What Is Interest Media? How Small Businesses Can Now Grow Online Without Followers
Social Media has officially been replaced by “Interest Media”
Interest media is the name for how social platforms now decide what you see: based on what you've recently engaged with, not who you follow. For a small business, that means your follower count matters far less than the relevance of each individual post. Someone with 400 followers can reach 50,000 people if the piece matches what those people are curious about, and the specific, narrow thing you do is now easier to distribute than anything general.
This post explains the shift, what it changes for practitioners and solo founders, and a one-week assignment you can actually finish.
What is interest media, and how is it different from social media?
Interest media is a feed built from your recent behavior. The platform watches what you linger on, search for, and engage with, then hands you more of it from any creator, whether or not you follow them.
Social media, in the original sense, was a feed built from your relationships: you saw what the people you followed posted.
Gary Vaynerchuk has been making the case that this switch happened several years ago, TikTok first and then every other platform, and that most businesses never adjusted. (Read it here: "Social Media is Dead. Interest Media is Here.")
His example is the one that convinced me. A video posted to his TikTok account with 15 million followers did a few hundred thousand views. A slightly different cut of the same video, posted three weeks later to a brand new account with zero followers, did over nine million.
The platforms judge the piece, not the person posting it.
Why does this matter more for small businesses than big ones?
Because the old model rewarded people who had already won. If reach came from followers, the people with followers got more reach, and everyone else spoke into an empty room.
Interest media flips that. A big account and a brand-new account start from roughly the same place on each individual post. The gap between you and someone famous is a lot shorter than it used to be, and it's closing from your side.
Three practical consequences:
Your follower count barely matters. I watched this happen in September with a coaching client whose YouTube channel was tiny. She posted a batch of optimized Shorts and picked up nearly 5,000 organic views in just an hour, from people who had never heard of her.
The specific thing you do is your advantage. A post about the one particular thing you do is far easier for the platform to match to the right person than anything general. "Ten wellness tips" goes nowhere, because the platform doesn't know who to hand it to. "What actually happens in your first Reiki session" finds the person who was wondering.
Everything you publish is being indexed for AI answers. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are built from content that already exists online, and they favor specific, direct answers to real questions.
You don’t have to be on camera to be successful.
Gary's own advice, and mine, is that if you'd rather write than film, get serious about Substack. Not as a hobby. As lead generation for your practice: share what you've learned from doing the work, the mistakes you see people make, the questions you get asked every week. The people who connect with you find their way to your door. I rewrote my guide to getting your first 100 Substack subscribers this month.
Read my free guide: How to Get Your First 100 Substack Subscribers
Video does travel further on most platforms right now, so if you can tolerate your phone camera, do both. But written content is a real path, and it's the one most of your competitors are ignoring.
What can I do this week to make progress?
Gary's advice isn't "make one great post." It's to make a lot of different posts, in different formats, across more than one platform, and let the platforms tell you what's working. Here's a version you can finish in a week.
Step 1: Do the five-hour homework in 20 minutes.
Open ChatGPT or Claude and use this prompt, filling in the brackets:
Act as a content strategist who understands how interest-based feeds work on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and Substack.
I'm a [what you do] in [where you are]. My clients are typically [who they are, in a sentence]. The most common things they come to me for are [two or three things]. The thing they misunderstand most before working with me is [one thing].
Give me:
The 20 questions my potential clients are most likely to type into Google, ChatGPT, or a social search bar before they ever find me. Phrase them the way a real person would say them, not the way an expert would.
For each question, one hook I could use as the opening line of a short video and a title I could use for a written post.
Five of those questions that are specific enough that almost nobody else in my field is answering them well.
Keep it plain. No marketing jargon.
The "misunderstand most" line is the one that produces the best results. That's where your only-you content lives.
Step 2: Pick three questions and make each one three ways.
A short vertical video (phone is fine), a text post, and a Substack Note or LinkedIn post. That's nine pieces. Same idea, different formats, different hooks. Don't polish them; the point is to find out which version and which platform picks it up.
Step 3: Post across at least three platforms.
Not just Instagram. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Substack are all live options. Most practitioners are on one or two, which means the others are wide open for your niche.
Step 4: Retrain your own feed.
Search your topic on each platform and engage with what comes up. Within a few days, your feed will show you what's actually working in your space. That's free research.
Step 5: Watch what moves, then double down.
Next week, take whichever piece got the most reach and make five more versions of it. Only then think about putting money behind it. Organic first, always.
How long does this take to work?
Honestly, longer than one week for most people, and the reps are the point.
What the first week gives you is data: which question, which format, which platform. Most clients I work with find their first piece that "moves" somewhere in the first two to four weeks of consistent posting, and it's rarely the one they expected. If nothing moves after a month, the fix is usually specificity, not volume. Go back to the list from Step 1 and pick the narrowest questions on it.
If you want to work through your own version of this with me, that's exactly what a 1:1 working session is for. You can book a free consultation first to explore if its a good fit.
FAQ
What is interest media?
Interest media is the current model social platforms use to build your feed. Instead of showing you posts from people you follow, the platform shows you content that matches what you've recently searched for, watched, or engaged with, from any creator. TikTok introduced the approach and Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn have adopted it.
Does follower count still matter on Instagram and TikTok?
Far less than it did. Under an interest media strategy, each post is evaluated on its own and shown to people likely to be interested, regardless of whether they follow you. A large following still helps a little, but a new account with a highly relevant post can outperform a large account with a generic one.
How do I get my content to show up in ChatGPT and AI search?
Answer specific questions directly, in plain language, on a page or post that's public and indexable. AI answer engines favor content that resolves one clear question completely. The narrower and more direct the piece, the more likely it is to be cited. General overview content rarely surfaces.
Should a small business be on every social media platform?
No, but more than one. Most small businesses post only on Instagram, which means TikTok, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and Substack are far less crowded for their niche. Start with three, post the same idea in a format native to each, and let the results tell you where to focus.
Is Substack good for lead generation?
Yes, for practitioners who would rather write than film. A Substack works as an ongoing, low-pressure way to share what you know, and readers who connect with your voice tend to become clients. It also feeds discovery through Substack Notes and Recommendations, which now surface writers to people who don't follow them.
Your homework checklist for this week:
Run the prompt above and save the list of 20 questions.
Pick three questions.
Make each one as a short video, a text post, and a Note or LinkedIn post.
Post the nine pieces across at least three platforms.
Search your topic on each platform and engage with five posts.
Note which piece got the most reach by Sunday.
Justine Harrington is the founder of Solas Growth and has spent more than a decade running search and content growth for small businesses, including the AI-search experiments described in this post.