What I'm Hearing from Brands About Social Selling

I've spent the last few months having conversations with brand operators, founders, marketing leads, social media managers, about how they're thinking about social selling. Not the theory. The reality. What's working, what's frustrating, and what they wish existed. After dozens of these conversations, three themes keep coming up.

Theme 1: The volume is overwhelming

Every brand I talk to says the same thing: they know their DMs and comments contain buying intent, and they can't keep up. A mid-size beauty brand told me they get 400 DMs a day and their social team can handle maybe 80. A fashion brand doing live streams said their comment volume during lives is completely unmanageable. They know revenue is sitting in those conversations. They just can't get to it fast enough.

Theme 2: Fear of sounding robotic

Almost every brand I've talked to has tried some form of automation, ManyChat flows, chatbots, auto-replies. And almost every one has pulled back. The feedback from customers was clear: it felt impersonal. In social, where authenticity drives everything, robotic responses are worse than no response at all. Brands want automation for scale, but they refuse to sacrifice the personal touch that makes social commerce work.

Theme 3: No way to measure social revenue

The most frustrating theme I hear is about attribution. Brands know social is driving revenue. They can feel it. But they can't prove it in a board meeting. There's no Klaviyo for DMs. No Google Analytics for conversations. When the CFO asks how much revenue Instagram DMs generated last quarter, the answer is usually a shrug. This makes it nearly impossible to justify investment in social commerce infrastructure.

What these themes tell me

These three problems, volume, authenticity, and attribution, are the same problems every brand faces. That tells me the opportunity isn't niche. It's universal. The brand that builds the solution to these three problems will have an enormous market. And from what I'm seeing on the ground, that solution needs to be AI-powered, commerce-integrated, and measurable from day one.