In the almost six years that I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve seen a lot of changes on social media. The biggest one, which I talk about in length in my essay Post-social media, is platforms moving from follower-based feeds to interest-based feeds. While the shift has been years in the making, there’s a common problem that keeps happening to brands in this new attention ecosystem: their social media stalls.
The brand presses the same gas pedal that used to work, but nothing moves. What used to overperform, now underperforms. We hear terms like being “stuck in TikTok jail”. I’ve even heard some brands question if it’s even worth showing up on organic social anymore.
Today’s newsletter is a toolkit for getting out of a social media stall. (Yes, it’s possible!) Link in Bio contributor Matthew Stasoff walks us through:
Why social media strategies stall
How to identify if your strategy is stuck
Three steps to jump-starting your account
Matthew is the Group Director, Social Strategy and Creative at Anomaly and has spent the past 10+ years shaping how global brands show up online. I’ve already bookmarked a few of the frameworks he outlines below.
In a recent article in Vulture, influencer Audrey Peters shared that the formats she was making a few years ago on TikTok now felt “overdone”. To keep up with the fast pace of algorithms, she’s had to keep pivoting. New bits, new topics, new series. “I’m going to have to constantly adapt and rebrand,” she said.
The article got me thinking about my own experience as a user. How I’ll come across a new creator, engage, see more of their content, until one day they just disappear from my FYP. On the off chance they do reappear, the comment section will be filled with notes like “the algorithm hasn’t shown me your videos in months”.
Brands experience this exact same thing. Content that used to do absolute numbers all of a sudden isn’t hitting.
It’s like the car your family has had forever. It works, it’s reliable, and then one day it just doesn’t get to where it needs to go.
Your social strategy has stalled.
Why do social strategies stall?
There are three reasons an account’s momentum might stall out.
The platform: Stills to carousels, carousels to video, landscape to vertical, and so on. What worked today doesn’t tomorrow. Certain formats get more reach. For example, Reels are shown to non-followers and single-image posts are not. Your strategy must adjust with these updates.
The brand: An internal brand change is enacted that no longer resonates with your existing audience. Maybe it’s a rebrand or new campaign.
The audience: A user’s algorithm reflects where they are in their life and what they consume. When a life change occurs (relationship, hobby, or interest), that new behavior sends signals, the algorithm rewires, and the FYP reshapes. Importantly, as audiences spend time in one niche, they might burn out on specific topics or formats more quickly.
Rachel recently described the algorithm as an air traffic controller. She wrote, “When your account doesn’t have a focus, your posts have a ‘cold start’. The algorithm air traffic control doesn’t have a strong test group to point that video towards.” Brand accounts that stay within a specific world make it easier for the algorithm to essentially source viewers.
What’s changing though is that platforms are giving the audience more power over their algorithms. Thanks to features like Instagram’s “Your Algorithm” people can hand-select what they want to see more of or less of. This theoretically puts your audience in that air traffic control tower too. That means audiences can, to some degree, pick and choose if they want to see more of your content.
How to know if your strategy is stalled
It’s just not working. I call this the “lemon stall”. The entire strategy is just not resonating. You’ve got a lemon. Maybe it never resonated or maybe what used to work is no longer working. The first step to fixing a lemon is being honest with yourself that you have a lemon.
It’s working, but with the wrong audience. The “hamster wheel stall”. You’re getting engagement and views but your audience demographics or KPIs are saying otherwise. Empty attention.
You’ve been audience captured. Your brand is letting your audience dictate what you should post. You’ve lost sight of what you should be making. It’s the “spell stall.” Writer Gurwinder talks about it with influencers, but it applies just as much to brands. He says, “Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.”
The hardest part about fixing a stalled social strategy is first acknowledging that the account has slowed in the first place. It’s easy to exist in a stall for a long period of time, blaming the algorithm or external forces. But there’s always a way out of a stall. It just takes a strategy shift.
Three steps to jump-start your social strategy
1. Pop the hood on your audience and brand.
To be clear, this isn’t a trend-finding mission. It’s an insight-finding mission. You’re after the “why” not the “what.”
Spreadsheet data and Google Slide personas rarely account for what someone sees when they scroll. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of multiple agencies that have dedicated burner phones set up in the office for different passion points. Each one has a fine-tuned algorithm for a specific niche: The Sports Fanatic Phone, The Romantasy Reader Phone, The Gamer Phone. People in the agency are then encouraged to pick it up and scroll to learn about what’s on the feeds of their potential customers.
Another option is using the DASH framework on your audience:
(D)IET. What’s actually on their FYP right now. Less about formats, more about the topics.
(A)UDIO. What’s in their ears? The song, the sound, the podcast they’re deep on.
(S)TARTS. What did they pick up in the last 90 days? From the hobbies to the behaviors.
(H)ANDLES. The five accounts they’d name if you asked who they actually watch. Not the big ones. The ones they’d be a little embarrassed to say out loud.
The goal here is to get a more dialed in version of who your audience is.
2. Change what you’re putting in the tank.
Break away from your brand’s mythology. The resurgence of the finsta and spin-off accounts are all signals that how a brand perceives itself and how the audience perceives them can be at odds with each other. Be honest about those perceptions.
Too many brands hold back their potential when they think of themselves as “too premium” or “too serious”. Here are some suggestions:
Run a content sprint. My preferred version is the 5×5 method: five new formats, five pieces of content each. If an idea can’t extend beyond five pieces, kill it. Remember that focusing an account or having a “niche”, whether it’s a brand or creator, helps an account more easily find audience.
Build better on-ramps. You know this from this newsletter, but campaigns need more on-ramps, more chronology-agnostic ways in. Here is a resource I put together, with a few listed below.
Better fuel, better mileage. What is an idea you can put out into the world that shows the work your team put into it? This can happen by bringing people behind-the-scenes but also just developing an idea that clearly took effort. This isn’t about big production, it’s about big effort.
3. Warm it up, start it up, and pay attention.
Prime the account. You don’t fix a cold start by flooring it. Warm that baby (your account) up first. Interact with content you would want your own posts sitting next to in someone’s scroll. Let the algorithm know where it should direct your posts.
Sweat the details during this phase. If you look back at your past 30 posts, what would you have changed? A different hook, font choice, tone, set, etc? Test the shit out of any new content you’re making. There’s no doubt Trial Reels have opened the door to testing and refining content, ideally taking it from good to great. You can find more info on how brands are approaching Trial Reels here.
In the end, sometimes the data says it all. Listen to it closely. Be honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
It’s getting more and more common to stall
It doesn’t matter what car you drive or the content you create, a “stall” is more likely to happen today than any other point in the history of social because of these two factors:
The feed has never been so fickle. The audience and algorithm are continually more connected. Your audience’s feed rewires every time their life does. It reshapes their FYP and the brands they used to see are just gone. Brands still think of a stall as something to avoid, but influencers already know that “adapt and rebrand” is the new normal. The social team from Grillo’s describes their social strategy as “different songs from the same band.” They told Rachel, “When we post, we want you to know it’s Grillo’s, but you’ll never know what’s coming up next on the playlist.”
There’s never been more content. In a recent episode of The Colin and Samir Show with YouTube strategist Paddy Galloway, Samir calls out that we’re in the “Abundance Era” of content, going on to say that “every video that I think about is probably being made right now.” He finishes by saying (and for me this is the most important part) that “the only thing you can think about or should think about is ‘What’s my thing to say?’” And “say” shouldn’t be misconstrued as “saying something meaningful”, it’s simply having a perspective, a point of view, an intentional look. That sets you apart from the others.
Every brand has stalled or will stall on social media. It’s the nature of how these algorithms work today. The important part is having a process in place to identify when you might be in need of a jump-start.
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This is a superb (dare I say it) vital read for anyone working in social media today
Really enjoyed this read. Refreshing to see specific frameworks, recommendations and tangible steps one can take instead of generic advice.