You have probably heard the advice for “how to social media” from many: Post consistently. Engage with your audience. Stay on top of trends. Beat the algorithm. This is what I call the social media grind.
And perhaps you have tried the grind out for your business or services, posting for a few weeks or even a few months. If the results disappointed you, you are certainly not alone! It’s common to get a handful of likes from people who will never hire you, or none at all. All that after spending hours of your week generating ideas, drafts, recording or creating, editing, and publishing.
And, like me, perhaps you felt a nagging sense that this approach does not fit your business. And it might not fit your brain or preferences, either.
You are a consultant, coach, financial advisor, or lawyer. You spent years building real expertise in your space. But competing for attention with hot takes, dance trends, and generated AI synthetic content feels wrong… because it is.
The data shows that for professional services providers, the social media grind produces diminishing returns while extracting an enormous cost in time, energy, and sanity. So let’s get into that.
The Story the Numbers Tell
Organic reach on social media has collapsed, and this now means that the effort we’re putting into our business content might not match the outcome. Especially when we’re on a small team or working on our own.
According to Social Status’s 2024 benchmarks, Facebook organic reach now sits at 1.37% of followers. Instagram engagement dropped 28% year-over-year in 2024. LinkedIn company page content appears in just 2% of user feeds.
That means if you have 1,000 followers on Facebook, roughly 14 people see your posts. You have to pay to reach the rest.
These platforms have evolved into advertising businesses. They make money when organic reach declines because that drives ad purchases. Your free content helps keep users on the platform while their algorithms decide whether your audience sees it.
I organically grew a Facebook page to nearly 90,000 followers, and over the years my reach declined to around 1% or less, unless I started to pay Meta. And you can also run into declining reach if you decide to slightly change your interest or topic base, which is what happened on a smaller scale when I tried to shift from teaching improv to teaching performance in general. It’s complicated and risky to pursue as a business, and an incredible, difficult ordeal to start a new account from scratch in 2026 (particularly if you are a professional business).
The Psychological Cost of Social Media Grind
A human toll exists beyond the math. A 2024 Billion Dollar Boy survey found that 52% of content creators have experienced burnout. Similar reports and surveys have documented even higher numbers than this.
The most telling statistic is that 65% of creators cite algorithm changes as the single most mentally taxing part of their work. The rules keep shifting for every platform. What worked last month fails this month. The platforms never explain why, and when you have limited engagement or data to work with it’s extremely difficult to guess what might work if you decide to change.
For professional services providers who already have demanding client work, adding this cognitive load creates an unsustainable situation. Trying to serve clients well while playing a game with constantly changing rules forces something to give. Or you burn out.
The Rented Land Problem
Building an audience on someone else’s platform means building on what is essentially rented land. The landlord can change the terms whenever they want.
In 2016, SocialFlow documented a 52% decline in organic reach for publishers in just seven months (described on HubSpot and several other sites, but original sources appear to be gone). These old articles detail how in 2018, Facebook’s “meaningful interactions” update caused organic reach to drop 34% almost overnight. It’s not unusual to experience a 50% decrease in impressions after Instagram decided to deprioritize one form of content over another (articles like this one is one example of this happening, which is not unusual).
Months of work and strategies refined through trial and error will, at some point, become less effective because the platform decides to make a shift in a different direction.
Your email list, website, and referral lists all belong to you, and these assets compound over time instead of depreciating with every algorithm update. Or, major structural or ownership overhauls as we have recently witnessed with TikTok and Twitter.
A Different Approach: Slow Marketing
A growing movement of marketers and business owners are stepping back from the algorithmic hamster wheel, leaving the social media grind. They call it slow marketing. This philosophy aligns well with how professional services actually grow.
Tad Hargrave, founder of Marketing for Hippies (which is a relatively short drive from us!), defines it this way: “Slow Marketing means that even figuring out our core platform and finding our voice takes time. It’s like making tea, sometimes we just need to steep for a while in figuring out what we’re all about. It means that instead of pressuring people to buy right now, we encourage them to sleep on it and sit with it to make sure it’s really a fit.”
The core principles focus on building genuine relationships over time and creating fewer but more valuable pieces of content. You respect your audience’s decision-making process, and you design marketing systems that do not require constant online presence.
Yeah, you can record your podcast and then go touch some grass. Or a douglas fir tree, in my case.
Proof It Works: Consultants Thriving Without the Grind
The theoretical case is compelling to me, but the examples I’ve seen are even more persuasive and has caused my shift to this general mindset. And it’s not just because I decided to stop posting on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok because my brain couldn’t take it anymore.
Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, has never had a social media account. Yet he has sold millions of books. His blog draws over two million visitors annually and his podcast reaches a substantial audience. His TEDx talk on quitting social media has nearly six million views.
Kate Kordsmeier quit social media in 2021 and her business grew 165% in the first year. She later took a six-month sabbatical working less than five hours monthly and still earned nearly six figures.
Paul Jarvis, author of Company of One and co-founder of Fathom Analytics, completely quit social media and the internet in 2020 after building a successful newsletter and working with clients including Microsoft and Mercedes-Benz.
These use cases show that it is possible to find better channels for their specific audiences, which is the trajectory that StereoForest is taking in our work.
What Actually Works for Professional Services
Consultants and coaches who grow sustainably tend to focus on three specific channels.
Email newsletters give you direct access to people who explicitly asked to hear from you. Email marketing returns roughly $36-42 for every dollar spent compared to approximately $2.80 for social media. Plus you own the list. You can move the list to a different server. Your main consideration is how inboxes are handled over time, as opposed to the algorithms or platforms themselves.
SEO-focused content (and, possibly, GEO-focused content) connects you with people actively searching for solutions. This can happen with your website or your podcast episodes. When someone searches “how to structure a consulting retainer” or “video production for thought leaders,” they have intent. They look for help while social media users mostly look for entertainment. And SEO seems to be prioritizing intent, authority, and trust in more recent years.
Referral systems leverage the fact that 92% of consumers trust word-of-mouth over all other forms of marketing. B2B referrals show 70% higher conversion rates and 69% faster closing times than other lead sources.
Each of these assets compound over time. A podcast episode, for example, continues generating traffic years after you publish it. An email subscriber who trusts you might tell a friend by forwarding your message. A client who got great results tells their network. As long as your assets provide value it can have a much greater ROI than a reel.
The Permission to Do Less (And Do It Better)
Mark Schaefer, author of Marketing Rebellion, argues that we have entered a “marketing rebellion”(pdf) where traditional interruptive tactics have stopped working. His central thesis is that the most human approach wins.
For professional services this means leaning into what you already do well. Deep expertise. Real relationships. Genuine conversations. The kind of trust that develops over months and years rather than seconds of scroll time while the commercials run on YouTube.
So you really don’t need to become a content creator to grow your practice or your services. You only really need enough visibility so the right people can find you when they are ready, and have enough to start trusting your voice or your business.
That might mean one solid blog post, or video, or podcast episode per month (or whatever interval works for YOU) that actually helps someone. It might mean a newsletter that shares your genuine perspective. It could include a few podcast guest appearances per quarter on shows your clients listen to, or strategic conversations with people who can refer work your way.
In other words, there are many other ways to achieve what you need without creating a bunch of Shorts or Reels.
Getting Started with Owned Assets
If you have been grinding on social media with minimal results then consider an experiment.
For the next 90 days redirect that time toward one owned asset. Start a newsletter, record a podcast episode (it can be a voice note on your phone!), or write three substantial blog posts or articles.
Track what happens, internally. I’ve heard from professionals who make this shift report feeling less stressed and seeing better business outcomes. I’m experiencing it myself, too. And this is because the math favours depth over breadth when you sell expertise.
Your visibility relies on being findable when the right person needs what you offer rather than algorithm performance.
If you’re ready to create a set of videos or podcast to build your credibility and trust, check out our services here.
Last Updated: January 20, 2026.
