Social frame is everywhere in everything you do before, during, and after the approach.
It's something that can be constructed by your fundamentals, verbals, pre-approach strategies, social proofing, and many, many other factors. Don't worry - social frame can certainly be hard to grasp in full at first (it certainly was for me), but you'll be recognizing these dynamics no problem with continued study and field experience. I also recommend reading
Teevster's series on social frame as well, which should help immensely in addition to giving the social frame section of SMMA lots of listens.
All of this might be leading you to see that it's not really about "using" social frame... it's a bit more like building and/or exploiting it.
Rock-solid social frame will do things like help communicate to women that you're the type of cool guy she can hang around without being concerned about her personal safety and having the holdbacks about having sex that she may have with certain kinds of men. It's why you knew it would be creepy to follow that girl at night. This also leads into the realm of
calibration which goes hand-in-hand with social frame.
In terms of the knee-jerk reactions,
strong social frame lowers the chances of knee-jerk reactions. We don't want knee-jerk reactions because we want to keep working covert influence and seducing her. Make sense?
Naturally, the act of approaching girls on the street can quickly lead to a knee-jerk reaction if performed without the
sprezzatura that glistens with good social frame from the get-go. Deliberately walking up to a girl and trying to stop her on the sidewalk can violate good social frame and lead to things such as girls ignoring you and walking/running away - and this becomes even more pertinent at night. In addition, the usage of a direct opener in that way is an immediate factor in creating a knee-jerk reaction because it literally causes her to make an instant judgement about you as she perceives that you're sexualizing her. The lack of social frame often becomes a gaping hole in this style of approach and could even resort to sheer volume hookup game... rather than working covert influence through tactics such as
SOTs and
elicitation to build the 3 keys in order to fuck THAT girl you really want to stick your dick inside.
Which path you choose is up to you. Though also know that going direct and later running tech such as
sex talk has a propensity to result in an LMR battle as the
ASD/FSC sirens go off. So if you are interested in SMMA tech and the juicy results a dedication to such a craft may bring... it's gonna be best to scrap those "excuse me you're cute" openers. But this turns into a bigger discussion, and for more insight on this I'll recommend
another couple of series written by Teevster on different gaming styles.
Keep getting better step-by-step as you approach more and more, but also don't be afraid to take those big leaps in your game, either.