The crumbs, not the cake: Are you wasting your time on social media marketing?

Don't ask "should we be on social?" — ask "where's our audience?" — start with a platform in mind and you've skipped the main question. Sometimes the honest answer is that your people aren't on there at all.

"The social media guy" has never won a client through social — in four-plus years Bon hasn't landed a single client via the platforms. The one that looked like it came through Instagram was really a relationship that already existed.

Social media isn't free — it costs nothing to post, but the time it eats is the real price. Grace Beverly didn't get lucky; she bought enough lottery tickets, over years, to win.

You're building your house on sand — a platform can turn overnight (see what one billionaire did to Twitter), and your hard-won audience can leave with it. Social gives you no foundation you actually own.

What feeds the algorithm rarely feeds your business — short, controversial, split-second-hook content is what the platforms reward, and a California jury has now found them liable for designing that pull deliberately.

Give social the crumbs, not the cake — put your energy into one substantial thing (a podcast, article, long video), then break off pieces for social. The crumbs hang together because the whole was considered.

You probably don't need to grow as fast as you think you do — the always-on hustle is a Silicon Valley export. Strong relationships and good work build a business, on or off the feed.