I’ll admit something that took me a while to say out loud.
It took me months to write this article.
Not because I didn’t have something to say. But because it had to be right. The structure, the wording, the timing. Every draft felt close but not quite there. And the longer I sat on it, the more invisible the whole thing became.
I work at a digital agency. I know better. And I still did it.
That tension is exactly what I want to talk about.
What’s actually happening on social right now
The global conversation around social media performance has shifted pretty significantly. For years, the primary metric was likes and followers. Brands optimised for them, reported on them, celebrated them. Likes and followers felt like applause.
Then something changed. Not the algorithm, really. The behaviour.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, was clear about it: DMs, reels, and recommendations are what’s driving Instagram’s growth now. The platform is reorganising itself around those features. Saves, shares, profile visits. The actions that happen when someone actually wants to hold onto a piece of content, or put it in front of someone else, those are the signals that matter.
Likes have become more of a social gesture between friends than a discovery signal for brands. A piece of content that travels quietly through DMs and gets shared to stories is doing more for your brand than a post that racks up double taps from people who scroll on and forget you.
The brands catching on globally have stopped trying to produce content that looks impressive. They’re producing content that’s worth sharing.
The trap most Caribbean brands are still in
Here’s where I have to be honest, because this is what we see most often.
A lot of brands in our market are still treating social like a billboard. Beautifully designed. Carefully worded. Approved by three departments. Posted to a mostly quiet feed, definitely needing some boost budget :)
Not because the marketing teams don’t care. They care deeply. But there’s a kind of perfectionism that creeps into social content when you’re working with established brands, or when leadership is always watching, or when everything going out the door has to reflect the company at its absolute best. Every post becomes a formal statement. Every image has to be immaculate.
And the result is content that looks like advertising. Because it is.
The problem is that people aren’t on social to be advertised to. They’re there to connect with the people and things they actually care about. A brand that shows up like a press ad in the middle of that is going to be scrolled past, no matter how polished it is.
The permission to be real on social is actually harder to get than the budget to run social. That’s the gap we spend a lot of time working with clients to close.
What “real” actually looks like
A few months ago, our team posted something on Instagram. Not a campaign. Not a designed asset. A video of us in a meeting, and somewhere in the background, everyone was drinking from something weird. A planter pot. A spray bottle. A tea press. Completely ridiculous. But what made it funny was that I totally missed everything that was happening in the room. If you know anything about me…this is the epitome of my personality. A fire could be happening and if I’m zoned in, I would not even notice.
The editing was raw. The quality wasn’t high-res. Nothing about it was polished. It was captured, edited and published the same day.
It hit over 160,000 views. More than 1,000 shares, 329 saves & 149 comments. From that video alone, we gained 219 followers, with 98% of the reel being viewed by non-followers.
That post did more to introduce 1GS to new people than our carefully produced content we’ve put out. Not because it was better made. Because it was actually us. People shared it because it was the kind of thing you send a friend with no caption needed.
That’s what the shift looks like in practice.
This is what social was always for
I started in social over ten years ago (after I decided to leave dental school in my final year, I’ll save that story for another day). One of the things that drew me to it early was what it made possible for smaller brands. For the first time, a two-person business could show up in the same feed as a company with a full marketing department. The content was the leveller. If you were interesting, if you had something real to say, you could reach people. You didn’t need the production budget.
For bigger brands, social offered something different but equally powerful. The chance to actually let people in. To show who you are behind the official version. To build the kind of familiarity that advertising can’t really manufacture.
That’s still true. In fact, it’s more true now than it was.
But somewhere along the way, a lot of brands lost the thread. Social became another communications channel managed like all the others. Formal, polished, on-message, and at arm’s length from the actual people inside the company.
The brands reconnecting with that original promise are the ones performing now. Not by accident. By making the deliberate choice to show up like a real thing, with personality, with warmth, with some willingness to be a little imperfect.
Think Long-Term
This isn’t a case against quality. Good creative matters. Brand consistency matters. Strategy definitely matters.
But quality and perfection aren’t the same thing. Perfection on social is usually the enemy of connection. And connection is what drives the metrics that actually move businesses.
Shares and saves expand your reach beyond the people who already follow you. A post that gets shared into someone’s DMs or story reaches an entirely new circle. That’s how social is supposed to work. Not by broadcasting louder. By travelling further.
The question I’d push any marketing team to sit with is this: are we producing content that’s worth sharing, or content that’s worth approving? Those two standards don’t always produce the same post.
What this means practically
A few things we’ve found that help:
- Reserve your polish for where it earns its place. A brand campaign, a launch announcement, a high-stakes campaign. Those benefit from being tight. Your weekly social content doesn’t have to carry that same weight.
- Give your team permission to be human on the feed. Behind the scenes moments, real reactions, the kind of content that shows the people inside your brand, it doesn’t dilute your brand. It adds to it.
- Start tracking the right things. If you’re measuring likes or follower growth as your primary KPI, you’re optimising for a behaviour that Instagram itself has moved on from. Look at shares, saves, and reach beyond your existing audience. That’s where the growth signal is.
- And lastly, remember, you have to think long-term. Social builds community. Community builds trust. Trust converts. None of that shows up in this week’s report, but it’s what makes the work meaningful over time.
That’s the reason I fell in love with social in the first place. Not the metrics. The genuine connection it made possible between brands and the people they wanted to reach.
We’re still capable of that. It just requires letting go of the version of perfect that’s been getting in the way.
A brand isn’t built in one post. It’s a series of interactions, compounding over time. So what’s the piece of content you’ve been sitting on because it didn’t feel ready enough? Maybe it is ready. Go approve it.
