Welcome to Issue 41 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about how to use storytelling to grow your brand. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.)

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Hello Reader,

My mother has never chased likes—at least, not online.

Unlike me, she has lived and worked entirely in the real world throughout the majority of her life. And it's been a pretty remarkable life, at that.

Raised by young American expats, she spent her childhood bouncing between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran in the 1950s and 60s. Later, she moved to the Yucatán, just as Cancún was transforming from a sleepy coastline of coconut plantations and fishing villages into a global party capital.

In other words, places that were culturally rich, wildly diverse, and constantly changing.

But for the past 30 years, she’s lived in Auburn, Alabama—my grandmother’s hometown, and the place we moved when I was eight. It’s the kind of town people retreat to after a life of adventure because it's stable, predictable, and a solid place to put down roots.

But also, like so many small American towns, it's entirely disconnected from the rest of the world.

At some point after I left for college, that connection, the one my mom once lived out in real time, started happening through a screen. And Instagram, specifically, became her window to the world.

She used it to escape the smallness of her surroundings and see the world through other people’s lives. It gave her a sense of connection to places and people she’d never otherwise encounter.

That was the original promise of social media.

Facebook was supposed to help us reconnect with old friends, while Instagram was for exploring new people and places. Twitter, meanwhile, was an online playground to spark fresh ideas and start powerful movements.

But like most tech platforms, that promise was never the business model or the product. The product was always our attention.

And as the platforms grew, so did their appetite for our attention. Connection just became content, and sharing became performance. Our efforts to build community turned into competition for reach, and growth-at-all-costs became the entire game.

Now, social media doesn’t feel like a window to the world as much as it feels like a slot machine.

But if you’re seeing what I’m seeing, I think we’ve finally hit our ceiling. Everyone feels wiped by the algorithmic race, and we've recognized that the returns are diminishing.

The only way forward might just be back through the thing we wanted in the first place: real, human connection.

Call me an optimist, but I can see that the pendulum is swinging.

A Good Perspective

We’re living through the peak of social media as we know it. And while I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove it, the numbers tell the real story.

The research shows that the number of people getting on social has plateaued at 82% since 2021 and isn’t budging. While a lot of people are still scrolling, the numbers have remained stagnant for the past four years. And global minutes spent per day on these platforms have actually started to decrease.

Meanwhile, scroll any social feed for more than five minutes and you’ll inevitably see a post from someone talking about touching grass or outlining their social media detox routine.

It’s the same conversation people are having about their phone usage and, interestingly, now AI tools. In case you haven’t seen it, people are publicly declaring that they’re breaking up with their ChatGPT.

Maybe you’re feeling it too. Maybe you’re posting less, consuming less, and craving something deeper.

The root of the issue in all of these cases is the same thing: A lack of real, necessary connection.

With social media, we feel disconnected from what’s real. With our phones, we feel disconnected from our lives. And with AI, we feel disconnected from our voice.

It’s like a big, unchecked social experiment that’s pushed us to perform connection, not feel it.

As I mentioned earlier, part of the problem is our focus on reach, virality, and follower growth, which the platform's business model relies on.

And our adherence to an outdated playbook for how to use these platforms to build our own personal brand and grow our businesses is ultimately what's going to keep holding us back.

​As Jay Clouse recently pointed out, the way we’ve learned to create on these platforms is based on old assumptions. It used to be that more followers equaled more reach, which meant a better shot at converting those followers into subscribers.

But that’s not true anymore. Baseline reach has become decoupled from follower count because platforms want to get the most engaging content to the largest number of relevant viewers.

In other words: Platforms no longer care who follows you. They care about who engages with you. And that’s because they’re optimizing for time-on-platform, not your audience growth.

Like everything else they're optimizing for, that works great for their business model. But for creators like us, it means we’re competing with every post, not just the people our followers follow.

This is why the stuff that goes viral with tons of engagement is the stuff that appeals to the masses.

And listen, I’ve talked to people who frequently go viral. Believe me, you don’t want it.

On a panel I spoke on this week alongside Becca Chambers, who constantly goes viral, she said something that really struck a chord with me (and elicited an audible gasp from the audience).

She said that any time she goes mega viral, she reaches a ton of people who aren’t her people. In fact, she said, she gets death threats. One of her most viral hits (which leaned slightly political) resulted in trolls calling her on her cell phone to insult and threaten her life.

I don’t know about you, but no thanks. I’m good with resonating with just a few people who won't troll me. People who align with my values and my way of being in the world.

A Good Takeaway

As Becca pointed out, viral reach does not equal aligned reach. And alignment is the new name of the game.

Even people like Jay, who’s built a 7-figure business off the back of social media, is taking a step back to recalibrate and connect with his small, tighter community of people.

He’s posting less frequently, and when he does show up, it’s less polished and more personal. From what I’ve gathered, he’s focused on more in-person events and relationship-building channels (like his newsletter and podcast), and only showing up on social every few days to tell us how it’s going or how he’s feeling.

While I only follow him on LinkedIn, I’ve noticed (unsurprisingly) that his engagement, which had been tanking for months, has gone back up. (Like, way up.)

All of this is actually great news for those of us who never wanted to play the numbers game in the first place.

What’s “working” for people like you and me now is fewer posts and a deeper, more connected presence.

​Heather Parady is another great example of someone who's playing this new, more fulfilling social game. I’ve been binge-watching her podcast after getting booked to be on it, and she's also (almost-sort-of-maybe) convincing me to check out Instagram again.

She told me that someone warned her to stay off Instagram because videos with depth don't have a chance there. She responded, “Watch me,” and as you can see, she’s proving the naysayers wrong.

Something she said that stuck with me was that in order to create from a place of depth, we need to stop caring about who’s watching and start paying attention to the people who are actually listening.

That means not creating for the masses or worrying about reach. It means creating more of the stuff that gets just a few of the right people to say: “This.” Or “I feel seen.” Or, “thank you for articulating that thing I’ve been feeling.”

Here’s what else I’m seeing work on social from people like Jay, Heather, Becca, and many others:

Show up with your story, but do it less. Your personal story probably won’t go viral. And that’s a good thing, because it will resonate with the right people. It will help someone feel seen and, in turn, become more invested in you, your ideas, and your work.

Put your spin on everything. Don’t just parrot what you’re seeing in your industry. Take note of what you’re noticing and give us your filtered take. For instance, when I wrote about noticing what’s happening with AI adoption, Erica Schneider said something similar but targeted it to her audience in her typical snarky style. Same insight, different (and unique) lens.

Get out of your echo chamber. When I talk about creating connection, I don’t just mean making people feel something. I mean helping people understand something by connecting the dots on trends, patterns, news, and cultural movements that impact their work or lives. The most innovative thinking comes from looking for inspiration outside your industry and certainly outside of your social media echo chamber. (More ideas on this next week.)

A Good Last Word

I think we can all agree that connection happens when we decide to show up as ourselves for the people who actually matter, and not for an algorithm.

The way I’m now approaching social is by thinking about creating for an audience that’s smaller, smarter, and more sincere.

I believe that brands, businesses, and creators who fundamentally understand this shift—who focus on meaning over metrics, depth over reach, and connection over performance—are the ones who will thrive in what comes next.

For us, the human users, the tool was always supposed to help us connect. Maybe it's finally time to use it that way.

A Few Good Resources

1. If you have trouble getting out to get inspired, Rob Walker talked to the NYT about ways to trick yourself into taking a walk.
2. ​A great piece on how we've moved from "facts" to "feels" and thoughts on the rise of the "intimacy economy."
3. ​A list of all the best books on storytelling I plan to read and give you my Cliff's notes about. Or, you can read them yourself.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee