What if the reason social media feels so hard right now has nothing to do with you?

I recently sat down with Melissa Davies, the social media coach inside our Inner Circle and founder of Bike Pretty. She sells a bike helmet paired with a helmet-friendly straw hat. It's highly niche, it's an investment, and people rarely rebuy. It retails for $200, with an average order value around $165.

Yet her customer acquisition cost is about $20. She barely breaks $10,000 a year in ad spend. Over the past 12 months, her average reach has been 500,000 people per month, and 1 to 3% of them click through organically to her site.

So I asked her: what's actually working on social media right now?

Thinking About Quitting Social Media? Read This First

A member posted in our group that she wanted to quit. She'd spent a year building posts three hours a day, three to five days a week. Thing is…her content was working. Some posts did really well. She was just exhausted.

Think about what you'd lose. When a potential customer finds you and sees no recent activity, she wonders if your store is dead. I do this myself. I find something cool, scroll to their links, and if they haven't posted in three years, it's a hard no. I assume they'll just take my money.

You also stop filling the top of your funnel (the people seeing your store for the very first time). Nobody can Google your brand name if they've never heard it. Social media is all about discovery, and quitting cuts off a basically free channel with no real replacement.

She booked a coaching call with Melissa, and they spent 20 minutes on why she wanted to quit and what to do instead. More on how it ended soon.

The Instagram Truth Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Melissa hears members and clients all saying the same thing.

More people are posting on Instagram than ever, but fewer are consuming that content. TikTok is taking Instagram's eyeballs, and so is YouTube Shorts since YouTube changed its Shorts algorithm in the past year. There is GOOD news though. Reach is getting slightly easier on Facebook and YouTube. If you only focus on Instagram, that could be why your reach is shrinking.

The Number That Tells You a Post Is Really Working

A good post on any platform reaches about 10% of your follower count. With 14,000 Instagram followers, that's around 1,400 people. With 10,000 Facebook followers, about 1,000. Do the math for each platform.

That's not every post. On average, only 1 to 2% of your followers see any given post, so hitting 10% means you did really well.

And that's reach, not engagement. Melissa never looks at engagement. That's for influencers. Store owners need new people.

Pull your organic posts from the last six months and find the ones that hit that 10% ballpark. Even if some are Instagram posts, don't make Instagram your primary platform.

Links are clickable on Facebook, sometimes on YouTube, and on Pinterest. Traffic is the lifeblood of a Shopify store, and if people can't click over, it's so hard to grow.

If your Instagram reach, traffic, comments, and likes are sliding, branch out to Facebook. And stop posting from your phone. The app has fewer tools, and opening Instagram costs you at least 10 minutes because the algorithm is designed to waste your time. You respond to a comment and never schedule the post. No wonder social takes some people three hours a day.

Use the free Meta Business Suite to post to Facebook and Instagram at once, customizing for each if you like. Always optimize for Facebook first, because Facebook rewards links and Instagram never will.

If your customers are on the younger side and don’t use Facebook as a social platform, Marketplace has pretty much replaced Craigslist and Kijiji, and they may be in neighborhood, interest, and sports team groups. They’re still opening the app, and good content can show up in their feed.

Why "Anyone Who Wears a Bra" Is the Wrong Answer

Thing one: talk to one specific person, not everyone. The perfect post that lands with anyone who could buy your product doesn't exist, and chasing it blocks you from making content that works.

A member who sells a bra product told Melissa her customer was "anyone who wears a bra." But the product adapts a conventional bra for racerback tanks and halter necklines and hides the straps. That points to someone fashion-conscious and sporty who often goes sleeveless. Maybe she lives somewhere hot, or works on her arms at the gym and wants to show them off. Now that's an avatar.

Melissa uses three named avatars based on real customers. Kat is 32, married, no kids, into Japanese fashion, and saving for her third trip to Japan. Heather is 40, a mom of three recovering from ankle surgery who uses a cargo bike to get her kids around. Debbie is retired with no kids and rides an e-bike to keep up with her outdoorsy partner, who rides for miles. They got the e-bike to save their relationship so they could spend time outside together.

She assigns days: Mondays for Kat, Wednesdays for Heather, Fridays for Debbie. The content doesn't have to be about her product. Heather is super into knitting, so fiber-arts content works.

A member named Jill noticed her viral posts brought in new eyeballs while her product posts fell flat. Product posts said, "Here's something I'm selling to you." Her viral post said, "I get you. I see you as a person." As Melissa put it:

When someone feels seen and then sees your product, she thinks, "This could be for me."

The Customer Research Hiding in Your Inbox

Clients often tell Melissa their customer is "a woman aged 25 to 65, and sometimes she does crafts." That’s a bit vague, though, and difficult to create a post for. A 30-year-old is in a completely different life stage than a 45-year-old.

Start with your customer service emails. Melissa once got a frantic note from a customer who'd entered the wrong address because she'd be at her summer home with the grandkids. (Hello, that's me. I shop based on where I'll be to get my packages, because I'm embarrassed to keep asking neighbors to hold them). Melissa built an avatar on the spot and named it after me: retirement age (I'm not retired), summer place, grandkids, wears mostly black, loves to travel, very busy, builds a mean charcuterie board.

No customer service emails? Think about in-person shows, where people share their whole life story in 10 minutes.

Write it down in a profile, or build one with Claude or ChatGPT. Focus on lifestyle, not age brackets. Kids at home or never had children? City or rural? Working? How do they travel? Sports, or home with a cup of tea? Aim for three avatars. Two is fine. More is great.

Stop Creating. Start Doing This Instead.

Thing two:

You're running a store, making products, and handling customer service. You can't spend eight hours on one reel. And batch-creating 50 original posts before you know what your audience responds to sounds like a prison sentence. Melissa never recommends it.

Here's the process from the 30-Day Audience Booster training inside the Inner Circle:

Don't reinvent the wheel. Repost every other month, or every 30 days if consistency is a struggle. Nobody is paying that much attention.

Prefer to put it on autopilot? Melissa helps members set up an auto list in Metricool, a tool built for social media managers. It's like a playlist that keeps reposting your winners. Setup stays laser-focused for business owners, so it's fast, and she shows members how to download the files from their best posts.

Remember the member ready to quit? In the last 20 minutes of her call, Melissa found her evergreen posts that had done real numbers and showed her how to load them into a post recycler. The member spent 90 minutes setting it up. She now posts three times a week and hasn't touched her social media in 10 months. Her store looks active, she answers comments as they come in, and she's focused on email and customer acquisition. Melissa has set clients up with a recycling system in as little as 30 minutes.

The Posting Frequency That Sounds Crazy (Until You Hear How)

Thing three: post more than feels reasonable. To grow your audience, work up to three times a day on Instagram and Facebook.

Hear her out. It's not three original posts. The Organic Audience Booster training shows you how to pull from three content libraries daily:

Going from inconsistent posting to three a day takes about six months while you build a content library. As long as you keep posting, the algorithms keep putting your content in front of your ideal customer. When she clicks organically, that's free, pre-qualified traffic.

What Free Awareness Is Really Worth

Awareness is getting on someone's radar so next time she thinks, "Oh, that's that brand I like," or, "I have to tell my friend." You can't buy that, it has to be organic.

Do the math. Spend $60, $70, or $80 in ads per customer on a $160 sale, and there's very little left after product costs, your 3PL, your email service provider, and every other monthly expense.

Melissa learned this the hard way. One of her email flows suddenly stopped performing. She traced it to two strong organic posts that had dropped off her posting cycle. That cascaded into her email flows, and her revenue dropped. So she built a better system. Now she checks posts weekly and does a new content push about once a month, always based on what worked. Maybe an hour or two a month, and no spaghetti at the wall.

Your Next Step

If you're in the Inner Circle, the full training lives in the E-commerce Roadmap. Book a one-on-one call with Melissa and she'll walk you through your avatars and recycling system, Metricool included, usually in about an hour. That's what I'd do, because then I know it'll get done. Then block a couple of hours every month, track your results, and schedule your posts.

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Learn more about the Inner Circle here: https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/inner-circle-membership