The short version: A social media blog is worth following when it has one strong opinion per post, updates its own advice when the platforms change, and tells you what didn’t work before it tells you what did. Most blogs in this niche fail on all three, which is why your reading list is probably three times bigger than it needs to be.
Next step on this topic: How Does a Social Media Scheduling App Help You Stay Consistent.
What “good” means when it comes to a social media blog
I’ve been writing about social media since 2009, back when Twitter chats were the main way anyone discovered new blogs and Google Reader was still a thing. In that time I’ve subscribed to hundreds of blogs, newsletters, and RSS feeds on this exact topic. I currently follow around fifteen. That’s it. Fifteen, out of the hundreds I’ve tried.
The ones that stuck share three things. First, they have a point of view you could disagree with. Second, the person writing has run actual accounts, not just read about running them. Third, they update or retract old advice publicly instead of quietly deleting it. That third one is rare, and it’s the one that separates a blog you can trust from one that just fills a content calendar.
The five minute test I use before I subscribe to anything
When I find a new social media blog, I don’t read the “about” page. I go straight to the archive and run this check:
- Find a post from at least eighteen months ago that gives specific advice about a platform feature. Is that advice still true today?
- Look for a number, not a claim. “Engagement increased” tells me nothing. “Reach dropped 40 percent after LinkedIn changed its algorithm in March 2026” tells me the writer was watching their own data.
- Check whether the writer names their source when they quote a stat. If every number is unsourced, that’s a blog written to fill a schedule, not to inform you.
- Read the comments, if there are any. A blog with real back and forth from readers is a different thing from one where every comment is “great post!”
- See if the site has ever pruned its own archive. A blog that never deletes old posts, even ones about features that no longer exist, isn’t editing itself, and that matters more than people admit.
That last point is why I wrote about pruning a blog without losing traffic, because the best social media blogs I follow have clearly gone back and cut dead weight, and it shows in how tight the remaining content is.
Why the blogs with the biggest audience are often the worst use of your time
Here’s the uncomfortable bit that most people writing about this topic won’t say out loud: subscriber count and quality are barely related. Some of the biggest social media blogs online publish five posts a week because volume is the business model, not because they have five good ideas a week. I’ve read posts on sites with six figure email lists that were, word for word, a rewrite of a platform’s own press release with three extra adjectives added.
I fell for this myself for about two years. I followed a well known marketing blog because everyone in my network shared its posts. I kept reading it for the social proof of being “in the loop,” not because it was teaching me anything. When I finally sat down and reread twenty of their posts back to back, I realised eighteen of them said the same four things in different words: post consistently, know your audience, use video, engage with comments. True, but not useful. Not once did they tell me what happened when they tried something and it failed.
Compare that to a much smaller blog run by a one person agency in Manchester I’ve followed for about six years. She has maybe 4,000 email subscribers. Every post includes a screenshot of her own analytics dashboard and a line like “this format got 2,200 views and the last one got 40,000, here’s my best guess why.” That’s a blog worth following, because she’s showing her working, not just her wins.
The one signal that matters more than posting frequency
People assume a good blog posts often. It doesn’t need to. What it needs is a consistent point of view across time, so you know what the writer believes before you even open the post. Ann Handley writes this way. Mark Schaefer writes this way. You can predict roughly where they’ll land on a new platform feature before you read a word, because their thinking has a shape to it.
A blog without a point of view will tell you TikTok is essential this month and then quietly stop mentioning it next month when the numbers get harder to spin. A blog with a point of view will say “I think TikTok is overrated for B2B and here’s the data from three client accounts that backs that up,” and then stand by it even when it’s not the popular take.
A short story: the blog I unsubscribed from after eight years
I followed one particular social media blog for close to eight years. It was one of the first three or four sites I subscribed to when I started building my own audience, back when I still had over 200,000 Twitter followers and a much bigger platform presence than I do now. For years it was useful, run by a small team who clearly managed real client accounts.
Then the site got sold. The new owner kept the name and the domain authority but swapped the writers for freelancers paid by the word. Within about a year the posts turned into 2,500 word listicles stuffed with “best practices” that read like they’d been generated from a template, long before AI writing was even common. No opinions. No failures mentioned. Just safe, bland, SEO shaped filler. I unsubscribed in early 2023, and I still think about it, because it’s the clearest example I’ve seen of what happens when a blog optimises for search engines instead of for the person reading it.
That experience is also why I now check any blog I recommend using the same approach I used when I asked AI to audit my own blog and it told me to delete half of it. If a tool that ruthless would flag most of a site’s archive as low value, that tells you something about the standard the site is holding itself to.
What keeps writers publishing when nobody’s watching
The blogs I trust most are usually run by someone who was writing before they had an audience and kept going after the audience showed up, not the other way round. That order matters. If someone starts writing publicly for its own sake, and a following comes later, the writing tends to stay honest, because the habit was never dependent on approval. If someone starts a blog specifically to build an audience or a personal brand, the writing tends to bend toward whatever gets shared, which usually means safer and blander over time.
I see this constantly with people just starting out. If you’re working out how to start a blog from scratch as a complete beginner, the temptation is to write what you think a big audience wants before you’ve written enough to know what you think. The blogs worth following, almost without exception, spent a year or two writing for an audience of a few hundred people before anything bigger happened.
It’s also worth knowing the traps that stop a new social media blog from ever reaching that point. I wrote a full list in how to avoid common blogging mistakes as a beginner, and the biggest one, by a distance, is writing about the platform in general terms instead of writing about your own specific results on it.
How to build your own reading list without wasting a year on it
Here’s the process I’d use if I were starting from scratch today:
- Pick three social platforms you use for your business, not five, and look only for writers who talk in specifics about those three.
- Give any new blog three posts, not thirty. If none of the three includes a real number or a named failure, drop it.
- Follow one or two people rather than one or two brands. Individual writers change their minds less often to chase traffic than corporate blogs do.
- Set a six month review. go back through what you’re subscribed to and cut anything that hasn’t taught you a single new thing in that window.
- Check whether the writer talks about the tools they use to run their accounts, not just the strategy behind them. A blog that never mentions scheduling, analytics, or the practical side of managing multiple platforms usually hasn’t run them at scale. That’s part of why I keep a running list of the best tools for managing social media updated myself, so I know I’m judging other writers against something concrete.
One more thing worth checking: does the blog ever cover formats that reward direct interaction, such as live audience sessions or scheduled chats, and does it explain why those formats work rather than just listing them as a tactic? I’ve written before about what makes a Twitter chat useful for growing an audience, and blogs that understand real time formats tend to understand audience behaviour in general far better than ones that only write about scheduled posts.
Frequently asked questions
How many social media blogs should I follow?
Somewhere between five and fifteen is realistic for someone running a business. More than that and you’re skimming instead of reading, which defeats the point of following any of them.
Is a bigger email list a sign of a better social media blog?
No. List size reflects marketing reach and how long a site has existed, not the quality of the advice inside it. Some of the smallest blogs I follow have under 5,000 subscribers and teach me more per post than sites with ten times that number.
Should I trust a social media blog written by an AI tool?
Be cautious. AI generated posts can summarise public information well, but they can’t tell you what failed in a real campaign or show you a real analytics screenshot. If a blog never shares first hand results, treat it as a summary of other people’s work rather than a primary source.
What’s the fastest way to tell a good social media blog from a bad one?
Open one post and look for a specific number, a named failure, or a stated opinion someone could disagree with. If a post has none of those three things after five hundred words, the blog is unlikely to teach you anything you couldn’t get from the platform’s own help pages.
Related reading: How to Build a Loyal and Engaged Following for Your Business Blog and How Businesses Use Social Proof Tools to Grow Their Following.
