Is social media actually overrated for small business?

There's a growing camp of owners who think the whole thing is a con. Years of posting, hours a week, consultants, and nothing to show for it. And they're loud about it now, which is fair enough, because a lot of them were sold something.

I sell content for a living and I think they're half right. The half they're right about is the important half.

Nobody judges other channels this way

Think about how many things you've actually bought from a television ad. Seen it, picked up the phone, paid. Almost none, I'd guess.

Nobody concludes from that that television doesn't work. They conclude that particular ad didn't reach them. Same with a newspaper. Plenty of people would tell you an ad in the local paper is money down the drain, and plenty of others get a steady trickle from it.

Social gets held to a standard no other channel is held to, which is that every post should visibly produce a sale, and when it doesn't the whole medium gets written off.

And genuinely, without strategy, CTAs and somewhere for people to go, it is grinding your gears. The sceptics aren't wrong about what happened to them. They're wrong about what caused it.

The bigger waste

Here's the thing I'd want an owner to take away more than anything else in this piece.

If you're spending the time and you're not learning anything from it, that's a much bigger waste than the hours. You burn the week, you get nothing back, and on top of that you feel bad about yourself, which makes it harder to start again next month.

Volume without signal is just noise you paid for. The reps only count if you read what came back.

Who should genuinely ignore social

There are businesses where I'd tell you not to bother, and I'd rather say so.

If you're a legacy distributor doing enormous volumes on contract, social isn't your lever. Say you manufacture a plastic component, and your entire business is fulfilling a specification for a handful of buyers who've been buying it for a decade. Who's going to read about how a plastic mould gets made? A few people, honestly. But not enough to matter, and not the people who sign your contracts.

Components, micro-components, contract manufacturing, most legacy distribution. Social can help anyone at the margins. It just isn't worth that owner's week.

Who I turn down

Two types, at opposite ends.

The first doesn't value marketing and never will. No public presence, doesn't care about reviews, everything's too expensive. Five hundred dollars a month for marketing is outrageous, and then a thousand goes at the bar on Saturday without a second thought.

What they want is for me to build their brand, make strangers trust them inside a month, beat their competitors, fix everything else that's broken, and make them the most visible business in their category, while spending nothing on ads, images, or understanding any of it. They want a result without knowing what a result looks like. That's a long day for everyone.

The second is the corporate asshole. The guy who's climbed into a position and now needs to pick apart everything in front of him, with a chip on his shoulder about something that has nothing to do with you. The trap is telling yourself that if you're accommodating enough, a purchase order appears. It doesn't. What appears is late payments, calls about nothing, very little actual understanding, and a cold silence the moment you push back on anything.

There's plenty of work out there in 2026. You don't need those headaches and neither do I.

"I tried it and it didn't work"

I hear this a lot, and my honest answer is: yeah, I know. That's probably why we're talking.

Because the fact that you're asking means you still think there's something in it. You know there's a formula somewhere, it just wasn't the one you were running.

So you've got two options. Hold onto the experience and decide the whole thing is broken. Or go back through what you actually did, work out where it fell over, and start from there.

Someone who has tried and failed is a better starting point than someone who has never tried, because there's real information sitting in that failure. You're not starting from zero. You're starting from data.

The test, and it's free

If you want to know whether your offer works before spending another dollar, here's the most old-fashioned thing in this entire blog.

Print some leaflets. Stand on a corner. Talk to a hundred people walking past and count how many stop.

I'm serious. That number is roughly the number your reels are getting, and you'll have it in an hour instead of guessing at analytics for a month. Then change the pitch. Make it sharper, put something in front of it that actually grabs attention, and count again.

When people start stopping, you'll know exactly what your content needs to do, because you'll have felt it happen. And if you're direct to consumer you'll probably pick up a couple of customers while you're there.

If that all sounds like a lot, there's a version where you keep the decisions and hand over the labour.

Or start with a straight answer

Three hundred dollars, your site and socials audited, scored and prioritised. Credited to your first month if you continue, and if my honest read is that social isn't your priority this quarter, I'll tell you that instead.