Sound like yourself. Nobody else is.
By: Jacob Kreinbring, Social Media Manager
When someone takes the time to scroll through most social media feeds right now, they’ll notice something. Most businesses sound the same. Same tone, same structure, the same safe, polished voice.
It’s not an accident that people notice. Most consumers can tell when content was not made for them, and they tune it out the moment they can. That polish and confidence can cost organizations one of the most underrated opportunities for community connection and business growth.
That opportunity? It’s organic, unpaid social media. More specifically, the kind of real, human community engagement lots of brands have quietly stopped doing.
If you have spent any time online in the last year, you have probably felt it. A kind of fatigue with the internet, a sense of frustration from the online masses that these spaces used to belong to us, and now they don’t. Feeds are full of content that looks polished, sounds confident, but feels empty. This influx of same-y feeling content is certainly tied to the availability of generative AI models, but It’s not that everybody hates AI. It’s that people can feel when something isn’t made for them, and they’re tired of it.
That fatigue isn’t about AI itself, it’s about sameness. When seemingly every brand chooses ease and scale for their communications, the internet starts to feel less like a place where people go to belong, and more like a place where things get delivered to them. AI has made this sameness easier to produce and spot, but it didn’t create the problem. It just accelerated it.
With each brand, business, and organization seeming to favor this style of communication through their online presences, those who know who they are, who their audience is, and how they want to relate to those people are standing out even more than before. This style of social media communication is not about polish or being louder. It’s just about being present, being yourself, and being there for your public.
How this happens is smaller than people expect. It looks like a business replying to comment how a person would, and not with a script. It’s your brand showing up in someone else’s comment section with something genuine to say instead of using your pages and profiles as a means of broadcasting outwards. It’s letting your own team show up unscripted on camera, instead of posting the same stock-quality product shots month in and month out. None of these are complicated moves. They are just increasingly rare ones, which is exactly why they work to help you stand out and get your audience to lean in and engage on a deeper level.
For so many businesses, organic social media profiles have been neglected for years. The most influential businesses know that organic social media isn’t a consolation prize for those without a large ad budget (or any at all). It’s the thing that’s supposed to build trust in the first place. Ads can, and will, get someone’s attention. Organic is how you convince someone that you’re worth paying attention to, and how you keep their attention long past a first impression. Organic social media can feel ineffective, but that’s not usually the channel’s fault. It’s a sign the account is being run like a series of billboards instead of a means to build relationships.
Over the next year, the biggest businesses who master the newest tools will undoubtedly have an edge online. But that edge is hard to sustain, and even harder to scale. Most brands chasing it will end up sounding like everyone else chasing it too.
The businesses that stand out will be the ones who zero in on their audience and relate to them best, and depending on your target audience, organic social media is still the best vehicle for that. Community and connection are what these platforms were created for in the first place, and brands who use them to foster both will stand out, while others flounder in the sea of sameness.
Struggling to figure out what that looks like for your brand? We can help you connect the dots.
