What Happens When You Stop Asking “What Should We Post?”
And start asking, “Why would anyone want to see this?”
One of the easiest traps to fall into as a social media manager is constantly asking:
What should we post today?
What’s trending?
What do we need to promote?
What can we turn into a Reel?
What do we have enough footage for?
What does the calendar look like next week?
And eventually, you can end up with a very full content calendar that doesn’t necessarily feel like a good social strategy. You can have a million posts and still have terrible content.
Christin Hume via Unsplash
Earlier this year, we found ourselves asking different questions about the Instagram presence for DM Injury Law:
Why would someone actually want to see this?
And that question ended up changing almost everything.
The problem wasn’t a lack of content.
When I took a closer look at the Instagram strategy, the account wasn’t failing. By any means.
We were posting consistently. We had plenty of things to talk about. There was informative content, promotional content, social proof, and plenty of material that made sense for a personal injury law firm to share.
But there was a disconnect between content that made sense for the brand and content that felt native to Instagram.
Those aren’t always the same thing.
A law firm can have an excellent award, an impressive settlement, or genuinely useful information to share. That doesn’t automatically mean someone scrolling Instagram wants to stop and look at it, though.
So instead of asking how we could create more content, I started thinking about how we could make the content we were already creating feel more intentional, more human, and more like something people would actually choose to consume. That meant rethinking the strategy from the ground up.
We stopped building the feed around what we had to say.
Instead, we started building it around why someone would want to follow us.
The refreshed content strategy became:
40% Personality + Trends
35% Social Proof
20% Community
10% Giveaways
The percentages themselves weren’t the magic. The important part was what they forced us to prioritize. We needed to give people a reason to engage with the brand beyond needing a lawyer. Because realistically, most people aren’t opening Instagram thinking:
I wonder what my personal injury attorney has posted today.
They might, however, stop scrolling for something funny.
Or relatable.
Or unexpectedly useful.
Or a familiar face.
Or a story that makes them feel something.
That became the lens we started applying to our content.
Then we gave the strategy a personality.
One of my favorite parts of social media strategy is taking something that looks good on paper and figuring out how to make it actually feel like a social account.
So we introduced recurring series concepts like: Mike’d Up, Mike’s Got This, and Fun Friday.
We leaned further into trends and humor. We brought more human storytelling into our feed. And we started treating testimonials, settlements, awards, and other traditional law firm concepts as content instead of announcements.
That distinction sounds small, but it changed the way we approached the creative.
Instead of:
Here’s an award we won.
The question becomes:
How can we make this interesting enough that someone actually wants to stop scrolling?
Instead of:
Here’s another client testimonial.
It’s:
What is the story here? What can someone connect with? What makes this feel human?
Instead of:
Here’s a trend we could technically participate in.
It’s:
Does this trend actually make sense for our brand, our audience, and the personality we’re trying to build?
The goal wasn’t to make a law firm pretend to be something it wasn’t. It was to make the law firm feel like it belonged on Instagram.
The biggest shift wasn’t what we posted.
It was why we posted it.
That might be the most important lesson I’ve taken away from this project… A content strategy can have all the right pieces and still feel completely disconnected from the platform it’s living on.
You can have:
A perfectly organized content calendar
Consistent posting
Strong brand guidelines
Great photo and video
Valuable information
A long list of things your business wants to say
… And still not have a social presence people actually want to spend time with.
Because social media isn’t just a distribution channel. It’s a behavior.
People open Instagram to be entertained, inspired, informed, connected, distracted, or surprised.
Your brand is competing for attention within all of that.
So the question can’t just be “What do we want to tell people?”
It has to be: “Why would they care?”
And the results?
Since launching the refresh in July, organic engagement has increased substantially, and the account has developed a much more recognizable voice and visual identity.
But honestly, the engagement numbers aren’t even my favorite outcome. The bigger win is that the account feels different. There’s more personality. There’s more consistency in the way we show up. There’s a clearer sense of what the brand sounds like and what kind of content belongs on the feed. That is something that gets overlooked when we talk about social media performance.
Sometimes the goal isn’t to get more likes. Sometimes it’s to make someone see a post and immediately know who it came from. That’s brand recognition. That’s community. That’s building an actual social presence instead of maintaining a content calendar. Anyone can do that.
The takeaway.
I don’t think most brands need to create more content; I think they need to get better at understanding why they’re creating it in the first place.
Before adding another post to the calendar, ask: Would our audience actually want to see this?
And if the answer is no, or even maybe, that’s probably where the strategy work needs to happen. Because sometimes the answer isn’t more content (in fact, most of the time it isn’t).
It’s better thinking behind the content that you already have.
This post was first published on my Substack, If I’m Being Honest.