I burned my feed so I could build a new one.
The inaugural edition. Tuesday, June 9, 2026.
Let me introduce myself.
I’m Mckenna. I am a Paid Media Specialist managing ads for 14 restaurant concepts by day and by night, I own Spill Social (@spilledsocial), a boutique social media management agency. The hats I’ve worn through my marketing career could fill an entire stadium and then some. I’ve QA’d direct mail for nonprofits, been a project manager for an agency on multi-million dollar accounts, designed emails, community-managed, been an impromptu web designer and then about ten thousand other things.
Most importantly, I am a creative at heart. Journaling, music, fitness, cooking, reading. They are what fill my cup when the days get long. The beauty about my career is that I get a lot of creative gratification designing ads, organic posts, blogging and whatever else I need to do to fuel my creativity and my livelihood.
I created Spill because I was burnt out from watching social media turn into a riddle. Brands chasing likes, copying competitors, drowning in the noise and forgetting why they showed up in the first place. I knew there had to be a better way.
Spill is my way of saying: you don’t have to do it all, and you don’t have to do it the way everyone else does. You deserve to use social platforms as a means to support your goals, share creative that feels true to your brand and all while gaining a partner who cares about your growth like it’s their own.
This isn’t just my business. It’s my belief: social media should be fun. Not more overwhelming.
Here’s everything I despised about my feed.
The announcement for a new platform feature and ‘explanations’ while no one actually knew what it was.
Think pieces about “what this means for brands” from someone who hasn’t touched Meta Business suite in weeks.
A press release recap with zero indication of what it means for my brands.
A LinkedIn post about algorithms that aged out within three hours.
And my personal least favorite, gimmicky hooks about marketing strategy, ‘best practices’ or ‘hot takes’ that are either aged by five years, reek of gen-AI or are just wrong.
Maybe, if I got lucky, was one update that was going to matter and be delivered in a manner that didn’t speak to me like I knew how to log into Facebook without asking for help. Things like delivery changes in the ad algorithm that would explain why my CPM’s shot up $10 overnight and how softly pivot. New formats that were being favored and best practices not to overdo it. The things that I should subtly encourage out of my audience so my posts didn’t fall deeper into the cave of where reach goes never to be seen again.
I couldn’t find it. So I’m solving the problem.
The overarching industry problem.
Over the last year, I’ve noticed an entire new subset of marketing that involves marketers marketing marketing to marketers. Say that 10 times out loud and fast. Anyways, its completely out of hand.
Someone copies a trending hook format, it gets half of a million views and suddenly they have a course on hooks. Never mind that the original hook worked because the original creator had a unique perspective or commentary on the original point. But, ripping off someone else’s idea with a loud first line and nothing to say behind it. Substance sells hooks, but that’s a harder sell these days.
Then there’s the person who had a couple thousand Instagram followers by the end of college and then rebranded themselves as a social media manager because they know how to swap some text out in Canva but not follow a standard brand kit and thinks they know everything. There is always something to be learned and there are true fundamentals of this industry that you need to dedicate yourself to growing with. You cannot learn marketing by watching 100 reels explaining marketing. You make mistakes, go and grow through it.
And my final point: fear-mongering. Every year someone shouts “Instagram is dying!” “Organic reach is dead!” or “Social media doesn’t work!” It’s wrong. I truly, deeply believe that. People want you scared. This industry is made up of a lot of Type A, (probably)anxious and high-functioning individuals. These people either want to sell you something or a small business owner is seeing this and making a real decision based on that noise to pull budget from things that do actually work.
My belief.
When a small business owner hands you their budget and their brand, they are handing you their life’s work. They are handing you something they most likely went into debt for. Something they built while scared and not knowing what they were doing. But most importantly, they are handing you something they genuinely believe in and that they believe will help people in some way, shape or form.
This is my bottom line on why I have remained in this industry. I love feeling the passion when I zoom with a new client and I interrogate them in regards to everything about their brand. You are constantly learning about things and making relationships with people you normally wouldn’t have. There is so much joy in this.
Where there is joy, there is also pressure to support them and make their hard-earned money work even harder. This pressure doesn’t go away because you know how to resize a graphic in Canva, or you can write a hook and understand ‘You don’t need to be posting everyday!’ type of advice. The fundamentals of this industry: the audience, what they need to hear, how to build trust, these are not optional. They are the job. Pretending otherwise, whether to gain a new client or get yourself some vanity followers is a lie that small business owners pay for.
Practitioners deserve better information. People trusting practitioners with their businesses deserve the best practitioners. Or SMM’s or marketers, just insert your role there.
These are the four tenants I stick to with everything I do online:
Cultivate magnetic, natural connection.
Speak authentically. Be honest where you have knowledge gaps.
It’s only worth saying if there’s a fresh, inherent perspective on the topic.
Make it unmistakably yours. Creatively.
And on the ninth day of June, Burn Your Feed was born.
Here’s my vow to you. A weekly newsletter, every Thursday addressed for the people running brands online. I feel inclined to emphasize (again) this is not for the people writing about running brands online who are trying to sell you something.
For my marketers who have their hands dirty, at the bar uploading a Reel that failed to schedule, the paid media folks, the agency superheroes and the solo operators holding down their own brands with whatever bandwidth and twenty minutes they can find on a Tuesday at 10 PM.
The question I am answering is simple.
“What if marketing news was delivered to you in an actionable brief?”
Every issue is called The Feed Report. It consists of two parts:
Burn Notice (free): The week’s headlines and platforms that are worth knowing for context, but not for panicking about. Not worth dissecting, contextualizing, all of the other buzzy analyst words.
The Safe (subscriber-only benefit): This is the meaty part. I take the most important actionable stories of the week and break it down in what I can only call a brief-like format. Next steps. Strategy audit directives. Context on how it may impact you, your clients or your creative. No BS. No buzzwords. You won’t need 90 tabs to understand and contextualize things. You just need this one.
The cost.
I, like everyone else, am tired of everything having a monthly cost. I hate the Adobe subscription model. I hate that Canva has somehow managed to scale a $15/monthly cost to a $28/monthly cost. I hate that photo apps will charge you $60/year or $10.99/weekly to slap a bad filter on photos.
So, I am promising that for at least two years, my prices will not change. And if they somehow do (I do not think it will) it will never feel like a bulging shock. You will be supporting a solo-female entrepreneur who is simply trying to make her car payment and provide real, genuine help to others in a very selfish and impostor-y industry (at times).
Free gets you the headlines and Burn Notice. Paid gets you everything plus The Safe and any 911 news drops on the fly and extra posts as inspiration strikes. (Probably once or twice a month.)
I’m starting the paid tier out at $7.77 a month. A medium coffee a month and endless time saved. I am also offering referral and group-subscriber discounts as well. My DM’s are always open.
For the next four weeks, the entire thing will be free. You deserve to know what you’re getting and make an informed decision on if this will be good for you. (This is me secretly hoping that the news stays at least semi-juicy so I am not over-explaining Social SEO for two thousand straight words.)
For my inaugural readers, I’m offering 20% off forever through July 15th, 2026.
See you Thursday.
The inaugural issue will drop two days from today on June 11th.
I encourage you to join my email list to get this delivered straight to your inbox in the morning so you can drop some knowledge on Slack by 10 AM and look like the office hero. I also will post weekly on Instagram (@burnyourfeed).
You’re on your way to feeling more grounded by algorithm updates. Let me soften the blow and make it easy for you. I know that’s what I have needed for years now.
Welcome to Burn Your Feed. I’m deeply thankful that you’re here.
xoxo (from the trenches),
Mckenna