The Social Media Advice That's Wasting Your Time

"We just need to post more consistently."

It's one of the most common diagnoses we hear from organizations struggling with social media. And it's almost always wrong.

Not because consistency doesn't matter. It does. But because consistency has become a stand-in for strategy, and the two are not the same thing.

The Consistency Fallacy

The advice to "post consistently" comes from a reasonable place. Algorithms reward regular activity. Audiences forget brands that disappear. The logic seems sound.

But somewhere along the way, consistency became the goal itself rather than a characteristic of good execution. Organizations started measuring success by whether they posted, not by whether anyone cared.

Research from Sprout Social shows that the average brand posts 11 times per day across platforms. Yet engagement rates have declined steadily across nearly every industry over the past five years. More content. Less impact.

This is scheduled noise.

The Difference Between a Habit and a Strategy

A habit is a behavior repeated regularly. A strategy is a set of choices about where to play and how to win.

Posting every Tuesday at 10 a.m. is a habit. Understanding that your audience of nonprofit executives checks LinkedIn during their Wednesday morning commute, and crafting content that addresses their specific anxiety about donor retention, is a strategy.

The distinction matters because habits are about you. Strategies are about your audience.

McKinsey's research on marketing effectiveness found that organizations treating marketing as a series of tactical executions rather than strategic investments underperform peers by 20 percent on revenue growth. The same principle applies to communications. Tactics without strategy are expensive ways to accomplish nothing.

Four Questions Before You Create Another Piece of Content

Before your team produces another social post, blog article, or newsletter, answer these questions:

Who specifically are we trying to reach? "Our audience" is not an answer. Neither is "donors" or "customers." Get specific. What do they read? What keeps them up at night? Where do they already spend their attention?

What do we want them to do? Every piece of content should have a purpose beyond "engagement." Are you trying to build awareness? Change a perception? Drive a specific action? If you cannot articulate the outcome you want, you are not ready to create the content.

Why would they pay attention to us? This is the hardest question, and the one most organizations skip. Attention is finite. Your audience has infinite options. What makes your perspective valuable enough to earn their time? If the answer is "we have important work," that is not enough. Everyone believes their work is important.

How will we know if it worked? Not vanity metrics. Real indicators of progress toward your actual goal. If your goal is donor retention, follower count is irrelevant. If your goal is thought leadership, impressions without engagement means nothing.

What Strategy Actually Looks Like

Strategic communications starts with clarity about what you are trying to achieve and for whom. The content calendar comes later.

A nonprofit we worked with last year came to us posting five times per week across three platforms. They were exhausted, and their metrics were flat. After a strategic review, we cut their output by 60 percent, focused entirely on LinkedIn, and rebuilt their content around three messages their target donors actually cared about.

Six months later, their engagement rate had tripled. More importantly, they could trace a direct line from specific posts to donation conversations.

Less content. More impact. That is what strategy looks like.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Consistency is easy to measure and easy to execute. It gives teams a sense of accomplishment. We posted. We did something.

Strategy is harder. It requires saying no to content that does not serve your goals. It requires understanding your audience deeply enough to know what they actually need, not just what you want to tell them. It requires patience, because strategic communications compounds over time rather than producing immediate results.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: your audience does not care how consistent you are. They care whether you are relevant.

And relevance cannot be scheduled.