Content Isn’t The Real Problem With Your Social Strategy

[00:00:00] Content isn’t the real problem with your social strategy

If you are a digital marketer who’s felt the frustration of doing all the right things on social, yet still struggling to improve impact, this series is for you.

Brooke Sellas: Welcome to the Social Media CX podcast. I’m Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media. And each week we’ll tackle the challenges of social care head on with candidate interviews, real world case studies and actionable advice to turn your social channels into loyalty building revenue driving, dopamine machines.

[00:00:45] Treating social like a broadcast

Let me start with something I hear all the time. What should we be posting right now? How often do we need to be posting? What’s the algorithm rewarding this week? Everyone wants to talk about content when it comes to social media, but here’s the uncomfortable truth, the real problem with social media today, right now, isn’t content. It’s that most companies are still treating social like a broadcast channel while their customers are using it as a sales and support channel. So when brands finally acknowledge that conversations matter on social, oftentimes they try to automate their way through them, or they rely too heavily on AI to replace the “human work.”

That disconnect between how brands use social and how customers actually experience it is what this episode is all about.

[00:01:47] Why we skipped the 2025 State of Social Care Report

And it’s also why we’ve been working on something really big behind the scenes, which is our State of Social Care Report 2026. Which we’ll be publishing later this month.

Over the next few weeks, I’m gonna walk you through what we’re seeing and why it changes how we think and how you should think too about social media ROI entirely.

If you followed our report series before, you might notice something a little bit unusual with the upcoming report, which is that we skipped 2025 and that was intentional.

Normally, we produce the report at the beginning of the year, and we name it for last year. So the report will be coming out this month, January of 2026, and we would call it the State of Social 2025. But as I explain in the executive summary of the report, social care changed so fast in 2025 that by the time we would’ve released the report, the insights would’ve already been outdated. So instead of looking backwards, we decided to jump forward.

[00:02:49] Conversations > content

In 2026, one thing has become very clear in all of our research and client work, and that is content is no longer the digital currency that builds loyalty through social media. Conversations are. We’re operating in what we now call the experience economy, where people don’t judge brands by what they post, but how they show up when it matters. This is the shift that most organizations haven’t quite fully made yet.

[00:03:23] The shift in customer social media expectations

Customers don’t experience your brand in campaigns anymore. They experience you in moments. That could be a comment, a dm, a confused question, a frustrated reply, a pre-purchase question that sounds like: hey, quick question. Do you have this in my size? Or, do you ship to Canada? Whatever that looks like.

According to our report and research, social platforms have become the front door to brand experience, a place where customers test trust long before they ever click buy. You’ll find this clearly outlined in chapter one of the report, which is called the Evolution of Social Care. And our data, and outside data, supports this.

[00:04:12] What the data says about revenue growth

Forrester found that companies who excel across both brand experience and customer experience grow revenue up to 3.5 times faster than those who don’t. That is a lot of revenue to be had. There’s a big opportunity there. So when I hear teams say things like, we can’t prove social media ROI, what they often mean is we’re still measuring social like a publishing channel, not like an experience channel.

[00:04:43] Why most brands still miss the mark on social care

Here’s one of the most surprising things we uncovered while working on this report. Despite all this evidence, most brands still aren’t doing true social care. They’re posting, they’re monitoring mentions, they’re responding occasionally. But intentional, structured social care, the practice of delivering customer experience through social media conversations, is still undervalued and under-resourced. In chapter one, we also talk about what we call The Experience Gap, which is the widening distance between what your customers expect and what brands consistently deliver.

Forrester’s CX Index shows CX quality–and CX stands for customer experience– so customer experience quality has declined for four consecutive years, and it’s now sitting at an all time low.

Let that sink in if you work brand side, all time low customer experience has gone down for four consecutive years and it’s at an all time low.

Here’s the important nuance. It’s not that brands don’t care, it’s because they’re still operating with models that are built for tickets and not conversations. Efficiency and not emotion. Publishing and not actual presence.

[00:06:08] Micro-fractures of trust and missed conversations

Every ignored comment, every canned response, every delayed reply creates what we describe in the report as a micro fracture of trust.

You see, like any relationship, trust doesn’t usually break in one dramatic moment. Sometimes, but most of the time it erodes quietly, one interaction at a time. This is where I want you to pause and rethink how you’ve been taught to evaluate social media success. Social care isn’t support. It’s not a cost center.

When done the right way, it is a growth engine. Think back to that Forrester stat we just shared: 3.5 x faster growth for experience.

[00:06:59] Key mindset shifts for social in 2026

So in the 2026 at a glance section, you’ll find that we outline the biggest shifts that are happening right now. I’m gonna give those to you as well.

Number one is that it used to be about content, content, content, content.

We think of that synonymously when we think about social media. Now it’s about conversations.

We used to think about those conversations as support, right? We’re helping solve problems. Somebody’s angry about something, but we need to shift that mindset from support to experience. This is all about experience, and we know if we treat it like it’s an experience, we could have growth. Big growth. 3.5 x more growth.

We also tend to think about automating as much as we can when it comes to social media because there’s not enough time in the day, and we have all these other things to do, but we need to stop thinking about automating our way into these experience spaces and start thinking about how we can augment these spaces.

And finally, yes, metrics are important. I’m not saying that, so don’t come for me, but instead of solely being focused on metrics, we need to start thinking about meaning; the meaning behind these conversations. The intent behind these conversations. In plain language, the loyalty of your customers forms in the replies on social media, not through reach, not through viral content.

It’s literally happening in the experience. And when social care is done well, your response times improve. We’ve seen retention increase. We’ve seen churn decrease.

We’ve seen pre-purchase intent surfacing earlier and earlier. Pre-purchase intent just means they’re asking questions in that buying moment. They’re in that moment of zero truth that we used to call it forever ago when Google coined the term, but they’re in that moment If we can help them in that moment the research shows that that person’s more likely to buy from us.

[00:08:59] The real ROI of social media

And when you think about all this, social becomes a revenue influencing channel, not just a channel for content. That is how you get to return investment or ROI on social media. And this is how, hopefully you will do this in 2026.

If you are a digital marketer who’s felt the frustration of doing all the right things on social, yet still struggling to improve impact, this series is for you.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be breaking down the report and we’ll be talking about things like why AI without empathy creates risk. Why social listening deserves a seat at the leadership table. And why doing social care right is hard, but unavoidable. All of it’s drawn from the state of Social Care Report 2026, which again, we’ll be publishing later this month, and by the time it’s released, you’ll already understand why we wrote it, what’s inside, and how to use it to rethink your social strategy.

We also have some really cool playbooks within the pages of the report. So stick with me.

[00:10:12] Conversation as the new CX

Until then, remember if content was the campaign era, conversation is the connection era, and social care is where that connection is either built or broken.

As always, thank you so much for being here. If this show is helping you think differently about customer experience, I would absolutely love your support. Please take a minute to rate and review the review at ratethispodcast.com/smcx, that’s CX as in customer experience. When you do this, it helps us bring on more brilliant voices and keeps this community growing with intention.

Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.

Brooke Sellas: Thanks for tuning in to the Social Media CX podcast. If you loved today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to up their social care game.