The time to rewrite the social media rules is now

+ 5 steps to grow beyond socials

Hey happy weekend :) I’m writing to you from a cafe in an unusually sunny London Bridge on Friday morning. This week I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about the tension between wanting to show up, do your thing, and connect online and wanting to throw your phone in the pond and run away to the mountains. No emails. No TikTok. Just quiet work, better eyesight, and a head free from that CMAT song. Although I actually love that song.

You want to grow your brand and business in ways that mean something to you. But growing a business online is inextricably tied to being online and posting on social media in particular. Some days that feels like a huge creative privilege and some days it feels like shit, never more so than when a genocide is live streamed through the very same platforms we’re talking about work on whilst scrolling past the full deets of Kylie Jenner’s boob job.

Social media has been in our pockets for so long, whispering “you could post more you know…” that there’s a sense it will always be there. But we’re in the middle of seismic changes online. What’s worked for the past five years might not work five months from now.

It’s a bad time to have built a business that depends entirely on Instagram ads but I think it’s a bloody great time for the rest of us to break free from the feeling that we “should” be doing this or that and to fully embrace our own creativity.

This is the situation. We are objectively not loving spending time on socials.

• 41% of US consumers don’t trust information on social media. (Attest, 2025)

• 46% of Gen Z would rather live in a world without it. (BSI 2025)

• Teenagers using social media 3 hours + a day face double the risk of anxiety and depression. This is most teenagers. (US Surgeon General, 2023)

And yet! We’re still spending a daily average of 2h20 (Global Data 2025) on social media while the experience is getting worse and worse.

Meta recently announced that they will stop using third party fact checkers in favour of an X-style “community moderation” approach, enabling misinformation to proliferate even further. Every second Story on Instagram appears to be an ad. We could not be further from using social media to connect with friends and family, despite this still being the top reason people give for using it:

You can lead the shift.

We’re craving connection. The messy, unpredictable, juicy, funny, smaller, neighbourhood kind. This month, Pinterest have reported searches for “digital detox ideas” and “digital detox vision boards” trending up by 72% and 273% respectively.

This is the moment to consider how you want to create and connect beyond social algos. Freeing yourself from the desire to lob your phone in the pond forever might be as simple as rewriting the rules and choosing to show up in your own way on and offline. Ironically, that’s exactly how you meet people where they’re really at today. Here’s how I’m thinking about it atm:

1. Start with clarity. Why are you creating? What’s the end goal? It’s ok for this to keep changing in the context of a world in constant flux as long as you keep checking in.

2. Think beyond Big Social. Email, audio, IRL, niche communities, print. Make it fun and don’t create anything with a “because I should be doing this” mindset. There are no rules.

3. Simplify your message. With platforms fragmented and in flux, clear cuts through over clever.

4. See posting content on social as an extremely low-stakes way to experiment. See what lands and use your learnings elsewhere.

5. Don’t let social media be your final destination. The real connection is happening in DMs, calls, and, mostly, offline.

Now is the best time to rewrite the rules online because they’re rewriting themselves anyway. Choose the spaces you enjoy creating for today and forget everywhere else. Test, learn, move on. There’s no playbook, no right way to show up, no sure answers. Experimentation and play have never been more important.

If you’re in London and want to dig further into what growth beyond social could look like for you, I’ve got something IRL exciting coming soon. Stay tuned 👀. If you’re elsewhere and want to work through your strategy together 1:1 — book an intro call!

Chat soon

Matilda

---

Matilda Lucy is an independent digital strategist interested in questioning how and why we build brands online today. Based in SE London and working with clients globally.