This is why most businesses content has terrible ROI

In a nutshell, they treat it the same as traditional advertising.

Traditional advertising interrupts attention that you more or less are renting. Social media marketing earns attention you keep.

Same goal (Influence behavior) with completely different mechanics. And that difference decides whether your results will vanish or compound.

The bad assumption is “Social media is just traditional advertising on a phone.” when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Treating it that way is why brands post for months, see nothing, and declare the platform “dead.”

Traditional advertising is built for interruption.

Social media is built for participation.

Confuse those two, and you will waste time optimizing for the wrong outcome.

Think in terms of attention physics.

For Traditional advertising you pay to interrupt someone else’s moment, hoping your message lands once (maybe twice). But memory decays fast and the meter stops the second the budget stops.

With Social media marketing you are earning permission to appear repeatedly to your potential (or past/current) clients. The audience opts in by watching, saving, sharing the content you create. The content that speaks to your ideal customer compounds on itself, as well as the momentum, instead of resetting.

One is a billboard on a highway.

The other is a relationship built in public.

When businesses use social media like a billboard, three things happen; They post sporadically (because nothing “works” immediately), they over-sell (because they think every post must convert) and inevitably they burn out (because effort doesn’t match expectations).

The real cost isn’t low engagement, it’s lost trust; From the audience and from the brand owner who quits too early.

Traditional ads forgive inconsistency.

Social platforms punish it.

If you’re doing traditional advertising, you can expect short-term visibility, predictable spend-to-reach ratios, and near zero residual value.

If you’re doing social media marketing, you can expect delayed results, uneven early performance, but that all compounds into long-term leverage if you stay consistent.

The goal isn’t to “go viral.”

The goal is to show up clearly and repeatedly enough to be trusted.