Social Media Is Doing a Lot. Here’s What Actually Matters.

Andréa Jones: You know that feeling when you open Instagram or LinkedIn or TikTok or YouTube or honestly any of the apps that give you that little notification, and then within a couple of minutes, you're convinced that your entire marketing strategy is terrible and you need to like tear it down and restart again. I want to talk about that in this episode because sometimes people are saying carousels are dead or carousels are back or AI is the future or AI is ruining everything or posts every day or ⁓ all of the things, right?

And I feel like there's this immense Pressure as a business owner right now to go viral. And I want us to just take a breath. Social media is doing a lot. We don't have to do it all, but I want to dive into what we actually can do in this episode here today.

But first, a word from our sponsor. Riverside is the all-in-one podcast recording and editing tool that I use for this right here show. I use it to edit not only the audio in the video, it is like chef's kiss, magical, making the entire process so, so easy. Plus, I love their magic AI clips.

Their little AI robot in the background pulls out the most impactful moments of the episodes without me having to comb through and do it myself, resizes them for social media. So those vertical videos you see on TikTok and reels. Those all come from Magic AI inside of Riverside. It's literally one click.

It spits out 10 clips. I pick the best one and away I go. Saves me so much time. If you want to get on the Riverside train, check it out today.

The links in the show notes. And make sure to use my code Dreya D-R-E-A at checkout to get 15% off your membership. Now listen, I've been here before. I'm an internet OG.

Okay, y'all? I have been on the internet since 2000 and 12, that's when I launched my first blog. And I've been creating content for a long, long time. And back in my day, we had to customize everything.

Like I had a blog spot blog, and then I was on Blogger, and we were doing things like what color should our sidebar be? How quirky should our about page be? What was our away message for our, you know, live journals? And really, those were the choices.

It wasn't like how do we convert people into a funnel? It was, you know, how do we have fun with this? Right. And now it feels like there's so much more you can customize in your social media experience.

And there's so much more as far as platforms go, right? We've got Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, we have Instagrams, but they're not squares anymore. There's stories, there's reels, there's TikToks, there's threads, there's LinkedIn, there's AIs in the room, all of the things, right? And so a lot of people are saying social media is harder than it ever has been.

And I get it. I totally understand why we feel that way, but I don't think that's the entire story. Like, I don't think that social media is harder. I just think that it is louder.

Now I do have some research around this. ⁓ Sprout Social, it released a social media stat in 2026 that said the typical user now moves between 6.75 social networks per month. So 6.

75 different platforms, atypical users moving through all of those per month. And 90% of consumers use social media to keep up with things like trends and cultural movements. And Sprout also says that human-generated content is the top priority for users in 2026, with 73% of consumers saying that they'll switch to a competitor when a brand doesn't respond on social media. So what does that all mean?

Basically, If it feels like you're bouncing around between too many platforms, too many updates, too many opinions, too many must do strategies, you're not imagining it. We're kind of all doing that right now. And it's a very noisy environment. Noisy does not mean impossible, though.

Noisy just means we need some filters behind that. So today I want to give you some of those filters. And these are the filters that I use inside the Mindful Marketing Lab to really help my members understand. What to do when social media is doing the absolute most right now.

So let's start with part one, which is why everyone is feeling so behind right now. People are feeling behind because we're receiving too much advice. We're receiving too much advice from all sorts of different directions. And most of that advice is missing the context of you, the context of your business, the context of the world, right?

And part of the reason that social media feels overwhelming is you're not just learning from one person. You're getting platform updates from over here. You're watching influencers. You're listening to that educator.

You're listening to this podcast. You're watching that YouTube video. AI is giving you some sort of strategy. People are selling you a template.

Now you see a a a Facebook ad that's like, here's the clawed code ⁓ strategy you need right now. And a lot of that advice is not wrong. And that's the super annoying part. It's not that it's a wrong advice.

Like posting every day works. I tried it, it works. Following trends works, sure it works. Long form content works, short form content works, AI works, paid ads can work.

But the problem is that all of that advice is usually missing the context of you, your capacity. It's missing the context of your community and their needs. It's missing the context of your offer and how that offer is presented into the world. It's missing the context of your business model and what that shape looks like.

It's missing the context of what resources you have available to you. And it's missing the context of your actual goals. Okay. So when you start spiraling, when you feel like, you know, ⁓ I need to post more or I need to be more personal or I need to funnel or I need to start a community or I need to use AI, that is when there's too many chefs in the kitchen.

Okay. It's starting to feel like group project, group project energy. And that group project is impossible to move forward with because everyone has different goals. Okay.

So The main point I want you to think about is if you're feeling overwhelmed, it doesn't automatically mean that you're doing something wrong. It could mean that you're trying to treat every single piece of advice as the absolute must instead of an option, a choice, a thing you can do. So instead of asking, you know, what should I do? Or how do I do all of this, I want you to think about what still matters to me and my business even as the platforms keep changing.

What still matters to me in my business even as these new emerging technologies come into play? Okay. So let's move into part two. What actually matters?

And the first thing I want you to think about is your clarity. A clear message gives people something to remember. Okay. A clear message gives people something to remember.

It's sticky. I I have an example of this. Have y'all heard of liquid death? Liquid death is a good example because their branding is absolutely ridiculous in the best way.

It's just water. Okay. It's water in a can. But the can has like this like punk rock energy.

It's got skulls on it. Their tagline is murder your thirst. It's water. And they have other things too, like iced tea and sparkling water and energy drinks.

But the big thing for them is that they got this like rock and roll kind of edge to it, but they're also sustainable. They have the recyclable cans. They have a really strong, like anti-plastic message. But liquid death.

Is one of those things that could easily feel gimmicky. I mean, it's canned water and it just looks like it's just sold at some sort of metal concert, but it works because you understand it quickly. Okay. The silliness of it actually helps you digest and consume and understand what they're doing very quickly.

You know what they sell, you know that their attitude is all about. You kind of get a sense of why they're different. It's kind of weird, not something I would do. But the message is clear.

And that's the part that I want business owners to pay attention to because sometimes we look at a brand like Eliquid Death and we think, ⁓ I need to be louder, I need to be weirder, I need to be disruptive. That's not the point. That's not the point I'm trying to make. The point is all of that weirdness is on top of a very clear messaging foundation that they didn't confuse with strategy.

They actually just tried to be memorable to their people, to their customers, to their audience. So for you as a small business owner or content creator, a brand, clarity looks less like murder your thirst, right? But it could look more like do people know what you do? Can they tell that if it's for them?

Can they tell if it's a problem you solve? Can they see what to do next from here? Okay. Because a trend, something trendy, definitely gets attention, but the clarity is what helps people understand why they should stay with you.

I'll also use another example here with Duolingo. Y'all know I Duolingo. ⁓ because their TikTok is on fire because of that bird duo, the owl. It's chaotic.

I don't know what pronouns the bird uses. They're chaotic, funny, ⁓ very internet, like internet native internet language kind of thing, right? But beneath all of that, the mascot helps represent their mission, which is making language fun and accessible. Okay.

So when we think about duo, the bird, and the TikTok presence, that grew from experimenting with that bird as a mascot, using trends and being aware of what people are paying attention to, which they're really going after younger generations, and building a long-standing brand personality that makes that language enjoyable again. So the owl, yes, unhinged, right? Because the brand Is that's what they want to attract, but it's easy to understand, right? That's the lesson.

Make it easy for people to understand what you do by packaging it in a way that's sticky and memorable. So social media can have a personality. Please actually, I'm gonna beg you that your social media has some form of personality. We're ditching the millennial grace, okay, and we're going towards something that is a little more fun, but the personality only works.

If it's a personality that your community and your people are attracted to, one and two, they know that it's attract ⁓ attached to value. Okay. So it's almost like y'all know that I write, I write queer romance novels in my my free time for funsies, right? That's my ⁓ retirement plan, so to speak.

So as I'm learning in the author world, people say, you know, don't judge a book by its cover, but people do judge a book by its cover. So I want you to think about your positioning your branding as the book cover. What is that thing that's gonna get someone to stop, pick it up, read the back, right? It's not to say that what's inside the book is good or bad.

That still needs to be great. You can't have a book cover with an empty book. However, if your book cover doesn't speak to that audience, doesn't speak to their expectations of what your brand is, you can be completely missing them. Okay.

So that's why clarity is important. Second thing I want to talk about is consistency. Consistency matters, but consistency is a rhythm. And the rhythm is a rhythm that people can recognize, but also one that you can sustain.

Okay. You don't have to go daily. You don't have to go all the time, but you do need to have some sort of rhythm so that there's repetition there. I want to use Aldi as an example here.

I live in Canada, but I'm from the US. I know Aldi. Aldi is like a ⁓ Grocery store that it removed all of the extra frills, right? So they're a really good example because they're not doing the glossy, branded everything, right?

They shifted to lower prices and they started creating customer-first, culturally relevant content on their social media because they want to reflect what it's like inside the store. Okay. And actually, I was reading this article where their social team. Only has three people.

There's a manager and then there's two kind of assistants. And they only do a couple posts a week. And they're only on Facebook and Instagram. They have some other platforms, but they're mostly on Facebook and Instagram.

And they get some really good engagement, not because it's fancy, but because it is consistent and it's accurate to what the experience is like in the store. And I love this example because some people like to pretend consistency is like churning out content. Especially for a big national brand like Aldi, people think, ⁓ they must be posting multiple times a day across all the platforms. No, no, no.

They're not doing that. They don't have a giant, you know, 12-person team just to run their Instagram. They have a small team, they have a very clear voice, they have a repeatable rhythm, and they're actually paying attention to what their customers really care about. And then they're adjusting.

They adjusted their content to make it feel more human, more. Culturally aware. And that's the kind of consistency that I want us to think about. It's not how can I post every day until the end of time?

Because honestly, even saying that makes me feel exhausted. It's more like, can people recognize me? Can me people recognize my point of view? Can they repeat my philosophies, my core ideas?

Do they know my ethos? Do they know what I'm all about? And can I post and create a rhythm that fits my actual capacity of my actual life? Can I show up in a way That doesn't require me to be a full-time social media manager for my business.

Okay. So this is so important and it's something that we teach inside of the mindful marketing lab. It's all about your marketing playground and creating your signature content and supporting content and making sure those two things work together. You choose your main thing, your main platform, your main message, and then your supporting content points people back to it instead of reinventing everything every single week.

And that's why I'm such a huge fan of having one pay main content home. For me, that's this podcast right here. I deliver a lot of my concepts, my ideas in the podcast. But for you, it may be a newsletter, it could be a YouTube channel, it could be a Substack, it could be a blog, it could be a live stream, it could even be a series of social media posts.

The main point is that your social media content has a main home and your supporting content. can feel lighter because it's just amplifying the main idea that already exists. Okay. So you're not starting from scratch every time.

All right. Third point is that relationships, relationships, relationships, relationships matter. Okay. Social media still works best when people feel like you understand them and you see them on a very deep level.

And the example I want to use here is glossier. Glossier, excuse me, I'm not cultured. Glossier. ⁓ so they have a really amazing community behind their brand.

And right on their website, on their about page, it says ⁓ it began as into the gloss, which was a beauty website and a community built around we real information for real people. But one of the most famous product stories is the milk jelly cleanser. And so Glossier asked the readers to describe their dream face wash, and that feedback helped shape the product. Okay.

So it started as a blog and a community. They asked their community, what do you want? And the community said, This is what I want. So Glossier is a brand that people love to study.

Marketers love it because yes, it's cute. They have a good aesthetic. They have the whole, like, I'd love to see this in my bathroom energy, right? But the deeper lesson is that they didn't begin by guessing what people wanted.

They started with the conversation, relationships built within their community with real people, real opinions, asking them what they wanted. And then they developed the product, the milk. Jelly cleanser came from people asking what their dream face wash would be. Okay.

I think that's so powerful because a lot of brands use social media to announce something. Hey, I did this thing. Look. And Glossier use their community to listen.

Okay. So I want us to think about how we can use our social media not as a billboard, but as a conversational tool. In your comment section, in your DMs, and even beyond social media, your email replies. If someone asks something twice, then let's turn that into content.

Sometimes the strategy is listening and paying attention to what people are actually saying to you. I use another example. I think I've said this before on the podcast, but the Stanley Cup, there was a TikTok video where a customer's car got on fire. ⁓ she had a Stanley Cup in the car.

Her car burnt to crisp, y'all. It was crunchy. And the Stanley Cup tumbler was in her cup holder. She pulled it out and shook it.

And you can hear the ice still inside of it. Like, what an ad for Stanley Cup, right? But it doesn't end there. The president of Stanley publicly responded, replaced her cup and her car.

And there's a case study that says the Stanley team paused their planned content. They responded within 24 hours and they generated billions of earned impressions from that one moment. From that one moment. And that Took paying attention and listening.

And I think it's just a good reminder that social media isn't just about blasting content out. And even something that's as awful as a car burning down can become part of a story. And Stanley is a great example of this because they responded like a human would, right? Like, ⁓ my gosh, that's awful.

Let me replace that for you. Right. It wasn't just like, yay, thanks for being a fan. Use code burnt car to get 10% off your Tumblr.

Like, whoa, that would like don't read the room, right? They responded generously and yes, it became a massive brand moment, but it became part of their story. And so for small business owners, I don't want you to like have to go out and buy someone a car. Okay.

I don't want I don't want you to be like Oprah and give all of your your community members and you get a car and you get a car and you get a car and everybody gets a car. It's not that moment, right? But the actual lesson behind all of this is actually quite simple. Respond, acknowledge, follow up.

Remember what people tell you. I'm saying this to me because I really struggle with this, y'all. Use your social media as a place for connection. It's not a billboard.

So when you're thinking about, you know, what matters, we don't want to ask ourselves how many people saw this post. Think about asking yourself, did this create a conversation worth continuing? Okay. I think that's a bigger question than how many people saw this post, right?

It's really the right people saying. The fourth thing I want to talk about with this is offers. Your offer matters. And I think attention works better when people know where to go with it.

Where creating attention for attention sake feels more like influencers versus creating attention for product sake, which is a brand positioning, right? So I want to use the example of ELF Cosmetics. They're a great example because they truly understand the difference between visibility and a clear path to purchase. In 2004, ELF became the first brand featured in the TikTok shop super brand day.

They did this campaign where they launched this power grip dewy setting spray and they used an original TikTok song for it, and they spotlighted it in the TikTok shop, also giving people a free mini product when they spent at least $15. TikTok themselves created a case study on this because they describe elf's always engaged. Full funnel strategy, which moves people from, hey, this is a thing into like traffic to the website and sales and actually lowering their ad-to-car acquisition by 56%.

That's from TikTok themselves. And I think it's wild that TikTok did a case study on a brand, but I think this is so good because it doesn't just create some sort of moment and hope people figure out what to do, right? They created a moment and connected it to the product and they made the next step very obvious. So with the TikTok shop super brand day, they had entertainment.

They had a product launch. They had this ⁓ kind of like platform native content that felt like it fit on Instagram and then or on TikTok and then there was a direct way to buy it. And that's the part that I want you all to hear. People can love your content and still have no freaking clue how to work with you.

Okay. I think you think that they're paying more attention than they are. They're not. They like you, they think you're smart, they look at your posts, they save it, they watch your videos, they go, this is amazing.

And then they have no idea that you have an offer or that you maybe mention it once every 10 posts, right? So for us, I'm gonna break this down for you. You don't have to sell every single post. That's not what I'm saying.

What I am saying is your marketing needs a very visible path. From discovering you to purchasing from you. This could be, for example, for with my podcast, people usually discover the podcast. Maybe I spoke somewhere, they listened to a few episodes.

I'm constantly talking about the mindful marketing lab. Maybe they sign up for my do less market better kit. That kit gets them into an email list. That email sequence then sells them on the lab.

And even if they don't buy right away, I'm constantly in my emails talking about the lab. But sometimes they'd miss all of that. And I talk about that on my social media posts. I talk about it again in the podcast.

The next step should make sense from the content that they consume. When I think about this, marketing works best when it clearly connects to what you're selling and how someone becomes a client. Okay. If you're creating content that's just for fun, it can be very challenging for people to connect that back to you being a client, unless this is my asterisk moment.

Unless you're going for influencer marketing, which is a different category, different bucket. I have a ton of episodes on that. And I can do more. If y'all have questions, DM me.

I'd love to talk more about that. But when you're selling a product and offer community a service, we really want to have your content directly connect back to this. And this is where a lot of people get stuck. They're visible for visibility's sake, but they're looking cute, right?

And we want the content to have a job. And that job should be. ⁓ building trust, building awareness. It could be conversion, it could just be conversation, but at some point your content has to lead somewhere.

Okay, fifth thing, judgment matters. Your judgment really matters here. And I gotta talk about this because this is the AI in the room. AI, I use AI every single day, y'all.

I have a whole lead magnet on it at online dra.com slash AI. It does help me move faster at some things, however. Your standards have to decide whether that is useful for you or not.

Okay. We don't want to ignore AI. I'm a huge fan of it, but I don't use it for everything. But I think that there's some use cases here that we can examine.

I want to talk about Dove, for example. Dove is a really great example at setting standards around AI instead of acting like the tool is like automatically the best thing ever or terrible, right? So they did this campaign called Keep Beauty Real. And Dove in the campaign says it will never use AI to create or distorts women's images, but it released guidance around creating more representative imagery.

So Dove gives us one version of that judgment. They're not pretending AI doesn't exist. They're just saying, hey, here's where we draw the line as a brand. Like here's where our brand standards are.

And that's what I found interesting because for business owners, the question isn't just. Can AI make this faster? I think the question is, can it make it better? Or what standards do I need to protect while I'm using AI?

So for Dev, the standard is they have decades of messaging around like real beauty, real people, and a very diverse community of people, right? So that's their line. For you, it may be you don't use it to represent your voice, or maybe you don't use it to maintain accuracy, or maybe you don't use it for privacy reasons, or maybe you're not outsourcing your opinions. But you use it to, you know, help you smooth over an email, right?

There's another example of this with Klarna. You know that the Klarna app where you can like pay in in in ⁓ segments. Well, this is kind of like a cautionary tale of this. Klarna announced in 2024 that its AI assistant handled 2.

3 million conversations in its first month and was doing the work equivalent of 700 full-time agents. Okay. They reported that they used generative AI to cut marketing costs by 10 million dollars annually. Then suddenly the next year, Klarna's CEO publicly acknowledged that the company had likely over-indexed on AI.

And then they had to go back and they started rehiring more human support, right? So I think it's fascinating because they bragged about it. AI makes us faster, better, save more money. We were able to help more customers.

And then they said, ⁓ hold on one second. We need to like readjust. So I'm not saying that it's bad. I'm just saying we have to find the balance with all of it and use our judgment.

I like to use AI to help me draft things, to help me organize myself. I just use AI this morning to figure out what to put in the crock pot. I use AI to help me repurpose some things, help me get unstuck, help me kind of prioritize my day. But my judgment is still the strategy.

I do not outsource my taste level. to AI, I do not outsource my values, I do not outsource understanding my customer or client. I have to look at it, look at the output and say, yeah, this technically sounds fine, but like something's weird about it. No.

And that's where I use my judgment on it. So for me, AI is like assistant, but my brain is still the main strategist, right? And you get to choose what that looks like for you. So let's move into part three of this podcast.

This section is your permission slip. Now that we talked about what does matter, I want to talk about what deserves less of your precious, precious, finite human energy. Because if you run a business, if you have a life, if you live in a human body, you have responsibilities, you have an email inbox, you maybe have children or clients or a dog or aging parents or chronic illness or whatever, right? You have to be selective.

I know I do. And I want us to care less about every single platform update. Okay. I'm giving you that permission slip.

I want you to care less about how often or how frequent you should post. Okay. The people who say you should post every day are assuming you have all the time every day to post. I know you don't.

I want you to care less about the trends that you feel like are like painful for you to create content with. I want you to care less about the vanity metrics. Okay. I want you to care less about being everywhere all the time.

I want you to care less about rebuilding your entire strategy because of one post you saw on threads that said you should, right? Doing your marketing exactly like someone else's means you're gonna end up with their marketing, but with your business model, with your team size, with your audience, with your offer, with your nervous system even. And it's not gonna work, right? Back to the Stanley story.

They paused their content when they had that real customer moment. And I think that matters more than trying to stay consistent with a posting calendar, right? Aldi, example, they have a small team, they have a recognizable voice. They're not acting like this giant content machine.

They're keeping it real. Glossier, built from community conversations, expanding into products and broader e-commerce. So I don't want you to focus in on doing everything. Okay, the pattern here in all of these examples isn't do more.

The pattern is make better decisions. Know what you stand for, know who you're talking to, know who you're inviting people into, and then pay attention to how people respond. So let's keep this very practical, very grounded. I want to give you something you can do right after listening to this episode.

If your marketing feels super heavy right now, I'm talking to myself here too. I want you to do this simple reset. What would you keep? Okay.

What are you going to keep? What's already working? Maybe it's your newsletter, maybe it's your podcast, it could be a LinkedIn post, it could be referrals, it could be showing up on stories because that's where people actually pay attention. Okay.

So first question, what are you gonna keep? Second question, what are you gonna cut? What is so much effort that you almost don't wanna do it? What platform gives you the E BGBs when you log in?

What content feels like you're forcing it every time you have to do it? And what weekly task do you keep moving back to next week because you're like, I don't feel like doing that one. Okay, so that's your second question. What are you gonna cut?

Cutting doesn't mean you have to give it up. It can be strategic, right? But we're gonna set that aside. And then the last question is what do you want to change?

What's a small adjustment that will make things easier for you? Can you turn one podcast into three supporting posts? Can you add clearer calls to action? Can you repeat your offer more?

Can you spend some time, maybe 15 minutes, replying to people instead of making more content? Can you use AI to help you draft and then you bring your own judgment to the final version? This is what we do inside of the lab. This is the point of what I try to do in helping people on this podcast as well.

I want to help you build a marketing system that fits in with your real life, right? Your clarity, your structure, your consistency. You are your own guide to this. And you get to describe your audience however it works for you.

So in closing. Social media is doing a lot right now. Yes, that part is true. There are more platforms, there are more updates, there are more AI tools, there are more opinions, there's more pressure than ever.

But your job as a business owner isn't to chase every single thing. Your job is to create thoughtful moments and have thoughtful decision making that supports your business and your life instead of trying to build everything all over again. Clarity matters, consistency matters, relationships matter, offers matter, and your judgment here really, really matters. And when you come back to those pieces, social media feels less like a storm and more like a breath of fresh air, I can do this.

Now, if you want to continue with this conversation, I'm hosting my third annual Social Media Day summit on June 30th. I would love, love, love to invite you to join me. We're gonna talk all about what matters in social media right now. How to build a strategy around your preferences and how to simplify your approach without like completely disappearing from social media like we feel like we should.

This year, all of my attendees are gonna get a huge gift just for signing up. So make sure you sign up for that at online-drea.com slash smd. And until the next podcast, I want you to keep experimenting, keep paying attention to what works for you.

And remember, simpler, smarter marketing for busy people. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It helps keep us in the top 100 marketing podcasts. And that's all because of your support.

I'll see you next week. Bye for now.