This Week
If social media for your business feels like a moving target, this is for you — plain, honest notes each week on what's actually working, from two people who run it for a living. No sign-up yet, just this week's issue.
This trips up a lot of small businesses — you build a following and assume growth follows, but on Instagram and TikTok most of what gets shown to new people has nothing to do with who follows you. The algorithm decides that separately, based on whether strangers stop and engage. A small, engaged following that keeps prompting the algorithm to show your content to strangers is worth more than a big, quiet one. Followers matter once someone lands on your page. They're not the lever for getting found in the first place.
The biggest thing we see small businesses get wrong — a slow build-up, a logo intro, or "hey guys" before getting to the point. Start mid-action, put the interesting part or the question in frame immediately, and add text on screen in that first second, since most people are scrolling with the sound off. It feels rude to skip the pleasantries. It works.
TikTok's median engagement rate has climbed to around 4.20% this year, up from 3.85% in 2024, while Instagram's gone the other way — engagement's dropped from roughly 17% in early 2024 to under 10% by late 2025. The cost side tells the same story:
Average cost-per-click, in-feed ads — aggregated industry benchmark data, August 2026.
So TikTok's both getting more attention and costing less to reach — that combination doesn't come around often. It doesn't mean move your whole budget there tomorrow, but if your audience is on TikTok and you haven't tested it seriously, this is a reasonable moment to.
Instagram announced back in April that accounts mostly posting content they didn't create, or haven't meaningfully changed, will stop showing up in recommendations to people who don't already follow them — and they've since expanded that from Reels to photos and carousels too. Reposted content now also gets a label crediting the original creator.
How strictly this actually gets enforced day to day isn't something anyone outside Instagram knows yet. Us included.
If you lean on reposting found content rather than adding your own take to it, this is worth watching closely over the next few months rather than assuming it'll blow over.
This one's close to home for us, since AI-generated content is something we use ourselves. The numbers are genuinely interesting: an AI-generated UGC-style ad costs around $6 to produce against roughly $900 for a real creator shoot, and AI clips are landing somewhere between 85% and 110% of the click-through rate of strong real UGC — which is a lot closer than we expected. But in head-to-head tests, real UGC still converted about 18% better than the AI version at the same spend, and in categories where trust really matters — health, finance, anything where the buyer needs to believe a real person is telling the truth — a real voice still wins. What we're seeing matches this: AI content is genuinely useful for testing more variants cheaply and for early-funnel awareness, but it's not yet a full replacement for a real person when the moment calls for trust rather than reach.
Australia's ban on under-16s using social media took effect on 10 December 2025, covering YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, and Kick — platforms have to remove or block underage accounts or face fines running into the tens of millions. Over 4.7 million accounts were pulled in the first month alone. But compliance has been patchy: the regulator's raised "significant concerns" about five major platforms and opened formal investigations, and the government's since introduced new legislation to toughen enforcement because so many workarounds are still in use.
For a small business this isn't dramatic — your audience was mostly over 16 anyway — but it's worth knowing the platforms are mid-scramble on age verification right now, and some of the friction you might notice in reach or account behaviour over the next while could be a side effect of that rather than something you did.
Disclosed upfront: this newsletter is partly written with Claude, so take our AI opinions here as disclosed rather than neutral.
Claude's current lineup (Sonnet 5 and Opus 5) — what we use ourselves for planning and drafting.
GPT Image 2 tops the independent leaderboards; Google's Nano Banana is the value pick for speed and quality.
Veo 3.1 for true 4K and native audio; Kling 3.0 if you're on a budget, around $0.10 a second.
We're still a small studio, so our own sample size is honestly thin — that's the truthful state of things, not a hedge. We're building out our case studies page properly at the moment, starting with two years of Dr Crack Wax content, and as that grows we'll bring real numbers from our own campaigns into this rather than leaning entirely on published research.
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