Michael Hunter on Social Media: Why Insurance Agents Need to Stop and Learn Before They Post
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
Every week, somewhere across the country, an insurance agent posts something on Facebook about their agency. Maybe it's a generic "we're here for all your insurance needs" announcement. Maybe it's a shared meme about rates going up. Maybe it's a photo from the office holiday party. And every week, that post gets two likes, one from the agent's spouse and one from their mother, and generates exactly zero new business. Michael Hunter, social media expert, has watched this pattern enough times to know exactly what's going wrong and how to fix it.
The Problem With How Agents Approach Social Media
The mistake isn't effort. Most agents who are active on social media are genuinely trying. They're posting consistently (or at least occasionally), they've set up business pages, they've boosted a post or two. The mistake is skipping the learning phase entirely and going straight to broadcasting.
Social media is not a megaphone. It's a conversation platform that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others, and the behaviors it rewards are almost never the ones that feel natural to someone trained in traditional insurance marketing. The cold announcement, the product pitch, the promotional offer: these are the moves that traditional media was designed for. On social platforms, they register as noise at best and spam at worst.
Michael Hunter's message in episode 180 is the kind of thing agents don't want to hear but need to: before you post another piece of content, stop. Learn how the platforms actually work. Understand what the algorithms reward. Study who your audience is and what they actually respond to. Because thirty minutes of learning upfront will make every hour of content creation you do afterward ten times more effective.
What "Learning the Platform" Actually Means
This isn't about mastering complicated technical details. It's about understanding three fundamental dynamics that govern how content performs on any social platform.
The first is native content. Every platform has a content format that it was built to host, and that format gets preferential treatment from the algorithm. Facebook rewards posts that keep people on Facebook. LinkedIn rewards long-form text posts and native documents. Instagram rewards reels, stories, and content that drives saves. When an agent posts a link to their agency website on Facebook, the algorithm suppresses that post because it takes people off Facebook. Knowing this one thing, that links to external sites get suppressed on most platforms, immediately changes what you should be posting and how.
The second dynamic is engagement velocity. Algorithms measure how quickly a post generates engagement in the first window after posting and use that to determine how widely to distribute it. A post that gets three comments in the first ten minutes reaches more people than a post that gets the same three comments spread over three days. This means your network matters enormously. Agents who have cultivated genuine relationships on social media, who comment on other people's content, who engage authentically with their audience, have posts that naturally outperform agents who only broadcast. The platform is rewarding relationship-building and penalizing one-way communication. That's not a coincidence. It's a design choice.
The third dynamic is content value relative to audience. The definition of "good content" on social media is entirely determined by who's watching. Content that resonates with a commercial lines audience looks nothing like content that resonates with personal lines homeowners. Content that performs well with first-time buyers is completely different from content that works with business owners evaluating professional liability coverage. Before you create a single piece of content, you need to know precisely who you're creating it for and what those people actually care about. Generic content for a generic audience produces generic results.
Michael Hunter's Framework for Agents
Michael's approach for insurance agents is built around a simple sequence: observe, study, then participate.
Observe means spending time on each platform you're considering as a consumer, not as a marketer. Scroll your feed with the question: what's stopping me here? What makes me pause, read, comment, or share? That real-time reaction data is more valuable than any social media course because it's direct feedback from your own psychology about what works.
Study means going deeper on the content that performed best in your observation phase. Look at who created it, how they framed it, what format they used, what hook they led with. You are doing a content autopsy, pulling apart what worked to understand the mechanics. Most agents skip this step entirely and then wonder why their content doesn't perform.
Then, and only then, participate. Start creating content based on what you've learned about your platform, your audience, and what actually works. This is not about posting every day to hit a quota. It's about putting out content that has a genuine reason to exist, that serves someone, teaches something, tells a story, or creates a real conversation.
The agents Michael has worked with who follow this sequence consistently get more engagement, more inbound inquiries, and a stronger sense of what they're actually building on social media. The ones who skip straight to participation keep posting into the void and eventually give up, concluding that social media "doesn't work for insurance."
What This Means for Your Agency
This week, pick one platform. Not all of them, one. Spend 30 minutes on it as a consumer. Ask what's stopping you, what's resonating, what you'd actually share. Then look at three or four accounts in your niche (not necessarily insurance, but serving your target audience) that seem to have real engagement. Study what they're doing. What format? What topics? What voice?
Take notes. From those notes, draft one piece of content that's actually native to that platform and actually relevant to the specific audience you serve. Don't link to your website. Don't announce a product. Tell a story, share a useful piece of information, ask a question your audience actually cares about. Post it. Watch how it performs. Learn from the data.
If you're going to invest time in social media, and you should, because your clients and prospects are there, invest it intelligently. Thirty minutes of learning before you post will make every post afterward more effective.
The Bottom Line
Michael Hunter's core message is both humbling and liberating: the reason social media isn't working for most insurance agents isn't that social media can't work for insurance, it's that most agents never took the time to learn how it works before they started using it. The platforms have rules. They reward certain behaviors and suppress others. Understanding those rules doesn't require becoming a social media expert. It requires slowing down long enough to observe what's actually happening before adding more noise to it. Stop. Learn. Then post something worth reading.
Catch the full conversation:
About Michael Hunter: Michael Hunter is a social media expert who works with service-based businesses and insurance professionals on building authentic, effective social media presence.
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