"educational" content is mostly memo theater.
education-as-content has become the corporate version of inspirational quotes. nobody changes their mind from a carousel. why we're betting on opinion, demonstration, and receipts instead.
nobody changes their mind from a carousel they swiped past at lunch.
most "educational" social content is a costume worn over an opinion the writer was too nervous to state. we cut educational from our weekly mix, replaced it with three other formats, and watched saves drop and shares climb. the audience wasn't learning from us. they were nodding politely.
open instagram. swipe four times. you will see, in this order: a carousel that says "5 ways to improve your morning routine," a reel that says "the secret to compounding," and a quote post that says "your network is your net worth." these are not educational. they are aesthetic gestures toward education. they perform the shape of a memo without ever risking a single specific opinion.
we made these for years. we got good at them. our saves were healthy. our screenshots were healthy. we mistook this for impact. it wasn't impact. it was the audience filing us away for a moment in the future that never came.
— section onethe format we got tricked by.
the educational carousel works for the algorithm because it produces saves, and saves are a strong engagement signal. this is the whole reason it exists. the format was selected by the platform's reward function, not by any underlying truth about how humans learn from short content.
a save is a future-self promise that almost never gets kept. it is a vote for the post's aesthetic, not its content.
we know this because we audited our own saves. we asked twenty people on our team to open the "saved" tab on their personal accounts and read aloud what they'd actually saved. nobody had a system. nobody had referred back to a single carousel. saving was a tic, a way of clearing the swipe-debt of having paused on something for a beat too long.
— section twowhat we shipped instead.
- 01the opinion piece. a single, specific, refutable claim. with a stance. with a person attached to it. the post you would lose a follower over.
- 02the demonstration. we did the thing. here is the work, before and after. not what to do — what we did. receipts attached.
- 03the receipts post. the screenshot, the dm, the result. the proof that the opinion holds. these compound across months.
- 04cut: the listicle carousel. "5 ways to," "3 things to remember," "the ultimate guide to." we still write these — we just publish them as essays on the site, not as social posts.
the numbers, six months in: saves down by roughly 35%. shares up by 60%. profile visits up. dm volume up materially — and the dms now arrive with a specific request, not a vague "love your content."
— section threewhy the opinion post wins.
an opinion has a person on the other end of it. you can disagree with it. you can quote it. you can use it in your own argument. a list of five things to remember is, by design, frictionless — and frictionless content is forgettable content.
this is harder than it sounds. it asks the team to stake out positions. it asks the founder to be present in the work, not abstracted from it. it produces some posts that flop. it produces a lot more posts that the audience can actually argue with.
— closingthe embarrassing test.
print one of your educational posts. cover the logo. give it to someone who doesn't work with you. ask them which account it came from. they will not know. that is the whole problem. you are renting attention from a format that is shared by ten thousand other accounts, and the rent comes due the moment a viewer scrolls past.
the alternative is uncomfortable. say something specific. attach a name. be wrong sometimes. that is how a brand gets remembered. memo theater is how a brand gets saved and forgotten.
this essay is part of the dispatch — one piece of writing on social, content, and the operations of running both, sent on the last friday of every month. no roundups, no listicles, no spam. subscribe here →