u/Fabulous-Car-6546

I'll start:

I thought Stories would be a fad.

A lot of small brands think they need a bigger budget to look established.

Honestly, I think visibility matters more.

When I keep seeing the same brand pop up on LinkedIn, newsletters, podcasts, and social media, my brain automatically assumes they're bigger than they probably are.

Not talking about basic stuff like “post consistently” or “use hashtags.”

I mean something that genuinely moved the numbers for you recently.

Could be: • Better retention on short videos • Higher story engagement • Getting more profile visits from Reels • CTR improvements on thumbnails/titles • Turning viewers into followers/subscribers • AI workflow that actually saves time • Posting timing strategy • Community-building methods • UGC ads performance • Organic reach tricks that still work

Would be interesting to hear what’s actually working right now across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, etc.

With ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews pulling more attention, are you noticing a shift in where your traffic comes from? Or is Google still dominating for you?

A few things I'm wondering:

• Are you tracking AI referrals separately?
• Has organic Google traffic dropped noticeably?
• Are you doing anything differently to show up in AI answers?

Would love to hear from people actually looking at their numbers, not just theory. Doesn't matter if you run a small site or a big one.

Black Rifle Coffee sells packaged coffee with a branding that is very US-military aligned. Their entire image is about the US military and US patriotism.

Their instagram is very successful. They put out high quality content and have nearly 2 million followers with high engagement on their posts. Their posts are not overly promotional. They're about their niche: shooting guns, US patriotism, military stories, etc

Despite this success, their company is slowly dying. Since their IPO in May 2021, their stock share price has decreased by 6x. They started with a market cap of $1.7B and are now at $397M. For comparison, Greens supplement, Gruns, sold for about a billion while having 138K followers on their IG.

What learning lessons can we all draw from this case study?