I want to borrow the topic “Being Able to Forget Is Also an Ability” to look at social media management from the opposite direction: some posts are fine for people to forget. But if certain service details disappear with your Stories every time, your chances of being found may evaporate along with them.
I lean toward a slightly deflating view: The content most worth keeping on social media may be the content least likely to earn a like.
Something like, “There are two steps at the entrance. If you’re bringing a stroller, call ahead and we’ll come out to help.” No quotable line, no filter, and it’s even hard to set to music. But it may come closer to someone’s actual search needs than a hundred beautiful latte photos.
Falling in Love with You and Choosing You Are Two Different Things
Imagine two cafés.
Café A’s social media looks like an independent magazine: backlighting, film photography, little universes in the milk foam. Every post makes you want to save it. As for whether dogs are welcome, where the outlets are, or whether it’s open on Tuesdays, you have to send a direct message.
Café B’s photos are ordinary, but it has a pinned post: “If you’re bringing a dog, please sit outside; the afternoon sun hits this area directly; for a quiet conversation, we suggest coming on a weekday morning.”
If a customer tells AI, “Find a dog-friendly café suitable for meeting with a client,” Café A’s aesthetic hasn’t stopped working. It’s just that this question calls for a different kind of material.
Whether the search system can read the posts, whether the information is current enough, and whether other pages can corroborate it will all affect the results. We can’t simply declare that Café B will win. But by hiding key information in direct messages, Café A has indeed put another door in the way of a public search.
People can like you first and ask questions over time; for AI to make a grounded recommendation, it needs to find clues that support the idea that you’re a good fit.
Social Media Can Be Charming—and Hard to Make Sense Of
Marketers will push back: without reach, who will see those service details? Fair enough. Beautiful content gets people to stop scrolling, and that job still matters.
What concerns me is whether we’ve mistaken “getting people to stop” for the entire journey.
An interior designer shares beautiful homes every day, and everyone knows they have good taste. But what a homeowner really wants to ask might be, “My place is only about 50 square meters, and I can’t move out during construction. Would you take the job?” If every project description says only “bringing life back to the way it should be,” the images are full, but the information needed to make a decision is sparse.
This has also made me rethink the creativity of social media managers. Creativity can help find appealing ways to explain limitations: turn construction noise into a map of daily life over a week, spell out which commissions aren’t a good fit, replace “we’re highly professional” with the back-and-forth behind a revision decision.
This content may never go viral, but it makes your value easier for strangers to recognize. When it also appears on publicly readable, regularly updated websites or business pages, search has more material to cross-check. Whether AI will cite it is still not guaranteed.
At eleven at night, a social media manager is getting ready to post for a café. There are two photos on her desk: one shows the sunset shining through an iced latte; the other shows the owner crouching at the entrance, measuring the height of those two steps.
She sends the second photo to the work group chat: “Can we shoot how to get a stroller inside tomorrow?”
The owner reads it. Half a minute later, he replies: “Would anyone really want to look at this photo?”