r/SocialMediaMarketing

Is this normal in the industry?

I’m almost 40 and I’m seriously thinking about building a personal brand around my actual life and experiences, rather than trying to force myself into a specific niche.

Hey everyone! I am a product engineer who is trying to promote his app in instagram.

I am a complete beginner in instagram game. Built a decent product that i want to start promoting.

My plan is simple: just to try to copy format of popular posts & engage with people in comments

How do you think, what will be: worst, average, great results if I will be doing it 1 month everyday? What should be my realistic expectations?

Thanks in advance!

I've stopped brainstorming content ideas and started pulling competitor data instead, then scoring every post against that account's own engagement rate median rather than raw likes. Tried it on 3 UK banks this week on the theory that if it works in banking it works anywhere.

Follower count and posting volume were both dead ends. Barclays UK has 86k followers and hit my 50 post ceiling in 75 days, Lloyds Business has 9.4k and posted 15 times, and their medians finished half a point apart.

86k followers or 9.4k, barely mattered. All 3 medians landed inside half a point.

Scoring each post against its own account baseline is where it got fun. Lloyds got 10.6x their median from one founder telling one story, and the strongest organic post Barclays managed in 90 days was a nail art reel captioned "Is this too niche? 💅". No product content anywhere in the top 5.

Same posts, ranked against their own account baseline instead of each other. Nothing in the top 5 is product content.

Lloyds is the one that stuck with me. Their Making Tax Digital posts are useful to exactly the right people and sat between 0.11% and 0.77%, while founder stories on the same account cleared 8%. Nobody wants the deadline explained to them, they want to watch someone else survive it.

Barclays also ran the identical Wimbledon reel 3 times in a week, so you can watch a repost die in real time.

One reel, 3 runs, 1 week. Run 2 kept about a fifth of run 1 and run 3 barely registered.

The 5 briefs I actually took out of it:

Content idea	What the data said	Format
Turn every product announcement into a customer telling the story	Lloyds founder reel hit 10.6x their median, their own deadline posts sat at 0.11% to 0.77%	Reel or carousel, one named person
Explain the boring history of your category	Barclays' notes, contactless and "pound of silver" posts all beat their median with zero product mention	Static or 15 second reel
Post something deliberately off-topic once a fortnight	The nail art reel was their single strongest organic post in 90 days at 2.74%	Reel, low production
Rebuild the winner instead of reposting it	Same reel 3 times went 0.98%, then 0.20%, then 0.12%	New cut, same idea
Split content by job, reach or response	NatWest reels pull 1,800 to 2,600 views at 0.16% to 0.41%, their photos sit at 1.1% to 1.5%	Reels for reach, carousel plus question for replies

Two things make the method work. Pull the whole 90 days rather than a top posts list, because top post rankings are survivorship bias in a nicer interface. Then score against each account's own median, since 100 likes at 9k followers is a different animal to 100 likes at 86k.

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

Instagram officially started rolling out an "Add Products" option right inside the Reels publishing screen. They basically ripped off the TikTok Shop model. It allows you to paste direct affiliate or product URLs into your video before you hit publish, and you can actually tag up to 30 products per Reel. It is widely available now, and the conversion difference we are seeing is insane.

The old way sucked: watch the video, go to the profile, click the bio link, find the product on the site, then check out. You lose buyers at every single extra step. With this new feature, they just tap the native product tag on the Reel and go straight to checkout. It removes so much of the friction that kills conversions.

You used to have to jump through massive hoops with Meta Commerce Manager to tag anything. Now, right before publishing, you just hit "Add Products," paste your external URL, and Instagram generates a seamless, shoppable tag right over your video.

I recently implemented this workflow for a high-volume apparel merch business I manage. We completely stopped pointing people to the bio and just embedded the links directly into the Reels. The current algorithm heavily penalizes content that forces users to close the app. Because these native tags keep the user inside the Instagram ecosystem right up until the final purchase page, your reach doesn't get throttled.

Honestly, stop making your customers hunt for your storefront. Check your Reel publishing settings today for the "Add Products" toggle. If you have it, your Linktree is obsolete.

Hi fellow marketers

Has anyone got any resources/advice for those out of work looking to keep up professional development. Just finished the miniMBA.

Got made redundant March 2026 after year out on mat leave in 2025. Led a team of 6 for a legal tech company for consumers and sme (not b2b). Have 13 years experience mostly in PPC and content/seo. Not strong in meta/social, no experience with creator/influencers.

Would love to get more experience in social, and product marketing.

thanks in advance

Hello, on August 8th, I emailed a few influencers, but I haven’t received a response. I sent a follow-up on August 12th, and I still haven’t heard back. I was wondering whether I should just leave it at that, or send one final, shorter email briefly mentioning my proposal again and keeping the details to a minimum.
Or do you think it’s a bad idea?

I am an experienced teacher/administrator and I’ve been working on an app for the elementary teacher. This is a teacher tool with AI embedded to generate content such as rubrics, report card comments etc! I’m super excited but not sure where to start with marketing! Just starting to make tik tok but I see some great ideas in this subreddit to try!! I’m open to suggestions! Thanks for reading!

Hi,

I have an influencer marketing campaign I'm working on and I only want to work with influencers who are continuously having a consistent, high average engagement rate on their recent videos (to show they are still relevant).

I'm looking at influencers that have 1.5 million or more subs and taking their average enegament rate of, let's say their past 10 videos. That rate needs to be 3% or more.

Is that an adequate engagement rate or do I need to be looking at higher? Yes, I know smaller influencers have higher engagement rates, but my biggest goal is getting this campaign as far reaching as possible.

Thanks.

Listen selling your product or your product the same way on Instagram and Facebook is not going to work anymore, we all know companies will hire one overused influencer who probably will pitch her voice so high that its so evident that they're lying about how incredible your product is.

Years ago before Instagram and influencer marketing, brands really understood the art of advertising and that is what genuinely made people buy a product while feeling connected to them, all the advertising made us feel certain emotions and now every time we look at those brands we directly relate to the emotions it made us feel all because of their advertisement. Surprisingly the newer brands are just discovering the power of true storytelling advertisements and are getting more traction via it, and understandably so

I am looking for the brand name which has unique and easiy to remember

how did you find your brand name?
I used AI to generate some names, but it seems not good

Heyy! I’m a CS student and I’ve been wanting to properly learn Social Media Marketing, but honestly I feel like learning with other people would be way more fun and motivating than just watching courses alone lol.

So I was wondering if there are any other students/beginners here who are also interested in learning SMM and would wanna learn together, share resources, discuss things, practice, etc

And if you’re already working in SMM or have some experience with it, I’d also love to hear about your experience! Like what helped you get started, resources/courses you found useful, mistakes you made, things you wish you knew earlier, or just any advice in general

Not looking for anything super serious or formal, just trying to find some people who are also interested and maybe learn together :)

If anyone’s interested, feel free to comment or DM me!

I'm a small-business owner in Canada, and I'm posting this because I'm genuinely curious how other business owners would handle this.

I hired a social media agency called Somizu Media and paid approximately CAD $3,000. Work started June 1.

I didn't expect miracles or guaranteed sales. I expected professional strategy, content creation, engagement and expertise — basically, people who knew more about social media growth than I did.

Instead, after roughly two months, we had gained barely 10 new followers. The tangible content produced was around 2 reels and 2 carousels, and even those required corrections and considerable guidance from me.

The irony is that I often felt like I was coaching the people I had hired to coach me.

There was one staff change. A new coach was eventually assigned who I believe genuinely tried, but the quality of work coming from the supporting/editing team was extremely disappointing. I kept correcting, explaining and waiting.

Eventually I terminated the service before the agreed period was over because I felt I was wasting even more time by continuing.

Here's the part that really bothered me.

When I asked for a refund, I received a very polished report explaining their position. But the report contained information I believe was inaccurate — including saying our work started July 1 when it actually started June 1.

That made me wonder: if something as basic as the start date is wrong, how am I supposed to trust the conclusions of the report?

They are very good at producing impressive-looking documents and presentations. But my experience made me realize something:

A beautiful strategy document means absolutely nothing if the execution behind it isn't there.

I have the agreement, their original audit, communications, submitted content, corrections and subsequent reports. I'm now considering my legal options and filing a complaint with the Competition Bureau of Canada regarding concerns I have about representations made versus what I believe was actually delivered.

Again, I'm not angry because they didn't magically generate sales. No marketing agency can guarantee that.

I'm upset because I paid professionals for expertise and execution and ended up spending an enormous amount of my own time managing and correcting the work I was paying them to manage.

I can earn the $3,000 again. I can't get those two months back.

Other small-business owners: Would you accept this as a failed marketing experiment and move on, or would you pursue a pro-rata refund based on what was actually delivered?

And has anyone here had a similar experience with a social media/marketing agency — particularly Somizu Media?

I hired my first instagram SMM manager around 2 weeks ago. He was a great guy to talk and was well prepared for our first call. I wanted to grow my digital product's instagram - which was created for instagram managers to help with their workflow. So, basically, he was his own ICP and needed to create content that he mostly consumes about his craft.

We agreed for $270/month for 10 posts and 6 carousels, also for overall engagement with potential clients and for being active on other instagram pages who had great following.

I gave him all the permissions and wanted him to be independent from me & just try his best. But the reality was that he was JUST posting AI slop content from which i want to VOMIT now. It was literally just stupid AI videos and AI images with some "helpful" 🤢 info.

After his 3rd post in this page, I decided to just fire him.

Actually I am the one who is guilty for this situation. Now I understand that when hiring someone phrase "garbage-in, garbage-out" stays 100% true. I just tried to find cheap option and gave little instructions and got what I deserved.

https://preview.redd.it/yr5bnwi7f2kh1.png?width=692&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b6a403a12d90016270c881c7ec4438dbf6eb2ec

https://preview.redd.it/4zdb76nze2kh1.png?width=1900&format=png&auto=webp&s=0804de4e370d2178a5e28ba7c4e4af79c8f503f8

I’m a 25 yr marketing brand manager
Today I worked late because my company is going through an AI integration. It feels like I’m teaching it to do my job for them to replace us not for AI to help assist us. Don’t get me wrong we’ve been using chat and Claud as a tool but today we had to sit through a seminar on the new marketing website we will be using (created by Claud). Showcasing how we will upload all fonts and marketing assets and it will help create posters, ads, social posts, and more. Trying to explain to boomers how or why we (young people) can tell when a photo is AI is exhausting and never works. Authenticity matters and young people (your next target demographic) cares. I think more companies should prioritize in being on the correct side of this AI wave by prioritizing honesty and creativity. 

They may not replace me in a year but I do think it’s only a matter of time. This makes me question my entire life plan not to mention my partners (he’s in a non creative field but what’s stopping his employer from finding a system to replace him?)They’re gonna stop hiring and they will start firing. What do we do to live when that happens?

Keep seeing mixed takes on whether organic social is worth the effort anymore or if it's just quietly becoming a discovery layer that eventually pushes people toward paid. Curious what people managing accounts day to day are actually seeing, not just what the platforms claim in their own reports. Has organic reach genuinely dropped for you this year, or has it just shifted to different content formats that aren't always tracked the same way?

Please don't tell me about upwork,fiver and linkedin. Everyone is saying that from Google to chatgpt. I am tired of please share me genuine way to find client. I recently started my social media handle on instagram but just in 45 days I make 3,4 videos viral and cross 2m+ views but I am struggling to find client. Can you please tell Mee your way?

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

should i try social media marketing for the site?