Chapter 24

Social

Social is proof of life, memory among the people who follow you, and reach through people. It is no longer a free distribution channel.

What changed

Most firms run social as a free broadcast channel. Post often, grow the following, chase engagement, and report followers, likes and reach each month.

The free broadcast has largely gone, by design. In January 2018 Adam Mosseri, then Facebook's head of News Feed, announced a shift towards posts from friends and family. "Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease," he wrote (Meta).

Data on what's left shows how little. Socialinsider measured 25 million posts from 130,683 Facebook business pages over 2024 and 2025 (Socialinsider). The average engagement rate was 0.15%, flat year on year. Link posts did worst, at 0.05%.

A team that still treats social as distribution is paying staff to shout into a room that has emptied.

What it is for

Social has three real jobs once the goal is being selected.

Proof of life is Believed. Buyers check a feed the way they check a website: are you real, recent, and used by people like them? A feed whose last post is from March says something, and it isn't good.

Memory among the people who follow you is Known, but only among people you already reach.

Reach through people is the one organic route to new buyers left. A founder, an employee or a customer reaches people your company page never will, and is believed more.

Video adds Answered and Found: it shows the thing, and machines transcribe it. Social does little for Preferred, Bought or Kept. Nobody decides on a supplier in a scroll. Social's job is to have put you in the room. Reach to new buyers at scale is paid, and that's advertising (Chapter 23).

The anatomy of a good one

Every post needs the first two parts, and at least one of the next three. The feed as a whole does the rest.

A moment the buyer recognises (Known). "Wages ate the takings again this month" stops a café owner. "We're excited to share" stops nobody.

A distinctive look, the same every time (Known). The same colour, framing, opening line and face, so a scroller knows it's you before reading a word.

Something useful, or something that delights (Answered). Leave the viewer knowing one thing they didn't, or answer one real question. A joke that lands in your moment, in your look, is memory work too.

A real person (Believed). Anatoli Colicev and colleagues tracked 45 brands in 21 sectors, day by day (Colicev and colleagues). The brand's own posts raised awareness, but not purchase intent. What customers said raised both. Your own posts build memory. Other people's words build intent.

The reason, in passing (Preferred). "That's why we send the report every Monday by nine." Said once and lightly, across fifty posts.

Spoken and captioned (Found). Ahrefs found YouTube mentions correlated with AI visibility at about 0.737 for ChatGPT, the strongest factor in its study (Ahrefs). Its authors warn that "correlation isn't causation". Say the moment, the question and your name aloud.

The feed as a whole: proof of life (Believed). One brilliant video from last year answers worse than a plain post from last week.

The mistake most teams make

They post in the brand's voice alone, and buyers discount a brand praising itself. A café owner believes another café owner far sooner than a logo.

The other mistake is chasing the viral hit. Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and colleagues studied a billion diffusion events on Twitter (Goel and colleagues). Moderately popular events came up about one in a thousand times. "Viral hits" came up closer to one in a million.

So post on a schedule you can keep for a year. Consistency beats volume, and both beat the viral hit. And let staff show their own work, saying who they work for. Ten staff posting the same paragraph tells the audience who wrote it.

How you know it's working

Use the measurement ladder from Chapter 23. Followers, likes and reach stay on the diagnostic rung. Steer by the feed audit score each month, and by the share of posts that feature a customer, an employee or the founder. Then ask new customers whether they saw you on social or checked your feed.

Fieldline, the invented scheduling-software firm, sells to a committee. For two years its company page posted product updates and award logos to 4,000 followers, mostly staff and partners.

The founder began posting weekly, and two engineers monthly. Customers appeared in a video series that opened the same way: a van, a map, and a dispatcher saying how long the drive was.

In one invented deal, a contractor's head of operations had seen the van videos for months, shared by a dispatcher she followed. When the problem became urgent, Fieldline was the first name she thought of. The finance lead checked the feed and saw last week's post about a customer's finance manager. The IT manager's assistant cited an engineer's video.

Fieldline still lost to a cheaper rival. But it made the shortlist, which it had never done from social before. None of it showed in the reach report.

The full playbook. The Social Playbook, with the feed audit scorecard, the monthly content rhythm and the one-question video brief, is free at rocmode.com/playbooks.

Whose evidence this is. Ahrefs sells SEO tools and an AI-visibility tracker; Socialinsider sells social analytics. Peer-reviewed sources: Colicev and colleagues; Goel and colleagues.