Do you remember when we had actual conversations on social media? I do, and I miss them.
Heck, I even miss internet flames — at least those had some pizzazz, some passion, some actual opinions.
Social media is fuller of people talking now than it was before. Yet, very few of them appear to be talking with anyone.
Personally, I used to spend most of my time on LinkedIn, where everything is formulaic, often even the comments, which are supposed to be spur-of-the-moment stuff.
And it kinda got to me. I find myself rushing through answering comments on my own posts, as if they were a nuisance — I used to enjoy that the most some two years ago.
Like me, most experts publish polished conclusions, frameworks, carousels, miniature essays, tutorials, infographics, and videos — the shorter the better because the internet told us that people can’t be trusted with full sentences anymore.
Then we wait.
We check the views. We count the likes. We inspect the profile visitors. We hope somebody wanders from the post to the bio, from the bio to the website, from the website to the newsletter, and from the newsletter into our wallet.
Sometimes, this Rube Goldberg machine produces a client. Most of the time, we publish another post.
Social media has become a remarkably antisocial activity. We stand on our individual boxes, deliver our prepared remarks, and call the resulting collection of simultaneous monologues a community.
I am including myself here. As a writer, I am far more comfortable developing an argument privately, editing it until every sentence knows its place, and delivering the finished version from behind the soothing barricade of my keyboard.
A newsletter is civilized. I write. You read. Occasionally you reply and confirm that another human being is present (I LOVE replies, so please keep sending them).
Social media is messier. People interrupt. They misunderstand. They take one sentence in a direction you never expected. Sometimes they improve your point. Sometimes they arrive carrying an opinion that appears to have been assembled from damp cardboard.
That mess is exactly where much of the value lives, and it’s a shame that we seem to have lost it.
These days, I find these messy conversations more often on Threads than on LinkedIn, which is why I’m so stoked to announce that the doors to the 30-day Threads challenge are wide open.
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The 30-Day Threads Challenge
Building on a new platform alone is how you end up yelling into a fresh void and calling it “experimentation.”
The 30-Day Threads Challenge gives you something far more useful: smart peers building beside you, six live calls, co-working sessions, constant feedback, practical homework, and a shared hashtag that helps everyone get seen from day one.
From September 9–October 9, we’ll test posts, compare results, sharpen your ideas, and figure out what grows your authority, audience, leads, and sales. You’ll leave with real evidence and a repeatable Threads playbook.
Want your name up here? Reserve your slot! (Sold out until September)
We turned conversation into distribution
The original promise of social media was connection. In the early days of MySpace or Facebook, no one talked about ROI.
In the meantime, social media changed a lot, and business owners were told to build audiences, demonstrate expertise, publish consistently, create authority, grow email lists, and convert attention into revenue.
So we developed content systems.
We created pillars, calendars, templates, hooks, repurposing workflows, editorial processes, and automated scheduling tools. We became exceptionally efficient at filling feeds with our thoughts.
The audience became the final destination of the content-production line. Ideas entered at one end, and posts emerged at the other. Human beings were invited to react using one of several tiny buttons or comment to feed the algorithm even more.
Even the language gives the game away. We talk about content distribution, audience capture, reach, impressions, and conversion. All useful concepts; all suspiciously similar to the language used for transporting bulk goods.
Then we complain that social media feels impersonal, even though it’s us who industrialized the social bit and discovered that factories have poor conversational skills.
Publishing expertise is only half the job
You may know that I talk about publishing, ideally on multiple platforms, a lot — because it matters a lot. People need enough exposure to your thinking to understand what you know, how you see the world, and whether allowing you near their business or their life would improve it or create a fascinating new category of problems.
Strong content can influence people who never speak to you directly. B2B buying decisions are shaped by “hidden buyers”: internal stakeholders who may have little contact with the vendor yet can advance or derail the purchase. The same report also found that strong thought leadership can make those people more willing to advocate for a lesser-known provider.
Your ideas can travel into rooms you never enter.
However, broadcasting your expertise covers only one part of the commercial job. Conversations reveal what happens after your argument reaches another brain.
A reply may show you that your supposedly clear distinction requires another seventeen caveats. A disagreement can reveal an objection worth addressing in your sales copy. A question may expose a problem you have treated as obvious because you have worked in your field since the Pleistocene. [This is one of the main reasons why real experts struggle online.]
A good conversation gives you information that an impression cannot.
This is where many expert-led businesses leave money on the table. Their content shows what they know, while their conversations could show them:
- Which problems people recognize immediately
- Which language their market actually uses
- Which opinions create curiosity
- Which assumptions need challenging
- Which examples make an abstract point click
- Which questions keep returning
- Which people care enough to continue the discussion
- Which ideas deserve deeper investment
You can stare at a dashboard for hours and still have no idea why someone replied, saved the post, ignored the CTA, or sent it privately to a colleague with the message, “This is exactly the shitshow I was telling you about.”
Conversations supply context.
Your comments section is part of the content
I said that I’ve become disenchanted with commenting on LinkedIn and I miss that. Partly because I loved the conversations there and partly because there is real value in these conversations.
A thoughtful reply can demonstrate more expertise than the original post because it requires you to respond to another person’s specific context. You cannot rely entirely on the polished argument you prepared earlier. You have to interpret, distinguish, challenge, clarify, or admit that the other person has found a hole large enough to drive your content strategy through.
That is expertise in motion.
It is also far more revealing to potential buyers. Anyone can publish a clean framework. The replies show how the person thinks when reality refuses to fit tidily inside it.
This distinction matters because expertise is difficult to evaluate before purchase. A prospect cannot test-drive your strategic judgment in the same way they can try a pair of shoes. Thus, people look for proxies. Content is one. Conversation is another.
How you respond to complexity, disagreement, and specific circumstances tells people something about the experience of working with you.
Conversations expand your commercial surface area
Your existing audience already knows you, or at least knows the particular internet version of you that appears in their feed.
Conversations place you beside other people’s ideas and in front of their networks. They create contact with loose connections, occasional readers, peers, collaborators, referrers, and people who would never have searched for your exact job title because they do not yet know what their problem is called.
The commercial importance of these weaker connections has substantial research behind it. A 2022 study published in Science examined several large-scale experiments involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users over five years. The researchers found causal evidence that moderately weak professional ties increased job mobility more effectively than strong ties in many circumstances.
The study examined employment outcomes, so we should resist the traditional online-marketing ritual of grabbing one finding and making it responsible for every sale since the invention of commerce.
The underlying network logic remains useful, though: close connections often know many of the same people and information you do. Looser connections can carry your ideas into different circles.
Conversation does not mean comment farming or engagement podding
At this point, social media experts usually prescribe “engagement.”
They tell you to spend 30 minutes before posting and 30 minutes afterward leaving comments. This turns human conversation into a crop-rotation schedule.
The result is predictable: bland comments like “Love this.” or “Great perspective.”, that could be replaced by the soft hum of a fridge with no measurable loss to civilization.
Strategic conversation requires more than proof that your account has a pulse.
A useful reply does at least one of these things:
- Adds a relevant example
- Introduces a distinction
- Complicates the argument
- Explains where the idea breaks
- Connects it to another problem
- Asks a question you genuinely care about
- Offers a specific experience
- Disagrees with enough substance to move the discussion somewhere
You do not need to perform enthusiasm underneath every post in your niche. You need to participate where you have something meaningful to contribute and where the people involved are commercially, intellectually, or relationally relevant.
Otherwise, you are exchanging low-value comments with other business owners who are exchanging low-value comments because everyone attended the same webinar.
Open ideas create better conversations than sealed ones
Experts often struggle to start conversations because their posts leave very little room for another person.
The argument is finished. Every exception has been handled and the conclusion has been laminated. The reader can agree, disagree, or admire the craftsmanship before continuing to a video of an exceptionally determined raccoon.
A conversational post creates an opening.
This does not require ending every post with “Agree or disagree?” That question has spent years wandering LinkedIn unsupervised and deserves rest.
An opening can come from:
- A tension you have not fully resolved
- A pattern you have observed and want others to test
- A distinction readers can apply to their circumstances
- A strong opinion with clear reasoning
- Two competing explanations for the same result
- A practical decision people are currently facing
- An example that invites comparison
- A conclusion whose consequences deserve discussion
The point is to give people something specific to enter.
“Any thoughts?” asks the reader to manufacture the conversation. “Which of these two is currently limiting your business?” gives them a real door to enter a real conversation.
Threads (still) makes the social part difficult to avoid
This is one of the reasons why I love hanging out on Threads these days. More reasons here.
Right now, Threads is designed around replies and real conversations. Maybe it’s the shorter format or the looser moderation but you don’t even need to ask for a reply – people contribute willingly and they do so without white-noise comments (for the most part).
Are you using social media for conversations?
The 30-day Threads challenge will have a strong conversational component to it. However, even if Threads is not your speed or you don’t want to join this challenge, I encourage you to try to turn any social media platform you’re on into a conversational experiment.
I’ve been doing this since January 2026 (less than I should have, TBH) and I noticed two significant changes:
- The time I spent on social media became much more enjoyable
- I was able to get more clients because I took the time to speak to people, not just at people.
A simple tweak you can try: instead of carving a set number of minutes per day, think of it in terms of conversations: “I won’t spend 30 mins on comments today; I will leave 5 thoughtful replies and send 2 DMs instead.”
