r/whaaat_ai

Many marketers seem to be panicking about engagement on social being down. These are the numbers: Instagram engagement rates are down from 2.5-3% in 2020 to 0.5-0.9% by 2025, based on a benchmark report covering 35 million posts. Comments on TikTok fell 24% year-over-year. Instagram comments dropped 16%. The overall engagement across platforms fell roughly 24% in 2025 alone.

Quite often, brands look at those numbers and conclude that social media stopped working.

But that's not correct, because even if public engagement cratered, private engagement like shares, saves and DMs went the other direction. TikTok shares grew 45% year-over-year. Instagram shares grew 12%. DMs are climbing across every platform. People are saving posts instead of liking them and forwarding content to three people who actually matter instead of broadcasting a reaction to their entire follower list. Just cross checked with my teenager: they do the share posts with friends whíthout necessarily having liked it. A generation thing?

In anycase: One thing is clear: engagement didn't disappear but simply went underground.

There's a name for this: dark social. Content shared through DMs, WhatsApp, private group chats, email forwards. The downside for marketers: This is not trackable referral data and totally invisible to standard analytics, besides its where most meaningful engagement actually happens.

Why did this shift happen?

When Instagram made likes public and permanent, engaging became a social statement. Pressing like on a brand post is a broadcast to your whole network. A lot of people stopped likig and started DM-ing instead. The behavior is the same, it just moved private.

What the private numbers look like:

• Instagram DMs: 90% open rates vs ~20% for email
• DM reply rates: 60% vs 1–5% click-through for email
• DM-to-sale conversion: 7–20% for targeted campaigns
• Responding to a DM within one minute: 391% increase in conversion
• 20% of all business Stories generate at least one direct message

These should not be titles "engagement metrics" as those are actually sales metrics.

What to track instead:

Saves and shares are today stronger intent signals than likes. Carousels consistently drive the most saves right now. DMs should be treated as a sales channel, with actual response systems, not an afterthought. And post-purchase surveys asking "how did you hear about us?" regularly surface word-of-mouth and social sharing that analytics platforms never capture.

The brands figuring this out are building content specifically designed to be forwarded. The question they ask before publishing: will someone send this to a friend?

Useful checklists, counter-intuitive benchmarks, frameworks, "mistakes to avoid" lists, comparison tables. That's the format that travels privately.

What's your experience been? Are you seeing the same shift in your own analytics or is public engagement still holding in certain formats or niches?

We have a few serial founders on the team, and there’s one thing they all agree on: most founders wait far too long before they start marketing.

They wait until the product or service is perfect and the website is up and running. Sometimes the launch date marks the starting point for marketing. And then they try to generate attention from zero to a hundred via LinkedIn or other channels. A real cold start, so to speak.

Our serial founders recommend a better approach:

1. Start earlier than you actually think you should

You don’t need a finished product to share your thoughts on it with others. Talk about the problem you want to solve. And also about what you’ve learnt from your initial conversations with users. You can also share failures, decisions you’ve scrapped or genuine dead ends, because that makes you human. After all, people often follow founders long before they follow companies.

2. You don’t need to become an influencer to do this

No daily selfies, no feigned vulnerability. The actual job is much simpler: make your start-up easier to understand by providing a bit of background information: Why this problem? Why you? Why now?

This context builds trust, which is so important but which early-stage founders usually lack.

3. Your pitch deck shouldn’t have to do all the work, as that often results in an overly crammed brochure.

If no one has seen you or your way of thinking before, every investor call effectively starts from scratch. If people have been following your journey for a few weeks or months, the conversation is already warmed up before you’ve even opened the deck.

4. Confusion is the reason why people don’t take action

I think most founders underestimate how many conversions are lost because customers, investors, partners or applicants don’t have a crystal-clear understanding of what it’s all about. But they need to understand your story before they commit. Clear, consistent founder-generated content clears up this confusion over time.

5. More content won’t fix an unclear start-up

And here’s another uncomfortable truth that our serial founders keep falling back on. If you don’t know who your customer is, what your core message is and why your start-up should succeed, posting more content is usually a waste of time.

First, you need to nail down your positioning. Then you can work consistently on building visibility.

Are any of you actively doing founder marketing? And if so, what’s actually worked for you?

Translated from German with DeepL.com (free version)