Is Your Social Media Active, or Actually Working?
By: Jacob Kreinbring, Social Media Manager
Most businesses think the answer to stagnating social media is simple: post more.
It’s an easy conclusion to reach. When a post underperforms, following up with another to make up for lost results or impressions can feel like the smart thing to do.
When social content is not performing to expectations, it’s natural to assume more output means more impressions, and strictly speaking, it can. But most businesses post to solve their own goals and problems, not to resonate or relate with the individuals scrolling through their various social feeds.
They share promotions, product news, company milestones, and news. That’s all understandable, but the people scrolling through their feed aren’t there to receive business messages. They’re there to be entertained, to feel connected.
So even when the content is well-made, it doesn’t land. Not because the business isn’t trying, but because the content isn’t speaking to anything the audience actually cares about.
A business posts three times a week for six months. The follower count barely moves. Engagement sits at a handful of likes, mostly from people who already know them.
So they decided to post five times a week.
The thinking makes sense from the inside: the messages feel right, the offers are real, the posts look fine. The conclusion they reach is that the audience just isn’t seeing enough of it. So, they push out more.
What happens is that impressions go up. More people technically scroll past the content, but reach doesn’t grow meaningfully. The same small audience sees more posts, and still does not respond.
That’s a signal. It means the message isn’t the problem, but the way it’s being delivered is. Posting “we have a sale on” or “$10 meal deal” more often doesn’t make those posts more interesting to someone who wasn’t interested the first time.
The shift isn’t about posting more. It’s about posting with context, understanding what your audience is thinking about, what questions they have, what problems they’re dealing with, and finding the overlap between that and what your business does.
Revisiting the example above, a $10 meal deal post is failing to resonate. Impressions are low, engagement is flat. The answer isn’t a different posting schedule. It’s about stepping back and asking whether the angle is right and whether the content is describing the business or connecting with the person on the other side of the screen. A $10 meal deal is a real offer, but if it’s not resonating, post frequency was never the issue. The angle isn’t landing, the format isn’t pulling its weight, or the post is a static image on a feed full of video.
Posting is not a social media strategy. It’s just the mechanism. What goes into those posts, the angle, the format, the relevance to the people seeing it, that’s the strategy.
Social media rewards relevance, not volume. The businesses that grow on these platforms are not necessarily posting the most. They are posting in a way that means something to the people already there. That starts with understanding the audience first, and building the content around them, not the other way around.
