Social Media Is Changing
And it's changing marketing.
Social traffic is plummeting even for big brands with serious marketing budgets and it raises an important question.
Is posting content on social media still worth your time as a solopreneur?
Because the decline is stark.
And it’s not just Twitter.
This means people consume content on social media and move on to consuming more content on social media. They rarely click through an external link or accept any invitation for a deeper connection to a brand or a creator.
What does that mean for solopreneurs who use social media as a part of their marketing mix?
Social media was never really "free" distribution. You were paying with time, creative energy, and psychological wear.
Now, you’ll be required to pay even more for less. Reconsider the conditions of that deal an only take it if you genuinely like social media.
Enough with “post 8 times per day” advice. Focus on your offer instead.
A remarkable offer travels. A mediocre one needs a megaphone. Solopreneurs have been trained by the content marketing era to be better megaphone operators. The first principle says: be worth finding instead.
What guarantees invisibility for a solopreneur?
Posting consistently about something undifferentiated, in a voice indistinguishable from a hundred others, on platforms that now actively deprioritize unpaid reach, while hoping volume compensates for lack of distinctiveness.
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Social media now prioritises content from friends & acquaintances over anything else.
That’s not a bad thing. You just need something people talk about unprompted.
Paid ads are still an option (perhaps a better one).
But the failure mode of paid ads is buying attention for something not yet worth the attention. Before you go there, clarify your offer. You must be committed to it.
Richard Millington talked about how he used social media advertising to grow his newsletter here.
Solopreneurs often resist paying for ads not just because of budget but because it feels like admitting defeat, like the work wasn't good enough to earn attention.
Instead, allow yourself to reframe it as a mature, intentional distribution decision, which it is.
The real long-term edge is not any particular channel but the capacity to keep evolving your distinctiveness faster than the market commoditizes it.
Commoditization happens fastest to people who are producing content from a fixed worldview. The people who stay distinctive over time are genuinely curious — they're reading outside their field, having conversations that challenge their assumptions, doing things that aren't directly productive. The distinctiveness is a byproduct of a living intellectual life, not something you manufacture for publication.
This is also why follow your passion is underrated advice: genuine interest drives the kind of sustained attention that produces original insight.
As social media expert Karen Michaels 🦋 put it: “The future of marketing belongs to those of us who are boldly, unapologetically ourselves. We should be using smart tools to handle the busywork only so we have time and energy to be creative and innovative in our own specific ways.”
What seems like it’s still working well for driving traffic is the short video format.
But consider this: users trained into short attention spans through short videos aren’t primed to read long-form content. Anything you offer them should be just as short & clear.
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t really fit what I do.
There are two theories in marketing: the broadcast theory, where success is a function of reach and frequency, and the resonance theory, where success is a function of fit between offer and audience.
The last decade of content marketing was largely broadcast theory dressed up in authenticity language — post more, be consistent, optimize for the algorithm.
What I’m pointing toward is a genuine shift back to resonance theory, where the quality and differentiation of the offer does the distributional work.
This connects to ideas in product strategy (be 10x different, not 10x better), in network theory (ideas spread through strong-tie trust networks more durably than weak-tie broadcast), and in the economics of attention (scarcity changes the value of quality relative to quantity).
There's a cultural fatigue with performed authenticity. Audiences, especially the kind that solopreneurs are trying to reach — educated, discerning, time-poor — have developed very good filters for content that is optimized rather than felt.
The rise of Substack, the loyalty of tight podcast audiences, the surprising staying power of newsletters with strong voices: these are all symptoms of a cultural appetite for things that feel genuinely made by a human with a specific perspective, not produced to a content calendar.
The marketing that works in this moment is the marketing that doesn't feel like marketing.
Consider this a prioritization framework at a moment when you’re overwhelmed by conflicting advice:
Make the offer genuinely differentiated
Choose distribution channels where you have a natural edge (interest, existing audience or something else)
If you want social media scale, use paid
“Be different” is easy to say and hard to do. You can read more about how to do it here.
Substack is uniquely positioned in this situation: it has both monetization and audience growth features.
Based on reports and personal experience, it’s effective for selling not just newsletter subscriptions, but also services and products.
It’s one of the few platforms I recommend you continue to take seriously (or start, if you haven’t).
This is a transition problem.
You built your mental models of marketing during an era when platforms offered social reach to grow their own audiences, and you’re now operating those models in a different economic environment.
The answer is to reduce the cost of distribution by doing less of it more intentionally.
Those who do will have compounding independence: attention you get through genuine relevance is attention that turns into a relationship.
Maya
I removed the paywall from this post so anyone can learn from the experiment - what happens when you invest $10k (now 20k) in social ads to grow your newsletter.
https://www.richardmillington.com/p/socialads