Why I deprioritized Instagram
On reading audience data honestly, even when the data tells you to walk away from a platform everyone else is on.
When I started at SDF in 2022, the social team was putting real hours into Instagram, partly because everyone else in crypto was on Instagram, and partly because the marketing-conference circuit was still pointing there. The audience data told a different story. The people SDF actually needed to reach (developers, fintech operators, policy people, the occasional CTO) lived on LinkedIn and X and almost never on Instagram. The Instagram audience we did have was mostly retail crypto, which meant thousands of follows that would never read a single Stellar blog post. I took the channel down to maintenance and reallocated the hours.
The same logic has kept applying through every audience-data exercise I've run since. When you read the data honestly and take it seriously, you usually find yourself doing less than the prevailing marketing playbook tells you to do. It's uncomfortable in the moment, and most teams will resist it for at least a quarter, but it consistently works.