Latest / Social Media Marketing with Fexingo: Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Platform Strategy / The Silent Death of the Social Feed
Transcript
- Lucas: Look, if you’ve been paying attention to the social media landscape over the last eighteen months, you might have noticed something strange happening. The platforms are getting better at showing us what we want to see, but brands are getting worse at knowing who they’re actually talking to. Luna: Right, because the signal is so noisy now that even when you hit the mark, you don’t know if it’s the right person or just someone who scrolled past out of boredom. Lucas: Exactly. I was looking at some internal data from a mid-sized apparel brand earlier this week—let’s call them North Coast Apparel—and their story is becoming a cautionary tale for half the industry. They spent the first half of twenty twenty six doubling down on short-form video, trying to chase those viral spikes. Luna: And did it work? Or did they just get burned by the algorithm? Lucas: It worked in the worst possible way. Their views went up three hundred percent quarter-over-quarter. But their actual customer acquisition cost doubled, and their repeat purchase rate dropped by twenty five percent. They were reaching millions of people who would never buy a jacket, but they weren’t reaching the people who actually liked their brand. Luna: So they traded precision for volume, and ended up with neither. Lucas: Precisely. And the reason this matters right now, especially as we sit here in late September twenty twenty six, is that the underlying mechanics of these platforms have shifted again. It’s not just about the algorithm anymore; it’s about the structure of the feed itself. Luna: You mean the death of the chronological feed? Lucas: Well, the chronological feed died years ago, but what’s happened recently is that the feed has become less of a timeline and more of a recommendation engine. It’s no longer about what your friends posted yesterday. It’s about what the platform thinks will keep you scrolling for the next forty-five minutes. Luna: Which means the brand’s job isn’t to communicate with customers anymore, it’s to entertain strangers. Lucas: That’s the core tension. When you design for entertainment, you optimize for immediate dopamine hits. When you design for community, you optimize for trust and loyalty. These two things are increasingly at odds. Luna: But surely there’s a middle ground? You can’t just ignore the algorithm because it’s bad for your soul. Lucas: No, you can’t ignore it. But you have to understand what it’s actually measuring. Most marketers think the algorithm measures interest. It doesn’t. It measures retention time. It measures how long you stay on the app after watching a piece of content. Luna: So if a brand makes a controversial post that gets people arguing in the comments, the algorithm loves it, even if those people hate the brand. Lucas: Exactly. Conflict drives engagement, and engagement drives distribution. So brands are incentivized to create content that provokes reaction rather than content that builds relationship. And that’s why North Coast Apparel saw their repeat purchases drop. People were watching the videos, but they weren’t buying the product. Luna: It’s like they were performing a play for an audience that wasn’t there to buy tickets. Lucas: A perfect analogy. And the tricky part is that this isn’t just a TikTok problem. LinkedIn, Instagram, even X have all moved toward this model. The feed is no longer a mirror of your social graph; it’s a window into the platform’s commercial interests. Luna: So how do brands fight back? Do they just pay more for ads? Lucas: If they just throw money at ads, they’ll bleed out. The smarter brands are starting to treat social media less like a broadcast channel and more like a customer service channel. They’re moving the conversation out of the public feed and into private groups, newsletters, or direct messages. Luna: So they’re taking their audience off the grid where the algorithm can’t track them. Lucas: In a way, yes. They’re building walled gardens. Think about how many brands now push users to join their Discord servers or WhatsApp communities. Once you’re in that private space, the algorithm doesn’t matter. You own the relationship. Luna: That sounds like a lot of work for what used to be a simple Facebook page. Lucas: It is more work. But it’s also more durable. If TikTok bans tomorrow, a brand with ten million followers loses everything. A brand with ten thousand email subscribers and a active Discord still has a business. Luna: So the strategy shifts from accumulation to cultivation. Lucas: Cultivation. I like that. Accumulation is about vanity metrics. Cultivation is about value exchange. And in a world where every brand is screaming for attention, the ones that listen are the ones that survive. Luna: It reminds me of the old retail principle: you don’t just want foot traffic, you want shoppers who actually spend money. Lucas: Right. And right now, social media is giving us a mall full of wanderers. We need to figure out how to turn them into buyers without annoying them. Luna: Which brings us back to North Coast Apparel. Did they fix the problem? Lucas: They started cutting their short-form video budget in half and reinvesting it into community management. They hired two real people to respond to comments, not with bot replies, but with actual conversations. Within three months, their repeat purchase rate bounced back. Luna: So the lesson is: stop shouting into the void and start talking to the people who are already listening. Lucas: Exactly. The algorithm will always change. The human desire to feel seen and heard does not. Luna: I think a lot of marketers are going to wake up to that truth pretty quickly as the ad costs continue to rise. Lucas: They had better. Because the cheap era of organic reach is definitely over. Luna: Before we wrap up, I want to mention something that keeps this show running. If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used, consider supporting us directly. Lucas: We rely on listener support to keep the production quality high and the content independent. If you find value in what we do, you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps us keep this ad-free and focused on the details that matter. Luna: Thanks for keeping the lights on. It really allows us to dig deeper into these stories. Lucas: Back to the topic though, one thing I’m curious about is whether this shift toward private communities will eventually break the network effects that made social media so powerful in the first place. Luna: That’s a big question. If everyone retreats into their own walled garden, do we lose the shared cultural moment entirely? Lucas: Maybe. Or maybe we just gain privacy. It’s worth thinking about which trade-off we’re willing to make as consumers. Luna: I think most people are ready to trade virality for sanity. Lucas: Probably. But the platforms aren’t built for sanity. They’re built for scale. Luna: So the brands that survive will be the ones that build islands of sanity in the middle of the chaos. Lucas: That’s a good way to put it. And honestly, that’s probably the only sustainable strategy left. Luna: Let’s see if North Coast Apparel becomes the blueprint or just another footnote in twenty twenty seven. Lucas: We’ll be watching. And if you’re interested in how other companies are handling this transition, look out for our next deep dive on community-led growth models. Luna: Until then, keep your feeds curated and your conversations real. Lucas: Thanks for listening. Let’s see what happens next.