Social media doesn't fail because nobody on your team is talented enough to run it. It fails because nobody actually owns it. It becomes the thing squeezed in between real tasks instead of a real job with a real schedule.
At Smoke Cartel, we grew an Instagram account from nothing to more than 188,000 followers. It wasn't clever by accident. It had a cadence, a structure, and one person whose job it actually was.
Treat it like a department
The cadence wasn't complicated. It just had to be followed. Instagram got one to two posts a day, at least three days a week. Every other platform had its own minimum, because a channel that goes quiet for two weeks doesn't just lose momentum; it starts to look like nobody's home.
Every post got tagged the same disciplined way: two to four targeted hashtags, one to three location tags, and two to four general ones, dropped into the first comment instead of buried in the caption. None of that is glamorous. It's also most of the difference between a post that reaches new people and one that only reaches the people who already follow you.
It ran on a real schedule, too: a named person, in a seat, at a set time, doing set tasks in a set order. Training in the morning. Inventory and photo shoots on a rotating weekly cadence. Posting windows blocked into the afternoon.
Give it a real budget for ideas that might not work
Early on, someone on the social team asked to buy a GoPro and a dog harness built to hold one. We'd always allowed dogs at work, mine included. I didn't think it would amount to much, but I said yes anyway.
For about a week, the whole office was chasing dogs wearing a GoPro around the building. The footage became that year's 4/20 holiday special, and one of the most profitable social campaigns we ever ran. We started including animals across more of our content, and eventually added a whole pet line: leashes, collars, and harnesses carrying the same prints our customers already recognized. All of it traced back to one small yes on a dog harness with a camera strapped to it.
Some of the best marketing doesn't look like marketing
Our single biggest video, by a wide margin, borrowed the respectful tone of a classic manufacturing documentary and pointed it at the people most customers never think about: the glassblowers making the pieces. We traveled to a studio in Asheville, North Carolina, and let the artists walk through the real process on camera, crediting them by name instead of treating the craft as anonymous.
It pulled in over a million views on a channel where most videos measured in the thousands, because it treated an often-dismissed product with the same seriousness any other kind of American manufacturing gets.
We did the same thing at smaller scale constantly: plainspoken explainer videos answering the questions customers were too embarrassed to ask, a recurring character mythbusting the real origin of 4/20, and a segment built entirely out of reading our own comment section on camera. Some of our best material was already sitting in our replies. We just had to put it on screen.
Reach is rentable. Trust isn't.
After Smoke Cartel, my approach shifted away from big-name paid placements and toward micro-influencers: smaller accounts with real trust with their own audience, discount codes tied to specific launches instead of a flat sponsorship fee, and a hard rule against paying an established creator just for a review.
The smaller the account, the more trust you're actually borrowing.
Your website is the one channel you own
The same logic applies to your website. It's not just a virtual store. It's your brand identity running live in front of customers all day, whether or not anyone on your team is watching.
Good interface works like good marketing: sell the lifestyle, not the feature list. The real question isn't what your website does. It's how it helps someone get closer to the life they want, and how they'd feel if a friend caught them looking at it.
A quick audit for your own social
- Who owns it? A name, not "the team."
- What's the minimum cadence per platform, and did you hit it last month?
- Is there a written tagging standard?
- When did you last say yes to a weird idea with a small budget?
- Are your influencer deals tied to trackable codes, or flat fees for reach?
Follow me on Instagram: @darbycox
Want help turning social into a real department? Book a call with me.
