There’s a trend in social media right now. Be authentic. Be truthful. Show the ugly bits. Bring people behind the curtain.
It sounds like a correction to years of polished, hollow content. It feels right.
It isn’t.
Social media, by its very nature, is hostile to authenticity. The platforms reward tricks. They reward hacks. They reward working the algorithm. Authenticity doesn’t trend; engineered virality does. The moment you start optimising for the platform, you’ve already left authenticity behind, no matter what you’re calling the content.
Before You Come At Me With Exceptions
I’m going to make a few big pronouncements in this piece. Before I do, a word from my statistics professor.
Never fall victim to the individual exception. Focus on the aggregates.
He told it through a story about cousin Louise. Here’s an off-the-top example: Research shows most people choose an electric clothes dryer. Someone pushes back … their “cousin Louise” would never. Loves her clothesline. And people like that are out there, more than you think.
Except they’re not.
You will probably think of an exception to at least one of the things I’m about to say. Maybe you know a baker who bakes the best bread and also manages to run a genuinely great social media account that drives engagement and helps the bakery grow. That’s because they exist. The issue isn’t whether they exist, it’s that most bakeries on social media are not good at it. And the advice people get about social media is built around the exceptions which ends up leading the rest of you off a cliff.
It’s like saying billionaires exist, here’s the rule to follow to become one and thinking everyone will become one. Billionaires are the exception.
Stop listening to people who tell you to follow the rules and become as great as the exception. They’re wrong and the exceptions don’t prove them right.
The Influencer Contradiction
Influencers cannot be authentic while simultaneously representing brands. This isn’t a criticism of brand representation, it’s a structural impossibility. The moment money changes hands, the relationship changes. Any claim that their opinions remain unaffected by the income they depend on will not be believed, because it shouldn’t be. The audience knows. The influencer knows. Everyone is pretending not to know, and that performance is the opposite of authentic.
Take the money, do the work, be successful. It doesn’t make it authentic.
The Schedule Problem
Your authentic self cannot be bound by a content development schedule.
Authenticity is spontaneous. It emerges. It doesn’t get blocked out in a calendar on the third Tuesday of every month between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. The moment you’re producing content because the schedule says to, you’re producing content not expression.
The rules don’t help here either. Post at these times. Use these hashtags. Open with a hook. End with a call to action. These are the mechanics of performance, not authenticity. Following them doesn’t make you more real. It makes you more managed.
The Beauty Standard Problem
Your authentic self cannot compete with digitally altered representations of beauty. It’s not a fair fight and it was never designed to be one.
These images are not photographs of people. They are constructed objects, as impossible to recreate in reality as a Barbie doll’s proportions. Holding your authentic self up against them (or expecting your audience to do the same) is a form of cruelty that the platform is perfectly happy to facilitate.
And when a brand steps in to “elevate real body types” and claim the mantle of authenticity? That’s not authenticity either. The motivation was selling a product. The campaign was engineered. The casting was deliberate. Calling it authentic doesn’t make it so, it just makes it a more sophisticated version of the same thing.
The Analytics Trap
Reviewing your statistics and plotting your next move based on what is and isn’t working is many things. Smart, maybe. Strategic, sure.
Authentic? No.
The moment you let the data reshape what you share and how you share it, you’re doing market research on yourself. That’s a legitimate business activity. It is not the same as showing up honestly.
What Authenticity Actually Looks Like
If you want to be authentic, do what you do. Share what you do. Do it well. Be a baker. Bake bread. Make it the best.
When the time comes to sell your bread … find the right tools to sell it. Choose the tools that work for you, that you can sustain, that don’t cost more in time and energy than they return. Maybe social media is one of those tools. Maybe it isn’t.
But lose the belief that you need it.
That it’s non-negotiable.
That your business cannot survive without a content calendar and a posting cadence and a brand voice document and an engagement strategy.
We survived before social media existed. If we’re lucky, we’ll outlast it. And when we do, the bakers who kept baking will still be baking.
We don’t need to let the machines set the terms. We can be human, we can be authentic, and we can bake our bread.
In the interest of being authentic, the machine helped me structure, edit, and review the positions in this post. The opinions are my own. Thanks to my wingman, Claude.