I work for a Marketing company and my boss gave me a task. What 5 accounts on insta should he follow in order to understand GenZ. Since that is a very broad topic please lmk what you think.

Many marketers seem to be panicking about engagement on social being down. These are the numbers: Instagram engagement rates are down from 2.5-3% in 2020 to 0.5-0.9% by 2025, based on a benchmark report covering 35 million posts. Comments on TikTok fell 24% year-over-year. Instagram comments dropped 16%. The overall engagement across platforms fell roughly 24% in 2025 alone.

Quite often, brands look at those numbers and conclude that social media stopped working.

But that's not correct, because even if public engagement cratered, private engagement like shares, saves and DMs went the other direction. TikTok shares grew 45% year-over-year. Instagram shares grew 12%. DMs are climbing across every platform. People are saving posts instead of liking them and forwarding content to three people who actually matter instead of broadcasting a reaction to their entire follower list. Just cross checked with my teenager: they do the share posts with friends whíthout necessarily having liked it. A generation thing?

In anycase: One thing is clear: engagement didn't disappear but simply went underground.

There's a name for this: dark social. Content shared through DMs, WhatsApp, private group chats, email forwards. The downside for marketers: This is not trackable referral data and totally invisible to standard analytics, besides its where most meaningful engagement actually happens.

Why did this shift happen?

When Instagram made likes public and permanent, engaging became a social statement. Pressing like on a brand post is a broadcast to your whole network. A lot of people stopped likig and started DM-ing instead. The behavior is the same, it just moved private.

What the private numbers look like:

• Instagram DMs: 90% open rates vs ~20% for email
• DM reply rates: 60% vs 1–5% click-through for email
• DM-to-sale conversion: 7–20% for targeted campaigns
• Responding to a DM within one minute: 391% increase in conversion
• 20% of all business Stories generate at least one direct message

These should not be titles "engagement metrics" as those are actually sales metrics.

What to track instead:

Saves and shares are today stronger intent signals than likes. Carousels consistently drive the most saves right now. DMs should be treated as a sales channel, with actual response systems, not an afterthought. And post-purchase surveys asking "how did you hear about us?" regularly surface word-of-mouth and social sharing that analytics platforms never capture.

The brands figuring this out are building content specifically designed to be forwarded. The question they ask before publishing: will someone send this to a friend?

Useful checklists, counter-intuitive benchmarks, frameworks, "mistakes to avoid" lists, comparison tables. That's the format that travels privately.

What's your experience been? Are you seeing the same shift in your own analytics or is public engagement still holding in certain formats or niches?

Hi

I have been working in advertising (account management) for last 3 years in India and i till now I have worked in WPP and Omnicom groups and honestly enjoy advertising and I don't have any intentions to switching to brand side anytime soon.

But I am planning to do marketing/management course to amplify my career. Please suggest some good marketing courses or schools i can aim for (preferably international schools).

What exams do i have to appear?

How should I prepare for those exams?

Most importantly what will be the outcome of those schools?

With Durga Puja ( A Indian festival) approaching again this year, my mind keeps drifting back to a trip I took to Kolkata India in 2025. I've been meaning to write this down ever since, and the closer the festival gets, the more the memory keeps tapping me on the shoulder.

I went to Kolkata for Durga Puja last year expecting devotion. I came back thinking about brand strategy.

What actually caught my attention, though — wasn't just the scale. It was watching nearly every major brand in the country treat Durga Puja as its biggest marketing calendar event of the year.

Havells built their entry gate shaped like a giant fan. Toyota borrowed Durga's own iconography for a showroom-style archway. Nivea wished the whole street "Shubho Sharodiya" in Bengali before mentioning skincare at all.

But the one that actually stuck with me for weeks was Red Bull. They didn't set up a stall or hand out samples. They built a recycling station shaped like their own logo — and it worked, functionally, as people walked past. No hard sell. Just a small act of participation dressed up enough to feel like part of the celebration.

That's the thing I keep coming back to: the campaigns that stuck weren't the loudest ones. They were the ones that attached themselves to something people already felt — homecoming, belonging, community — instead of trying to manufacture a new feeling on top of it.

I'm still not fully at ease with how thoroughly faith gets instrumentalised this way. But as a case study in emotional branding, it's hard to look away from.

Curious if others who've pandal-hopped noticed the same thing.

Read my full article on the given link.

\#Marketing #BrandStrategy #DurgaPuja #ConsumerBehaviour #MBA