What to Post Right Now

This is the newsletter equivalent of scrolling for eight hours.

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about how companies need to care less about their employees posting about them on TikTok. It’s inevitable. Embrace it.

Miri (@mirithesiren), a former Chick-fil-A employee, had gained a following the past four months for documenting her free employee meals at the company. The top comments always looked the same: “The way that i am heavily considering going to cfa right now bc of this video 😭😭 that looks so yummy” and “My fave account on TikTok CFA needs to get you in corporate because I ate CFA 3x this week because of your videos 😂”.

Last week Miri posted that “Chick-fil-A Corporate has asked me to stop making content. I’m sorry you guys :/ Thank you for all the support and love but an era has ended.”

This reminds me of when Sherwin-Williams fired a popular paint mixer creator.

It’s a new trend. Employee creates content around the brand they work for. The content starts to go viral. The brand shuts it down.

But what if they embraced it or, at the very least, ignored it?

I’ve seen @aalexaconcepcion’s, a McDonald’s employee, dancing videos on my FYP a handful of times. I’m sure the company knows about her, considering one video has over 25M views. But, ultimately, what’s the harm? And, importantly, is the harm of the employee coming out and posting a video saying corporate shut them down worse than the harm of the actual videos?

All of this is to say, I hope more brands realize that it’s inevitable that employees are going to post about them on TikTok. And, yes, I get that companies are likely worried about their unfair pay, bad work conditions, and poor quality products getting exposed…but maybe focus on fixing that instead of policing social posts!

(Also shout out to the Shake Shack team for partnering with Miri. The sponsored post has almost 1M views. I hope they paid her well and it’s an ongoing series!)

Alright. Let’s get into today’s post, which is just 19 ideas for social posts. Sometimes I get in a rut with coming up with new posts and just scroll various platforms to get inspired. This is the newsletter version of that process. I know it goes without saying, but the point isn’t to copy the brand examples I include, but just to illustrate how the idea can come to life. Some of the ideas are:

• A really fun way to announce a digital product update

• More cartoons (plus four cartoonists to work with!)

• “Which one are you ______ in?”

• The evergreen meme I always turn to

• Or draw your own memes like these brands did!

• Examples of brands referencing Taylor Swift in ways I don’t hate

• A clothing brand should buy this TikTok series

• Why I’m into two-photo carousels

• One idea for brands that are willing to do something very weird…

• Lots more!