If you've been in the online business space for more than about ten minutes, someone has told you to "add value."
And if you're anything like me, you smiled and nodded while thinking "that is the least helpful advice I have ever received."
This week I finally figured out what it actually means. Not from a course, not from a guru, but from spending time on Threads with a specific intention and a willingness to pay attention.
Here's what I did, and exactly how you can do it too.
Step 1: Spend time on your platform with your eyes open.
I've been reactivating my Threads account this week as a traffic source for this newsletter. Instead of just posting and hoping, I started actually looking. Which accounts had both strong follower counts AND real engagement on their posts? Which posts made ME stop scrolling? Which ones made me want to read all the way to the end?
I took screenshots of everything that caught my attention. Profiles I liked. Posts that were performing well. Even the way some people were selling inside a post without it feeling like a sales pitch.
I wasn't copying anyone. I was studying the room the same way I'd study a room full of students before deciding how to teach a lesson.
Step 2: Bring your observations to an AI and talk them through.
This is the step most people skip and it's the one that made everything click for me.
I uploaded all my screenshots along with my current account statistics into Claude and essentially said "here's what I'm seeing, here's where I am, help me figure out what to do with this."
What happened next surprised me. The act of processing my observations out loud, even with an AI, turned a pile of vague impressions into a clear, specific strategy. I went from "I think I need to post differently" to "here is exactly what I'm changing and why."
AI didn't create the strategy. I did, because I did the observation work first. The AI just helped me hear what I was already thinking.
Step 3: Identify the one thing worth changing right now.
After looking at dozens of posts this week, the single biggest insight I walked away with was this.
Everyone says add value. Nobody explains what that means. But when I looked at the posts that were genuinely stopping people mid scroll and generating real comments, the pattern was obvious. They didn't tell people what to do. They showed them exactly how to do it, step by step, with specific examples they could use immediately.
Telling is "use AI prompts to save time." Showing is "here is the exact prompt, here is where to type it, here is what comes back." One feels like advice. The other feels like a gift.
Starting next week my Threads content is shifting toward that second kind. Specific, immediate, usable.
Step 4: Decide on your one metric for next week.
The whole point of this exercise isn't to admire other people's accounts. It's to make one specific improvement, test it for a week, and then come back and look at the numbers again.
My metric next week is simple. Did my engagement rate improve when I posted step by step content versus opinion content? That's it. One question, one week, clear answer.
The time investment: I did all of this inside the 30 to 45 minutes I was already spending on Threads getting the account restarted. I didn't add extra hours. I just added intention to the time I was already using.
That's the whole process. Observe, process, identify one change, measure it. Repeat weekly.
The AI assist this week: Claude for processing my Threads research and turning observations into a specific action plan. Same tool, different use case than last week.
The honest take: AI is most useful when you show up with real observations and genuine questions. Garbage in, garbage out. But thoughtful input plus a good conversation? That's where the actual insights live.
Next week I'll be reporting back on whether the strategy shift worked, and sharing the specific type of Threads post that the data says performs best in this niche.
See you Wednesday.
— Kelly
P.S. If you want the free NotebookLM Quick Start cheat sheet, grab it here!