Sometimes, inauthenticity can become a meme unto itself. When Mrs. Clinton released a short video saying, unconvincingly, “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids,” internet denizens pounced, remixing the clip on their Vine accounts. In response to these incidents, the website Super Deluxe made a video deftly skewering the Clinton campaign’s less-than-successful attempts to use memes for political gain.

Mrs. Clinton may be beating Mr. Trump in the polls, but he outpaces her on social media: 11 million Facebook “likes” to her 5.5 million; 11 million Twitter followers to her 8.4 million. (It’s worth keeping in mind that both follower counts are relatively small compared to other celebrities. The pop singer Katy Perry has 92 million Twitter followers.)

The reason so many people like to follow Mr. Trump on Facebook and Twitter (if not for his policies) is that he is the rare politician whose online persona seems like a pretty accurate reflection of who he is in real life. He is just as unfiltered online as he is in person, and as consumers of internet content, searching for some morsel of levity to fill the vacuum of our workday, we live for that kind of drama. The closest Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has come to Mr. Trump’s brand of Twitter pugilism is telling him, “Delete your account.” The message has been reposted more than 480,000 times.

Social media has caused many politicians strife (looking at you, Anthony Weiner), but it has also allowed candidates to reach voters where they are, without having to go through traditional gatekeepers, like pesky reporters. Mrs. Clinton hasn’t given a news conference in more than 250 days, but her campaign has sought out friendly alternative media that is well known to a certain set of urbane, college-educated millennials. She has sat down for interviews with Lena Dunham and the hosts of BuzzFeed’s podcast “Another Round,” and has written (or had ghostwritten) articles for The Toast and Teen Vogue.

Most recently, the Clinton campaign started a podcast called “With Her,” in which the host, Max Linsky, interviewed her about her alarm clock (she chose “the most obnoxious sound that I could find on the ringtones”), Congress’s stall on Zika funding (“It just infuriates me”) and her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (“It was both a liberating moment and a crushing sense of responsibility”). The podcast currently sits at No. 3 in iTunes’ news and politics section.

Laura Olin, who ran the Obama campaign’s social media operation in 2012 and now works as a consultant to the Clinton campaign, said the podcast is a way to make Mrs. Clinton a more approachable figure.