In 2024, we ran a six-month experiment. We posted every day across LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. We followed the “best practice” playbook: we tracked engagement, varied the content, and built a workflow that produced daily videos and images.
The results on paper were great. Followers increased. Engagement went up. People I met at networking events mentioned they’d seen the content. But the only metric that actually matters: lead generation, told a different story.
During our period of highest social media activity, leads actually decreased.
The reason was simple: the time I spent producing content was time I wasn’t spending networking in the real world. I had fallen for the logic that digital reach could replace physical presence. To test this, we flipped the experiment for the following six months. We killed the social media output entirely and went back to networking in person.
The result was immediate. We got more work. The difference was night and day.
It is now 2026. I haven’t posted on social media in over a year. We’ve hidden our YouTube channel, deleted Facebook, and walked away from LinkedIn and Instagram. Today, we have more work than we have ever had.
In our specific B2B experience, there is a direct correlation between doing less on social media and having more work. While this wouldn’t apply to every business model, for us, the “digital footprint” was nothing more than a distraction from the high-value activity that actually pays the bills.
