Your Social Feed Is Doing the Wrong Job.

Here is the shape of it. The posts go out. The likes come in (or don't). The comments sit unanswered because answering them is "not what social is for." The team measures reach. Leadership asks for more posts. Nobody asks whether anyone is on the other end.

That is a broadcast feed. One-way by design.

And while cities have been broadcasting, residents moved.

43% of US adults under 30 now regularly get news on TikTok, up from just 9% in 2020. (Pew Research Center, September 25, 2025) That is the news layer your city is almost certainly absent from. Not because TikTok is the answer. Because the under-30 resident is forming a daily news habit somewhere, and it is not the city press release.

Now look at where the city is still publishing. In every comms shop I have walked into, the calendar is Facebook-first. The volume is on the page where leadership grew up scrolling, not on the platform where the under-30 resident is forming the habit. The team is being asked to fill a feed that the next generation of residents is not opening.

A private-sector parallel helped me see this clearly. NYT Cooking. The New York Times took a recipe library and rebuilt it as a relationship product. Personality-led video. A direct subscription. A daily habit, not a destination. (Digiday, 2025) They are not asking the homepage to do the work. They built a habit instead.

Press-release-first cities are betting on the front door (the website, the official page) at the exact moment residents are forming direct daily habits with creators and platforms instead. The fix is not "be on TikTok." The fix is to stop treating the channel as a megaphone and start treating it as a newsroom.

When I started as Chief Digital Officer in Gilbert, Arizona, there was no communications team and I was the first one in the role. The brief was open: figure out how this town talks to its people in the channels they actually use.

It took years but the key was to build and bring everything under one umbrella. The 311 system. The open data portal we called Alex. The website. Social. All of it sat with my communications team, not in a silo across the hall or in various departments.

We started a digital newsroom. Not as a press release pipeline. A a place where residents could find what was happening, in the format they would actually consume it. Articles, yes. Also video. Social. Direct stories. We did a holiday lights map where residents could tag their own house. We geo-targeted road closure messages to the neighborhoods they actually affected, not the whole follower base. We ran the channel like news producers, not button-pushers.

Then the pandemic hit.

I heard from a mayor of a large Minnesota city who said, "I'm not even using social media. What do I do?" My answer was the same one I will give you here. You needed to already be there, building trust with people on a platform so that when they need you most, they already believe what you are going to say.

Gilbert was already there. The newsroom had been running for years before any of us knew what was coming. So when COVID arrived, we had a place to speak from. We had data dashboards that we could turn into pandemic-related content. Not hastily set-up accounts. A relationship. Trust.

Build trust before you need it.

A social feed is infrastructure, not a soft skill.

The cities with a living feed have somewhere to speak from when something goes wrong. The cities with a broadcast feed have to build trust in the exact moment they need to spend it. That is not a tactical problem. That is a pre-crisis liability sitting in plain view, week after week, in a public account anyone can scroll.

Trust is not built by saying you are trustworthy. It is built by being present, being responsive, and being useful on the days that nothing is on fire. The resident who got a reply to their pothole comment in March is the resident who reads your boil-water advisory in October without scrolling past it. The behavior in normal times decides whether the message lands when it has to.

Build the relationship before you need it. There is no other version of this that works.

I just pointed you to Nextdoor, so let me bring in the person who runs government and crisis response there. Joseph Porcelli was on the podcast last summer, and he said the line I keep coming back to when a city tells me they are trying to "do more" on social.

The whole argument for a relationship-first feed lives in the difference between two ways of using a channel. He puts it cleaner than I ever have.

"What I see is, people, communicators that think of Nextdoor as a customer service engagement platform, not so much a public affairs air game platform. People wanna know like. Why wasn't my trash picked up? If you're gonna block my road, I wanna know that I can't get down it so I can plan around that."

Air game versus customer service. That is the choice. And it is the choice on every platform, not just Nextdoor.

Which platform feels most stuck for your team right now? Reply and tell me. I read every reply.

Talk soon,

Dana

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