Business

Leaving Social Media, Learning to Sell on It

AI-compiled · 2026-09-11 · 5 sources · gorontalo.antaranews.com, rri.co.id, www.beritajogja.com

A first selling lesson

Fitri Istianatun already knew TikTok as somewhere to watch content and shop. Selling through it was the unfamiliar part. In its September 6, 2026 report, RRI described the Klewer Market trader joining training for 150 Solo Raya merchants in TikTok and Tokopedia sales. She linked her willingness to learn to quiet trading at the physical market, where she sold clothing, batik and fabric and offered sewing services. Her account establishes a reason to explore another channel. It does not establish that TikTok caused the decline in visitors, or that learning to sell there would reverse it.

The distinction between trying and committing is central to this archival comparison, bounded by September 11, 2026. RRI dates the training to September 4, although its accompanying weekday is inconsistent with that numerical date. The report documents participation and instruction, without subsequent sales figures. A first attempt can therefore be examined as a practical discovery exercise: what does creating a selling account involve, and can the merchant produce an intelligible offer? The evidence does not show unexpected competence, enjoyment or increased confidence. Nor does an introductory lesson reveal the ongoing time and money required to maintain a sales channel.

A separate, undated second-page excerpt from Berita Jogja makes beginner practice more tangible. Canden herbal-drink producers developed customer personas, explored consistent logos, colors and typefaces, and practiced simple product photography. They also worked on names, taglines and product stories. A WhatsApp Story exercise divided an advertisement into a headline, message and invitation to act. These are observable tasks that can make an unfamiliar process concrete. Their presence supports a narrow finding about what participants practiced; missing recruitment information, the publication date and follow-up measurements prevent conclusions about who benefited or whether the exercises became sustained commercial activity.

Withdrawal starts from another position

LUSH approached platform participation from a different starting point. SE.pl's September 3, 2026 article, explicitly labeled press material, said its Safer Socials campaign began across the company's stores in early September. The account described LUSH leaving Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat nearly five years earlier, followed by X in 2023. This was a campaign built around an established withdrawal, rather than a novice's first experiment. The archive establishes the published channel choices and their presentation. It does not independently verify the campaign's broader claims about platform harms, its commercial success or its asserted distinctiveness among global brands.

According to SE.pl, LUSH's campaign website was intended to gather educational resources, links to digital-safety organizations and guidance on social-media habits, alongside a history of the brand's digital-rights activity. LUSH connected engagement-focused platform design to data collection and monetization. That is the company's stated critique, conveyed through promotional material. The operational point is more concrete: stores and a company website gave the campaign places to appear after withdrawal from major social networks. Those distribution resources matter when comparing its position with a trader seeking customers beyond a quiet market stall.

The interpretation suggested by this contrast is that withdrawal and adoption can both address different customer-access problems. LUSH could carry its message through an existing store network; Istianatun described seeking an additional discovery route. Owned channels offer greater control over presentation, but customers still have to reach them. Platform participation offers another place to be found, while requiring skills and continuing work. Neither tradeoff is quantified in these sources. Without comparable acquisition costs, customer retention, store coverage or revenue effects, the archive cannot rank the strategies or establish that one business could successfully borrow the other's approach.

Preference is a separate question

ANTARA News Gorontalo's September 6 report introduced a possible audience-side explanation for physical channels retaining relevance. Marketing analyst Yuswohady described Gen Z and Alpha seeking more direct experiences and reducing screen time after pandemic-era digital acceleration. He called this an emerging offline generation and cited Blok M, Harmoni and Dukuh Atas as social gathering places, including areas connected to public transport. These observations broaden the questions a retailer might ask about where customers spend time. They remain one analyst's interpretation, without a supplied population survey, measured screen-time series or evidence of purchasing changes at the businesses discussed here.

Kantar's September 7, 2026 article offers measured preferences, but its research belongs to 2025. Kantar surveyed 21,267 consumers across 30 markets and 974 senior marketers. It reported that the consumer and marketer top-five advertising platforms had no brands in common: consumers favored Amazon, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch and Prime Video, while marketers favored YouTube, Instagram, Google, Netflix and Spotify. This is a reported difference in advertising preferences. It is not a comparison of campaign returns, and the supplied article lacks sufficient country-level sampling and uncertainty information to estimate the likely outcome of a particular retailer's spending.

The strongest counterargument to a general digital-backlash explanation is selective channel use. Yuswohady explicitly rejected the idea that young people were abandoning online channels altogether. Kantar, meanwhile, identified Indonesia among markets with high advertising receptivity, despite substantial variation across Asia Pacific. People seeking physical encounters could also welcome some advertising, including on digital platforms. That possibility is consistent with both accounts, but neither proves it for a defined group of shoppers. Advertising receptivity, screen time, purchases and approval of platform design describe different things. One measure cannot explain the others simply because all concern digital life.

What would make a channel choice defensible?

Source dependence further limits the apparent convergence. SE.pl carries LUSH press material; ANTARA's regional page republishes the agency story featuring the same analyst. Kantar publishes its own commercially relevant research. RRI supplies reporting about a training event and participant testimony, while Berita Jogja provides only an excerpt of another intervention. These sources contribute different kinds of evidence, rather than independently measuring one retail transformation. Their repetition in earlier posts or archive digests adds no corroboration. The defensible synthesis is narrower than a demonstrated hybrid consumer journey: documented initiatives coexist with attributed observations and measured advertising preferences from different settings and periods.

A useful next stage, if later evidence becomes available, would connect the introductory exercises to repeated activity. For the trained merchants, that could mean establishing whether participants continued producing offers, received inquiries, completed sales and sustained the work at an acceptable cost. These are proposed evaluation questions, not outcomes supplied by the archive. The same discipline applies to withdrawal: campaign visibility through stores would need to be connected to its stated objectives before being called effective. Beginner practice has value as something a merchant can inspect and assess, but neither participation nor a completed promotional image demonstrates commercial usefulness.

Kantar announced a fuller Media Reactions 2026 report for September 29, beyond this archive's cutoff. Its eventual audience detail could inform a later comparison, but cannot be anticipated here and would still need pairing with business results. The research question consequently remains specific: what evidence justifies prioritizing owned and physical channels over social platforms for this audience and this transaction? The sources support differentiated decisions and bounded experiments. Whether a first selling lesson becomes a workable business routine depends on the unanswered commercial test: which channel brings reachable customers at a sustainable cost in staff time and money?

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