Mornin’ Friends! We’re back after taking last week off due to Advertising Week and… me somehow perma-deleting the newsletter I wrote. Smooth moves. But today’s a fun one, answering my #1 FAQ. We’re gonna hit on:

• Why throwing all your budget at content is what matters most

• Some AI automations to make your marketing life easier

• 3 essays from 3 social media folks that aren’t me! (Social Cues is back!)

—Jack Appleby

Marketers: please automate your life so you can spend more time on the fun parts of your job. 

My brain’s basically held together with duct tape… and it doesn’t work. I drop tasks all the time (I’m writing this at least 2 days later than I should because I can’t keep my ish together). So my new plan: automate my whole life. I wanna be creative all the time, so I’m just gonna let Zapier be my new dad, err, new Chief of Staff.

Here’s a few automations I’m giving a go:

👻The Ghostwriter Clone: When a social post hits 2x my usual engagement, I’m dropping it in Zapier so it’ll autosave into a “High Performers” Notion Table → send to GPT to summarize what worked → drop the summary into a “Social Prompt Bank”

🤖The Future Social Forecast Bot: Every Monday, Zapier will scrape trending keywords from advertising / social media publications → ask GPT to identify 3 emerging social trends → email me a mini “Trend Forecast” to consider writing about.

⚡The Energy Tracker: Every morning, I answer a one-line prompt in Slack: “How do you feel today?” Zapier logs it with your sleep data from Oura + workout data from my Apple Watch → creates a rolling chart of “energy vs. sleep vs. output.”

Those are custom flows I’m building, but they’ve got a huuuuuge template library to get you started—Marketers, give this Brand Mention & Sentiment Tracker Template a whirl. But really, the whole glory of Zapier is you can honestly use it to automate basically anything.

Give Zapier a try right over here—greatly appreciate them showing me automation ropes + sponsoring the newsletter! 

Why your first social media hire should be a Content Creator

“How do you build a social media team from scratch?” is probably the most common question I get on my LinkedIn. It’s also my personal nightmare, and a big reason I turned down my dream job of leading social for an NBA team—they needed me to rebuild the team from zero, and I genuinely couldn’t imagine how I’d go about that mid-season.

But with the state of social in 2025, and what type of content wins, and with more content being slopped into the feed every day, I feel very confident in what sort of person should be the very first hire for your new social team.

You need to hire a content creator before any other roles.

Let’s talk about why.

Great Content will beat Great Strategy.

Keep in mind that I’m a strategist. The above headline is basically suggests you hire a video guy before you hire me.

But this is social media we’re talking about. Content is King, and that monarchy’s holding strong. And I cannot tell you how many social teams I’ve worked on where we built gorgeous, beautiful, brilliant strategies that our creatives couldn’t pull off.

The reality: Good content with a half-baked strategy is always gonna outperform Good strategy with meh content.

If I hire a content creator, I can tell them “hey, here’s our brand, here’s the 4 or 5 things we want customers to know about our brand, go make a bunch of videos highlighting that, but focusing on big shots at virality.” And that’s probably gonna get some decent results! No, it’s not sophisticated, it’s not scaleable, and it won’t work long-term. But it’s a whole lot better than hiring a Social Media Manager as hire #1 and expecting them to make strategy, content, analytics, decks, and wear all the hats.

You can’t win Social without Video Content

There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Your brand absolutely, positively must be making video content to succeed at social now. There are too many advantages to videos.

• Short-form vertical video can go on every platform. You can drop the same vid on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook, even Twitter

• The For You Page reaches non-followers. Organic reach is back, baby. The FYP pushes your content to people who’ve never followed your brand, making organic social more powerful than ever.

• Retention is higher on video than static image. Emotional recall is so, so much higher when a viewer watches a a video.

And you really can’t make video content worth a damn unless you’re hiring real content creators who’ve done it before. This isn’t a moment to give someone the chance to learn a new skillset—you need to hire social natives, who’ve made the content before.

Maximize your budget towards content

Many social media teams are strapped for budget. Let’s think about the above points, though: if content is king, and video content is a must, you’ve gotta throw every dollar possible towards making great content.

You don’t need 60 slide strategy decks, or deep analytics pulls, or executive-friendly creatives. You don’t need a Social Media Manager (yet! You will, but not yet!) who will likely ask for six figures to split their time between multiple areas of social.

You need to throw all the money towards hiring the best creative talent, and giving them the tools they need, and funding their best creative ideas. That’s how you’ll win social.

Hiring Creators first builds a culture of content, not overthinking and approvals

I spent most of my career at advertising agencies working for Fortune 100 clients—giants organizations with tons of red tape, strongly opinionated CMOs, and everyone clamoring for their chance to get their idea made. Anddd all of that made getting content made very cumbersome and slow.

But if you start building your team with creators to begin with, suddenly the social team is most focused on getting content out the door. Yeah, you want some diplomacy and understanding of how to grease the wheels, but it’s easy for teams to get more worried about the process than the results.

But really… you should hire the thinkers and the creators, and not just hire one person.

This piece is written for Marketing Directors and Directors of Social to consider when building out their teams. But really, you, the reader, are the first hire.

If any CEOs are reading this, don’t just hire a content creator before you hire someone with marketing knowhow. Content matters! A lot! But please, hire a Head of Social first, then your content creator, then everyone else. I really think that’s how you’ll get the best results.

Social Cues

There are so many social big thinkers out there, writing all kinds of amazing strategies, analysis, and breakdowns. All ships rise with the tide, so here are a few reads from other places I think you could learn from.

What are Indirect Ambassadors? (Trish Riswick)

We love a new content term. I like this idea around the halo effect from influencer to influencer, brand to brand. Probably makes sense for you to hire some indirect ambassadors for your next creator campaign.

How to use trends without losing your brand voice (Kendall Dickieson)

I tend to be the trend police, mostly because I can’t believe how many brands are so thirsty for views they’ll make any content and totally forget they, you know, work for their brand. I like Kendall’s structure for helping you decide to trend or not to trend.

Instagram launches an awards show for Creators (Hollywood Reporter)

And you thought 30 under 30 was exclusive. Instagram’s gonna award 25 creators with both actual rings and gold rings around their profile pics. It’s a pretty interesting concept I’ll likely write more about in the future.