Rethinking Social Media Strategy

In this episode of Torch Talk, Lindsey Chupp sits down with Julia Kooser to break down what’s actually changing in social media and what businesses need to be paying attention to moving into 2026.

As platforms evolve and search behavior shifts, social media is no longer just about posting content. Lindsey and Julia unpack how social is now directly tied to visibility, search, and long-term brand growth.

The conversation explores how businesses should be thinking about platform selection, content formats, and performance metrics, along with why consistency and strategy matter more than ever.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• How social media is becoming part of search (not separate from it)

• What types of content are actually performing right now (video vs. carousels)

• How to choose the right platforms based on your audience

• What metrics matter and why likes don’t mean much anymore

• Why consistency and long-term strategy drive real results

• How YouTube and short-form video are gaining traction

• The growing importance of personal brands in business

• How to use AI without losing authenticity in your content

This episode offers a practical look at social media today, especially for business owners trying to keep up with changing platforms and build a strategy that actually works.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

In a world where there's a ton of AI creation of things out there that sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and it's not an idea. So being able to show the real human side of you in the business is going to resonate with people, especially as we move into the future where you might not know that a video is created and it's real. I can't tell you how many uh AI videos have gotten.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

At least 35 seconds, I'm like, what is this who doing?

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Welcome back to Torch Talk, the show where we spotlight bold leaders growing their businesses and communities with grit and purpose. Today, Julia and I are going to discuss all things social media. So at Fierce Creative Solutions, we manage social media for service-based businesses. We have approximately 25-ish social media accounts that we are working on right now, and we've seen some really interesting trends over the last year, and we thought we would want to discuss them with you. So, Julia, let's talk about this a little bit. One of the hot topics of 2025 was that search engine optimization is turning into search everywhere optimization, and it's really linking social media together with organic search results. So talk to us a little bit about what that looks like.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

So uh November 2025, believe it was November, um, Instagram or Google started being able to read Instagram cap captions. So that was kind of one of the first Is that 25 or 24? That was 24. As soon as I said that a lot, I was like, 2025 was just a few months ago. Um, but it really was um changing a lot of things in 2025. So Google's able to read the social media or read the captions on Instagram, so as people are searching. The other thing that I think is changing is people are going to social media to search for things as well. So not just going to Google to learn how to do things or going to YouTube to learn how to do things, but also going to TikTok and how to DIY or how where to look up restaurants. So just using that as a search engine is definitely changing as well.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

So with the Google algorithm updates, what that means is, and I actually had this happen to me a few times, you can have Instagram content show up in your organic search feed. So, like if you were looking for a restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio, it could pull actual in Instagram reels and put that into your search feed along with the map results for the restaurants and all of the other things. But um, it really opened up the gates for where and how those social media posts are shown.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

And then, like you said, they're actually looking on those platforms first. We did an uh interview with some of the social team earlier, and most of them are younger. And I had asked them all how how they actually like what is their number one platform to go to. And there is definitely a trend that it's the first reaction is not to go Google something, it might be to go look it up on Instagram first or Facebook. It depends on your age and profile or platform preference. But um what does that mean though for the business who knows they need to do social? So, what should that look like for them?

SPEAKER_00 3:16

That would be showing their services. So for us at service-based businesses, so showing their services on those platforms Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, what are those services, who those services for, um, and just kind of go through those that information.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

Is there a certain type of content format that they should be using? What is the frequency? What does that look like in 2026?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, so reels have always been the big thing. Video is king, um, but that is starting to shift a little bit where carousels we are seeing, um, especially on Instagram, are performing maybe better or about the same as reels. So taking that content and doing it through reels. So, what's your message showing that in a short form video? What is your message? That same message showing it in a carousel, and honestly, test both. Testing, testing, testing is always the key. So algorithms are gonna like certain things, but also what resonates with your audience is just as important because then the algorithm will push that out for the client. So, same message, show it multiple different ways.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

How do you or what's your philosophy on matching up platforms to the type of businesses that we work with? So, like how when when you have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, I we don't really talk about Twitter that much. I don't know if anybody's actually posted on there other than political, yeah, like X uh political things, I feel like, or like news updates. Yeah, I I know there's sports stuff on there, but we don't like for our service-based businesses, most of them are not, it's not an active part of their strategies.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

How do we decide which platforms to focus on and what is a priority? Yeah, so it all depends on who the client's target audience is and then where are they at. So if your target audience um for a company is going to be middle-aged men, you know, 45 up, TikTok may not be the place that we need to focus on. It's gonna be uh Facebook or Instagram or maybe YouTube, depending on what it is. So knowing who your target target audience is is so important. That way you know where they're at, so you know where to where you can speak to them and then how to speak to them.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Do you have any examples of clients where we have chosen maybe let's talk about us? How what do we prioritize from a social media perspective?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

It's a constant battle because we always tend to want to go to Instagram first, but Facebook is where our target clients it are, so Facebook is what we need to be prioritizing alongside um with LinkedIn. But that I think would be totally different strategies for how we're gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

We have also talked about Fierce has competing goals. So, like, are we trying to reach our target client or are we trying to recruit? Because social media has been a huge part of our hiring process. Uh, we expect people to go look us up on social media and have a sense of what our culture is like and what it's like to work here, and and so that's something we talk about our clients with our clients on a regular basis as well is what are the actual goals of your business? Um, most of the time it's lead generation, but some of the time they have an additional goal. Like we are working with uh Kingsway Services, and one of their goals this year is hiring. It's a it's a hard um industry that they're in, it's hard to recruit. And so they want to utilize social media to help draw interest and increase brand awareness with potential employees. Yeah, and that can also change the platforms that we're recommending because who your employee is and who your target client is might be a little bit different.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, and even with our own social media strategy, so the fun culture type videos, we're sharing that only on TikTok and maybe a little bit of on Instagram because that's where our target employees are hanging out on Instagram and TikTok. And then so something that we shoot for a culture or video probably might not end up on Facebook, not because there's anything wrong with it, just because of who we're trying to reach and where they are.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

So, what do you say to the client who says Instagram or TikTok isn't like their target audience isn't on there?

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Well, it depends on who like who is their target audience. Also, I think um when TikTok first came out, it was the dancing platform, but that has changed so much of who actually is on TikTok. A lot a lot more people are on TikTok than people want to understand.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Some of them don't, I was gonna say some of them don't even want to admit.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, then then they admit and also TikTok right now is driving a lot of the other platforms to change their algorithm to match what TikTok is.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

I mean, TikTok literally changed the world. It used to be that Facebook and Instagram, in order to get a business post, you had to like the page. It has changed so that all algorithms are pushing content out based off of the content that's created in the interest of the person interacting or the user. And TikTok was the one who paved the way for that. Um, it's also changed how we measure the performance of social media. So let's talk about that a little bit because um because content can be served by anybody anymore or to anybody anymore, it does not matter if they like your page. Okay, so what things do we measure for social media success?

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Engagement and impression. So those are your top two things. So how many people are seeing the post? Because again, you don't have to like a page to see the post, and then how many people are then engaging with it? And that could be sharing it, it could be liking it, commenting on it, viewing it if it's a story. So that's also depends on what type of content you're put putting out as well.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

Um, we when we did a lot of our annual performance reviews for 2025 at the end of the year, we were also able to measure quite a few of our service-based clients uh were getting great conversions from organic social media as well. And there's usually a layered paid advertising strategy in there as well. But I know uh for a number of our clients, it's a pretty significant number that we're tracking. Um, what I told all of my clients is that is not something that we expect to see happen in a short period of time. So we're not gonna start social media for you in 2026 and expect to have a hundred social media leads that year. But when we have worked together for, you know, two, three, four years, we do expect to see conversions through the social media platform. Uh, we've learned enough about you as a brand to that we should know what type of content to um capture, edit, post, where to post it to capture the audience well. And I definitely think that we have seen a big shift in that, like being able to actually measure the business that's coming out of social media. Uh, most of the business owners that I'm talking to really love that because they always want to measure ROI at the end of the day. And the the cost per lead number might be higher than what they want, but it is still a branding tool at the end of the day. It's increasing visibility, it's increasing trust and authority, and there's a dangerous risk in not being on social at all.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Yeah. Well, just to kind of go with that brand awareness. So social media is always going to be brand awareness first over lead generation, but just to your point, as we are seeing some clients come out with leads on it, but that's clients that we've been working with for a while, who've been building up their brand. So a brand new social media account that doesn't have a lot of content on there isn't, shouldn't expect to get a lot of leads from it. I mean, they need to build up the content, build up the brand, and then people need to be comfortable with them before they just start buying something or checking out their services from that. So the consistency of it definitely is important as well in knowing that it's a foundation. So let's get that brand awareness foundation right. Let's get people warmed up to you and then start adding in those call to actions that can potentially get you those leads.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

So at Fierce, we have three different service packages for social media. We do this with all of our monthly services. Um, so we have um essential, pro, and elite, and then we're able to utilize different levels of those packages to match the client's goals. What we are able to look at is say for our for our essential clients, that is for um authority and kind of maintenance. So that is for somebody who is, you know, wants to be present so that if somebody looks me up and they go find me on Facebook, I look like I'm active and I'm a real business. That is not to be in people's feeds. We do not expect growth. It is for maintenance and support of other marketing things that we're doing. Um, but for the pro and elite clients, we're able to identify primary platforms. So that might be like for us, Facebook and LinkedIn. Um, and then supporting uh channels would be Instagram and TikTok, but a different service-based business, it might be Facebook and Instagram first. But if we're going to create reels for Instagram, we will still cross-post those onto TikTok and onto YouTube, even if like TikTok isn't necessarily your target audience. Our philosophy here has just been let's get if we're going to create the content, let's recycle it and put it across all of the platforms. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to uh create the unique piece of content that TikTok wants. So maybe it won't perform as well, but we just want to increase that visibility across to all of the channels. We've seen a lot of success with YouTube. It's actually been a little surprising. Yeah. Because I'm not a YouTube first user, but when we looked at all of those performance reviews from last year, I was really surprised like with the strong and steady growth that we saw with clients, both in subscribers and in impressions. And one of the things that I really noticed with the trends is like TikTok and Instagram, your your views and impressions might be really up and down and up and down and up and down. It's very algorithm-driven. With YouTube, with almost every single client that I looked at, once you started growing, you really kind of maintain that. So once you reach a certain level of impressions and subscribers, it's it's not really like this the growth doesn't really go backwards. No. So it is a uh more consistent growth platform, and I think something that we're leaning into heavier, specifically for service-based businesses, in 2026. Do you have any examples of clients that you're doing these things with?

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Yeah. So two of our clients have performed really well on YouTube, um, and it's YouTube Shorts. So we don't have too much long-worm content that we're putting on YouTube. It's the shorts that we're also recycling on um Instagram as well. But it's a lot of that um, well, I was about to say it's a lot of the ASMR videos, but that's I take that back because we have um one client that does a lot more education of what their service is, talking through their work, kind of taking us alongside their job site with them. And that is really what's performing well for them. So just that somebody with the mic on their chest working alongside the camera is um, but then we also have the some clients that have that those traditional like ASMR satisfying videos that I think of perform well anywhere just because people like that.

SPEAKER_02 14:12

When we say ASMR satisfying videos, that looks like a flooring company, a floor coating company like rolling out their the coatings and the flakes. That looks like a power washer doing the slow power wash or a roofing company tearing off or installing the shingles. Yeah. So we do want to get like the working sounds in those videos, but it's not like uh ASMR traditional style, in what you would think. But it is about the sounds, the satisfying, the relaxing. Um, and those might all not always convert into customers right away either. But if it's an interesting piece of content, it's gonna increase visibility, it can be the initial hook to get people in and interested to interact with your brand. Yeah. Another trend in 2026 that really isn't going to be a trend, I think it's not gonna go anywhere, is leaning into personal brands. So we have applied this here at Fierce because I have really worked on developing a personal brand channel in 2025. But talk to us a little bit about what does that mean? What do you do? Who should have a personal brand? Why, how do you use that for visibility for your company?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah. So using Fierce as an example, we have our Fierce social media accounts. Now we have a Blaze social media account. The Blaze Network. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and Facebook, yes, and YouTube. Follow us on everywhere, the Blaze Network. So what we are utilizing is with your personal brand, you're bringing that human side of Fierce out and then also the thought leadership, the authoritative side of things. Um, so why brands need that is because it one, it just brings a human side to it. It's that authentic authenticity of social media that I think we got away from a little bit that people are going back to and wanting to know, you know, behind the business, obviously, like who works there, what do they do, but what's the why? And there's no better way to say that than the owner of the business explaining their why, why they do things, what they do, how they do it. So that is really important, but then it also helps drive the business content. So LinkedIn, um, in particular, we'll have a business page for it that we encourage the employees to interact with across all businesses, but having that owner or higher leadership, having a brand on there where they're very active on there and just reinforcing what the uh business is posting out, we've seen perform really well.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

I would also say it's really important for a salesperson. So, like if you have a key employee who's going to be visible to the community, then leaning into your personal brand and the way that you're posting is pretty vital.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

It's like the new influencer marketing. I mean, influencer marketing is still relevant in some ways. I think that's changing and evolving. It mostly applies to e-commerce or product-based businesses. We focus more on service-based businesses. Um, there's definitely opportunity with our service-based businesses for them to lean into that personal branding side. But the ironic thing is most of them have not fully even leaned into a as complex of a social media strategy as what they need. I my fear would be that some of them are going to get left behind with some of the changes. There's just such a a lack of understanding and or not understanding the investment of when they're working on social media. They know they need to do it, they know they don't have time to do it themselves. They have a hard time paying somebody else to do it though, probably because they don't know what's going to bring. And if you layer a personal brand into that, that's a whole nother thing. Yeah. But we want to make sure that we bring it to everybody's attention because it is something that's relevant. And it would be horrible if we were sitting here knowing that there's a key part of social media, and we didn't recommend that to our clients, even if we didn't know if they were willing to invest into that as an option.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Yeah. So I have a client now where they have sales reps all across the country, so different regions part of it, and we're working with them to develop a um, not necessarily a full LinkedIn strategy, but just quick reference guide, do's and don'ts that they can share to those uh sales reps to help increase their postings. And just we're right now we're just starting the basic, let's increase posting. Let's just start posting. And um, what should they be posting? What should they, you know, be saying and doing, and then how also are should they be interacting with the business page?

SPEAKER_02 18:33

I think people in the world are craving real and authentic. They love that behind the scenes, the thought leadership. But thought leadership sounds like a it's such a coined phrase or like a trending phrase. It's really why like at fierce, why do we do what we do? What are what is my vision? What is the what are the ideas? What's my goal? What's my heart for the company, for our employees, and for our clients? Um, and being able to share a little bit of rawness, which kind of is leading me into my next point in a world where there's a ton of AI creation of things out there that sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and what's not. Yeah. So being able to show the real human side of you and your business is going to resonate with people, especially as we move into the future where you might not know if some a video is created and it's real or not. I can't tell you how many uh AI videos have gotten me.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

I'm like at least the first five seconds, I'm like, what is this raccoon doing?

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Oh, that's not real. So any advice when it comes to somebody who says, Oh, I'll just create that with AI. I'll just make my social media with AI.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Tread lightly. So AI is a great powerful tool. It can definitely help speed up work processes. We love using different AI tools, but also it's very easy for things to become cookie-cutter, not authentic that people like, and people are starting to spot, are getting better at spotting what's real, what's not, and always tending to go for the just that real authentic side of things. So um also AI is not perfect, so just be make sure you count how many fingers you have as you are creating different content photos and videos with it.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

I mean, it's always like people are like, oh, you can just create that. And I'm like, yeah, that's okay to like show somebody in passing, but rarely is it marketing ready. Yeah. And we had talked last week about you know what we bring as an agency is that personal touch, the unique design. So we do this across everything. So with our websites, it's going to be a unique design to you. Social media, it's going to be a unique strategy, a unique design to you. We're not using templates, we're building things from scratch, and we really don't use AI very much on the content creation side. We use that more for brainstorming strategy, for um organizing and developing processes and um being strategic and efficient, but not necessarily for the visual content creation.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Yeah, it's great for efficiency, but the way AI works is that you need to feed it more information for it to learn. So if you're feeding it um more content and it needs to see other content to create that content, at the we're gonna get to a point where it's all gonna look the same. Yeah. So you can definitely spot out like that was a AI-generated logo because it looks like all the rest of the logos that you've vetted examples of. Yes. So I was listening to a podcast where their head of Instagram was speaking, Adam, and different things that they're testing out right now in India is just like TikTok when you open up your phone and it's a full screen of just videos. So on Instagram, you can live in your reels, you can live in your feed, you can live in your um stories, and you can live in your instant messages. So you'll have a choice of which of those sections of Instagram you want to first see when you open up. So you can Just be looking if you want to live in your reels. As soon as you open up Instagram, it'll be a full screen just to reels. If you like to be in stories, you can open up Instagram and just be stories.

SPEAKER_02 22:09

So interesting. They're testing it out. In other countries first.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Yep. And then slowly.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

So that will probably change too how we create because like there's um instant messaging strategies are out there on social media now, but if somebody chooses to have their DMs open first, you can create messaging.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yeah, and you can create different channels and things like that that you can invite subscribers to. So just in time to make it more complicated. And then just to go back to our AI, what um the social media different companies are working with um different content capturing companies like Canon, uh that to be able to tell right away if something is AI or organically captured. So again, this came from the um podcast I was listening to. So there's gonna be the what they're like floating around examples, is if um a picture was taken with um a canny or with an iPhone, it will be like a watermark stamp on it, or if it's j um AI generated, that it will say something about AI generated so that it's easier to well.

SPEAKER_02 23:17

I know TikTok was downgrading, like you have to you have the option to indicate whether something is AI generated. And if it caught you posting things that were AI generated and you didn't indicate it, then you can actually be like red flagged, almost put into like a little bit of jail from a content performance standpoint. So they had an incentive to make sure that you content creators are putting that out there. Yeah. Um, so that's interesting to hear like the the camera companies, which they're it's in their best interest to help make sure that you know they want to continue to sell cameras.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

And all of their devices.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Um, so I think it's still a way, ways off of what that's gonna look like and then how is it gonna be policed by the platforms if it's not um how they're gonna enforce it and things like that, but just some they are working on not necessarily fighting back the AI creation, but just being able to sh identify what's real and what's AI.

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Okay, well, thank you for the updates. Stay tuned to us here if you would like to continue to get social media hot takes and updates. Um, at Fierce Creative Solutions, we have a couple of different social media options and solutions for you. Uh, number one, we can do a marketing audit where we go in and look at all of the things you're doing from a marketing perspective now. Specifically, since we're talking about social, we can review and audit all of your social media platforms, take a look at the back-end performance and give you some clear insights on what's working, what's not working, are you focusing on the right things, content, uh, recommendations. We also do a full comprehensive market social media strategy so we can do a more in-depth um let's create your target audience and client persona and go really deep on research of who your target client is and then match them up to a social media platform so you have a lot more clarity moving forward. And then we have three different social media management packages. So if you're looking for somebody to support you in your social media efforts, we um have three different budgets, three different options, and we will match one of those up with your goals and priorities. So if that's something that you're interested in or you need more information on, you can reach out to me or Julia, visit Fierce Creative Solutions.com. Message us here, find us online. It's almost hard to not find us. We're bright pink and black. So look anywhere you go. Um, and we we really do live and breeze social media. We talk about it on the time. I don't even want to talk about my screen time. I'm on social all the time. So um we'd love to support our clients and and help bring social media to life. Thanks for tuning in to Torch Talk. If today's story inspired something in you, share it with a colleague, future change maker, or community leader. Until next time, stay inspired, stay intentional, and keep your fire burning.