By the way, I have seen the very impressive behind-the-scenes footage that Apple shared of their MacBook Neo commercial. The virality has generated a flurry of think pieces about how brands are posting BTS to prove they didn’t use AI. So it’s probably a good time to celebrate the one-year anniversary of writing my “proof of reality” post! Last April I wrote, “As some brands slopify themselves, it will be the ones that invest even deeper in good creative that will stand out. With this, we’ll see a rise in what I am calling ‘proof of reality’ posts—videos, images, and captions that clarify how specific creative was made.” Spot on, I’d say.

Here’s what is in today’s newsletter:

• Why Adam Mosseri thinks follower count is a misleading metric

• Opt-in vs opt-out social media

• I asked , ’s social strategist and trusted collaborator, about how to promote a book (or anything!) online right now

• Duolingo is having trouble reaching their 17M TikTok followers

• Three post formats to try this week

• The choreographer your brand should work with before Gap does

• A big idea for a skincare brand

Read more

Many of the responses have come through private messages and DMs, with people letting me know they gave it a “silent repost” out of fear that their boss would see anything public. One person shared, “It made me (and my work BFFs) feel less lonely and crazy.” It’s on track to be one of my most-viewed sends so I’m hoping at least a few of your bosses have read it.

Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• A new approach to tourism social media

• This brand might owe up to $20M for using unlicensed music

• Emily Sweeney from The Boston Globe shares a social video tip

• Five post formats to try this week

• A sponsored post with 35.2M views

• The only Coachella influencer trip I liked

Read more

In the weeks that followed my discovery of the post, I’ve been having conversations with marketers about what it’s like to be on a team where leadership is obsessed with AI. While the news stories around how AI is impacting marketing mostly revolve around job loss—a recent Adweek headline reads “65% of Marketing Jobs May Not Survive AI”, for example—I haven’t heard about how it’s impacting those who are still in those jobs. It’s clear these fear-inducing headlines are trickling down, with leadership scrambling to make sure they aren’t left behind. What is it like working for one of those bosses right now?

“Demoralizing as hell”

When I posted the Reddit screenshot on my LinkedIn, I received almost 200 comments. One read, “It didn’t matter that I was writing excellent content — [the CEO] fully believed AI was better at everything. It was so discouraging and made the day-to-day of my job miserable. And who can create good, engaging content from that mindset?”

I heard many more examples just like this. That leadership feedback is now relegated to their AI chatbot of choice. Copy, briefs, and campaigns all run through AI. One person shared with me, “My managers keep taking my copy that’s with them for final approval, running it through AI, and going ‘here, use this.’ A huge waste of time and effort on everyone’s part, not to mention demoralizing as hell.”

Marketers also shared that they’ll look to their boss for feedback on something and immediately get told to ask AI instead. One commenter on the Reddit thread said, “CEO was like ‘don’t share anything (i.e. drafts for review) if you haven’t run it through AI.’” Another person told me, “Literally every action item from a meeting is met with ‘just ask Claude it’. Even creative hooks for marketing.” To a boss, that’s just them being “efficient”. To an employee, that’s their boss saying, “I trust AI more than I trust you or myself.” That has an impact on job satisfaction. I heard from a few marketers who have left jobs in part due to this sort of behavior.

I should mention that feedback and approvals have always been a frustrating dance in marketing, even before AI. I covered it here. But at least there was a mutual understanding that your manager was actually taking the time to review the thing you had worked hard on. Even if the feedback wasn’t what you wanted to hear, it came from a place of assumed expertise. Now it feels like AI is the final approver.

Not only is leadership using AI in their own work, but they are forcing employees to use it as well. The problem is that many of the tasks that bosses are asking their team to use AI for are the exact ones that made them want to work in marketing in the first place. Brainstorming. Writing clever copy. Thinking outside of the box. One marketer told me, “It feels like our bosses are more intent on using AI to take away the fun parts of our job instead of automating the more menial tasks that take up so much of our time day-to-day.”

Some employees are finding workarounds. One person shared that their boss “doesn’t care about his team’s experience and expertise. He wants a summary from Copilot instead. We’ve started writing our own summaries and putting it on fake Copilot chats to get him to listen to us.”

Outsourced gut instinct

So much of good marketing is instincts. Seeing the signs before anyone else. Translating a spark into a smart campaign. Knowing the line between brilliance and brash. With AI, we’re watching decision makers run big ideas through a machine that finds the median.

One of the people who left their job in part due to an AI-obsessed boss shared the worst offense. Their boss would put memes meant to be posted on social pages into Claude to see if they were funny.

I asked some of the marketers I spoke with if their boss’s use of AI has changed their perception of them. Many said it did. When the person who is supposedly in a role because of their experience and intelligence is constantly outsourcing their instincts to AI, it says to a team, “I don’t trust my own opinions on humor, storytelling, and marketing”. Which, if that’s the case, wouldn’t that make those leadership jobs the most susceptible to be replaced by AI?

One person shared, “It validates to me how absolutely unqualified and inept these people in C-suite positions are that they need a machine/robot to validate their opinions because they have no real POV and strategy themselves. They so desperately want to always be the right answer in the room. To have a machine that can’t argue back and essentially feeds their own thoughts back to them is a case study in the narcissism of executive leadership.”

“Sometimes it kind of feels like I’m training my replacement”

That’s another comment that a marketer left on my LinkedIn post.

As I was writing this piece, I came across an interview with the co-founder of AI note taking app Granola on ACCESS. In it, the co-founder said that the CEOs of companies using Granola are making it a requirement that their employees run the note taker during all meetings because “they all kind of realize that it’s going to be such valuable context for all of the internal AI agents doing the work in the future.” Even if you are just using AI for meeting notes, it’s also providing training data for the tools that some executives want to replace you with.

It’s statements like the above that make it unsurprising that a recent Stanford study found AI experts and the U.S. public have very different perspectives on AI’s future. On how people do their jobs, 73% of experts expect AI to provide a positive impact compared to just 23% of the public. Is the expert opinion optimistic because of the actual opportunity of AI? Or is it because the expert is likely financially tied to there being an opportunity in the first place?

I heard that many companies now have questions about AI usage in job interviews and performance reviews. Gold stars for prompting. But when every employee is using AI, what’s left? As one person put it, “Lowkey it sometimes feels like my job is ‘I’ll have my AI talk to your AI’”.

For many marketers, they unfortunately feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. Someone shared with me, “I’m relatively early on in my career and am faced with this uncomfortable situation where I either need to fully embrace AI to feel secure in my job or risk ‘getting behind’ and not meeting performance expectations.”

These feelings are shared by veteran marketers as well. One told me, “We’re on a runaway AI train with no breaks — and even less strategic direction. I’ve been doing this for 13 years and this is no longer the marketer I want to be.”

Where’s the strategy?

My point here isn’t to judge the work of AI (I already did that here), but to talk about the way it’s being rolled out to marketing teams. I am not naive enough to think that the answer is for companies to stop using it altogether. But, just like any other type of big company change, there needs to be an implementation strategy.

A recent Gallup poll found that “while 44% of employees say their organization has begun integrating AI, only 22% say their organization has communicated a clear plan or strategy for doing so.” That’s a problem. Any time that I’ve been in a job where a process-disrupting software is rolled out, there has been change management. A slow, considered approach to how the new tool is marketed internally and adopted team-wide. Usually there is someone on the software team assigned to the company, hand holding and educating. That’s not happening with AI tools.

Right now the adoption of AI on marketing teams feels more like a scramble than a strategy. A race to be the first without thinking of the ramifications. One person shared, “There has been no official training, guidance, or even guardrails for how we are expected to use or adopt AI tools, just a directive that we should be doing it as much as possible.”

As a recent article in Slate put it, “Unless organizations develop clear strategies, A.I. in the workplace becomes a bull in a china shop—with those who never even wanted it tasked with cleaning up the mess.”

So much of the dialogue around AI focuses on the long-term employment effects. There’s also something urgent happening in the here and now. Leadership is being sold a future where creative work is done by AI agents and moving at reckless speeds to not get left behind. Meanwhile, marketing teams—and I am sure teams across many industries—are feeling increasingly dehumanized and unsatisfied in their roles because of the way AI is being implemented without any vision or care.

In short, we’re all losing our minds.

Cartoons by Ryan Cecil Smith

If you enjoy free essays like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Discord community. One member shared, “The Link in Bio Discord has been an absolutely invaluable part of my growth as a social media professional. It’s allowed me to meet so many fascinating and talented folks in an industry that can often feel like living on an island, and helped me contextualize a lot of the mysteries of social.”

Subscribe now

It might even be an educational expense at your company! Here’s a template for you to use when asking.

Finally, if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making this newsletter possible! I’ll be back Thursday with the this week’s strategy send.

On Tuesday, WIRED published an article digging into how Chaotic Good Projects worked with the band Geese. The headline? The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop. Psyop! They wrote, “Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm.” The Twitter conversation immediately picked back up.

It’s not often that marketing discourse makes my head spin. Here’s a peek inside my brain on Tuesday:

This is just how marketing works. Get used to it.

But if they are paying people to post a song. Shouldn’t it be disclosed as an ad?

I wonder if my favorite SpongeBob Squarepants edit to Geese was part of the campaign…

It doesn’t matter that this is “just how marketing works”. How fans and consumers perceive marketing is just as important as the marketing itself.

Is it ethical?

Wait, the FTC told Billboard that accounts don’t need disclose if they are paid to use a song.

Maybe it’s just that this specific tactic doesn’t match the “brand” of Geese.

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing but when does it go too far?

I should log off.

For today’s newsletter, I wanted to talk to someone who works in music marketing. Kalesha Madlani has held roles at places like Sony Music, Epic Records, Interscope Records, and now works in marketing at SoundCloud. She’s worked with artists like Lana Del Rey and Zara Larsson. Below we talk about her time running @1DUpdatesOnline, what she thinks of the term “industry plant”, and why she hopes more teams lean into direct-to-fan marketing.

Rachel Karten: First, can you tell me a little bit about your background in marketing and music?

Kalesha Madlani: I got my start in music by running one of the biggest fan pages in history (I was eclipsed by the Blinks when Blackpink came around). I ran @1DUpdatesOnline, and had nearly a million followers at 17 years old. I leveraged the fan account to live tweet on behalf of the band at events and award shows, which ultimately lead to my first internship at Sony Music. I’ve advocated for fans and fandom long before ‘superfan’ was a buzzword, back when the industry still thought it was uncool, and everything I do in music leads back to my ‘why’—I do it all for the fans!

I’ve spent most of my career in between music and tech, working frontline at major record labels and at music-tech companies leading partnerships.

At Epic Records, I supported releases across the entire roster—Travis Scott, 21 Savage, Meghan Trainor, Zara Larsson, Mimi Webb, to name a few. At Interscope Records I led digital strategy for Lana Del Rey, Jon Batiste, Willow, Ellie Goulding, Gwen Stefani, and more.

Following my time at record labels, I launched my own creative advisory.

Now, at SoundCloud, I work closely with our internal team and joint-venture partners to identify artists before labels catch wind of them, and offer them white glove artist services—marketing, digital, creative, project management, release strategy, commercial strategy, etc—to prepare them for the next step in their career. It’s a great opportunity to be a part of an artists early journey and help them out so they don’t go into these label meetings blind. Most artists have no idea what they can expect from a label or manager and by offering them white glove artist services, we can provide them with a launchpad for success.

Rachel: I have to start with Geese-gate. What was your reaction to the reaction?

Kalesha: I laughed, honestly. Clipping is such an old strategy. It’s not even innovative anymore. And Geese of all artists! I think most people have no idea how the music business works and they would have a stroke if they really knew what goes into making an artist pop nowadays.

Rachel: What other social media marketing tactics are popular in music that you think might surprise fans?

Kalesha: So many! Most “fan pages”, especially for newer artists, are team led. You can confirm an artists fan pages are team lead a few different ways:

1. Number of fan pages and viral TikToks do not match up to number of tickets sold

2. Fans at concerts only know the TikTok snippet of a song

3. Fan page doesn’t have “standard” fan behavior (no photos of the fan, no emotional language, no “fan account” mention in the bio—this is necessary to avoid copyright issues, but if its team led, they’re already whitelisting the account—the account always has information early, etc.

Rachel: Can you manufacture fandom for an artist or band?

Kalesha: The best thing to keep in mind is very rarely is anything on the internet an accident. Everything is planned and nothing is real. While you can manufacture awareness with a hefty budget, you can’t manufacture fandom. That’s an experience that requires years of work and buy in from every angle—artist, manager, label, agent, and, of course, the fans. While you can manufacture the idea of fandom through virality, smoke and mirrors, I do believe we’re going to witness a pendulum shift very soon. People are getting fatigued and marketers need to switch things up.

As a future thinking marketer, some of my focuses moving forward are: direct-to-fan marketing, events and experiential, creative OOH, intentional livestreams, and creating safety and meaning for the community. I’ve coined the term “the meaning economy”, which I outline in my advisory white paper here.

Rachel: What do you think people mean when they accuse someone of being an “industry plant”?

Kalesha: There’s really no such thing. This industry moves off of relationships, it’s all about who knows you. Most people who use the term “industry plant” have no clue what they’re talking about. Most “industry plants” have 5-10 years of hard work under their belt. Blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of money go into making a star.

Rachel: You’ve worked in this industry for a long time. These interest-based algorithms seem like a real shift in how both artists and bands post. What are some of the ways music marketing has changed due to that?

Kalesha: Before, artists would get signed to record labels and were promoted via relationships the labels had with cultural accounts—TV, press, film, media, etc. Nowadays, so many of those institutions no longer exist or no longer move the needle. The tech companies have more power than the media platforms do, which is why you only see marquee artists getting support from Meta, TikTok, Snap, etc. It’s impossible to service everyone, so you have to pick and choose.

The old model of A&R has also changed how artists are signed and marketed. Before, a kid nobody knew would get signed and labels would market the hell out of them until they became a star. Nowadays, nearly every label owns some distribution company that provides them with data. For example, when a major label purchases a distributor, the data from all of the developing artists uploading their music to these free or cheap distributors is given to the major labels. The labels have certain algorithms that trigger alerts whenever an artist reaches a certain threshold, using whatever data they see fit (streams, followers, impressions, etc), and once the trigger hits, the A&R process begins. You have to have motion now in order to get signed or even considered.

Rachel: Are there any bands or artists that you think are doing a great job of showing up on social media right now?

Kalesha: So many, and it’s a spectrum. On the independent side, I love Liim—a Harlem based alt/hip hop artist. He uses social media in such an authentic, genuine way and has leveraged the “finsta” trend to generate hype around him and his music. He’s been cosigned by Tyler The Creator, ASAP Rocky, Joey Bada$$ and more. He’s up next for sure.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have groups like Katseye who have an ultra manufactured machine around their marketing—the girls have a dedicated content team that goes everywhere with them. Before rehearsals even begin, they spend at least an hour shooting TikToks. Before shows, all the girls get content for both the Katseye page and their personal pages. As industry darlings, they also get tons of support from the platforms—Meta, TikTok, etc.

At the end of the day, it’s less about the artist and more about the team behind them. There’s so much turnover in music marketing—with layoffs and never ending poaching, people are hopping around and not taking their roster with them. So one day an artist will be on top and the next day they’ll be silent because their content / digital / marketing / seeding person left, or the label ran out of budget to pay the secret nerdy teams that are boosting everyone online.

There should be awards for the best digital marketers, they don’t get enough recognition for the work they do.

On the artist side, I’d love to see more long term focus on content and social. More artist teams need to build out internal agencies. Due to lack of resources and headcount, it seems like artists only get invested in when they’re having a moment (see Zara Larsson for example). The talent has always been there but the digital budget was unlocked only after she had her viral meme.

Rachel: What do you love about working in music marketing?

Kalesha: I genuinely love telling stories and creating fun experiences for fans. The more depth an artist has, the better story I can tell. I come from a superfan background, so this is my way of paying it forward.

What I’m scrolling

The New York Public Library posted a Dic Pic. Short for Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, of course. In Link in Bio’s recent trend report, Paulina Mangubat shared that our feeds would get more ribald…but with purpose. This is a good example of that. So is NYGov’s “hole filling season” post that has 74K likes.

This video from a new bandage company has 601K views and 48K likes. So much of a social launch strategy is spent overthinking photoshoots and grids, when videos like this are what actually move the needle.

Is the best part about Instagram Edits the analytics? Samantha Yehle called out on LinkedIn that the editing tool now lists engagement metrics in order of importance to reach.

I love Peloton’s ad with Hudson Williams. It’s directed by Bethany Vargas, who also directed Gap’s Katseye ad and Young Miko ad.

A.I. has a message problem of its own making. Great read from in The New Yorker. “A more effective strategy might be for A.I. executives to stop appointing themselves as the only arbiters of safety, to stop asking for blind faith, and to start fostering a system of external accountability, with input and involvement from the public.”

Every account right now is asking their followers to vote for them in The Webby’s, but this creator did it best. Friend of the newsletter Max Zavidow filmed his mom handing out flyers in a park and asking people to vote. It’s wholesome and also clearly gets his message across. A good lesson in making a big audience ask entertaining.

Carvel made one person’s day and got 2.1M views. It was in response to this viral video. Too many brands would look at the original viral video, see the user has under 10K followers, leave a comment, and move on. Instead, brands should be looking at the velocity of a story—no matter the follower count of who posted!—and if there’s a way to supercharge it.

Before you go, check out the Link in Bio Job Board! There are new roles from The RealReal, J.Crew, JPMorganChase, and more.

Finally, if you enjoy free interviews like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Discord community.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making this newsletter possible!

Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• I spoke to the agency behind @arbysboys and @not_spiritairlines

• The Instagram Explore page is changing…

• Why I’m bullish on ShopMy’s new Substack

• Four post formats to try this week

• The skincare brand YouTube channel that got 8M views in 30 days

Read more

The end of the report focuses on how brands are refocusing on resonance. Ditching quick trends and creating posts that actually stick. While I was writing that section, I thought about the campaigns from the last three months that still felt top of mind to me. One I kept coming back to was SheaMoisture’s Silk Press Conference, where stylist Law Roach interrupts a “silk press conference” between Clarke Peoples, Kirah Ominique, Masai Russell, and Serena Page. It’s clever, entertaining, and somehow still heroes the brand’s new product. As one commenter put it, “I just love that we’re making marketing fun again 😍 ATE!” The campaign has over 3M views across platforms.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Alyssa Ackerman, Social Lead at SheaMoisture, to understand how the campaign came together. (It was born out of a sticky note brainstorm!) Alyssa is also the Creative Editorial Director at CultureCon and The Creative Collective NYC, where she oversees all creative and editorial output across social, email, website, and experiential. She previously worked at or consulted for Topicals, Hypebeast, Parkwood Entertainment, Refinery29, BREAD, Farmacy Beauty, and more.

A big part of why SheaMoisture’s campaign resonated is because it made their audience feel seen. As Alyssa tells me below, “I never try to make content go viral…I’m trying to make content that makes someone feel seen—and if it goes viral, that’s because we got the first part right.” I talk to Alyssa about her favorite tools for content planning, the role instinct plays in her strategy, and why social should be there to build the foundation of a campaign and not be “handed the keys after the house was already built”.

Rachel Karten: If you had to sum up your social media philosophy, what would it be?

Alyssa Ackerman: The best social doesn’t follow culture, it understands it well enough to move with it.

That distinction matters more than people realize. Anyone can hop on a trend. And any brand with a big enough budget can hire an agency to reverse-engineer what’s working and produce a version of it two days later (sometimes hours, if they’re really good 😉) . What I care about—and what I’ve built my unique sauce around—is something harder to replicate: it’s the kind of cultural fluency that lets a brand show up in a way that feels native, not performed.

That fluency starts with listening. Like, really listening—not just to what your audience is saying about your brand, but how they’re talking to each other, what they’re celebrating, what they’re tired of, and what kind of content makes them feel like someone finally gets it. When you build from that place, social stops being a distribution channel and starts being a relationship. And relationships, over time, become the thing that no algorithm update or competitor budget can take from you. You own the #1 spot on their story lists. You’re the pinned conversation in their DMs. You’re the one they want to hear from, not the one they quietly mute.

I never try to make content go viral (anyone who still says this should remove from their vocabulary stat). I’m trying to make content that makes someone feel seen—and if it goes viral, that’s because we got the first part right.

Rachel: About a year ago you wiped SheaMoisture’s feed and started fresh. What were some of the big changes you made to how the brand shows up online?

Alyssa: Shea is a special brand to be a part of. There’s so much heritage there to respect. But years of history also comes with the weight of old habits—and the very real need to capture the hearts of a new generation who’d rather reach for the trendy new haircare line from their favorite influencer or celebrity.

I came in as a strategist tasked with building their new annual playbook. A brand refresh was already underway, and a strong social perspective was needed to help tell that story in a way that honored the brand’s legacy while signaling to new audiences who the OG in Black beauty really is—one of my favorite phrases I coined for them. After playbook was done, I was invited to join the team full-time.

Some of the biggest changes I made centered on visual content first. Our creative director, ShaNiece Pyles and her team had captured hair, versatility, and expression so beautifully—I knew I wanted that work to live across every format, every piece of real estate I owned. It was bold, fresh, and an undeniable representation of Black girlhood.

Beyond visuals, I knew how important it was for our audience to not only see herself, but to hear herself. Shea had long been associated with the aunties—and honestly, to some, it probably still is, and rightfully so. But in this new era, I wanted us to claim authority and cultural relevance. Not through gen-z speak or borrowed slang, but in the ways she and we actually talk: playful, casual, and 100% ownable.

I also had the pleasure of collaborating with my Topicals-alumni, Imani Moss, on influencer and social crossovers—one of my many favorite places to play. She had the it-girls that worked for Shea’s new direction, I had the vision for how it would live on social, and together we created some of the brand’s best social-owned moments. That kind of cross-collaboration is what I believe helped put Shea back on the map in a genuinely remarkable way.

Rachel: I want to zoom into your recent Silk Press Conference campaign. You’ve shared that it was born out of a “dream like you have no budget cap” sticky note brainstorm. Do you remember what was written on that sticky note?

Alyssa: Honestly? Not even a little. There were hundreds of sticky notes by the end of that eight-hour day.

What I can tell you is that the session itself was magic—and that’s largely a credit to our Head of Marketing, Reema Amin. I’ve sat on a lot of marketing and creative teams over the years, and I tell her often: this is my first experience working with a marketing lead who truly gets social. Not “social-first” as a buzzword, but someone who genuinely sees eye to eye with me and understands that leading with this mindset creates immediate, measurable impact—for growth, for the business, for every cross-functional team it touches.

Our full internal brand team was in that room. We had to dream without limits, but we also had a product to launch: our newest innovation, Silk Press In A Bottle. So the dreams had to mean something.

We threw out our wildest ideas. I originally pitched Katt Williams as our Silk Press King—and the team instantly ate it up. It didn’t work out, but we landed Law Roach, who turned out to be an even better fit. And as a Chicago girl, the fact that we share the same roots made me feel giddy inside.

Casting from Reema and our influencer team was impeccable, but it wasn’t the only spark. What made Silk Press Conference actually work was every person in that room and our external partners deciding to protect the idea all the way through—from a sticky note on a wall to the brand’s most engaging campaign to date. That’ll never get old for me.

Rachel: How do you know when a campaign idea has it? I know it can just be a feeling, but I am curious if you’re able to put it into words.

Alyssa: It’s actually pretty difficult to put into words, so I appreciate you calling that upfront.

I’m lucky enough to work in spaces where I’m part of the target audience. Which means my friends and peers are too. That proximity is a kind of leverage most people underestimate. Because of it, knowing whether something has it is less of an analysis and more of a light switching on (or off) in my brain. A feeling in my gut that I’ve learned to trust deeply. I lead with intuition more often than not, and I don’t take that inner knowing lightly.

That instinct, paired with the ability to simply vibe test an idea with people who reflect the audience, is how I know. If I don’t have an immediate reaction, it’s more than likely a no for me. I’m not someone whose enthusiasm can be easily manufactured or sold—I can tell pretty quickly whether something has it or not.

That said, I’ll admit I’m not always right. And I genuinely love being proven wrong, because there’s real growth in that.

Rachel: I’ve covered a lot of big campaigns. I can almost immediately tell when social was involved from the beginning. Why do you think it’s important for social teams to be brought in at the outset of a campaign?

Alyssa: I say this often: in today’s marketing landscape, social is the nucleus. It’s also the connective tissue between creative and brand—one of the only teams that gets to see the full arc of a campaign from both sides and pick up workstreams from each.

Traditionally, brands would spend hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—on a single ad spot with a single asset. Once it was live, you stepped back and waited for a signal from your CMO the next morning. That model is over, or at least it should be. Social is your opportunity to directly connect with your audience in real time: to address pain points, build genuine relationship, and—my favorite part—tell a story that keeps unfolding long after launch day.

When social is brought in early, you gain three things: invaluable cultural perspective that can shape the campaign before it’s too late to change course, a strategic throughline that ensures every asset has a life beyond the hero moment, and more content than you’d ever get from a single shoot day. The difference between a campaign that lands and one that fades is usually whether social helped build the foundation—or was handed the keys after the house was already built.

Rachel: Do you have any tools you use to help prepare for a campaign shoot?

Alyssa: My boss at Topicals once coined the term “left brain creative”—and that’s me to the T. Though I’ll admit, some mornings I wake up more right-brained than others.

Tools are my secret weapon. And I think they’re a big part of what makes me more than just a social girl. I see things 360 and I act on them 360. I consider all angles, evaluate risk, and ask myself the simple question: is this cool, or is it not? But then from there, I build. An idea becomes a plan, a plan becomes a brief, and a brief becomes execution—whether by me or my team.

My go-tos: Airtable for daily planning and project management, Pitch or Google Slides for presentations, Notion for team knowledge bases, and Canva or Figma for collaborative creative direction. Each one serves a different part of my brain, and together they keep the work organized without killing the instinct.

Rachel: A lot of big brand campaigns flop on social. If you had to diagnose an overall theme for why, what would it be?

Alyssa: They’re still working from old approaches to marketing, resulting in them not trusting the people closest to the audience to inform them on how to show up.

Social teams at large companies are often the youngest, most culturally plugged-in people in the building. They know the audience. They live in the same feeds, use the same platforms, speak the same language. And yet they’re frequently the last ones invited into the room (if they’re invited at all). That disconnect between where the decisions are made and where the culture actually lives is, in my experience, the root of most campaign misfires.

Rachel: Do you have any advice for advocating for yourself when you work in social media?

Alyssa: When you work in social for a company that wants to actually succeed on social, your job is to be present in as many rooms, and on as many projects as your strategy can support. If you see a campaign in the works and you have no seat at the table, knock on the door. And when it opens, come prepared with a point worth fighting for.

The honest truth is that some people simply don’t consider social when a campaign is being built. And some people don’t take it seriously enough to seek out the person who does. That’s not an excuse to fall back, let that be your motivation. Come with the data, the precedent, the case for why your presence changes the outcome. Make social impossible to overlook.

My favorite way to frame it: would you rather have my input now or would you rather watch the asset tank later? Bold, I know, but you can soften the delivery without losing the point. Either way, the truth remains.

Rachel: I’d love to do a few rapid fire questions to end! If you could only post on one platform for the next year, which would you choose?

Alyssa: TikTok - one repeatable content series that never changes. You know the brand for that kind of content, that’s it.

Rachel: What’s one thing you wish more CMOs understood about social media?

Alyssa: It’s never as simple as you think, and reducing tasks to simplicity is undermining someone’s skillset.

Rachel: Biggest brand social pet peeve?

Alyssa: Corny community engagement comments.

Rachel: Best social media tip you’ve ever received?

Alyssa: Stop trying so hard.

Rachel: One thing you love about working in social media

Alyssa: The ability to flex my creative, entrepreneurial, and marketing muscles all at once.

Before you go, Check out the Link in Bio Job Board! There are new roles from Fly By Jing, Anthropic, PBS, and more.

Finally, if you enjoy free interviews like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Discord community.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making this newsletter possible!

The Brand Social Trend Report: Q1 2026 covers topics like:

• Delayed virality

• TikTok’s slow down

• Accounts going create mode

• “Drop everything” campaigns

• Human interest = brand interest

• A refocus on resonance

There are also trend contributions from people working at places like New York Magazine, Amtrak, BÉIS, Jeopardy, and more.

Thank you to paid subscribers for supporting the newsletter and making reports like this possible! If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your free subscription, this is a good one to do it for. Plus, you’ll get access to the Link in Bio Discord, which has been described as “an essential place to be for anyone managing social media.”

Read more

The brand’s recent Women in Medicine campaign, which features Lenny Kravitz’s It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over, has 4M views and 34K shares on Instagram. They worked with The Pitt’s Noah Wyle on a custom FIGS tuxedo that he wore to the Emmys. They recently helped develop the Healthcare is Human Act, a bipartisan bill that would provide a federal tax credit of up to $6,000 per year to healthcare professionals serving communities most impacted by shortages. The emotional truths in their holiday film led to over 143K likes. They showed up with a coffee truck at the New York nurses’ strike.

While many of the examples above are expressed on social media, I’ve worked in this industry long enough to know that’s not where they all started. These are clear reflections of how the entire marketing organization operates—a team that takes risks and acts with purpose. Want to be a social-first brand? Start with marketing leadership.

That’s why for today’s newsletter I wanted to talk to Bené Eaton, the CMO of FIGS, about her approach to big brand moments. She’s held marketing roles at places like Nike, Ralph Lauren, and Under Armour. She also reads Link in Bio.

Below we talk about the unexpected campaign metric she tracks, how the brand uses music as an “emotional shorthand”, and the advice she’d give a social media manager who wants to be in her role one day.

Rachel Karten: What role does social media play in your position as CMO of FIGS?

Bené Eaton: Social is where our brand breathes. Alongside in-person connections, social is where we listen, learn, and reflect our community back to itself.

I think what makes the healthcare community so unique is that they have so many lived experiences and they share those experiences online—their highs, their lows, the intensity of what they go through every day. Social gives us a space to connect with them. And then, of course, to also share their stories. It’s central to everything we do.

Rachel: What I love about FIGS on social is that it’s less about the technical qualities of the scrubs, and is more about a celebration of healthcare workers. If you work in healthcare, you want to follow FIGS. How intentional is that positioning?

Bené: 1000%. Everything we do is about telling the story of the people who are wearing FIGS.

I love that you say it feels like a celebration. I mean, that’s the best compliment. Our mission at FIGS is to celebrate, empower, and serve healthcare professionals. And so it’s awesome that you see our social as the living embodiment of that mission.

I think for us, in culture, we’re used to seeing celebrities revered. Or even in my past life, coming from Nike and Under Armour, you see athletes put on center stage and billboards. Our founders, Heather and Trina, even from the beginning, they asked themselves, “What about the people who are saving lives? Who’s telling their story? They are doing the world’s most important work. They’re curing diseases, they’re researching, they’re literally saving people’s lives every minute of the day. And so why aren’t they celebrated?” That’s really the intent of what we try to do in all facets of our branding and marketing, but social really is the embodiment of that.

Rachel: There’s also an amazing specificity to your campaigns. In the recent Women in Medicine campaign there’s a subtle eye roll and line about epidurals that your audience all picks up on in the comments. Do you have healthcare professionals who are on the marketing team or brainstorming with you?

Bené: We are genuinely obsessed with the healthcare community. We have what we call an Ambassador community. These are a group of healthcare professionals and their full-time main job is working as a healthcare professional. We have about 500 of them globally. We lean on them for all of our sort of insights and really try to understand what they’re going through.

With the women in medicine film, every single scene that we shot came from an actual story. We sat with all of the women that we were going to feature and we were asking them about the types of scenarios they’ve been in. So we captured that. When we rolled cameras, we told them to do what they would normally do in the office and relive the experience they shared.

Those details matter, like the eye roll or those little vignettes that we capture. I think that’s what makes someone feel seen.

I’ll say on a personal note, I’m super fortunate because my husband is a doctor. He is a good gut check. I’ll be like, “Would you actually say this? Is it correct?” We met in college, so I’ve been there through medical school, residency, and now working for years and years in healthcare as a physician. I have that lucky advantage as well.

Rachel: That specificity also makes the campaigns more memorable. There’s a real resonance to what FIGS posts on social media. It’s not because you are doing every trend or participating in every cultural moment. It’s because when the brand does speak, it matters. How do you prioritize memorability?

Bené: We are comfortable taking risks. I think designing a tux for The Pitt’s Noah Wyle was completely out of our lane. We had never designed or created a tuxedo before. I had in my past life working at Ralph Lauren, but not in the world of FIGS. But we really believed in what he represented and it was coming from a genuine real place because he had such a passion for this community. He also thanked the healthcare professionals when he received his award at the Emmys.

Rachel: In today’s algorithm, everyone is an influencer if the story is told right. I love how you highlighted Lindsey Vonn’s doctors, for example. You essentially gave them the star treatment in this campaign. That really resonates on social right now, especially when you’re highlighting the effort that goes into these healthcare roles. It’s like an antidote to the “make everything more efficient with AI” story we’re hearing everywhere right now.

Bené: Healthcare is just human nature, right? AI can never replace the work of a healthcare professional and the way they connect with their patients. So I do think, by nature, when we’re telling these stories, they hit at these deep human truths. In the age of AI, I think that really cuts through.

Rachel: Music plays such an integral part of your campaigns. There was I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) and now It Ain’t Over ‘til It’s Over. How do you decide the song that will carry through the campaign? And why is it important to use a known song as opposed to stock music?

Bené: We spend a lot of time on music, so thank you for seeing that. For us, music is a bit of an emotional shorthand. It can carry stories in such a beautiful way and so we always look for songs that amplify the feeling that we’re trying to create.

For Lenny Kravitz’s It Ain’t Over ‘til It’s Over, it is just a song that makes you feel something—where you smile but also get teary-eyed at the same time. It worked for our women in medicine campaign because there’s this idea that women still have so much work to do in this space and it’s not over yet. We’re just getting started.

Rachel: Are you working with agencies on these campaigns or are you doing most of them in house?

Bené: Everything’s in house.

Rachel: Wow. That is extremely impressive.

Bené: The in-house team we have at FIGS is so special. I can say this because I’ve worked for the most amazing brands and with the best agencies in the world. Jenny Seyfried, our SVP of Brand & Creative has amazing relationships with all of our community members. Sam Pepke, our director, who creates all of our films, has great chemistry with the team.

I always tell my team, life’s so short, we’re here to do the best work of our lives.

Rachel: You have a film director who’s in house?

Bené: Yeah, we have an in-house film director. He does all of the films you’ve seen—including our “Where do you wear FIGS?” films from last year and our “Never Change” films this year. We have an in-house film director, in-house art directors, graphic designers, in-house narrative and copy. Everything is done by the FIGS team.

Having an in-house film team means we’re not reinventing ourselves every campaign. We’re building on a deep understanding of our community. That continuity creates a consistency you can feel. Each campaign is distinct, but all unmistakably FIGS. And just as importantly, it allows us to move quickly, trust our instincts, and create without layers.

Rachel: That’s amazing.

Bené: They are so talented. It’s a very humbling experience to get to lead this team because they bring so much passion and they want to shine a spotlight on this community, like you said, that doesn’t always get the spotlight.

Rachel: Are there any unique or unexpected metrics you like to track when it comes to campaigns?

Bené: We pay attention to things that do not show up neatly in a dashboard. I love what I call “break room buzz.” It is not a formal metric, but it is very real. Like I said, my husband is a physician, and when he comes home from the hospital and says, “everyone was talking about the FIGS Women’s film,” that is gold.

That is when I know the work traveled. Peer to peer. Human to human. In the spaces that actually matter.

We look for signals of that kind of organic velocity. How ideas move inside hospitals. How often FIGS comes up in conversation when we are not in the room. It may sound anecdotal, but when you see it consistently, it becomes directional truth.

If we are showing up at the nurses’ station, we are doing something right!

Rachel: A lot of social media managers read this newsletter and some might want to be in a CMO position one day, what advice would you give to them?

Bené: I would say be a student of what’s around you, but don’t copy it. I think there is a lot of pressure to follow trends or just replicate what’s working. But the most valuable thing someone can bring is having a point of view.

Correction: I mistakenly said that FIGS “introduced” the Healthcare is Human Act, when I should have said “helped develop”.

If you enjoy free interviews like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Discord community.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making this newsletter possible!

Finally, check out the Link in Bio Job Board. There are new roles from Substack, Audible, e.l.f. Cosmetics, and more!

I also finally cracked open ’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The book is about writing fiction but it’s also about keeping a reader’s attention. In it, Saunders highlights the role escalation plays in short stories. He says, “Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.”

A story that escalates builds reader investment. So does a good social media strategy. In my recent interview with the Fishwife team, a reader commented, “What I take [away] is how they’ve really focused on the emotional bts component as part of their social strategy, which generates the feeling of people rooting for them even as their brand profile has rose.” A business is, by nature, filled with escalation. How do you capture it all in a way that allows your audience to root for you?

Kate Bolger, the owner of The Village Confectionary, knows the answer. Her candy shop doesn’t open for another 10 weeks, but has already accumulated over a million views and over 43K followers. Kate is building online investment early through her beautifully-scripted videos, prompting comments like “Ok, watched all your videos like I’m binge watching Netflix 😍 you are an amazing story teller. I’m here for your journey and cheering you on!” Below I share her tips for telling a small business story online and why she thinks of her social presence in seasons not posts.

I also cover:

• Four post ideas to try this week

• The best movie marketing isn’t about the movie

• Is Instagram’s new premium subscription available to brands?

• Why I’m going detective mode on Chanel’s social media

• An early bet on the MLB team with the best social this season

• New roles on the Link in Bio Job Board!

Read more

In today’s newsletter, I talk to the Fishwife team. I’ve written about the colorful tinned fish brand a handful of times, covering their carousel strategy and TikTok Shop presence, but have never done a deep dive. It’s an interview that’s long overdue. Below you’ll hear from Becca Millstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Fishwife (who also oversees company leadership and brand marketing!), and Lauren Murphy, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, on their social media playbook. We cover why all carousels need a good hook, the online trend that’s showing up “explicitly” in product sales, and how the team builds social momentum through newness.

Rachel Karten: If you had to sum up Fishwife’s social media philosophy in a sentence or two, what would it be?

Lauren Murphy: Fishwife’s social media philosophy is rooted in making people ~feel~ something, blending emotional consistency with a warmly irreverent, funny (humble brag), and community-obsessed voice. Across every touchpoint (whether a recipe, meme, or retail announcement) the goal is to make tinned fish feel fun, culturally relevant, and deeply human.

Becca Millstein: I also think of Fishwife’s social media as the diary of our extremely dynamic, maximalist company story. So while our platforms have unique content and voice, I also see them as vessels for all of the new products, ideas, events, retail launches, partnerships, initiatives, etc. which breathe so much life into these platforms.

Rachel: What platform would you say has been the most impactful for Fishwife’s growth?

Lauren: Instagram and TikTok have both fueled Fishwife’s growth—but in different ways. Instagram lets us engage deeply with our community, while TikTok helps us reach new audiences and tell our stories to people who might not know us yet.

Becca: I agree with Lauren overall. I’m biased because I started building the company’s social media presence on Instagram (and barely touch TikTok), but I think the connections forged on Instagram over the years in DMs have had a massively duplicative effect on the company’s community and customer base. Ever since the beginning, we’ve maintained such personal relationships on Instagram, and that closeness engenders at least some degree of brand loyalty, passion, and word-of-mouth.

Rachel: Becca, what role do you see yourself playing in the Fishwife social media ecosystem? You show up quite a bit on the feed!

Becca: I told Lauren she didn’t have to answer this one but now I’m wishing I hadn’t, because she’s the one responsible for smearing my mug all over Fishwife’s social media!! As we all know too well, founder-led companies tend to lean into being founder-led, and for good reason. A face makes a brand more relatable, easier to root for and all-in-all is an unfair advantage against other companies that might lack an origin story or founder character to loop the story of the brand back to.

Rachel: I’ve talked a lot about how important product newness is on social media. So much of what people are reacting to when they say they love a brand’s social presence are those big announcements and partnerships. Your team is really good about this. How often would you say you’re announcing something new? And would you say that newness is a big piece of your overall social strategy?

Becca: Momentum is everything in brand-building. People want to engage with brands and companies that are actively and enthusiastically engaging with them. To us, engaging with our customer base means consistently talking to them to understand what they want to see from us (we’re big survey people), and then bringing their (and our) visions into being.

Our first company core value (we have four and we really live by them) is “Build a delightful world.” This relates to both our customer and our team—there’s nothing the Fishwife team loves more than coming up with a wild idea and bringing it to fruition. It delights us to make delightful things! In turn, our customer base derives so much energy and joy from all the newness—whether it’s a new tinned fish product, a long sleeve t-shirt (shhh!), a pop up, or a one-off cobranded demo at Whole Foods.

The company is a living, breathing organism, and our constant newness is the expression of that lifeforce!! Big caveat—we also really try not to fatigue our base. It’s a delicate dance.

Lauren: About 75% of my role (with Becca’s support) is dedicated to planning and executing newness. Whether it’s a new tin launch, a small merch item, or a bigger brand partnership, our marketing calendar is always stacked with exciting new moments (at least 1x/month).

Rachel: Is there a specific post or announcement you recall driving meaningful sales? Why do you think it worked?

Lauren: It’s hard to say which individual posts drive sales, so I usually look at retail launches as a clearer signal. Our first Costco announcement is a standout. We first announced our Midwest rollout, and the number of organic UGC posts was a strong early indicator of excitement. One of our CTAs was to fill out a Costco request form (to request Fishwife at your local club), and so many sweet people submitted that Costco had to email us multiple times asking us to pause promotion—oops! The bigger takeaway is that Fishwife has been thoughtful about launching in retail when demand exists, rather than jumping in too early. That timing has been a key part of why our retail expansions work so well.

Becca: I remember that we launched the our Valentine’s Day chocolate sardines over email and SMS in the morning, and sales were doing solidly, but when we posted on IG, they popped off. There are certain items—tinned fish, merch, or anything in between (like choco sardines)—that we know are really going to resonate on social. If the price point is approachable, like it was with the chocolate sardines, conversion from social is much likelier to be high.

Rachel: How do you interact with “trends” within the category? It seems like tinned fish is having a moment every month.

Lauren: We’re not chasing trends, but we think strategically about how to stay top of mind when tinned fish moments happen. That means building strong relationships with creators who are shaping the conversation, staying present in the cultural conversation, and making sure our brand voice and story are visible—so when interest spikes, Fishwife is already part of the conversation!

Becca: I’m obsessed with talking about tinned fish trends, because we’ve basically had a new one or two every year since 2021 and it’s so fun to watch (especially when you’re running a tinned fish business). 2026 is just…sardines!! How healthy they are, how they make your skin glow. We’ve never had a trend show up so explicitly in our sales.

Rachel: Wow. What has the jump in sardine sales been?

Becca: On the retail side, our baseline unit velocities 3x'd between Q4'25 and Q1'26, and 2x'd on DTC.

Rachel: I’ve written about how Fishwife’s carousels are best in class. Do you have any tips for making sure they are shareable and engaging?

Lauren: Carousels have always been Fishwife’s bread and butter, but we don’t create them just to fill the feed—they’re designed with purpose.

Every post starts with a strong hook and a clear reason for someone to swipe to the next slide. For more complex stories, like sourcing content or nuanced rollouts (like this or this), we layer in text overlays, music (which I spend way too long picking 😅), and pacing to make the story easy to follow and engaging.

I would think of each carousel as a mini narrative: plan why someone should keep swiping, make each slide meaningful, and use format elements strategically to tell the story in a way static posts alone can’t.

Rachel: I can’t stop watching Toni Bravo’s videos about tinned fish. Do you have any tools you love or helpful tips for finding influencers and creators to gift and work with?

Lauren: Toni!!! An angel. As longtime fans, we’re overjoyed seeing all the love she’s getting. She’s built such an magical moment around tinned fish, and we’re so, so grateful to be part of it.

In terms of how we think about creators, we keep it pretty simple and really relationship-driven:

• We prioritize creators who already have a genuine food ritual. It’s less about size and more about behavior: are they already building snack plates, cooking with tinned fish, etc.

• Most of our discovery is actually organic. We’re lucky to get a ton of inbound love, so a lot of our relationships start from a really genuine place, people who are already part of the Fishwife universe.

• From there, we lean heavily on gifting and our affiliate program. Typically, the people we invest in are folks we’ve already seeded and built a relationship with over time. Up until about a year and a half ago, we weren’t spending much (if anything) on influencer marketing, and even now, we’re very intentional about it.

• For us, it’s less about “finding” creators and more about paying close attention to who’s already showing up for us, and then nurturing the heck out of those relationships.

Rachel: Sourcing is a big piece of the Fishwife story—and you do a great job of telling it. Many brands struggle to make that style of content engaging. How do you get it to resonate with audiences?

Lauren: Becca and our Head of Ops, Jack, visit our cannery partners across Europe every summer so to say I’m spoiled with incredible sourcing content is an understatement. We focus on bringing humanity into the process: showing our cannery partners faces, sharing their names, and giving real visibility into the hands that bring each tin to life. Paired with thoughtful, story-driven carousels, it makes sourcing feel personal instead of just a step in the supply chain.

Becca: For most folks, seafood and its supply chain feel incredibly foreign and intimidating. This is where putting faces to the brand really helps, it brings the customer closer to the source. Instead of a stock photo of tuna swimming in open water, it’s a picture of me and our head of ops breaking bread with our cannery partners in Spain, Washington, Scotland, Denmark, Norway. All of them grew up in the regions we source from. For many, their ancestors founded the cannery, their families have spent generations carefully tending relationships with local fishermen and olive farmers. It’s just so much more human, much easier to envision and understand.

Rachel: What advice would you give a food brand that’s struggling to break through on social right now?

Lauren: Prioritize emotional consistency over aesthetic perfection or chasing trends—people follow brands that make them feel something, consistently. That consistency isn’t just about what you post or how often you post, it’s about how you show up in conversation, too. The brands that win aren’t treating social like a distribution channel, they’re treating it like a conversation. If you’ve DM’d with a customer or creator a few times and they still don’t know your name, something’s not right.

Last tidbit! Sometimes there an opening in the social calendar and I just can’t think of what to post for the life of me, so I don’t. Showing up with intention matters more than just showing up for the sake of it.

Becca: Such good advice from Lauren!!

Authenticity is the be-all, end-all. Start with what your “unfair advantages” are and build your strategy off of those. If you’re a founder-led brand, recognize that as an advantage and lean in. Important caveat—this does not mean that you have to become a founder-creator. In fact, I’d advise against that (one woman’s opinion, but who’s got the time!?). What I mean is that because you’re starting the company, you almost can’t help but be authentic in your vision and your voice. OR, is your unfair advantage that your product has a really cool production process or sourcing narrative? Then lean in there! Do you have a teenage cousin who’s really good at memes? Do you have someone on your team that writes really funny Slacks? It can be anything, but finding your special little golden nugget, and leaning in there, usually yields positive results.

And if you’re being authentic, you don’t have to worry about being precious. We’re chaotic, and all-over-the-place, and share a million different types of content—but we know who we are, we all embody the Fishwife brand, so it all works out in the end.

Five takeaways from my conversation with Fishwife

1. Start carousels with a strong hook and a clear reason for someone to swipe. “I would think of each carousel as a mini narrative: plan why someone should keep swiping, make each slide meaningful, and use format elements strategically to tell the story in a way static posts alone can’t.”

2. Newness builds momentum. “Whether it’s a new tin launch, a small merch item, or a bigger brand partnership, our marketing calendar is always stacked with exciting new moments (at least 1x/month).”

3. Tinned fish trends have real impact. The online conversation around sardines showed up in Fishwife’s sales. “On the retail side, our baseline unit velocities 3x’d between Q4’25 and Q1’26, and 2x’d on DTC.”

4. Nurture your existing fans. “For us, it’s less about ‘finding’ creators and more about paying close attention to who’s already showing up for us, and then nurturing the heck out of those relationships.”

5. Prioritize emotional consistency over aesthetic perfection or chasing trends. “People follow brands that make them feel something, consistently. That consistency isn’t just about what you post or how often you post, it’s about how you show up in conversation, too. The brands that win aren’t treating social like a distribution channel, they’re treating it like a conversation.”

One more thing!

Final reminder that all annual subscriptions to Link in Bio are 20% off until Friday. That’s $16 off, or two free months. The paid tier gets access to weekly strategy emails, quarterly trend reports, the running list of post ideas, and an invite to the Link in Bio Discord. Upgrade your subscription here.

The biggest highlight was hosting a joint Link in Bio and After School subscriber happy hour at Nickel City. I loved meeting so many of you! Thank you to Nuuly for partnering with us on it.

Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• I talk to Jeremy Carrasco (@showtoolsai) about how AI-generated content is breaking down the inherent social media social contract

• The hook that took a video from 166K views to 18.5M views

• Five post formats to try this week

• The video framework more brands should utilize

• Is Facebook back…?

Quick reminder that I’m running a sale to celebrate five years of writing Link in Bio. All annual subscriptions will be 20% off until March 20th, 2026. That’s $16 off, or two free months. The paid tier gets access to weekly strategy emails (like the one today!), quarterly trend reports, a running list of post ideas, and an invite to the Link in Bio Discord. Upgrade your subscription here.

Read more

Link in Bio was born out of a bone to pick. A frustration that social media managers didn’t get the credit they deserved or the resources they needed to do their best work.

Five years later, those goals remain the same. We still get called interns, but now there’s someone in the comments who immediately writes “Interns don’t run the accounts of corporations!”. That back up didn’t always exist. CMOs, founders, and marketing leaders tell me all the time that they read Link in Bio to educate themselves on the trends, platforms, and strategies shaping this world. If you’ve ever had a boss who doesn’t “get” social, you know how big of a deal this is. Of course, I still put every newsletter send through the “actually-helpful resource” test.

One of the most important projects of this newsletter was also the first. I launched the inaugural compensation survey only a few months after my first send. Since then, it’s become a core piece of the Link in Bio puzzle. In 2021, the median salary for a social media director was around $97K. In 2025 it was $138K. There’s still so much more work to do, but I’ve been encouraged by stories from readers who tell me they’ve received a raise by using the data.

I often get asked how I decide what to write about. I use my own interest as a barometer for coverage. I need to see how a brand’s post or campaign lands online before ever deciding if I want to talk about it here. While this might not sound radical, I’ve found that a lot of advertising and marketing media is more interested in an exclusive than covering something that’s proven. I have no interest in writing about an expensive campaign from a fancy agency until I see that it’s actually working. I’d rather interview a small coffee shop getting 1M views than a Fortune 500 getting 50K views. I don’t publish every platform update, just the ones I think you should know about. There’s a place for all of that, but it’s not Link in Bio. Once I notice that something is resonating? I sprint. I’m grateful to every brand and social marketer who has trusted their story with Link in Bio, sharing big insights and answering late-night emails.

Link in Bio wrote about serialized social shows all the way back in 2023, interviewed Zohran Mamdani’s video agency before the primaries, and investigated how Wimbledon makes their “Overheard” videos by calling a stranger who was in one. “There’s always a social angle” is something I often tell myself. Link in Bio has received over 21M views since sending that first newsletter. I’m grateful to every single reader.

When reflecting on these past five years, I was a bit shocked at how little has actually changed in my process. It’s still just me writing the newsletter every week. My screen time remains dangerously high. I don’t use AI. I cold DM social managers on LinkedIn for interviews. I consult for brands. I get nervous before every send. I have bones to pick. I am consistently delighted by the inventive work that social teams do.

I’d be thrilled if the next five years looked exactly the same. I remain laser focused on making Link in Bio the most helpful resource for social media teams. Growth to me looks like going deeper not wider. I’m dreaming up a summit where we can learn from one another and developing a long-form video strategy. I can’t wait. In the meantime, I’ll see you in your inbox. Thanks for letting me in.

What I’m scrolling

Brands are posting the new “Distorted Face” emoji on Twitter. Figma here, Wendy’s here, and McDonald’s here.

Adweek reports that 65% of marketing jobs may not survive AI. The same publication recently announced their “AI Power 50” honoring the “leaders driving innovation and adoption of artificial intelligence tools within the marketing and advertising industry.”

Apple launched @helloapple on Instagram today. I really like this post from inside their durability lab. Last week, I noted that they hadn’t posted their popular Neo TikTok videos on Instagram yet. One of them is already on this new account.

AI could never replace Taco Bell’s Live Más LIVE event. My feed is full of UGC from it.

Gen Z’s negative feelings about TikTok are starting to affect their usage habits. “Gen Z still shows up to TikTok every day, but they’re showing up skeptical, exhausted, and nostalgic for a version of the platform that’s already gone,” said Harris Poll Chief Strategy Officer Libby Rodney in a statement. “That’s not loyalty—that’s habit. And habits break.” Meanwhile, The Harris Poll survey found that 78% of Gen Z views YouTube favorably, and 66% of that group visits YouTube every day. Regrettable minutes will have a profound impact on the direction social media goes!

The beer company Happy Dad just tweets news headlines now. Very bleak strategy! Thanks to the reader who tipped me off to this.

Speaking of Twitter, everyone is very confused by this Axios tweet. It’s a quote tweet of an article they shared that reads “It's the terminally online news junkies who are detached from the actual reality. We've been manipulated by algorithms and politicians amplifying the worst of humanity. Our feeds and screens spread a twisted, inaccurate view of America.”

Joshua Charow makes the most beautiful social videos. Brands should study the subtle ways he hooks viewers.

Gap had a campaign director and a making-of-campaign director. Mick Kelleher was responsible for capturing how the recent spot came together. That “making of” video has over 20K likes.

A few more things

Get 20% off an annual paid subscription. To celebrate five years, all annual subscriptions will be 20% off until March 20th, 2026. That’s $16 off, or two free months. The paid tier gets access to weekly strategy emails, quarterly trend reports, a running list of post ideas, and an invite to the Link in Bio Discord. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now is the time. I rarely run sales.

Get 20% off an annual subscription

Want to work with Link in Bio? If your brand is interested in partnering with Link in Bio, sponsoring in-person events, or having me speak at a company offsite, please email rachelkartengroup@caa.com.

The job board is back! I switched providers and the Link in Bio Job Board is up and running again. It features all of the best social media roles in one place, updated daily. Right now there are roles from places like Disney, Ramp, and Ben & Jerry’s. If you work for a brand that’s hiring within social media, this job board is for you too. You can post your job listings to get in front of the most talented social media professionals in the business. Check it out here.

Join the Link in Bio Discord. A reminder that paid subscribers get access to the Link in Bio Discord. Think of it as an always-on chat with some of the smartest people who work in this industry. It’s been described as “invaluable” and “as close as you can get to the pulse.” If you’re a paid subscriber and haven’t joined yet, shoot me a DM on Substack for an invite.

Thank you for reading! If you’ll be at SXSW this weekend, please say hi! Unfortunately my happy hour with filled up in an hour, but you can find more details on our panel here.

Today, that logic no longer holds up.

I’ve watched as creators like Taste Buds and Kid with Crocs get over a million views on their first few posts. If there’s a FYP-market fit, the video will get seen—regardless of how many followers the account has. Some users even speculate that the platforms give a bump to new accounts, although I cannot verify that.

Meanwhile, so many brands continue to use their main account to do everything. They program their feed like a television network—product images, campaign videos, recurring series, UGC testimonials, sales announcements, and more. It doesn’t work like it used to. I’ve written at length about the benefits of focusing your feed—which many small brands have done a very good job of!—but for larger brands I understand that they can’t just turn their main account into one serialized show.

It got me thinking about what brands could unlock if they took a more relaxed approach to starting new accounts. What if instead of programming the brand page like a network, brands programmed each platform like a network—spinning off new specialized accounts. A movie studio with a fan edit account. A fashion company with a style makeover social show. In today’s newsletter, I explore what this approach might look like in practice.

Here’s what’s inside:

• The psychology of discovering a new account

• How to take an ecosystem approach to social media

• Why politicians have “team” accounts

• The five types of additional brand accounts

• How I’d apply this model to J.Crew

• Social strategist Matthew Stasoff on the benefits of “side quest” accounts

Read more

When you work in social, you’re often asked to see the future. What format will break through? How can we get this to go viral? The truth is, even the best social teams surprise themselves. Jane Ashley, who leads the social media strategy at LA Metro, told me, “We didn't anticipate that the announcement post would be completely eclipsed by something we barely officially promoted.” That’s the fun of working in this industry. I talked to the LA Metro team to learn more about how they announced the D line.

The announcement

One thing the social team did expect? People were going to care about the D line. Jane shared, “The vision for the D Line subway in its fully extended glory (!) dates back to the 1980s or even earlier. Political strife meant it took decades to become reality. That long history, combined with its location through the highest-density corridor in Los Angeles and its status as one of only two fully underground, heavy-rail lines in our transit system (allowing riders to truly bypass all car traffic), makes the D Line extension among Metro’s most highly anticipated openings of all time.”

While the social team knew there was anticipation, they weren’t given a heads up before the announcement. Joseph Lemon, the social content manager at Los Angeles Metro, said, “The social team finds out when everyone else does. On the morning of the announcement, we gathered in our ‘War Room’ (our regular conference room) with a livestream of the official Board meeting pulled up, waiting for the news just like the public.”

Once the announcement was live, it was time for the nine-person social team to move. Jane tells me, “The moment the board member announces the date, each channel manager downloads the file with the correct date from a prepopulated Dropbox and scrambles (read: fights against abysmal Internet speeds in our building) to upload to their respective channel with independent oversight to modify the file or caption for their platform.”

The video creative caught my eye because they took a popular format—screenshots of comments asking for something—and tweaked it. They took those comments, but placed them within drone footage using After Effects—animating them popping up on the screen as the first-person footage moves into the new station. It was a slight build that made a big difference. Joseph said the style “was a new take on something we have used successfully in the past, which carried the tension all the way into the station entrance and the date drop.” He said they don’t use After Effects often but the “bigger moment” felt like it needed it. The video has over 1M views across platforms.

The shirt

Then there was the shirt.

One hour after the launch video was live, the team followed up with another post. “Give the gift of the D before opening day 5.8.2026!” with a shirt that simply says “Ride the D”. Just the right amount of chaos.

Jane tells me the idea came from Reddit. “Months prior, the shirt concept had been mocked up by a Redditor, and r/LAMetro all but demanded we make it.”

The team knew diehard fans would buy it—but they didn’t expect the reality of the response. They did a full year’s worth of sales in under 24 hours. And then continued to do an additional year’s worth of sales over each of the next three days. It’s worth noting that the Metro Shop is essentially a “passion project by the social media team”, without even one staff member dedicated to it full time.

Many commenters assumed the post was executed by a Gen Z intern. Jane told me, “While we do absolutely have Gen Zs on the team driving tons of successful ideas (including handling most of the legwork of the T-shirt execution), the reality is all three working-age generations are represented plus a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds.” She says, “Our different lenses and freedom to give and receive feedback, regardless of bureaucratic hierarchy, is one of our greatest strengths.”

Of course, I had to know about the approval process. Jane said that they seek buy-in from everybody on the immediate team and “generally operate under the assumption that senior leadership trusts our expertise and judgment to push the edges of what’s acceptable for a government account without actually crossing it.” The team reads Link in Bio (thank you!) and understands how to play with the tension that exists between what audiences might traditionally expect from a government account and what they deliver.

It’s ultimately a good reminder to provide multiple on-ramps for announcements. It’s a concept I learned from Matthew Stasoff’s very good social signals deck. Brands must utilize different tactics—not just one hero asset—to bring audiences in. Get in the comments. Release merch. Make a meme. You never know what piece of the announcement will take off. For the LA Metro, merch was a powerful (and unexpected) on-ramp.

The story

The excitement for a piece of merch isn’t about revenue for the LA Metro team. It means more. Public transit needs branding and fandom too. It’s why they do collab posts with @nathanialpov and Metro Art or get 5.2M views for simply showing real people celebrating a new train line. Jane told me that a number of team members are car-free Angelenos (“Yes, we exist!”), so the impact of the shirt has been meaningful to them on both a personal and professional level. It became an opportunity to reach people who rarely think about public transit.

“A T-shirt got more people excited about a subway opening than any official announcement ever could. Wouldn’t it be a marketer’s dream to have every other person in LA walking around in a Ride the D tee in the weeks prior to the opening?”

What I’m scrolling

AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines to review the rule. Cory Doctorow has a great thread on the decision here.

Facebook was an important platform for James Talarico to reach online audiences. “Facebook was the last platform we joined for the @TeamTalaricoHQ accounts. Despite that smaller window of time, the platform caught up and grew to be our biggest platform! Out of over a million followers, over 379k were on Facebook—reaching the most critical voters across TX.” Their digital strategy is led by Luminary.

The New Screen Fest reflected words into someone’s eye to announce submissions are open. The video has 3M views.

I’m speaking on a panel at SXSW! See you there?

This video from BANDIT reminds me of The Studio. It’s directed by my friend Henry Kornaros, who is the co-founder of Public Opinion and works on Track Star.

Clothing brand Hanifa shared a thoughtful post announcing they are hitting pause. It happened amid pre-order backlash and fulfillment struggles. The video is filled with lots of comments of understanding and support.

A24’s Backrooms trailer is the 9th most-shared TikTok on the platform in the last seven days. It has 36M views.

Sinners released footage from their hair and makeup test, narrated by Ryan Coogler. A good example of how b-roll paired with interesting VO can turn into an entirely new story. It has 2M views.

I’ve come back around on the McDonald’s CEO. I’d like to see the other fast food CEOs grow their social accounts like he has! Have you seen his LinkedIn? That being said, I bet the Burger King team is very happy that they just so happened to be running a very fun campaign with their CEO at the same time.

Zara Larsson doing the Portland bike bus has 13M views. Outside but also online. The strategy of 2026.

If you enjoy free sends like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Discord community.

Subscribe now

It might even be an educational expense at your company! Here’s a template for you to use when asking.

And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making this newsletter possible!

There are a few things that I know to be true right now.

The consumer reaction to AI-generated imagery and video isn’t consistent. Audiences might like an AI-generated meme of Victoria Beckham but hate their favorite brand—like Gucci or Equinox—using the same technology in a campaign. Brands are held to a different standard and it’s important for marketers to understand this.

At the same time, consumers have never been more aware of how marketing works. Campaigns are dissected on TikTok. Announcement posts are littered with comments like “Best campaign of 2025” and “Now THIS is marketing”, as has pointed out before. We’re increasingly seeing consumers conflate the quality of the creative with the quality of the product.

The pendulum swing of glossy content into one-take iPhone video has reached it’s maximum amplitude. Trends have homogenized feeds. Standing out on social is often about a tension of doing something that feels different.

Finally, as a society, we’re being sold ease. Optimize this, save time with that. The people posting AI-generated movie clips with “we’re so cooked” forget that so much of what makes something interesting is implied effort. The plot of Mission: Impossible is almost as important as the subtext that Tom Cruise does his own stunts.

This all leads me to that larger story.

The best content on the internet right now heroes effort. Telling the story of people actually trying. The effort heuristic is a studied cognitive shortcut that assumes that tasks requiring significant investment—whether it’s time, energy, or skill—will result in a better quality compared to those achieved without that investment. On social media, audiences are often making snap decisions on whether they want to stick around to watch a piece of content. Perceived effort is a strong way to create that cognitive buy in.

In today’s newsletter I am breaking down exactly what I mean and how to do it.

• The three categories of effort

• 24 examples of how brands are bringing this to life

• An interview with the filmmaker working with brands like Notion, Spotify, Patreon, and more

• The brand that’s hiring someone to build “scalable storytelling franchises”

Read more

Part of being a good social media professional is knowing your blind spots. B2B marketing is my blind spot. I have only ever worked for consumer-facing companies. I know how to show up on LinkedIn as a person (I have a Top Voice badge!) but brand strategy feels out of my wheelhouse. I know there’s a good amount of you who’d like me to cover the space more.

Today, I called in Christina Le, Head of Marketing at Slate, to share her B2B social playbook. She’s spent the past 10 years almost solely working in B2B social. What’s refreshing about her approach is that she views social media not as a distribution channel, but as one big ecosystem. It’s a framework I’ve been circling lately too. She told me, “When we approach our LinkedIn strategy, we don’t think ‘how do we grow the Slate page?’ We think, ‘how do we increase Slate’s surface area on LinkedIn?’” It’s an important distinction. I attempted to sketch out what that looks like in practice below.

Christina’s job right now as Head of Marketing is to make sure the Slate story gets out there and that the product is positioned in a way that actually resonates with people who do social media for a living. (Slate is like your favorite video editing app…but for brands.) That story can come to life in so many ways beyond just the official brand account.

Below we talk about using people as a distribution engine, why message is more important than format, and the LinkedIn metric she loves to track.

Rachel Karten: If you had to sum up your philosophy when it comes to social media, what would it be?

​​Christina Le: Social isn’t just a distribution channel. It influences so many different avenues of the business like how the product is perceived, how we hire, investor confidence, sales conversations, customer support, literally everything. The brands that treat it like “just content” are limiting themselves. And if social is that central to the business, then the teams running it shouldn’t be treated like the meme department. They need real budget, real authority, and real tools.

At Slate, we build with that assumption and empathy. Our team has all worked in social before, so it makes all the world a difference. Social teams aren’t junior marketers anymore. They’re operators who drive real revenue and brand equity. They deserve software that respects their time and complexity.

RK: Your background is in B2B social. What do you think the biggest difference is between working in B2B social vs B2C social?

CL: The biggest difference is friction, I think. In B2C, the path is pretty clear: here’s the product, here’s the desire, here’s the purchase. You’re driving awareness and emotion toward something tangible.

But in B2B, you’re not just selling a product, you’re selling change inside an organization. That means you’re speaking to practitioners who feel the pain, but you also need decision-makers who control budget. And those aren’t always the same person.

So the content has to do two jobs at once. It has to resonate emotionally with the person doing the work, and it has to justify itself strategically to the person signing the contract. That’s why I fully believe that B2B social requires more positioning discipline. You can’t just be entertaining. You have to be useful. You have to build credibility, and be commercially aligned. And candidly, I think B2B social marketers could move into B2C more easily than the reverse.

In B2B, you’re constantly balancing. You’ve got the challenge of building a brand and then education, and then there’s revenue pressure. All of which sharpens you. It’s a different game. I mean, there’s much slower buying cycles. More stakeholders. But when it works, it compounds.

RK: Let’s focus our conversation on LinkedIn. I love the way Slate shows up there. What would you say LinkedIn’s superpower is?

CL: LinkedIn’s superpower is precision access. You can identify the exact companies in your Ideal Customer Profile and then see the actual humans who work there. Not a vague audience bucket, like “people interested in marketing.” Real names with real titles.

On other platforms, especially for B2B, you’re competing in a mixed feed. Your buyer, their employees, their cousin, and someone’s grandma are all scrolling the same algorithm. The signal gets diluted. On LinkedIn, I feel like the intent is different. People are there as professionals. They’re using their real identity. They’re thinking about work, growth, hiring, vendors, performance, you name it. You’re not interrupting their downtime outside of work. It’s also one of the few platforms where distribution is still relatively democratic. A strong idea from a practitioner can outrun a polished corporate page. And I feel like for B2B, that combination clear targeting and professional intent plus the organic reach that still works is very powerful. If you know who you’re trying to reach and you’re saying something worth listening to, LinkedIn gives you a straight line to them.

RK: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how brands should think about LinkedIn like an ecosystem. When I think about Slate’s presence, it’s not just the brand page. It’s employee posts, influencer posts, outbound comments, and more. How do you operationalize an approach like that?

CL: If you treat LinkedIn like just a brand page, you’re going to grow slowly. That’s just the unfortunate truth in 2026. For us, LinkedIn is layered. It’s our brand page, yes. But it’s also all those things you’ve listed and a few others, working together.

When we approach our LinkedIn strategy, we don’t think “how do we grow the Slate page?” We think, “how do we increase Slate’s surface area on LinkedIn?” That age old belief that “people follow people” is true. So we invest in personal brands internally. I wouldn’t call it a traditional advocacy-program because it’s more like, if you want to build your voice, we’ll support you. And because our team actually enjoys this, it compounds.

Operationally, we have swim lanes. Christina Pearo owns community and engagement, including how Slate shows up in comments and conversations. Carmen Vicente owns content output and consistency. I own partnerships and external distribution (creators, customers, collaborators, all that). Everyone knows their lane. Things overlap, but one person drives each stream.

When we look at everything we do it might look scattered from the outside, but it’s intentional. We decide where reach should come from, then assign ownership. We review goals weekly. We iterate constantly. We’re also a fairly new team, so we’re still calibrating. Thankfully there is zero ego. If something needs help, we say it. Even our cofounder treats LinkedIn like a serious growth lever. That team alignment is what makes the ecosystem work.

RK: What types of post formats have you seen work particularly well on LinkedIn?

CL: Hmm. I actually think format matters less than clear messaging and direction. You can package the same idea as a meme, a video, a carousel, a text post and if the insight is sharp, it’ll land. If it’s weak, no format will save it.

I see people obsess over “carousels are hot right now” or “video gets reach.” That is all so secondary to me. The real question should be, whether this is something your audience actually thinks about? Like, does it feel earned? Format trends also come and go. I think brand operators should focus on saying something specific, and from experience. Good messaging travels.

RK: How do you track performance? Are there any unexpected metrics you like to look at?

CL: LinkedIn finally adding post-level follower growth and share tracking is huuuuuge. Impressions are fine. Engagement rate is fine. But shares tell you if something actually moved someone. If someone reposts your content, they’re attaching their reputation to it and what’s a better way to signal that your content is work than that?

I also care about qualitative signals like who is engaging? Are the right people in the comments? Are decision-makers responding? You can have a viral post that drives nothing meaningful. And I still believe in dark social. The DMs. The “saw your post” in sales calls. You can’t measure all of it, and going so deep with attribution will have your head spinning but you can feel when things work. Trust that it’ll show up.

RK: One tip you’d give a brand that’s struggling to break through on LinkedIn?

CL: Stop putting all your effort into the brand account! Use people as the distribution engine. Start internally. Who actually wants to show up? Support them properly. If that means giving them editing help, content prompts, or production support—do it. Don’t just tell them to “post more.” That’s not helpful.

Then layer in customer advocates. Then creators. Then partners.

There are more levers than paid ads, I promise. Oh, and don’t quit after three months. LinkedIn rewards consistency and voice. Commit.

RK: What do you love about working in social media?

CL: It never gets boring. NEVER. I’ve been doing this for over a decade and it changes so fast. The platforms are constantly changing. The algorithms is forever humbling us. You can’t coast. And I like that. If you hate repetition, social is a great place to be. And I love being connected and aware of what’s happening in the world. Social, even with all of this faults, is a great place to keep you connected.

If your social team wants to see Slate in action, you can request a demo here. The tool is made by social media managers for social media managers. Video and image editing, branding, and collaboration built for how social teams actually work.

Request a Slate demo

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Why @Instagram has a finsta

A few weeks ago, a selfie of Fred again.. came across my Instagram feed. Except it wasn’t from his account. It was posted on an account called @notfit4main with the caption “hey guys im takin overrrr”. I clicked into the account. It had no profile photo and the bio was “guess who… 🫡”. I did immediately notice one thing though. Almost every person who I follow that works at Meta, also followed this account.

I scrolled through the content. A lot of it is what I’d call inspirational shitposts. Low quality photos with text like “respect anyone trying” and “make it. (i did.)”. It’s very 2014. Then there are talent takeovers from people like Tyrell Hampton and Tamir Omari. The first takeover was from Tyla, who many commenters still think runs the account as her own finsta. I searched if anything had been written about who was behind the account and found nothing.

When I emailed Instagram about @notfit4main, they confirmed that they are indeed behind the account. Of course, I was curious about the strategy, but I was also curious why Instagram wanted to create a finsta in the first place. What does it mean when the platform itself has an account called @notfit4main? I found out below.

Rachel Karten: First, can you tell me a bit about your role at Meta?

Jackie Tan: I’m the creative strategist who oversees the @Instagram channel, as well as @Threads and @Facebook. I lead the strategy of our finsta @notfit4main. I also help with various projects like Close Friends Only, Carversations, fashion initiatives and other various talent driven projects on @Instagram.

Rachel: Why did Instagram create a finsta?

Jackie: We have been talking about starting a finsta for so long now. We really wanted creativity at the heart of the account. We do a lot of programming on @Instagram, but we really thought @notfit4main could hone in on that brand ethos. It’s a carefree and open space that celebrates and unlocks creativity through spontaneous and mysterious posts.

Rachel: How did you come up with the name for it?

Jackie: There was a lot of back and forth. We had a lot of names. We were like, should it be @instagrammer or @instagram_user? We always wanted it to feel anonymous though, which is why there’s no profile photo. We felt that @notfit4main really encompasses what a finsta is—alluding to close friends, being intimate with your friends, and posting things that maybe you wouldn’t exactly share to main.

We really love the idea of it not having a singular identity and being anonymous. Like those ghost accounts you see on Instagram and playing into people not really knowing whose account it is. And that’s exactly how people use their finstas, like Addison Rae who has @freedomandcontrol, which she never outright says “hey this is my finsta”. We want @notfit4main to feel separate from @Instagram since this is how people are using finstas on the platform.

Rachel: There are two buckets that the account posts, the first is talent takeovers. People like Tyla, Fred again.., and more have all posted from the account. Can you talk to me about how those work?

Jackie: @notfit4main takeovers are a great way for our partners to talk about their own projects in a new way. For example, the Fred again.. takeover coincided with Instagram’s Ask It Anyway campaign. His team was excited about centering the takeover around his time in NYC. We were able to feature some of the shows he played in NY as well as his new song “scared”. We see these takeovers as a fun way to show that Instagram really stands behind these people by giving them another outlet and way to show up on the platform.

We’ve also worked with content creators. We just did our Close Friends Only podcast episode drop recently and had a screening at a movie theater in NY. We invited the creator Tamir Omari, gave him an old vintage iPhone, and just said go do your thing. At Instagram events, like this one, we’ve been handing them off to creators and letting them run wild.

Rachel: The second bucket is what I’d call…inspirational shitposts. It reminds me of photos I’d take in 2014. They feel intentionally ugly.

Jackie: I grew up on the internet and just feel like what’s old is new again. It always recycles. On the platform right now I’ve been seeing a lot of creators doing text posts on images. We actually commissioned the artist Lola Myers, who’s based in New York, to take these photos. Her work includes these sort of “Post it anyway” lines. So we thought it was a good tie-in to the brand ethos.

Rachel: Does the official Instagram account ever interact with the finsta?

Jackie: We don’t want to outright be like “This is @Instagram’s finsta” or whatnot... When we do interact with @notfit4main, we use the repost feature on @Instagram as a subtle way to connect the two accounts. In the past, we would have to share content through @Instagram Stories, but now we can use the repost function from @notfit4main to @Instagram. This feels more lightweight and anonymous, since the content just appears on our audience's timeline rather than being posted on our stories. We typically reserve these reposts for talent takeover moments, allowing us to interact between the accounts without drawing too much attention to the connection...

Rachel: Finally, the entire concept of a “finsta” was created to combat the pressure of maintaining a super curated main feed. Some might argue that a lot of that pressure has come from the changes made to Instagram over the years. What would you say to a person who might feel confused by the fact that even the official platform has a finsta?

Jackie: @notfit4main highlights a different side of sharing from @instagram. It embodies the creative risk at the heart of our brand: connecting creativity and self-expression directly to Instagram. We’ve been seeing a cultural shift, with people like Justin Bieber and Steve Lacy, that are actually posting it all on their main accounts.

For us, @notfit4main is not meant to replace @Instagram; they’re supposed to live together. They support and amplify each other. You can see this tie in our talent takeovers. With Tyla, we shot a Creative Process feature on @Instagram with Tyla about her upcoming tour followed by her takeover on @notfit4main, allowing her to go deeper into her creative process on the making music video for CHANEL. So I wouldn’t say it’s a response to the pressure to post, but that there are all kinds of ways to post and express yourself on Instagram!

Here’s what else is in today’s newsletter:

• Five post formats to try this week

• How one brand used Reddit to spread joy

• The beauty campaign video getting compared to The Office and Nathan Fielder

• IKEA’s viral Punch post came together in just 20 minutes

• Your invite to join the Link in Bio Discord

Read more

Below you’ll find my conversation with Aila Morin, the CMO of Merit. She’s one of the rare marketing executives who comes from a social media background. She got her first job by creating a hundred-page document analyzing a brand’s Instagram. (This was before analytics tools existed.) She later joined Mejuri as the first marketing hire. When Merit launched, she was doing all of the social media.

When I talk to social media managers about why they leave jobs, it’s often because they felt their boss didn’t understand what they do. It’s hard to deny that Merit’s impressive social media output is, to some degree, a direct reflection of what happens when your boss has done the work before. Last year, I asked Link in Bio readers to share one brand account that exemplifies “great social”—Merit tied at number two, right behind Duolingo. I wanted to learn more about the infrastructure that allows that work to happen. As Aila shared, “We guide campaigns off of social instead of retrofitting it into social.”

We talk about why the marketing funnel doesn’t work, creating the campaign before the product, and the importance of understanding the internet.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rachel Karten: I’ve joked before in this newsletter that I don’t interview CMOs. But through reading interviews and talking to people on your team, I get the sense that you really understand this world. In your role right now as CMO, what is your relationship with social media?

Aila Morin: I think what’s quite different for me is that my career started when these platforms were coming out. I was coordinating influencer marketing deals off of YouTube before there was even Instagram. When Instagram launched, I started doing social marketing. I had the fortune and the timing to start my career at a time when all of these platforms were coming out.

When Merit launched five years ago, I did all of the social. For me, not only is the work not far away but it’s also formative to how I was taught marketing in the first place. To this day, I am in every single social review. I don’t believe the delusion that social media is done by one manager, which I think is one of the most damaging things that executives believe about social media. We invest in it. We take the time to really think about how a story rolls out. We guide campaigns off of social instead of retrofitting it into social.

RK: When you zoom out to marketing as a whole—what would you say your philosophy is?

AM: For the last 15 years, marketing got diluted to a funnel that we all know doesn’t work. But it was a philosophy of CPM views into CPCs into traffic into conversion. Everybody forgot about sentiment and retention, which is actually so much more important than your funnel can ever be.

My philosophy is very much focused on telling tangible stories that people remember and that evoke emotion because then it’ll have a positive sentiment. It’s very simple and streamlined, but if everything doesn’t come from that and doesn’t come from building something from a position of a pain point and fixing a problem and telling the story around that problem, then it’s not marketing.

You can see a photo without product in it and know that it’s Merit because we built a brand, not just product marketing. It’s something that a lot of brands are still missing today because they think that every single post needs to drive revenue immediately.

RK: Obviously I look at social media for a living, but it feels notable how I am able to recall Merit posts from years ago. The Solo Shadow thesis video comes to mind. They stick in a way that a lot of brands aren’t able to accomplish. What role does resonance play in your strategy?

AM: Merit develops product in a not-so-linear way. We actually develop campaigns before we even develop a product. To use Solo Shadow as an example, the thesis existed before the product existed. I knew what we were going to say. I knew what the product had to do.

The video from this campaign, where we read the thesis out loud, wasn’t actually planned. We had our whole campaign ready and then a retailer told us that they were going to launch 10 other eyeshadows on the same day as us. So we had planned this entire campaign around Solo Eyeshadows and we were being launched in an animation featuring palettes. We had never made that internal-facing thesis public before but we felt we had to say the why so it’s clear what the intention was behind this new product. That ended up becoming a step change in our marketing because it was the first time that we had publicly put forward the why or the problem that we’re solving.

I would also say that we didn’t design that to go viral, nor do we design any of our content to go viral. We’ve done many similar videos since that have not gone viral. It’s always a mix of timing and sentiment and what else is going on in the world.

We used to try participating in TikTok trends. My theory though is that why would you even want that to be the content that goes viral? Because it’s probably not the best representation of your brand. And is that what you want people to remember? Not only are we not fast enough for it—nor are we very good at it, to be honest—it’s never really driven anything for us that’s been of value. That viral video is actually the only one that I think drove value for us because it also was about the brand ethos.

RK: You’ve talked about this concept of being relevant and rooted in previous interviews. What does that mean to you?

AM: I think brands spend a lot of time talking to themselves or looking at what other brands are doing.

Rooted for us means marketing in a way that is honest to the brand and coming at it from a direction that hasn’t been done 50,000 times. I also don’t keep social media on my phone and that is a very intentional decision.

Relevant means that it serves a purpose in people’s lives. Otherwise, why do I care?

A post should either fundamentally trigger an emotion—with Whitney on the trampoline, we’re not selling a product, we’re selling a feeling. Or a post should sell a product—show the shades and the lineup, explain what it does, explain why it’s valuable.

Ultimately every post needs to have a purpose. I think so often you’ll see people post content because they’re still thinking in a grid. That era of social media is dead because people don’t consume like that. We’ve just gotten so much more focused on high-value content. We are posting a lot less. We were posting every day on Instagram. We’re now down to every other day, because you can’t expect teams to create 365 days a year of perfect content. It’s not realistic. We focus much more on quality engagement instead of quantity of posts that go out.

RK: Something I’ve been circling recently is this idea of a brand respecting their audience’s attention. Treating them like they are intelligent. Merit does a good job at this.

AM: It’s such a small thing, but we’re very clear on what we are and what we’re not. Right? Merit’s core consumer is Millennial and Gen X. We are 30 to 50-year olds. That’s who we serve. Gen Z is welcome to come join in. And it’s happening, but we know who we serve and we speak to her like she’s a grown adult and it’s such a subtlety, but I think it makes such a difference. I think if we were super trend driven, it would feel very asynchronous for the consumer.

RK: There is so much talk about “going analog” right now. Chatter about logging off and throwing our phones out the window. Does that conversation impact how you think about marketing at Merit?

AM: First, because I came up in marketing in the 2010s, I was very aware of what happens when you depend on one algorithm to make your business. So you put 90% of your bad spend at a Meta and then the algorithm changes and you’re screwed. At Merit, we have never invested more than 30% of our ad spend into any one platform. That strategy meant that we went offline in marketing very early—things like billboards, direct mail, podcasts.

We also have a consumer that is less online because the 30 to 50-year-old consumer spends way less time on social media. There’s many that don’t have it at all because they made the decision that it’s not adding value, which means you have to find a way to reach high value customers. And most beauty brands are looking at this tiny segment on TikTok of Gen Z and Gen Alpha because that’s who’s there. So I think if you look at our marketing as a proportional spend, we’ve always been investing offline.

When it comes to the ethos of spending more time offline, I identify with that so much. In our marketing for this year, for example, we are investing much more into community events. We’re continuing to push the budget into offline spend because, frankly, buying a billboard ends up actually being cheaper than a lot of digital marketing. We’re also continuing to invest a lot more in relationship building, very old school stuff. I think the movement away from the dependency on social media is only in the early stages.

RK: What keeps you up at night about the future of marketing?

AM: Many things keep me up at night these days on marketing. AI definitely keeps me up. It has pushed us more towards real content and stories. It has made me more bullish on not editing, on keeping things more unfiltered, on keeping things more emotional and less polished.

The recent Minimalist campaign that we just ran is such a good example of that. We were celebrating five years in business and everyone that I talked to was like, What product are you launching to celebrate five years? And then when you look at what we do as a brand, the whole point is that we don’t launch that many products. So to re-hero a five-year-old product in a campaign and expect it to work is kind of crazy because nobody does that. So how do you take something five years old and tell a new story and make it relevant and make it move units? The Minimalist was an example of us being able to do that. It keeps me up at night to know, can you continue to do that over the years? Can you continue to market core is a very hard question to answer, and not many beauty brands have done it.

RK: So much of what people react to when a brand has “good social” is simply newness. Some brands are releasing new products what feels like weekly. How do you find a balance?

AM: This is such a deep cut, but there’s this column called LaineyGossip that I used to read in the 2010s. She had a phenomenal sociological lens on gossip. One of the things I always thought she was so right about is if you think of celebrities, sometimes they need to be quiet for a little while for you to fall in love with them again.

There is a mystery to brand building. If you launch something once a week, it’s irritating. Brands can ebb and flow. Sometimes we can be in your face, but right after we do a big campaign, it’s very intentional that we get really quiet. You have to know how to read the room and give people breathing space to miss you to then come back with a new idea.

RK: Finally, how important do you think it is for a CMO to understand the social media landscape? Can you be a good CMO and not understand what’s happening on social media?

AM: 50% of our sales are online. Sephora is a proportion of online. The majority of our sales happen on the internet. If you don’t understand how internet conversation works or how to drive a narrative or how to understand sentiment or when not to step in, I don’t know how you possibly drive a digitally-native brand.

The comment that every manager says about their boss when they leave, across roles, is that they didn’t understand my value or how I spend my time. There is a lack of understanding in the demands and nuance that are expected now of marketers and creatives.

Every creative is now essentially a marketer, and every marketer has to think like a creative. And you cannot expect that one person encapsulates all of those things because social media is creative, it’s analytical, it’s a sales channel, it’s a storytelling vehicle, it’s customer experience and feedback. To not understand that ecosystem is a huge disservice. I don’t think I would be effective at holding people accountable to their jobs if I hadn’t done their job myself.

If you enjoy free interviews like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Discord community.

Subscribe now

It might even be an educational expense at your company! Here’s a template for you to use when asking.

And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for making this newsletter possible!

A quick heads up that I recently updated the Link in Bio Running List of Post Ideas. It now has over 150 formats for your brand to try. A resource I return to over and over again!

Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• The charts, graphs, and stats guiding my 2026 social strategy

• I talked to the Heated Rivalry fan editor who HBO just hired

• Five post ideas to try this week

• The camera app used in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” videos

• Access to the Link in Bio Discord (“An essential place to be for anyone managing social media”)

Read more

I understand that engagement—specifically shares and watch time—are signals that help a piece of content perform better. It’s a non-negotiable if you want to be seen. But I worry that we’ve slowly boiled out substance in search of performance. The sugar high of a trend feels good, but I have a feeling audiences want something more to chew on. Attention doesn’t always tell the full story of resonance.

Of course, this isn’t true across the board. Plenty of accounts have been doing a great job at this. It’s hard work. One of those accounts is More Perfect Union, the nonprofit newsroom dedicated to building power for working people. They are one of the fastest growing partisan-leaning YouTube channels, according to Kyle Tharp, author of Chaotic Era. Their posts, like this investigation into stadium prices and this carousel on the median age of homebuyers being 59 years-old, regularly go viral. When I ask myself—What social media content has moved me lately?—their posts come to mind.

In today’s newsletter, I talked to Georgia Parke, Director of Audience Engagement at More Perfect Union. She oversees all of their day-to-day social media content, vertical video program, and distribution strategy for long-form videos. Her background is in politics—starting her career as a press intern for Bernie Sanders in his DC Senate office and eventually leading the social media and design team for his 2020 presidential campaign. We talk about how carousels contribute to follower growth, the role Shorts have played in their YouTube success, and why you can’t just rely on “fueling outrage to activate your audience”.

Inside More Perfect Union’s social media strategy

Rachel Karten: If you had to sum up More Perfect Union‘s social media philosophy, what would it be?

Georgia Parke: Build power for working people by producing substantive, informative content that can have real impact. Our audience is smart, informed, and desires substantive news content that relates to their lives—not to be patronized or told that everything is great when it obviously isn’t.

My personal philosophy is also to give yourself as much room and permission as possible to be in the moment and responsive to news. I’m very resistant to making content schedules too far in advance or trying to make posts overly polished. On the Bernie campaign, we would joke that the more time we put into making a post, the less likely it would perform well. You should have high standards, yes, but not set so many rules for yourself that you waste time trying to follow them all.

RK: What really stands out to me about More Perfect Union is how you show up in truly platform-first ways. The Twitter presence feels different from the Instagram presence—you meet people where they are. Which platforms do you consider your priority platforms?

GP: More Perfect Union started out with a very YouTube-centric strategy, and a lot of our work is still focused on that audience. It’s our largest account by far at nearly 3M subscribers, and we’ve added more than half of those in the past year. Right now we’re very focused on building up our Instagram and TikTok in a similar way, with their own strategies and personalities that connect best with the people following us there.

Our journalism and social content runs on several different timelines. We do mini documentaries that are produced over weeks or months; create vertical videos with on-the-ground reporting produced in days; and engage with news on a daily or hourly basis. But the common thread among all is relevance and substance. No matter what platform something goes on or how long it takes to produce, it needs to be relevant to the current moment and our audience, and it needs to give people some substantive information or storytelling.

RK: Researcher Kyle Tharp recently published a chart showing that More Perfect Union was one of the fastest growing partisan-leaning YouTube channels in 2025. What do you attribute that growth to?

GP: Our team produced over 100 incredible long-form videos last year that covered everything from why skiing has become a terrible experience to talking to Trump voters with Bernie Sanders in West Virginia. We also went all-in on producing vertical videos a year ago, and that drove fantastic growth on YouTube. In 2025, we had nearly as many views coming from Shorts as we did from our regular channel videos.

But separately from any particular tactic or format: I think many people are eager to see journalism and social media content that tells the news through a working class lens, about the labor movement, the economy, corporate accountability, political corruption, and more. I think a lot of people find our content refreshing and unique, and can see themselves represented in stories about working people speaking on the realities of the current economy.

RK: Can you share an example of a long form YouTube video that you cut down into a successful short form video? What sort of things do you keep in mind when converting long form to short form?

GP: We try to produce cut-downs that don’t necessarily condense the full video but pull out a compelling piece of it. We’re also not trying to leave you hanging or drive you to our site; we want you to get a full piece of compelling info even if you only watch for a minute or two.

For example, this video about the impacts of a Meta data center was cut into this clip focusing on one of the individuals in that story. It’s our most-viewed Short ever and led to Meta reaching out to the affected person directly.

RK: I also recently covered your Instagram carousel strategy in the newsletter. They are really great! Can you talk to me about your approach to carousels and some of the success you’ve seen from posting them?

GP: Carousels are a central piece of building up our Instagram audience. Especially when they are tied to breaking news—such as workers launching a strike at Starbucks or the election of Zohran Mamdani—they tend to bring in more followers than single slide posts. They’re also very helpful way to repackage our videos and investigations for a different audience. For example, our social team put together this great carousel based on an investigation of Instacart by one of our video producers. We’ve also used carousels to collaborate with other outlets; on this post, we worked with BreakThrough News to illustrate their report on how people’s retirement accounts are funding ICE.

RK: A lot of media companies are struggling to break through on social media right now, especially when so many platforms suppress links. What are some tactics you implement to make sure your posts get seen?

GP: We don’t rely on link sharing very much because we usually post content directly on the platforms themselves to maximize engagement there. Unlike many other news outlets or companies, we’re not aiming to drive traffic to a website. We’re also constantly looking for opportunities to collaborate and crosspost with other pages and outlets to reach other audiences that might not know about us yet.

RK: In my interview with Melted Solids they told me “well-produced media is a weapon in any fight”. It really stuck with me. A lot of people who read this newsletter work in corporate social. Some see what’s happening in the world today and want to use their digital skills for good. What advice would you give them?

GP: I have to stay on message here—unionize your workplace!

But also, I’m very lucky to work in a role that enables me to do advocacy work I care about. I know that’s not the case with many social media jobs—but there are countless ways to support your community or causes you are invested in if you have a solid skillset in digital or social. Movements need communicators and designers and videographers, too. And you don’t have to have access to a multi-million-follower account to do something impactful.

RK: Last week, Twitter was debating how to create content with substance that also captures attention. I'd consider More Perfect Union to be very good at finding this balance. What kind of content do you think actually mobilizes people?

GP: We have entire meetings and Slack channels dedicated to finding the perfect titles, tweets, and thumbnails that will accurately represent the story and grab the most attention possible. It takes a lot of work but makes a huge difference in viewership, especially when the subject matter is not particularly sexy (i.e. anything with the word “tariffs”).

But beyond engagement strategy, I also think you can’t rely just on fueling outrage to activate your audience. You might need to lean into some conflict or tension, but people won’t be mobilized if they watch your video and just feel despair. They need something specific to get behind. In our videos we try not just to identify and explain a problem; we also lay out potential solutions. This might be proposed legislation, regulatory action, a union’s list of demands, or an international or historical success story. We want to provide a blueprint for a world where working people aren’t subject to the whims of the billionaire class and can live in security and dignity.

Five takeaways from my conversation with More Perfect Union

1. Prioritize relevance and substance. “No matter what platform something goes on or how long it takes to produce, it needs to be relevant to the current moment and our audience, and it needs to give people some substantive information or storytelling.”

2. Make sure your short-form content tells a complete story. “We try to produce cut-downs that don’t necessarily condense the full video but pull out a compelling piece of it. We’re also not trying to leave you hanging or drive you to our site; we want you to get a full piece of compelling info even if you only watch for a minute or two.

3. Don’t discount YouTube Shorts. “In 2025, we had nearly as many views coming from Shorts as we did from our regular channel videos.”

4. Carousels drive follower growth. “Carousels are a central piece of building up our Instagram audience.”

5. You can’t rely just on fueling outrage to activate your audience. “You might need to lean into some conflict or tension, but people won’t be mobilized if they watch your video and just feel despair.”

Ask me anything!

Quick reminder that I am going to use an upcoming newsletter to answer reader questions about social media strategy. Want my advice, feedback, or thoughts on something social related? Submit your questions here.

If you enjoy free interviews like this one, you can upgrade to a paid Link in Bio subscription. You’ll get weekly strategy newsletters and quarterly trend reports, along with access to the Link in Bio Discord. Here’s what one person said about the Discord community: “Definitely an essential place to be for anyone managing social media. As close as you can get to the pulse—and one of the best places to get insights from others in the industry.”

Subscribe now

It might even be an educational expense at your company! Here’s a template for you to use when asking.

And if you’re already a paid subscriber, ignore this and thank you!