Hey Reader,

I'm back from vacation! Am I caught up from vacation? Absolutely not. But I'm back! Thank you for your patience over the last couple of weeks. I know this newsletter is likely the highlight of your Monday and I sincerely apologize for depriving you of its splendor.

Today I'm brining you a story of small business success on the internet. In 2026, that kind of feels like saying, "Today I'm going to tell you about the sasquatch that I saw!" But it's true, I promise. The subject of today's story is Pimp My Pancakes, a food trailer in Pensacola, Florida, and their viral moment on *checks notes* Facebook.

1,000,000 views just for saying "Sorry."

I stumbled upon this occurrence after it happened, as did many of the people who saw it. There's no reason that content from a food trailer in Florida should find its way into my feed, especially not organically. Typically if I see a small business post from way out of my market, it's because that business did a bad job of targeting their boosted posts. Pimp My Pancakes snuck onto my feed through good ol' fashioned virality. Here's the post I saw:

Give the people what they want!

The post above is not designed to go viral. It's text heavy, it's not related to the business's product, it isn't perfectly formatted. In a word, this post is raw, but isn't that what we've been asking for? Modern social media marketing advice encourages content creators to be genuine, sincere, and personal. Pimp My Pancake's post is all of those things AND it announces a shift away from generative AI. The humanity of this post drove up the engagement and that's what brought it to my feed.

At time of writing, Pimp My Pancakes has just over 4600 followers on Facebook. At time of writing, the above post is sitting at just over 12,700 likes. That's an engagement rate of 276%. I will remind you that the average engagement rate across the internet is 1.5-3.5%. In case you're not a math person, 276 is way bigger than 3.5.

The aftermath

Pimp My Pancakes shared an update post a few days later that went into the metrics of the post. Here's that:

One million views, just for saying sorry. A 303% increase in approximate earnings, just for saying sorry. 400 new followers, just for saying sorry.

Pretty good, I'd say.

-MC

p.s.

• Back from vacation but not back to content creation. Do you miss my blogs and/or TikToks? Let me know.
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