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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
Do you keep posting videos without seeing an increase in conversions? A solid TikTok marketing strategy can help with that. The comment to cart pipeline is real and 68% of users say brands should use the comment section to better understand their audience, but a lot...
Dec 11, 2025
For years, marketers fed the Content Monster with nonstop posts. Big names said volume won, so we treated visibility like a numbers game. That playbook’s outdated.
Engagement now hinges on quality and clear relevance. According to the GWI study for the Financial Times, global time-on-platform has dropped by nearly ten percent. Digital natives lead the decline, signaling real fatigue.
Feeds that once felt social now look like streams of what John Burn-Murdoch calls “ultra-edited content.” Generative AI sped this up by flooding platforms with quick, shallow visuals. Creation got easy, but good taste didn’t.
Strong content still wins, but only if you cut the outdated habits dragging growth down. I’ve narrowed them to six practices worth dropping in 2026.
Nowadays, algorithms on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn prioritize retention over recency. They value the time a user spends with your content far more than the timestamp. That’s why posts from 3 weeks ago surface on your feed on a random Thursday.
Consequently, flooding your feed with low-value filler content will damage your account score because it signals to the platform that you produce noise. Unfortunately, this suppresses your reach even when you finally post something brilliant.
I tested this theory right here at Planable. We slashed our posting frequency from five times a week to three. The result defied the old logic. Our reach expanded. Our engagement rates climbed. By pouring our creative energy into three high-impact pieces rather than five mediocre ones, we earned more attention with less output.
We are in good company. HubSpot’s 2025 Social Media Trends report reveals that 64% of marketers abandoned the daily posting schedule. Furthermore, Social Insider’s research shows that TikTok rewards two highly engaging posts a week far more than seven low-effort Facebook updates, all of which goes to show that attention follows quality, rather than frequency alone. Audiences respond when content feels meaningful, interactive, and worth their time.
Instead of filling a calendar grid just to see it full, focus on the mix that actually builds value. We found success with a specific balance:
This approach respects your team’s bandwidth and your audience’s time. Quality wins.
As marketers, we spent years curating the perfect Instagram grid. Overproduced content signals “advertisement” to the brain. When we see perfect studio lighting and scripted dialogue, we keep on scrolling. So I realized that audiences crave the unfiltered moment. They want to see the human mess behind the brand logo.
Look at Nude Project. Their feed ignores every rule of traditional brand management. It looks chaotic. It features screenshots of video calls, messy photo dumps, and raw street photography.
This “lo-fi” aesthetic works because it removes the barrier between brand and consumer. It signals peer-to-peer communication. You become a person in their feed rather than a corporation interrupting it. It’s an example from a new brand-building book – one that I trust.
On this note, let me share another social media project that caught my eye.
Betty Booze. Their feed is highly produced. The colors are saturated. The lighting is perfect. And it works.
Betty Booze succeeds because the polish serves a specific vibe. It builds a cinematic world.
We must distinguish between “corporate polish” (stock photos, stiff acting) and “world building” (cinematic, aspirational). I fear brands that try to look too “professional” will end up looking like nothing.
Audit your content creation process. If you require a DSLR camera and three rounds of lighting checks to film a TikTok, you might be trying too hard (no shade to the camera, which I love, but time and place).
Trust builds in the messy moments. Let them happen.
As social media managers and digital marketers, we often confuse consistency with repetition.
In our quest for efficiency, we developed a bad habit. We take one piece of content, like a LinkedIn text post, for example, and reschedule it for Instagram, copy-paste the caption to Facebook, and force it onto TikTok with some stock music.
We call this efficiency, but your audience calls it spam. 😅
Psychological studies on the mere exposure effect confirm that familiarity builds trust. We like what we recognize. However, there is a tipping point where familiarity turns into content fatigue.
When a user sees the exact same asset on three different apps, the brain stops processing it. It categorizes the post as “already seen” or, worse, “low-effort ad.” You lose the attention you worked so hard to earn.
Planable calendar showing scheduled weekly posts for a new product launch across multiple platforms.
The reality check you need is: A feed needs diversity. And while repurposing content is smart, copy-pasting is lazy. Each platform has a distinct rhythm. For example:
When you ignore these nuances, you create the “uncanny valley” effect, meaning when something looks almost human, but not quite. Do you know that feeling when something is close enough to feel familiar, but not authentic enough to feel real, so you get a subtle sense of discomfort or disinterest?
In social media, the same thing happens when content tries too hard to mimic trends, engagement tricks, or viral formulas without really understanding the audience.
Maintain your brand identity (the familiarity) but change the wrapper (the format).
We reached a point of saturation where AI-generated captions, auto-replies, and scheduled cross-posting created a “Zombie Internet.” Brands post content that looks real at a glance but feels hollow upon inspection.
Automation serves efficiency, not creativity, and when it takes over the entire process, authenticity suffers. Audiences possess a sharp radar for the artificial. They tell immediately when a caption came from a prompt rather than a person.
I watch brands rely too heavily on automated repurposing, like blasting the same AI-generated material everywhere, and losing their audience in the process.
PS: Have you seen the backlash Duolingo received after its CEO released their take on becoming an AI company? 👀 Humans hate it when you try to remove, trick, or automate human input.
The data confirms this rejection of the artificial. A MarTech report reveals that 94% of organizations use AI for marketing, yet this mass adoption correlates with a “trust gap.”
Pew Research found that 53% of adults believe AI diminishes creativity. When your brand feels automated, you trigger the “Uncanny Valley” effect, which is a sense of unease that kills engagement.
We use a strict ratio at Planable to keep the soul in the machine:
Let’s allow the tech to handle the content calendar, while we handle the connection.
When a sound blows up on TikTok, marketing teams rush to record their take before the day ends. The worry about missing the moment now beats any concern about keeping the brand’s voice straight, especially after years of joking about legal teams being too slow to approve trends.
So, it seems that following trends blindly isn’t the smarter social media strategy. When a B2B SaaS company forces its employees to do a Gen Z dance challenge, the audience winces.
They experience “brand cringe”, AKA the visceral reaction to seeing a company try to wear a costume that does not fit.
Jumping on every viral moment dilutes your identity. It confuses the algorithm and the audience. I advise teams to stop asking “How can we use this trend?” and start asking “Does our audience actually care about this?”
“Vibe culture” is becoming an overplayed card. Not all brands need to be funny.
Adopt a strict filter before you film.
If you hesitate on any of these, skip it. Let the trend pass. Your brand integrity matters more than a temporary spike in views.
You likely have outdated tactics running in the background right now. We call them “Zombie Habits.” They eat your budget and produce no life. You keep them alive simply because they always existed.
The best way to spot an outdated habit involves a cold look at the data, no romanticizing old practices or stuff that was cool when you started out.
If a tactic consistently underperforms or fails to drive meaningful audience engagement, it signals a need to evolve. We must stop defending the strategy if there’s no real tangible impact to back it up.
1. The volume check
Pull your data from the last quarter. Compare your high-frequency weeks against your low-frequency weeks. Did posting 5x a week actually generate more leads than posting 3x? Often, you will find that the extra effort produces diminishing returns.
If the line stays flat despite double the work, cut the volume. PS: You can do this in one click via Planable Analytics, for all your channels.
Weekly social media performance overview with metrics on followers, reach, impressions, engagements, and profile visits.
2. Your marketer’s intuition check
Scroll your own grid as a stranger. Cover the logo. Does it look like a stock photo library? If your feed lacks human faces or unpolished moments, you suffer from the “Corporate Polish” trap.
Humans connect with humans. If your feed looks like a brochure, it is time to pivot.
3. The value check
Look at your “synergy” posts. Identify the ones you copied and pasted across platforms. Compare their engagement rate to your platform-native content. If the copy-pasted posts underperform, stop doing them. You waste time only to annoy your audience with content that feels out of place.
Perform this audit quarterly. And frankly, be as ruthless as possible. If it walks like a zombie and converts like a zombie, it’s probably a…(I’ll let you figure it out).
At Planable, I adopted a simple mindset to go with this shift. We do our absolute best to try to lead with creativity and personality. We show the people behind the brand. We use our expertise to educate and debate rather than just broadcast.
This shift requires bravery. You must post less. You must show your face. You must kill the safety of the corporate script. But the reward involves an audience that actually trusts you.
If you want the visual space to plan this new strategy and to focus on quality over noise, Planable helps you see the big picture.
Stop feeding the feed. Start feeding your audience. And get 50 free posts to try this strategy out. Best of luck!
George – Content Marketing Strategist, storyteller, and self-appointed cringe detector. 7 years in marketing, starting from graphic design to social, campaigns, and content. Writes, shoots, edits – if it’s creative, he’s on it. Knows what’s funny, what’s fresh, and what should never see the light of day. Always up to date, always cooking up something (and trying to hit his protein goal), all while pretending to get 8 hours of sleep.
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