integrating athletes and creators, and navigating every platform shift from the follow graph to the discovery graph. Then she left to help build Popfly, the creator platform built specifically for the outdoor industry. In this conversation, Maren shares the playbook she developed at TNF for running brand social at scale, including how to say no to the hundreds of internal requests that flood every social team, why the outdoor buying journey is fundamentally different from fashion and beauty, and what brands still get wrong about TikTok, Threads, and Facebook.

Plus: Why Head of Social to CMO is now a real career path, what makes a creator pitch actually land with a brand, and the Adidas sub-two-hour marathon moment that might be the greatest brand activation of the decade.

Second Nature is supported by Popfly. If you want to support our podcast - and discover a platform that we believe is one of the best tools for connecting brands and creators, follow these links:

Popfly for Creators/Athletes: https://popf.ly/secondnaturecreators

Popfly for Brands: https://popf.ly/secondnaturebrands

Show Notes:

Maren Hamilton: https://www.marenhamilton.com/

Popfly: https://popf.ly/secondnaturebrands

TNF Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenorthface

DBo on X: https://x.com/dylanbo

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com

Gnara on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gnara_apparel?lang=en

Taylor Hoekstra: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorhoekstra/

Popfly Storefront: https://app.popfly.com/@superridertv/storefront

Alpaka: https://www.alpaka.com