Do people spend more time on content because it grows your business, or because it's this thing that gives you a game to play while helping business ?

The more I am doing social media / content creation process for promoting my products, the more I'm realizing that content creation is more like a game and that's why people enjoy it so much. You keep leveling up every day, you improve your content and you keep leveling up and see better results. There is a very live metric that you can see any time. Very accessible way to see what competition is doing and learn from it. There's the social ranking part of it.

But is that just how social media keeps you in the game? I feel I'm thinking more about the part of growing on socials rather than purely thinking of how my products benefit from it. I initially thought they're connected but it might be true only in long term (once your brand grows big).

How do you balance the time spent on socials versus other way of promoting your business (SEO/cold outreach/launches etc)?