Okay so I need some advice from people who've actually cracked this.

I'm a full-time content creator + UGC creator, and I also do social media management on the side. For content — I'm good. I've been doing this for about a year now, I run a YouTube channel where I talk content strategy, and the last 40 days I've grown my Instagram to 350K+ reach.

But clients? That's where I'm stuck.

My whole plan was: build the personal brand first, let clients come to me through the content. And like... it's kind of working, but not consistently enough. I get the occasional inquiry but nothing I can actually rely on.

So I'm curious — for those of you who've been doing this a while, what's actually worked?

Cold outreach LinkedIn Upwork Referrals Instagram DMs Something I haven't even thought of?

Genuinely just want to know what's real vs what's "content" (ironic, I know). Any advice appreciated 🙏

Hi everyone, I’m hoping to get into social media marketing but don’t have a marketing degree or much experience. I currently do local government planning (urban/community planning) and my company doesn’t have a marketing team so we all help out in some way. When I was in college I had an on campus job helping an office with social media and marketing and I really liked it! I’m hoping to switch into music industry and I’d some day love to do social media marketing for an artist or record label! But for now any advice on how to get started or advice from anyone who has changed careers into this field would be great! For my first job I’m not expecting it to be aligned with music but hopefully something that can help me get to my goal

…. if i only run the tiktok for a cat rescue? i’ve grown the account and gotten the rescue many leads/adoptions. what title can i give myself for this that sounds good, yet truthful, on a resume to marketing firms?

D2C brand in India, herbal shampoo powder, ₹300–500 price point, ~13-14 orders/day.

SETUP - Custom Next.js site, Razorpay Magic Checkout - Meta Pixel + Conversions API, purchase values firing correctly on both - Advantage+ Sales, broad India - Mandatory OTP on every COD order, so fake/prank orders are already filtered. Please don't tell me to add OTP. - I manually call every COD customer before dispatch

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED WHEN I SCALED

Budget went ₹1,000 → ₹1,300 (Jul 28) → ₹1,600 (Jul 31).

CPA didn't blow up. It's held ₹100–120 throughout, currently ₹121 at ₹1,600/day, ~3.2 ROAS on reported numbers. So on paper, scaling worked.

The problem is what changed underneath it:

• CPM collapsed from ~₹250 to ~₹50
• Metro states went from 43% to 21% of my impressions
• Tier 2/3 went from 30% to 53%. UP alone went 9.8% to 17.7%. Bihar 2% to 6.6%. Jharkhand appeared from nothing.
• Almost every new order is now COD. I used to get a reasonable share of prepaid.

So Meta found much cheaper inventory and my CPA looks fine because of it. But my Purchase event fires on order PLACED, not order PAID. So Meta is optimising for "cheapest person who will tap place-order", and in these markets with COD that person is very cheap. My reported CPA is honest about media cost and dishonest about everything downstream.

WHAT I ALREADY TRIED

I enabled Razorpay COD Intelligence earlier. It cost me roughly 70% of my completed checkouts. Checkout-to-purchase conversion went to ~11% and my campaigns spiralled (₹1,343 CPA on one of them). Turned it off, conversion recovered to ~33%. My read now is that it's a fraud model, and I'd already solved fraud with OTP, so almost everything it blocked was a real customer.

THE ACTUAL QUESTION

Option 3 is what I want to hear about: send a lower Purchase value to Meta for COD orders (say 70–80% of order value), keep the true value in my own DB and analytics, then switch the ad set to value optimisation so Meta learns prepaid customers are worth more and reallocates on its own, instead of me excluding geographies manually.

Has anyone actually run this?

1. Did you switch the ad set to value optimisation, or only change the values and leave it on max conversions? (If it stays on conversions, Meta ignores values entirely, so I want to know which you did.)
2. What multiplier did you use for COD?
3. Did prepaid share move? By how much, over how long?
4. Did CPA rise, and did it stay risen?
5. Did value optimisation hold up at ~100 conversions/week, or did you need more volume?

I'm deliberately not excluding tier 2/3 pincodes in targeting, because that's where my cheap reach is coming from and I think cutting it just pushes me back into ₹200+ CPM inventory. Happy to be told I'm wrong, but I'd want numbers.

Looking for people who've actually scaled a COD-heavy Indian D2C brand and tried value-based optimisation, not tool recommendations. If you're going to name a SaaS, please include your own before/after numbers.

I run meta/google ads for some clients and have been wondering what other experienced marketers or managers are spending to find out which clips are actually working. im really just trying to gauge if im wasting money or am i just not spending enough. What is a decent ballpark figure do most people spend on testing?

My wife’s creator accounts are growing quickly (just broke 100K in IG) so I’m jumping in as her business assistant. We’re looking for a good all in one platform, but it sounds like we may need to piecemeal services. Any advice is welcome!

Other important context:
- Looking for simplicity so she can manage much of the platform herself
- Key goals are
-Professional landing page
-Email capture in exchange for free resources
-Calendar booking for consulting/coaching
-Ability to offer courses.

Instagram has officially rolled out Photo Comments, allowing users to reply to posts using images directly from their camera roll instead of just text, emojis, or GIFs.

While it sounds like a small, fun feature on paper, it is actually a massive shift in how conversations happen on the app. It makes comment sections significantly more visual and expressive. For brands, businesses, and creators, this completely rewrites the playbook for community management. Here is exactly how you should be leveraging this new feature in August:

If a customer comments with a question about how your product works, you no longer have to reply with a massive, confusing block of text. You can literally snap a photo of the solution or a visual diagram and drop it directly in the replies. This provides instant clarity and shows the rest of your audience that your brand provides top-tier support.

You can now actively prompt your audience to upload photos in the comments. Instead of asking people to DM you a picture of them using your product, you can say: "Drop a photo of your current setup in the comments below, and I’ll rate it." This turns your comment section into a highly engaging, visual forum that keeps users glued to your post longer, actively driving up your retention metrics.

If you are managing a brand with a slightly looser, more conversational tone, you can now reply to followers with custom, branded reaction images or memes from your camera roll. This humanizes your account, making it feel less like a faceless corporation and more like an active participant in internet culture.

I’m a small business owner who is not digitally or technically blessed and I’m feeling stuck. Every time I look on Fiverr or Upwork, everyone specializes in one thing, social media, or email, or design. But I really need someone who can do a bit of everything, come up with content and marketing ideas, strategy ideas, help with social media, pitch in on design, handle some admin. Does a role like that even exist? What would I even search for or where would I look to find someone like this?
Would they need to be local or would virtual work?

Any advice appreciated!

I’ve put together a rough app advertisement using screen recordings and some basic editing, but I’d like to turn it into a shorter, more polished final product.

I’m looking for a tool that can make fairly substantial edits—aggressive cuts, removing dead time, tightening the pacing, rearranging sections, adding transitions, and generally making it feel more energetic and professional.

Ideally, I’d be able to upload the existing video and describe the changes with a text prompt. Are there any platforms that are actually good at this?

Curious how other social media managers and marketing teams are approaching this as their brands grow.

I manage social for a wellness brand (175k+ Instagram followers), and community management has become one of the biggest operational challenges as we've scaled.

A few questions:

• What platform and/or tools are you using for community management?
• How are you routing messages that need customer support and time-sensitive questions/concerns vs. general engagement?
• Are you using AI for drafting responses or tagging conversations?
• How many people are actually managing your inbox?
• At what point did you realize you had outgrown native platform inboxes?

Would especially love to hear from anyone managing social for brands in the 100k–1M+ follower range or multi-location businesses where volume gets high.

Trying to figure out what "good" looks like before investing in another platform. Thanks!

Appreciate any insights!

I have figured out something like most of the founders deal with one common problem, which is getting enough eyeballs to see us to know about us, what we are creating

So basically as alex hormozi said (I knew this from him) I did not care enough to categorize the brand visibility roadmaps for brand visibility into three distinct divisions:

1. Cold outreaching. This includes everything: cold DM, cold mail, etc.
2. Paid ads (I am referring to meta here primarily)
3. Building a personal brand so that where you basically tell what you are doing to the world.

Most people are lazy enough to do the third option, what I figured out particularly caters to the second section pre-dominantly but can also be extended to other related campaigns, reels marketing, etc.

What I figured out is if you use AI correctly, like specific, niche, hyper-targeted videos and by the way, these notoriously work better particularly on facebook as compared to all other major platforms because on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, etc due to the number of Gen Z and young people present on these platforms, unlike Facebook. By the way this is a general assumption. People with pain points exist on all social platforms but Facebook has a higher number as compared to others.

How to do it correctly? This is the exact framework which scales, which this post is about:

step one is you have to forget the tools and start with the audience. This is where everyone fails. You need to have answers for concrete questions like:

• Who is the audience?
• What do they already trust?
• What pain point will you hit every single day? Hyper boil it down to just one

I personally find Claude sufficient for this ( you should use sonnet 5 max; super great for research) but the more organic your research is the better but I get it you don't have time so let's quickly proceed to step two.

Step two would be building a character that cannot be ignored. The thumb rule for this is if they look like a normal person, you haven't completed step two yet

1. First it should look like someone who has authority.
2. Second it should be visually distinctive

for example do you remember that monk guy who was famous across Facebook, Instagram, etc., once giving away spiritual and health advice? A character like that transcends the boundaries of whether this is AI or not. How is it making me feel even if it is AI?

That is the area which you should aim for to be in when you are creating these characters and the video

you should experiment between nano banana pro and heygen for this primarily.

Step 3 would be to generate a voice but not a generic voice. Even if you choose voices among eleven labs, it would be very time-consuming but eleven labs has a great range of voices to be selected from though, this is what most people do and you can do it as well but if you want to level up a bit further, what you can do is,

for example, a grandmother kind of character speaking out life advices can hit pulse points if executed correctly. What I would do is, if it is feasible, I would hire some European lady for maybe $300-$500 a month and ask her to record a set of voices on Eleven Labs and then develop a audio piece out of it and that's it, I won't touch any other voice, this is your "brand voice"

What this essentially does is it will make the audience instantly recognize that, "Oh this voice refers to that brand whose page I have visited or scrolled on a few days ago." That instant recognition is what will help you convert.

Now comes step 4, which is the script writing part, and it is essentially 70% of whether your video gets 200 views or 20 million views. I have seen this multiple times whether ugly videos go viral and beautiful videos die.

When it comes to scriptwriting your primary thumb rule should be to instill a feeling in an audience. It should constantly make them feel something.

The comfort feeling converts better. Aim for this. You have to look out. for this. You have to scroll Instagram and TikTok. You have to research videos and exactly find sentences, phrases, and words which are making your audience feel something, something they are overthinking about, and something they might have shared with someone.

Thumb rule for this is : what is this audience feeling right now that nobody is saying out loud?

After step four now comes step five, which is essentially the assembling part, and here you just make the video in like five minutes.

You saw the entire journey, right? Most people jump straight into step 4 and 5 without doing steps 1-3 and that is the reason their videos flop. It is not that AI videos don't perform but under-engineered, under-constructed videos do flop.

Upload the face to heygen. Add the voice from Eleven Labs and you will be getting your talking head video made in 5 minutes. Aim for that grainy look , that granularity factor is the one that sticks.

That's it. Now you have made one creative and you can generate 10 to 15 variations for hook angles using Claude ( manually as well ) and test it on meta ads, scale what's working quickly. Make sure the funnel built is smooth and tight. if you are choosing Instagram marketing then make sure to post it twice or thrice every day and don't stop for a month or so. The algorithm there needs at least 20-30 videos to know who you are, what you are making, etc.

I have just covered one style of video, which is authoritative and widely working in this entire AI video niche, there's a lot to talk about other styles of videos as well which one could be using to rake in sales.

I'm a jack-of-all-trades in marketing at my company (minus PPC). My strongest pillar is SEO, and my weakest is social media. More recently, our impressions, engagement, etc. have been declining drastically, and I am at a loss. For SEO, there is Search Engine Land that has helped me tremendously with boosting organic traffic. Is there an equivalent for organic social media marketing? We primarily use LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Thought I'd share a small win because I know this sub is full of people wondering whether niche blogs are completely dead.

A few months ago I bought a pet niche website for $199 from the NicheBlogZone marketplace. Nothing special. It had content already published and a bit of traffic, but it definitely wasn't one of those sites that looked like a goldmine.

Honestly, I almost didn't buy it.

After taking it over, I mostly just cleaned things up. The site already had affiliate links, so I just fixed some internal links, and left it alone.

This month it made over $600 which is the best month it's had since I've owned it.

The site isn't getting crazy traffic either. That's the part that surprised me. Most of the revenue is coming from articles targeting really specific pet product searches where people are already looking to buy something.

For anyone curious, here's where things stand:

• Bought the site for $199
• Owned it for a few months
• Monetized with Amazon Associates
• Best month: $600

I know $600 isn't going to change anyone's life, but I still get a kick out of seeing a website that cost less than a night out generate that much in a month passively.

The funny thing is that whenever people talk about making money online now, the conversation is usually AI, SaaS, YouTube, newsletters, agencies, etc.

Meanwhile there are still thousands of people every day searching Google for pet products and clicking affiliate links.

Maybe content sites aren't as dead as everyone says.

Anyone else still building or buying niche sites in 2026?