Marketing ADHD: Your social content is just expensive noise

TL;DR

• Social platforms prioritize ads and algorithms over authentic connection, causing user fatigue and declining engagement

• Marketers face a choice: create for algorithms (high volume, low impact) or create for humans (lower frequency, higher loyalty)

• Research shows users are lurking more and posting less, shifting to private messaging over public sharing

• The path forward: audit for signal vs. noise, prioritize two-way conversations, build core communities, and measure what actually drives business results

Social media platforms are driving people out.

Platforms that once fostered social connection now push content that is for ad algorithms and broader monetization. Unsurprisingly, user fatigue is on the rise. People post less, drained by constant noise and wary of privacy risks, misinformation, and AI slop.

Marketers have a choice to make: create assets that satisfy the algorithm (frequency, tone, content, messaging) or content that gets less AI-love but actually connects with their ideal customers. Most marketers choose option 1. It's easier, especially when you need to show engagement KPIs and you're not held accountable to sales metrics (which by the way they should be, as explained here.) Option 2 is harder, slower, but the tradeoff is a more loyal community that has a longer lifetime value and lowers your overall customer acquisition costs by becoming your real-world advocates. Option 1 gets you likes. Option 2 gets you better business performance.

The Data Doesn't Lie: Users Are Checking Out

The numbers tell a sobering story. While social media penetration continues to grow globally, engagement quality is collapsing. Recent research reveals that social media fatigue is driving users toward "lurking behavior," passive scrolling without meaningful interaction. One 2024 study found that branded content overload and irrelevance significantly drove social media fatigue, which directly increases lurking and disengagement.

Users aren't abandoning platforms entirely. They're changing how they use them. The shift from public posting to private messaging has accelerated dramatically. People are retreating into DMs, group chats, and closed communities where they have more control over their attention and fewer interruptions from commercial noise.

This is a strategy crisis for marketers who've built entire content strategies around feeding platform algorithms: posting multiple times daily, chasing trending audio, optimizing for reach metrics that don't translate to revenue.

The Marketing ADHD Effect: Content Overload Is Creating Cognitive Chaos

The constant barrage of marketing content creates a mental state eerily similar to attention deficit: fragmented focus, decision paralysis, and the overwhelming sense that you can't process another piece of information. Your customers are mentally checking out because their feeds feel like a never-ending assault on their attention. Content isn’t created in quality and frequency for the human mind, but for algorithms (now run by AI) optimization, and the results is a drastic overabundance in low quality AI-feeding slop.

Stop.

Your brand doesn’t need to add to marketing ADHD via another trend-chasing video that is a near identical copy of what the “other guy” did.

Why Algorithm-First Content Is Alienating Your Best Customers

It might be well-intentioned, but its adding to the problem and taking your customers away from you. You might get likes from an occasional teenager or a mom stuck waiting in a school pickup line, but are they your target customers, and does their engagement translate into long-term sales success? Probably not. And there in lies the problem: spending time, money and effort to gain engagement from disconnected audiences that do not matter to your business.

Here's what happens when you optimize for algorithms instead of people: You train platforms to show your content to anyone who might engage, not necessarily people who will buy. You chase vanity metrics like impressions and likes that make your reporting look good but don't generate leads or move revenue.

Meanwhile, your competitors who post less but say more are building tight-knit communities of advocates who refer business, leave reviews, and stick around for years. They're having conversations, instead of monologues. They're measuring customer acquisition cost and lifetime value, not just engagement rates.

Your actual customers are craving human authentic human experiences and connections and are going where they can secure it – you can build a strategy around this or algorithms, but not both.  The algorithm wants volume. Your business needs conversion. These goals are fundamentally at odds, and most marketing strategies haven't caught up to this reality yet.

The Conversation-First Comeback: Four Tactical Shifts

Getting back on track doesn't require a complete overhaul. It requires strategic discipline and a willingness to prioritize quality over quantity.

1. Audit for Signal vs. Noise Cut your posting frequency in half. Seriously. Identify which content generates actual conversations, high value replies that are more than emoji reactions, DMs asking questions, shares with personal commentary. Double down on those formats and topics. Kill everything else, no matter how "on brand" it feels. If it's not starting conversations, it's just noise.

2. Shift from Broadcasting to Listening Start treating social media like networking, not advertising. Ask questions. Respond personally to every comment and DM. Share customer stories (with permission). Create content that invites participation, not passive consumption. When someone engages, treat it like the business development opportunity it is.

3. Build a Core Community First Stop chasing follower counts. Focus on identifying and nurturing 50-100 engaged stakeholders who genuinely care about what you're building. These people will become your advocates, your case studies, your referral engine. A community of 100 engaged people is worth exponentially more than 10,000 passive followers.

4. Measure What Actually Matters Retire impressions as your primary KPI. Start tracking conversation rate (meaningful replies per post), repeat engagement (same people showing up consistently), referrals from social channels, and customer acquisition cost by channel. If your social strategy isn't lowering CAC or increasing customer lifetime value, it's not working, regardless of what your engagement metrics say. (and this one is a tough pill for marketers to swallow, because engagement rate is the easier metric that can be made to look impressive).

The Bottom Line

Your customers are turning away from brands on platforms that have become exhausting to use. Winning in this environment is about being a problem solver for your demographic and building trust in your professional partnership. You can keep chasing the algorithm and hoping engagement metrics eventually translate to revenue. Or you can start building the kind of community that makes marketing easier every year, not harder.

The choice is yours. But the longer you take to make it, the more difficult your make it for yourself in the future, because the trust chasm is getting wider.

Take advantage of the opportunity for your business to grow beyond the market gloom. If you need additional clarity and support, reach out to info@MelkPR.com. We offer limited spots for free consult sessions.