Month: May 2026

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers and then ran my own social media agency, with a specialism in Pinterest for business. I’ve used these platforms commercially. I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and what’s simply not worth a busy business owner’s time. This series is my honest perspective on each one. No strategy guides. No content calendars. Just a straight answer to the question you’re probably already asking.

Social Media & AI. Help or Hindrance?

I want to close this series with something that isn’t quite a platform verdict – because AI isn’t a platform in the way Facebook or LinkedIn is. You don’t have a profile on it. You don’t build a following there. But it is reshaping every platform we’ve covered in this series, and ignoring it in a series about social media for SMEs would be dishonest.

So here is my honest observation, after watching social media professionally for a long time and closely for the past couple of years.

Something has changed in the feeds. And most people can feel it, even if they haven’t named it.

The 40/40/20 observation

Scroll your LinkedIn feed right now and make an honest assessment of what you’re reading.

My rough estimate – and it’s an observation, not a statistic – is that around 40% of what appears there is straightforwardly AI-generated. Written by a tool, maybe given a light polish, and posted. Another 40% is AI-rewritten: a human had something to say, fed it into a tool, and the result is technically accurate but sounds like nobody in particular. That leaves around 20% that sounds like an actual human being with a genuine point of view, writing in their own voice about something they actually think.

WHAT I BELIEVE I’M SEEING IN MY LINKEDIN FEED
40% Straightforwardly AI-generated – written by a tool, lightly polished, posted  
40% AI-rewritten – a human idea, fed through a tool, now sounds like nobody in particular  
20% Traditionally authored – a real person, a genuine voice, something actually worth reading

That 20% is the most engaged-with content in my feed. By some distance.

Which tells you something important.

What AI is actually doing to social media

The content creation layer is the visible part of this shift. But there’s a less visible layer that matters just as much: engagement.

AI agents are now being used by businesses – and by individuals – to monitor social media feeds, like posts, respond to comments, and simulate the kind of active presence that used to require a human being to actually be there. If the post was written by AI and the response to it was generated by AI, what is that interaction worth? What relationship has been built? What trust has been established?

The feeds are filling up. The rooms are emptying out.

This isn’t a new problem – social media has always had bots, spam accounts, and low-effort content. But the scale has changed, and the quality of the imitation has improved to the point where it takes more effort to notice. The result is a growing sense among people who pay attention that something has quietly drained away from platforms that used to feel genuinely valuable.

The platforms haven’t changed. The humans have left. And for SMEs, that’s both the problem and the opportunity.

Why this matters for SMEs specifically

The businesses most damaged by this shift are the ones who’ve invested in an AI-mediated presence that feels like showing up but isn’t. A posting schedule maintained by a tool. Responses drafted by a tool. Content that covers the right topics in the right format but sounds like it could have come from anyone – because it could have.

None of that builds the thing that actually drives SME growth: trust. And trust, as we’ve discussed across this series, is what shortens sales cycles, generates referrals, and turns a platform presence into a pipeline.

The businesses best placed to benefit from the current moment are the ones that still sound like a real person. Not because authenticity is a virtue in the abstract – but because in a feed that’s increasingly dominated by AI-generated content, a genuine human voice stands out more than it ever has. That’s not a moral argument. It’s a commercial one.

What AI is actually good for in a social media context

I want to be careful not to land this as a blanket rejection of AI tools. That would be dishonest, and it would miss the point.

AI can genuinely help with the parts of social media that are about logistics rather than voice. Generating a list of post ideas when you’re staring at a blank screen. Repurposing a long blog post into shorter social formats. Drafting a caption that you then rewrite in your own words. Scheduling content so that consistency doesn’t depend entirely on you remembering to post on a Tuesday morning.

Used in that way – as a support for your voice rather than a replacement for it – AI tools are genuinely useful for time-poor SME owners. The question worth asking, every time, is: does this still sound like me? Does it say something I actually think? Would I be comfortable if a client read this and knew I’d written it?

If the answer to any of those is no, the tool has done too much of the work.

The connection that runs through this whole series

Looking back across these seven posts, there’s a thread that connects all of them – and the AI question makes it explicit.

The platforms that reward SMEs are the ones where genuine human presence is possible and sustained. Facebook Groups, where you show up and contribute to a community. Pinterest, where you create content that reflects real expertise and real aesthetic sense. TikTok, where you appear on camera as yourself. LinkedIn, where your thinking and your personality are visible over time. Even Reddit, where the community will see through anything that isn’t genuine.

The common denominator isn’t the platform. It’s the showing up. And showing up – really showing up, as a human being with something worth saying – is exactly what AI can’t do on your behalf.

A note on this series

We started seven posts ago with Facebook – the platform everyone had written off – and worked our way through Pinterest, TikTok, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, and now AI.

The question underneath all of it has been the same: is it worth your time? And the honest answer, in every case, has been: it depends on whether you’re prepared to actually show up.

Not to broadcast. Not to automate. Not to be everywhere. But to choose the platforms where your presence means something – and to be genuinely present there.

That takes more than a content calendar. It takes a point of view. A voice. And the consistency to use both, regularly, over time. If you’ve found this series useful and you’d like to think through what it means for your business specifically, I’d love to have that conversation.

A final thought 

AI isn’t going away. And it isn’t all bad.

Used well, it can help you show up more consistently – and consistency, as we’ve seen throughout this series, is what the platforms that matter actually reward.

But there’s a difference between using AI to support your voice and using it to replace it.

The feeds are full. The question is whether you’re actually in them. If the answer is yes – really yes, human and present and worth reading – that matters more now than it ever has.

Helping business owners in Oxfordshire work out where and how to show up – and finding the right support to make that sustainable – is exactly what I do. If anything in this series has resonated, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

About the Author

Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. Former Buying Director for major UK retailers and founder of a social media agency specialising in Pinterest for business. Vicky works with SME owners to find the right support for their business – and writes about the commercial realities of social media, outsourced expertise, and growing a business without burning out.

Next in the series: This is the last in this current series, but I really recommend a recent series by my colleague Kristy Roff that looks at the power of community and connection. Links for the whole series are below:

In Your Corner – The Human Side of Growth

A four-part series exploring why human connection, community, and the right support still define how growing businesses succeed – even in an age of automation.

  1. In a World of Artificial Intelligence, Human Connection Still Wins the Buying Decision
  2. Community Is a Commercial Strategy (Not Just a Nice Idea)
  3. Bespoke Beats Off-the-Shelf: Why Fit Matters More Than Features
  4. You Don’t Need More Pressure – You Need the Right People in Your Corner

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers and then ran my own social media agency, with a specialism in Pinterest for business. I’ve used these platforms commercially. I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and what’s simply not worth a busy business owner’s time. This series is my honest perspective on each one. No strategy guides. No content calendars. Just a straight answer to the question you’re probably already asking.

Is LinkedIn Worth It For Your Business? Yes! The Metaverse? Let’s Talk About That!

We’ve reached the penultimate post in this series, and for once the verdict comes quickly.

LinkedIn: yes. Unambiguously, for most business owners reading this, yes.

The Metaverse: no. And the story of why not is actually more useful than the verdict itself.

Let’s do LinkedIn properly first – because it deserves more than a one-word endorsement – and then we’ll take a brief, honest look at what the Metaverse hype cycle taught us, and why it matters for every platform decision you’ll make in the years ahead.

Why LinkedIn is different from every other platform in this series

Every other platform we’ve covered has come with a significant caveat. Facebook: yes, but only if your audience is there and you engage through Groups. Pinterest: yes, but only for visually aspirational businesses willing to invest long-term. TikTok: yes, but only if you’re genuinely prepared to show up on camera consistently. X: probably not, unless your business runs on real-time commentary. Reddit: possibly, but only with patience and zero promotional intent.

LinkedIn is the platform where, for most SME owners, the answer is simply yes – without a long list of conditions attached.

Your clients are on LinkedIn. Your referral partners are on LinkedIn. The people who might recommend you to others are on LinkedIn. It is the professional network, and for businesses that grow through relationships, reputation, and trust – which describes most of the SMEs I work with – there is no substitute for showing up there consistently.

What good LinkedIn presence actually looks like

The mistake most business owners make on LinkedIn is treating it like a CV. A static record of credentials and achievements, updated occasionally, used mainly to receive connection requests and occasionally browse job listings.

That’s not what LinkedIn rewards. What it rewards is consistent, personal, and useful presence. Posts that share genuine thinking. Commentary that demonstrates expertise. Responses to other people’s content that add something rather than just agreeing. The occasional personal post that reveals something human about who you are and how you work.

LinkedIn rewards consistency and personality above polish. A post that sounds like you, published regularly, will outperform a perfectly crafted piece of corporate content that appears once a month.

The businesses and business owners that get the most from LinkedIn are not necessarily the most prolific. They’re the most consistent. They show up regularly enough that their name becomes familiar to the people they most want to reach – and familiarity, as we discussed in the context of community earlier in this series, is what shortens the sales cycle.

What to post about? Your expertise. Your observations. The questions your clients ask you repeatedly. The things you notice in your sector that others haven’t said yet. The occasional honest reflection on what running a business actually involves. None of it needs to be groundbreaking. It just needs to be genuinely yours.

The mistake that undermines LinkedIn for most SMEs

The single most common LinkedIn mistake I see from business owners is inconsistency. Posting intensively for a few weeks, then going quiet for a month, then posting again when something feels urgent. The algorithm notices. More importantly, your audience notices – or rather, they don’t notice, because you’ve disappeared from their feed.

LinkedIn’s algorithm strongly rewards regular, consistent engagement. An account that posts twice a week reliably will almost always outperform one that posts daily for a fortnight and then vanishes. Rhythm matters more than volume.

The practical implication for time-poor SME owners is that LinkedIn is one of the platforms where having consistent support – someone to help you maintain a presence even in your busiest weeks – delivers disproportionate returns. The content should still sound like you. But the consistency doesn’t have to depend entirely on you finding the time.

A brief reflection on my own approach

LinkedIn is where I do most of my own professional showing up. I post regularly – usually around the Get Ahead content I’m involved in, the conversations I’m having with business owners, and the things I notice about how businesses are using their time and resource. It’s not a polished strategy. It’s a habit. And the habit, more than anything else, is what builds the kind of presence that generates warm inbound rather than cold outreach. 

If there’s one thing I’d say to any business owner reading this: start smaller than you think you need to, but start consistently. Two posts a week, every week, that actually sound like you, will do more for your business than ten posts a week that sound like everyone else.

The Metaverse: what happened, and what it tells us

In 2021, Meta announced that the future of social connection was the Metaverse – a fully immersive virtual world where people would work, socialise, attend concerts, and conduct business through customisable avatars. Mark Zuckerberg showed the world his virtual office. Analysts predicted trillions in economic activity. Brands rushed to buy virtual land. Business owners were told they needed a Metaverse strategy.

By 2023, Meta had written down billions in losses on its Reality Labs division. The virtual world was largely empty. The avatars, which notoriously had no legs in early versions, became a meme. The urgency evaporated almost as quickly as it had arrived.

What went wrong? Fundamentally, the Metaverse proposition failed the most basic test: it didn’t solve a problem people actually had. People weren’t clamouring for a virtual office. They weren’t desperate to attend meetings as legless avatars. The technology existed before the need – and in the absence of genuine demand, even the most lavish investment couldn’t manufacture it.

For SME owners, the lesson isn’t really about the Metaverse specifically. It’s about the pattern. Every few years, a new platform or technology arrives with outsized promises and credible advocates. There’s pressure to act early, to stake out territory before the rush, to build a presence while the algorithm still favours early adopters. Sometimes those bets pay off. Often they don’t. The filter that cuts through most of the noise is simple: where are your customers, and what would it genuinely cost you in time and resource to reach them there? Applied honestly, that question would have saved most businesses their brief Metaverse anxiety. It will serve you just as well for whatever comes next.

A final thought 

LinkedIn is the one platform in this series where the answer is almost always yes.

Not because it’s fashionable – it isn’t, particularly. But because it’s where your clients, your referrers, and your peers actually are. And showing up there, consistently and genuinely, is one of the most reliable investments a business owner can make in their own visibility.

As for the Metaverse: it’s a useful reminder that not every bold prediction becomes reality. The filter is always the same – where are your customers, and what does it cost you to reach them? Apply that question to everything. Including whatever arrives next.

LinkedIn is a platform I use every day – and helping business owners in Oxfordshire show up consistently and confidently there is part of what I do. If you’d like to talk about what that could look like for your business, I’m always happy to.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

Next in the series: And Then There’s AI.

If you missed Part 1 of this series discussing Facebook, you can find it here. Part 2 – on Pinterest – is here. Part 3 about Twitter is here. All things X in part 4 here. Read about Reddit here.

Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. Former Buying Director for major UK retailers and founder of a social media agency specialising in Pinterest for business. Vicky works with SME owners to find the right support for their business – and writes about the commercial realities of social media, outsourced expertise, and growing a business without burning out.

Making Automation work for your business

We’re all striving to make our businesses run more efficiently, minimising wasted time and streamlining our systems. Yet, with our workloads often keeping us busy, it can be difficult to dedicate attention to the potential savings in both time and money that these improvements could bring.

In this blog post, we’ll explore practical strategies for enhancing productivity within your organisation, while also improving employee morale.

Eliminate repetitive tasks and save costs

Does your organisation have routines that squander valuable employee time and effort? Tasks such as tedious data entry, invoicing, or inventory management can often go unquestioned simply because “that’s how it’s always been done”, leaving little motivation to review or update existing processes.

Just because a process is longstanding doesn’t mean it’s effective. By critically examining your current workflows and identifying opportunities for improvement, your business can reduce operational costs and boost productivity.

Automating routine tasks such as accounting and reporting not only minimises errors but also frees up your team to focus on their core responsibilities and deliver better service to your customers.

Complement human skills – not replace.

By leaning into technology and making small changes to how we get things done each day it doesn’t mean your team is any less important. The real goal is to help everyone do their best work and have more time to focus on what matters most.

Teams get more done together by using tools that make it easier to collaborate and cut down on lengthy email threads. For example, sharing files through Google Drive makes working together smoother and helps everyone stay connected.

Automating tasks has all sorts of benefits: people feel less stressed, morale goes up, productivity improves, and costs drop. And your team can put more energy into helping your business grow.

Where to start and how can Get Ahead help?

Chances are, you already know which areas of your business could do with a bit of a shake-up. Maybe it’s making customer service faster with automated replies. Or perhaps you want to connect with a specific group of your audience and need a quicker way to do it, like using Mailchimp. For better communication between colleagues, there’s always Slack.

Want to find out how to easily share updates and work together with your team? Check out our article on Google Drive.

If you’re feeling a bit lost, especially if you run a small business or start-up, our guide to choosing the right software is a great place to start.

Our expert, Carrie Jones, suggests one way to improve efficiency through automation: “I recommend a good CRM system because it eliminates the chaos that leads to mistakes. Keeping everything in one place doesn’t just streamline your daily tasks; it ensures you’re handling customer information responsibly. In a world of strict GDPR requirements, having accurate records is the best way to protect your customers and your reputation.”

Outsourcing is a brilliant way to hand over some of the work involved in automation. By teaming up with virtual experts, you get access to specialist support and people who really know their tech.

To discover how automation can work for you – get in contact with us to speak with someone who listens to make the best of your business.

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers and then ran my own social media agency, with a specialism in Pinterest for business. I’ve used these platforms commercially. I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and what’s simply not worth a busy business owner’s time. This series is my honest perspective on each one. No strategy guides. No content calendars. Just a straight answer to the question you’re probably already asking.

Is Reddit Worth It for Your Business? 

Of all the platforms in this series, Reddit is the one most business owners have never seriously considered.

It doesn’t come up in social media strategy conversations. It rarely features in marketing advice aimed at small businesses. And for most people, the mental image of Reddit is either anonymous strangers arguing about obscure topics, or the front page of the internet – vast, chaotic, and not obviously connected to finding new clients.

Both impressions are partly accurate, and both miss something important about what Reddit actually offers a business with genuine expertise and the patience to use the platform properly.

What Reddit actually is

Reddit is a network of communities – called subreddits – each built around a specific topic, interest, or question. There are subreddits for entrepreneurs, small business owners, UK businesses, productivity, freelancing, virtual assistants, and dozens of adjacent topics. Each community has its own culture, its own rules, and its own norms around what’s acceptable to post.

Content on Reddit is voted up or down by community members. The posts and comments that rise to the top are the ones the community collectively finds most useful, most honest, or most interesting. That voting mechanism creates a very different dynamic from algorithmic platforms – you can’t pay your way to visibility, and you can’t game engagement through posting frequency. You earn it, slowly, by contributing things that are genuinely worth reading.

There’s one more thing about Reddit that matters enormously for businesses thinking about whether to invest time there: Reddit threads rank extremely well in Google search results. When someone searches ‘should I hire a virtual assistant’ or ‘how do I know when to outsource’ – Reddit discussions appear prominently in the results, often above dedicated articles and blog posts. A genuinely helpful comment posted in the right subreddit today can surface in search results for months or years. That’s a long-tail content opportunity that most businesses have never considered.

Why Reddit users are resistant to marketing – and why that’s useful to understand

Reddit communities have a well-earned reputation for being unwelcoming to promotional content. Post a link to your website in most subreddits without context and it will be downvoted into invisibility within minutes. Introduce yourself as a business owner and immediately start talking about your services, and you’ll likely be banned. The community radar for self-promotion is finely tuned, and it has zero tolerance for the corporate-speak and thinly veiled advertising that passes unremarked on other platforms.

Understanding this isn’t a reason to avoid Reddit. It’s the most important thing to understand about how to use it well.

Reddit doesn’t reward the loudest voice or the most polished content. It rewards the most genuinely useful one. For a business built on real expertise, that’s actually a significant advantage.

The businesses that build valuable presences on Reddit are the ones that go in to contribute, not to sell. They answer questions thoroughly. They share hard-won knowledge without a sales pitch attached. They engage with other people’s posts as a member of the community, not as a brand broadcasting at it. Over time, that consistent generosity builds a reputation – and a reputation on Reddit, because of how the platform works, translates into visibility that no advertising budget can replicate.

The genuine opportunity for SMEs with expertise to share

The business types best positioned to benefit from Reddit are those with deep, specific knowledge that other people are actively seeking. B2B service businesses. Consultants and agencies. Specialist knowledge businesses. Anyone whose clients tend to research carefully before making a decision – and who asks questions online as part of that process.

The subreddits most relevant to a business like Get Ahead – and to many of the SMEs we work with – include r/entrepreneur, r/smallbusiness, r/UKBusiness, r/productivity, and r/VirtualAssistant. These communities are active, their members ask questions that knowledgeable business owners are well-placed to answer, and they have the kind of engaged, thoughtful audience that doesn’t exist in quite the same way on any other platform.

The one rule you cannot break

There is a single principle that determines whether a business succeeds or fails on Reddit, and it’s worth stating plainly:

THE RULE
Go in to contribute. Never go in to sell.

This isn’t a guideline or a best practice. It’s the operating principle of every Reddit community, and violating it – even once, even subtly – can result in a permanent ban from the subreddits where your potential clients are most active. More importantly, it simply doesn’t work. Reddit users are highly attuned to the difference between someone sharing genuine knowledge and someone using the veneer of helpfulness to promote their business. The former builds trust. The latter destroys it.

The practical implication is that Reddit requires a longer runway than other platforms before any commercial return is visible. The first weeks and months are about lurking, learning the community’s norms, and contributing answers that have no promotional content whatsoever. It’s a slow build. But for businesses that stick with it, the compounding effect – visibility in search, community trust, and the kind of warm inbound that comes from someone who’s already seen you be genuinely helpful – is unlike anything paid advertising can produce.

What it costs – honestly assessed

Reddit’s time cost is front-loaded and sustained. Building karma and community trust takes consistent effort over weeks before any return is visible. Unlike scheduling a LinkedIn post or creating a Pin, effective Reddit participation requires being present in conversations as they happen – reading threads, responding thoughtfully, engaging as a member rather than a broadcaster.

For most SME owners already stretched across LinkedIn, email, and their primary social channels, finding that additional bandwidth is the real barrier. Reddit rewards the businesses that can genuinely commit to showing up regularly. Half-measures – an account that posts occasionally and then goes quiet – don’t just underperform. They can actively undermine credibility in a community that notices and remembers.

A final thought 

Reddit isn’t for every business. And it isn’t easy.

But for businesses with genuine expertise to share – and the consistency to share it without expecting anything back straight away – it’s one of the most underused platforms available.

The community rewards real value over time. That’s a harder model than posting a graphic. But it’s also a more durable one.

The question isn’t whether Reddit is worth it in principle. It’s whether your business has something worth saying – and whether you can commit to saying it, consistently, without turning it into a sales pitch. If the answer is yes to both, it’s worth a serious look.

And being honest, I’m not a regular Reddit user myself. But I have been paying more attention to it recently, particularly how often it shows up in search results and the depth of the conversations happening there. It’s definitely made me think twice about writing it off. Without wanting to sound like a talent show – at Get Ahead we’ve got one yes to the question above, and I’d expect us to have two yeses before the end of this year.

Working out where your business’s expertise is best deployed – and which channels will actually reward the effort – is something I think about with business owners regularly. If you’d like to talk it through, I’m always happy to.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

If you’d like a conversation about where your business should be showing up, I’d love to hear from you –  please get in touch via vicky@getaheadva.com.

Next in the series: LinkedIn – and some lessons from the Metaverse

If you missed Part 1 of this series discussing Facebook, you can find it here. Part 2 – on Pinterest – is here. Part 3 about Twitter is here. All things X in part 4 here.

Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. Former Buying Director for major UK retailers and founder of a social media agency specialising in Pinterest for business. Vicky works with SME owners to find the right support for their business – and writes about the commercial realities of social media, outsourced expertise, and growing a business without burning out.

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers and then ran my own social media agency, with a specialism in Pinterest for business. I’ve used these platforms commercially. I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and what’s simply not worth a busy business owner’s time. This series is my honest perspective on each one. No strategy guides. No content calendars. Just a straight answer to the question you’re probably already asking.

Is X (or Threads) Worth It for Your Business? 

This post covers two platforms – X (formerly Twitter) and Threads – because the question for most SME owners is really the same for both: is there any text-based social platform worth my time?

An empty table and empty chairs - clearly computer generated - suggesting a platform where AI talks to AI

The honest answer is: it depends on what your business actually runs on. And for most businesses, that answer points fairly clearly in one direction.

Let’s start with X, because it needs the most unpacking.

What happened to Twitter – and what X is now

Twitter was, for a long time, a genuinely valuable platform for a specific kind of business. Real-time conversation. Breaking news. Niche professional communities. Journalists, commentators, and thought leaders building audiences around ideas rather than images. If your business ran on opinion, commentary, or being part of an industry conversation, Twitter was often the right place to be.

Since Elon Musk’s acquisition in late 2022 and the subsequent rebrand to X, the platform has changed in ways that are hard to ignore. A significant portion of the brand advertising community left. Several high-profile communities migrated elsewhere. The atmosphere shifted – for some users, sharply so. Whether your view of those changes is positive, negative, or neutral largely depends on where you already stood politically and professionally.

What’s less disputed is the data. Active user numbers in the UK and Europe have declined. Advertising revenue dropped substantially in the period following the acquisition, though it has partially recovered. The platform has introduced new paid tiers, changed verification to a subscription model, and adjusted its algorithm in ways that reward certain types of content and users over others.

None of which makes X useless. But it does mean that the case for being there needs to be made more carefully than it once did.

Where X still has genuine value for SMEs

If your business operates in sectors where real-time conversation matters – journalism, PR, media, politics, financial services, tech, legal – X remains relevant. These communities haven’t all left, and the network effects that made Twitter valuable for them are still largely intact.

Thought leadership content – opinions, commentary, takes on industry news – can still find an audience on X in a way that doesn’t work as well on other platforms. LinkedIn has moved in this direction, but it still has a more formal register. X rewards a sharper, more direct voice, and for the right business owner, that’s a genuinely useful distinction.

Customer service is another area where X has historically performed well – the public, searchable nature of the platform means that businesses that respond quickly and helpfully build visible reputations. Some businesses still find real value in monitoring their brand name on X for exactly this reason.

The question for most SME owners isn’t whether X is still alive. It’s whether the people they most need to reach are still there – and what it would actually cost to show up properly..

The honest assessment for most SMEs

For most small and medium-sized businesses – particularly those in local services, retail, hospitality, professional services outside of the sectors listed above, or any business selling to a primarily consumer audience – X is probably not where your time is best spent right now.

That’s not a political statement about the platform. It’s a practical one. The audience has fragmented. The organic reach is limited. And the content format – short, text-based, fast-moving – requires a particular kind of consistent presence that many business owners simply don’t have the bandwidth to maintain effectively.

If you were getting genuine value from Twitter before 2022 – leads, referrals, meaningful conversations with potential clients – it’s worth asking whether that’s still happening at the same rate. If it is, stay. If it isn’t, that tells you something. If you were never really sure whether Twitter was working, this is probably the moment to stop asking the question and redirect that energy somewhere more productive.

A note on X if you’re already there

One thing worth saying clearly: if you have an established X presence that’s working – an engaged following, regular interactions, content that’s performing – there’s no reason to abandon it. Sunk time isn’t a reason to stay, but genuine current value is. The businesses I’d encourage to think hardest about X are the ones maintaining a presence out of habit or obligation rather than evidence. Posting into a void on any platform is a poor use of time. On X in 2025, that risk is higher than it used to be.

And what about Threads?

Threads launched in July 2023 as Meta’s answer to X – a text-based social platform built on Instagram’s infrastructure, designed to feel like Twitter at its best without the turbulence of recent years. It grew extraordinarily fast in its first week, then settled back as the initial curiosity faded.

Where is it now? Quietly growing, with a user base that skews towards people who were already Instagram users and wanted a text-based space that felt less fraught than X. The atmosphere is generally warmer and less combative. The algorithm is still being shaped.

For SMEs, the honest verdict on Threads right now is: watch and wait. The platform is not yet at the scale or maturity where it makes sense to invest significant time in building a presence from scratch. If you’re already active on Instagram, posting to Threads requires minimal additional effort and may be worth doing simply for visibility. But as a primary channel? Not yet. The more interesting question is what Threads becomes over the next two to three years, particularly if X continues to lose ground in certain communities. It’s a platform worth keeping an eye on without yet feeling obligated to commit to.

A final thought 

X has changed. Threads is still finding its feet.

For most SMEs, the honest answer is that text-based social platforms are not where your primary effort should go right now – unless your business genuinely runs on conversation, commentary, and real-time presence in a professional community that’s still active there.

If that’s you, X may still be worth it. If it isn’t, that’s not a gap in your strategy. It’s a reasonable decision based on where your audience actually is. The question was never whether these platforms are interesting. It’s whether your customers are there – and whether showing up properly is a price you can realistically pay.

If you’re reassessing where your business should be showing up – and what that should actually look like – it’s one of the most useful conversations you can have. I’m always happy to think it through with you.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

If you’d like a conversation about where your business should be showing up, I’d love to hear from you –  please get in touch via vicky@getaheadva.com.

Next in the series: Is Reddit Worth It for Your Business?

If you missed Part 1 of this series discussing Facebook, you can find it here. Part 2 – on Pinterest – is here. And Part 3 about Twitter is here.

Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. Former Buying Director for major UK retailers and founder of a social media agency specialising in Pinterest for business. Vicky works with SME owners to find the right support for their business – and writes about the commercial realities of social media, outsourced expertise, and growing a business without burning out.