I’m sitting here chugging a Celsius at 8:34 am, tired from hitting an Emo Christmas bar last night (yes, that exists) (so does Santa) before accidentally wandering into a kickball league’s end of season awards party where a bartender made me a Shirley Temple. Why, what did you do last night?

Shenanigans aside, this issue’s hitting a point that’s been slowly killing our industry for years now. Let’s talk about:

• Why speed shouldn’t matter for social media jobs

• Why being terminally online shouldn’t matter for social media jobs

• Why slowing down will get ya better social results.

—Jack Appleby

Social Media shouldn’t move fast. Speed literally doesn’t matter.

When did we decide that speed was what’s most important to social media?

Better question: why?

If you really think about it, speed only really matters if your social strategy’s focused on attaching to whatever’s trending or floating around social. Which, hey, is worth doing sometimes when your brand’s got a natural tie, but it’s no secret I think wayyy too many brands care wayyy too much about trends.

I came across a LinkedIn post this week that had me furiously nodding my head. Then I went and looked at some research, and boy—it doesn’t really make any sense at all that we focus on “fast social” or even filling up our content calendars. All our social efforts should be towards making the most significant social content. Slower social. Less posts.

The biggest lie in social media

Here’s the aforementioned LinkedIn post from Annie Kolatsis, Social Media Lead at Mars Wrigley UK:

Couldn’t have said it better myself. A little homework only proved the point further.

How we got here (and why it’s breaking social pros)

Let’s make one thing crystal clear: none of the “go faster” pressure can from audiences—this call’s coming from inside the house.

Executives want more, agencies want more, marketing teams want more. And we can’t just blame leadership, because I’ve managed the social teams where my juniors slack me every day with some sort of trend they wanna make content about asap.

And what has that gotten us?

• Industry exhaustion: Sprout Social says 77% of Social Media Managers are burned out.

• Content Oversaturation:: Social teams are producing 4x more content than they did in 2019, yet…

• Ineffectiveness: …only 34% of social pros say posting more helps performance

Great. That sounds super helpful. Yet we still preach speed for some reason?

The data is clear: speed isn’t helping your brand

This might be the part you send to your boss. The research is damning.

Across WARC, Nielsen, and IPA studies, we see the same conclusion:

• Reactive content rarely improves brand recall.

• Trend-chasing almost never boosts favorability.

• Emotionally crafted creative is what builds memory.

Kantar’s creative effectiveness research shows emotionally strong ads can be up to four times more impactful and far better at driving long-term brand equity than low-emotion, “just get it out” creative. Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome work shows that creative quality is the single biggest driver of performance, responsible for roughly two-thirds of media effectiveness — and that “optimized” creative can deliver multiples of the ROI of average work. New research from Sprout Social and Edelman DXI found that a third of consumers think brands jumping on viral trends is embarrassing, even though 93% say it’s important for brands to understand online culture.

Even Meta’s Creative Shop has said creative quality drives 60–80% of ad effectiveness. Not frequency. Not speed. Not volume. Creative quality.

So, plainly: you’re only going fast for yourself. It’s not helping your brand.

Why “slow social” should be your new move

Good creative takes time. It’s the result of sharp thinking, and leaving good-but-not-good-enough ideas on the cutting room floor, and truly understanding what about your brand is most appealing to consumers & scrollers.

Most social media pros should triple their brainstorm time & cut their production time in half.

Here’s why slowing down works:

• Emotion builds memory: Nielsen shows emotional storytelling boosts memory encoding by 23%.

• Consistency beats chaos: Ehrenberg-Bass reminds us brands grow through distinctive assets, not random reactive content.

• TikTok’s shifting toward depth — storytelling > speed.

Slow social isn’t about doing less. It’s about making sure what you do matters.

What slow social actually looks like

I don’t want you to become a monastery, I just want you to stop making content that dies in 3 hours.

Here’s the practical version:

• Post less, but make the posts count: there’s no need for daily content unless you can make awesome content every day. Watch your numbers get WAY better with an every-other-day cadence.

• Build repeatable series instead of random ideas: make original IP. Think in TV shows, not one-off tweets.

• Prioritize craft: better writing, better ideation, better editing.

• Use AI for pre-production: research, outlining, and structuring get so much easier with some AI assistance. Use it to expand your ideas!

• Audit your actual impact: ask “what did this do for the brand?” not “how fast did we publish it?”

You’ll catch up by slowing down.

The fastest treadmill in the world still keeps you in place. “Slow social” isn’t about falling behind. It’s about finally giving yourself the space to create the kind of work that actually moves people, builds brands, and grows businesses.

No one remembers how much you posted last month.
They remember the one thing you made that hit.