6 underrated tactics for better organic social

Happy Sunday! To the hundreds who have been emailing me back to see if I finally got an apartment, I finally got one! Now I've been trying to trick the TikTok algorithm to start showing me some good interior design content that doesn't break the bank.

To the thousands of Sunday readers who have recently joined, welcome! If you were forwarded this email, you can get it every Sunday evening by clicking here.

Here are some goodies I found this past week:

Melior. This is a new company by Ryan Markman with one goal: find companies with great growth marketers. Ryan was the co-founder/COO of Metric Digital, one of the best performance agencies that worked with brands like Hint, Bonobos, Vuori, Marine Layer, and others. He hired incredible talent, and now he's allowing you to use him to vet candidates for you. You get a free month of candidate sourcing for a limited time on his site.

Rolling Fund. We are underway now investing in companies. The first investment was made into Jolie (https://www.instagram.com/jolieskinco/), and we are going to make investments 2 & 3 this week.

When you invest into Masala Capital, you're really investing into the startups I get direct and unique access to. It's not a fund that sits for the next handful of years, I am going to be actively deploying capital into pre-seed business. Many of my past pre-seed investments (33) have increased their valuation 3-6x’d and with the caliber of the companies I’m seeing, I’m confident so will these ones. You can CLICK HERE to learn more and invest. If you have any questions just reply to this email.

Hire or Get Hired. Levels, Flipboard, Very Great, Red Antler, Ugly Drinks, Hazel, and Spritz Society are a few of the companies finding talent. Click here to get to the job board.

Casual Customers vs Biggest Fans. No Best Practices dove deep into my email from last weekend around customer cohort analysis. Check it out.

A favor. If you have 10 seconds, please reply to this email with something you think I can write about that would be helpful, tactical, and worth forwarding to your team. Rather than trying to think of topics to write about, I'd love to hear what would be helpful to you and your organization. Seriously...really appreciate it.

Carbone. Well, at least the pasta sauces. Carbone is on Shopify?! This is less of a resource, more an interesting look into where the future of cult-followed restaurants will be headed. An omni-channel restaurant flywheel: restaurants (retail), pop-ups, merchandise, product lines, advertising, content. You won't be able to tell the difference between CPG brands and good restaurants in a few years.

Ok, now let's get into today's email.

I remember at one point being in San Diego and listening to Channel 933, the iHeartRadio Top 40 station, and flipping the station after an ad came on. I thought to myself, "Why listen to ads when I can just flip the station? They don't even know if I'm listening or if I liked the ad."

Of course, as a kid, I wasn't thinking about advertising or ad units, but more just that I hated ads and the radio ads never made sense to me. It was just "ads" back then too.

When I was in 10th grade, I got really interested in digital marketing, specifically organic social media. It was easy to put up a photo on Facebook, understand what people reacted to or engaged with, and then do more of it. I could clearly see when I posted an iTunes screenshot, it prompted more song sales than when just posting a link with an iTunes link preview.

Since 2013, social has obviously changed, but there are still lots of low hanging fruit on organic social. Whether it's on Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, or Twitter... there's always room to get 1% better. As a curious and constant browser, I wanted to call out 6 underrated tactics for better organic social.

Create content for the DMs. Don't just post images of your product, or lame lifestyle images. Put out content that you're proud of. If you had one shot to share a piece of content with the entire world, you would make sure your standards for it would be high, right? Apply that across all the stuff you put out on social media. Content that people want to DM to their friends, save to a board to come back to later, provides value to someone scrolling (emotionally, literally, etc).

No one wants to see a lame product picture — just look at most major CPG company Instagram pages... the engagement is in the gutter. The reality is that social media today actually IS a world stage, so if you put good things out, it'll travel far. Lastly, you don't need a massive budget to create good content — that's just an excuse.

Feedback loops. The biggest benefit of social media is an audience you have direct access to. If you're a CPG brand, creator or a services-based business, you can decide your next move based on what the people want.

Use Instagram stories to run polls or ask for feedback. Leverage TikTok to go behind the scenes or get personal — Tik Tok loves genuine human interaction, not the polished stuff like an Instagram feed. It's also an easy way to keep your posts engaging... if no one is engaging, you're going to be lost in the algorithm.

Prevent DMs. Most people under 40 now use Instagram to look things up from brands, not just Google. If you realize that the majority of your questions, concerns, DMs, customer service tickets, and inquiries come from the same few things, make it easy for potential customers to become educated. 99% of comments ask the same question. Instead of responding privately, set up a hashtag (i.e. #SpritzFAQ) where a secondary account posts answers to the most common answers. When someone comments a question, the brand account replies with the hashtag where 9 posts live answering the question — you can add text to the thumbnail so people know what to click. Also, take advantage of the Instagram profile highlights.

Highlights, playlists, boards. Each platform has their own way to categorize content, but few use it properly. If you're a CPG brand with a retail presence, you should have all your wholesale accounts highlighted with swipe-up links going to store locators for those stores. If you get inquiries of the same info, answer the questions in a FAQ highlight. Lots of customers tagging you? Compile customer love into a highlight called "Reviews". Think of your Instagram bio + highlights + first 3 posts as your "landing page".

Shoppable products. Most social platforms now allow you to connect product feeds in, so you can tag products. Connect them! Tag all your products when you post them, just like you tag other people in your images.

The second step to this, is make sure that your product pages are optimized for random people coming from Instagram. Make it easy on the product page itself to learn more about what is being sold, why it exists, how it benefits them, how it compares to others on the market, what people think of it, and how it works. Someone coming from an organic Pinterest or Instagram post is already a high-intent user, and typically also has the higher time on sites.

If you want to take it to the next level, when you upload your product feed, add a UTM to the url so that your site knows how to differentiate that traffic. With that in place, you can do things like change the pop up from email collection to phone number collection, or make it easier to highlight a better first-time customer offer.

Leverage the algorithms. Millennials curated their feeds, but Gen Z (and the future of social) wants content curated for them. YouTube has YouTube Shorts. Instagram has Reels. Snapchat has Spotlight. Tik Tok and Pinterest pretty much entirely is this. Create content that rides the algorithm — figure out what's trending, what is about to trend (just follow creators who are early to trends to see what the trends are) and make content that fits the narrative.

It doesn't even have to be for a trend, but just publish content there. Most brands we work with see 1-2 posts at a minimum really hit the algorithm for every 15-30 they post. It's a numbers game, but you have to put that work in.

If you have 30 seconds, shoot me a reply to this email and lmk something you do well on social that you think most people drop the ball on.

On to some fun stuff...

Software/App of the Week:

Neutrl — The sustainable way to shop

New and still in beta (but you can sign up), Neutrl allows you as a brand to calculate and make orders carbon neutral. The fee funds the most respected carbon removal technologies, to ensure it's removed from the atmosphere.

These aren't large amounts of money either, maybe a couple dollars, but their beta customers have seen conversion rates go up with Neutrl enabled. As a promotion, you can even sponsor the offset as a promotion, similar to how brands sponsor donations with ShoppingGives.

Sign up for early access here.

Brand of the Week:

Looma Home - The comfiest sheets that don't break the bank.

Looma is a pretty unique DTC brand based in New York & India. They produce everything in their own factory in India, and then sell it here in the US. Being vertically integrated allows them to have such low prices, compared to other bedding companies, and still deliver an incredible product. 5 stars from me!

Thanks for sticking with me all the way to this point. I know how tempting it can be to just grab that thumb and swipe it from the left to the right side of your screen.

If you get 10 seconds, please do let me know what I can write about that would help you or your organization.

I hope you have an incredible upcoming week, stay healthy, and you get 9 hours of sleep tonight!

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