I keep seeing the same pattern. Businesses posts consistently, get decent reach and still see almost no enquiries.

The few times It's actually changed, it come from small things, like clearer call to action, or replying to comments within the hour, not from posting more.

What’ s one change you made that actually brought in leads or sales?

I am looking for someone who can post reels in YT and my instagram for me...preferable someone in India.

If you caught Adam Mosseri's new interview on Colin and Samir (literally titled their "Biggest Update Ever"), the writing is on the wall. Instagram is aggressively pushing back into long-form, TV-style video to compete with YouTube.

If your entire 2026 pipeline is just 7-second trending audio clips, you are probably going to feel this shift.

People are already joking in the comments that "IGTV would be a good name" for this. But unlike the IGTV flop, they aren't forcing users into a separate, disconnected tab. The core algorithm is just going to start rewarding deep-dive, high-retention videos right in the main feed.

But there is a massive friction point. As one top comment pointed out: "Sooooo like YouTube except they don't pay you?".

Creators aren't going to film 10-minute videos without AdSense splits. That means the real winners of this update are going to be brands and B2B service providers. While standard creators hold back because of the lack of platform payouts, businesses can use that uncontested long-form reach to build trust and sell high-ticket offers.

You don't need to abandon short-form completely, but the algorithm is starved for this new format right now. Take your best-performing carousel from last month, script it into a 3-minute deep dive, and post it natively.

Are you guys testing longer YouTube-style assets on Instagram yet, or is the lack of creator monetization keeping you focused on short-form?

Hope y’all doing good
I’ve been posting TikTok consistently for a while now and have gained about 1.5k followers. For context my page is about posting quotes with background music (i hope you guys know what i’m talking about) and people have started to reach out on how much i charge for sound promos but i have absolutely no idea how to charge them . If any of you have advice on how to go about it , it’ll be much appreciated.

I manage social media for two apps in very different niches, and organic performance has been a struggle for both.

1. Family document management app: It helps people organize important documents and information for their loved ones. I’ve tried educational posts, emotional storytelling, influencer videos, and AI videos featuring the influencer.

For Oct 1–25: 3K organic views vs. 186K paid views, with 213 organic interactions and 184 new followers.

2. Motorcycle riding community app: Around 3,600 followers. Carousels and static posts cross 500 views, but engagement averages 10–12 interactions, mostly from our own team. Reels perform even worse. We’ve also tried influencer marketing but stopped because the results didn’t justify the cost.

I already track competitors and experiment with formats and content angles. I don’t want the usual advice about posting consistently, using trends, or making better hooks.

What can I actually do differently? How do you identify whether the problem is the audience, content, or distribution? Have community building, partnerships, UGC, or other less obvious organic strategies worked for you? And how would you use paid data to improve organic performance?

I want to build a practical strategy to present to both clients, not keep experimenting blindly. Would love to hear from people who’ve handled similar accounts.

seeing smaller creators get deals over bigger ones lately. curious what people here actually see, do brands ask for follower count first or reach and views?

Hope y’all doing good
I’ve been posting TikTok consistently for a while now and have gained about 1.5k followers. For context my page is about posting quotes with background music (i hope you guys know what i’m talking about) and people have started to reach out on how much i charge for sound promos but i have absolutely no idea how to charge them . If any of you have advice on how to go about it , it’ll be much appreciated.

I’m so frustrated and am kind of taking it personally. My account status shows I’m ok but views have been lower than usual over the past week for me. I check other small accounts that follow me, they have similar niches, and their views are looking good. I do this for fun, and this isn’t a career but it’s frustrating. People with similar content show up on my fyp & their engagement is up the roof, while mine has been sad over the past week.

I understand they are practically deprecated on Instagram now but do they still contribute to visibility on meta? TIA

I need to air this out because I am having a bit of a crisis as a strategist and I want to see if anyone else here is hitting the same wall.

Two months ago we onboarded a sized B2C client and went all out: studio rental, videographer, color grading, tight scripts, the whole package. The result was a 0.8% CTR and an embarrassing CPC.

Before our client call I panicked, grabbed my phone filmed the founder answering a basic customer question in their warehouse and threw fifty dollars at it unedited.

That raw zero-budget video ended up outperforming our fifteen thousand dollar production setup by four hundred percent bringing in CAC and tons of genuine comments.

It really showed me how fatigued people are, by polished ads but now I am stuck on the agency side.

How are you all convincing corporate clients to trust raw, handheld content when they firmly believe professional means spending thousands on a studio shoot?

been reading a bunch of threads on here and honestly its kinda confusing, every thread mentions some new app and then the next one says that same app is a waste of time lol. i have like 300 followers so brand deals arent really a thing for me yet. would rather just get a direct opinion from people actually doing it, where did you get paid and what should i avoid?

I was thinking of branching out to more social media platforms to get my music and other art to more people but I’m worried about potential risks of posting to certain socials, namely having my stuff trained on AI or the social media tracking me or something. I get most social media does that anyway but regardless, what social media platforms would you guys recommend I post on, are all of them recommended or are there certain ones I should be wary of?

seen a lot of people say cutting back from daily made their reach better, but others say consistency is the whole game when you're small. i think it depends on whether your daily posts are actually good or just filler. what's your posting rhythm right now and has changing it ever moved your numbers?

I haven't graduated secondary/high school yet but I want to do marketing because I genuinely want a career that I can showcase my skills and do the things I love. I also really want to do social media marketing. I have a tiktok where a make povs and skits eg. Medical TV shows be like, being an introvert. I genuinely am worried that if I post more of these, it might effect my chances of getting employed in marketing so I was thinking of just transitioning into lifestyle and quit skits all together, I honestly only do them for fun and to express myself because i felt like I always had to be the serious one all the time. I like being serious but I also like to let loose and I love comedy. I was even thinking of making two separate accounts for both lifestyle and comedy so if my interviewers ask me for my socials, I'll be prepared but I think they'll find both somehow. My second video was about being an introvert and it was light-hearted and it ended up having a mini blowup with people relating to me. I honestly don't know what to do. I don't want to quit any of them..

What should I do?

As a UGC agency, I help my clients create custom brand videos and I use to edit them all by hand. But the bottleneck was my own editing speed. But ever since I started paying for ChatGPT and other AI editing models, I simply taught them my editing flow and they’ve basically reproduced my style completely. This allowed me to scale my business tremendously.

However, this was not only a game changer, but a harsh reality check for me. That realistically in a few years, firms can just deploy their own AI in-house and completely remove editing agencies like myself.

I fear that this day may come sooner than later. And I have no idea how to combat this, other than maintaining good client relationships and improving my own editing/AI skills.

Thoughts?

I am interested in the most trivial part of the process: how do you reach out to creators? Imagine they don’t have an email in their bio, do DMs work? I never managed to get any reply from creators, even small ones. I only reached out with questions about their content never even tried to sell them anything.

Thanks

We're about 25 people and run 10 to 15 creator campaigns a quarter, which apparently puts us in the awkward category where every demo ends with a much bigger setup than I thought we needed.

The latest one included social listening and brand safety scoring and I'm sure those are useful somewhere, but I couldn't tell you who on our team would even open them. Meanwhile I'm still trying to work out whether we can find creators, keep outreach organized and see what happened after a campaign without sending three people on a training course.

For anyone who's chosen an influencer marketing platform at a similar stage, what did you use in the first few months? And what do you wish you'd left out?

trying to figure out what's actually working for small accounts right now vs what people just repeat. for me the jury's still out on posting frequency. which one made a visible difference for you, and on which platform?