BACKGROUND
This project was for a client in the independent specialty coffee space. The goal was the opposite of most social media strategies: not to grow the audience, but to deepen and protect the relationship with a small, intensely loyal existing community.
I started with a community health audit analyzing comment patterns, DM response rates, and content save behavior before making any strategic recommendations, because a retention-first strategy requires understanding what is already working before deciding what to change. The strategy deliberately opted out of TikTok, formalized comment and DM response as a named strategic practice rather than an afterthought, and introduced four structural retention mechanisms including an invitation-only inner circle channel and an annual community survey with results shared openly.
The result was a strategy built around three questions every piece of content had to answer before it was worth posting, and a success framework that explicitly removed follower count and reach per post as primary metrics, because a strategy optimizing for depth will naturally produce numbers that look wrong to anyone measuring the wrong things.
