Let me hold your hand while I say this one, because I say it in almost every strategy meeting I'm in:
Nobody wakes up and opens a social app hoping a brand has something to sell to them.
Not once. Not ever. Nobody has unlocked their phone, opened TikTok, and thought, I hope today's the day I finally hear what this company has to say. Nobody scrolls with the quiet wish that a stakeholder's Q3 priorities get the audience they deserve. That's not why the app is open. It's never why the app is open.
And yet so much of what gets greenlit in business social media is built on the opposite assumption — that if the message matters to us, it will matter to them.
That's the gap I spend most of my time trying to close. Not "is this on-brand," not "does this hit the talking points," but the much less comfortable question: does anyone actually want this in their feed?
And this is the part that gets argued with the most, so let's sit in it: just because someone follows you doesn't mean they signed up for your update.
Stop. Go Back. Read that part again.
It doesn't mean they requested your announcement. The follow is not a standing invitation. It's not a subscription to whatever you feel like posting. It's closer to a maybe — a "you were interesting enough once, prove it again" — and the algorithm doesn't even guarantee they'll see it.
They opened the app for the same reason they always do: to be entertained, distracted, moved, amused. Not to check in on you specifically. Not to see what's new in your world. They opened it for themselves, and your content showed up in the middle of that, uninvited by the moment even if it was technically invited by the follow.
That's why "but they follow us" doesn't hold up as a defense in the room. It's the thing stakeholders reach for when a post underperforms — as if the follow is a contract, as if it obligates attention. It doesn't. A follow just gets you in the building. It doesn't get you a seat at the table. Your content is still a guest in that moment, not the host of it. It still has to justify being there, the same way everything else in that feed had to earn its way in — the ex-text song, the pots-and-pans DJ set, the stranger's storytime.
None of it gets grandfathered in because someone tapped follow six months ago. Every single post starts from zero. That's not the algorithm being cruel. That's just what attention actually is — something re-earned, not something owed.
That's the whole game. Not "how do we get this in front of people," but "why would this person, mid-scroll, on their own time, choose to stay on it."
If you can't answer that honestly, no amount of distribution strategy will save it. You'll have gotten the content in front of people. You just won't have given them a reason to stop.
If any of this is landing a little too close to home — reach out. If you're ready to stop asking for a bigger distribution plan and start asking a harder, better question, we should talk.