Why Social Media Is Not Easy

Andréa Jones (00:00):
Social media is no longer easy. And in this episode, I wanna talk about why that is. Let's get into it.

Intro (00:18):
Welcome to The Savvy Social Podcast, the show that blends stories and strategies to help businesses create engaged and profitable online communities using the unique power of social media. And now, your host, Andréa Jones.

Andréa Jones (00:35):
Hi, friends. So I recently posted a video on social media, a TikTok video, reel, YouTube shorts, whatever you wanna call it. About how I used to say social media is easy. And I used to really believe that social media is easy. This is back in the day where you could take, you know, a square graphic with a caption and post that exact same thing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Do y'all remember these days? Oh the good old days. That was easy back then, and a lot of the way that I taught social media was along those lines. And the way that I implemented social media for my clients was along those lines. But the past two years, two to three years, especially since the pandemic hit, and then the rise of TikTok, social media has changed and it's shifted. And I've talked a lot about that here on this podcast.

(01:33):
But it absolutely has changed and shifted, and I resisted it for some time. And then I also had a baby, which kind of, I feel like put me personally, professionally, a little bit behind the shift as well. But recently, I would say in the past six to nine months, I've been studying this shift and the impact that it has. And I realized the, so the reason that I'm struggling in teaching social media and in some of the work that we're doing with our clients is this concept, the belief that social media should be easy. Because I've always said that social media is easy, but it ain't easy anymore. And I find that when I first realized that, I felt a little bit down about that. And I wonder if you feel the same. You know, a few episodes back, I talked about how engagement is down across the board on nearly every platform except for TikTok.

(02:25):
I talked about the experiments that I'm running to boost that engagement app and the complexity behind things like content repurposing. All of that means social media is no longer easy. However, social media is awesome. It helps connect us to the right people. It helps build our brands. It helps us sell our products. So while it's not easy, it is. And I wanna dive into that distinction in this episode today. So first of all, let's tackle social media is changing and the evolution of the platform. So I remember when I worked at Marriott Marquee in downtown Atlanta. You know, you know, I was the spa and fitness center supervisor. Prior to that I worked at Spa Cadell. I was the assistant manager at the Buckhead location, and then also as the assistant manager at the Midtown location. And in those roles, I, especially at the Marriott Marquis, I had my hands in social media.

(03:27):
And at the time, I remember taking this leadership class and going, oh, I wish I could just do the social media part of my job. And they laughed and they were like, that's not a thing. <Laugh>. this was like 2012, 2013. So, fast forward to today, and obviously it is a thing, and even my nephew was talking about how he wants to be a Twitch streamer when he grows up for Fortnite. I was like, this is like a job now it's a whole new category, right? But that evolution happened, I would say over the past eight to nine years, where social media was this kind of obscure avant-garde marketing channel. Now it is a absolute must for businesses, but because of that, because it feels like a must for most businesses now, we feel obligated to use social media. So not only has social media changed, our perspective on social media has changed.

(04:26):
It went from being a nice to have to being a need to have. And that mental shift is very challenging for business owners when you feel like you have to do something. Just like as humans, when I say, oh, you have to eat your vegetables. It just, it feels like someone's telling you what you should be doing. And we don't like that. We wanna rebel against that. And so that mental shift has been draining. But then also the dynamics of social media has changed. More people are posting than they ever have before. The content itself is complex. You can't just take, you know, television ad put it in, you know on a TikTok and expect it to perform. We're at the whims of the algorithm because the algorithm, as I mentioned in a previous episode, is trying to serve his master. So Mr. Al is trying to serve the social media platform, and all they want is views because attention equals dollars for them.

(05:24):
So if your content isn't giving the algorithm what it wants, it's not gonna show your posts. And with more to choose from, it has more options, and that means it's more competitive. Okay? So it's making it harder and harder for brands to reach the right people. The shift that we're also seeing on social media right now is that personal brands Reign Supreme. Now, I've talked about this before, and sometimes if someone comes to me and they say, Hey, Andrea, should I post my logo as my profile photo? Or should I use a photo of myself? I would always say, use a photo of yourself. People wanna interact with people. And that is even more important today. People wanna interact with people. We don't wanna feel like we're being sold to. We don't wanna feel like an entity is engaging with us. In most cases, we wanna feel like as a person and even brands that are an entity.

(06:20):
What comes to mind for me is Duolingo. Duolingo on TikTok is an entity with a very strong personality. And it's why I've doubled down on personality driven brands, because that very strong personality doesn't make people feel like they're interacting with an entity. They feel like they're actor interacting with an individual. And that shift in marketing is becoming even more apparent. So even if you have a collective, a group, an entity, that collective group entity needs to have a strong personality to survive the highly competitive nature of social media today. Okay? So that huge shift has gradually happened over the past eight to nine years. The second shift that has happened is that as consumers, we are watching more content. We're consuming more social media content than we literally ever have in history. It is wild. Think about your life 10 years ago. Okay, let me, let me actually look this up.

(07:23):
Okay, so the iPhone launched in 2007, and if y'all remember this launch, we already had iPods. And it felt like your iPod could also text people. That was like the concept. And if you had an iPhone, you were like rich and famous at the time, right? 2007. Okay. So if we go back 10 years to 2013, we have the iPhone five. And I don't know, I think that was really the start of people consuming social media apps like they are today. I would say 20 12, 20 13 is really when that took off. That's 10 years ago. Okay, now we can't even poop without taking our phone with us. In 2012, I still had a Blackberry. And on Blackberry, I remember being frustrated because you couldn't access the Facebook app. It wasn't the same. You could do some stuff, but it wasn't the same. And I was like a little bit jealous of my friends who had iPhones.

(08:31):
I didn't get an iPhone until, oh gosh. So I had a Samsung for a while. So I didn't get an iPhone until like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. So yeah, I was not consuming content at this rate. We were not consuming content at the rate that we're consuming it. So why I say this is because we have become more discerning with how we consume content. So as users, as individuals, if something doesn't interest us, swipe immediately. I know people say our attention span is seven to eight seconds. Mm-Hmm. I think it's more like half a second now. If we can't, if we don't like something, we're moving on. I remember sitting down with my mom, mom, I hope you're not listening. Watching her scroll through Facebook, when she first got it, she would read every single post, even the ads and be like, why is this in my feed?

(09:27):
And like, read the whole thing and then go, huh, that's weird. And keep scrolling. Now, she'd recently came to visit for Ellie's birthday. I watched her scroll through Facebook. Oh, she's fast. Scan, scroll, scan, scroll, add. Totally skip it, right? Our behavior on social media as a collective, as humanity, it has changed. And so what that means is, as business owners, when we are posting content on social media, we are expecting the content that worked five years ago should still hit the same weight that it does. And it doesn't because consumers are like, I did done seeing that, and I don't want to read a post. That sounds like chat sheet PT wrote it, right? I don't wanna read something that's general knowledge. AI did it. I want something interesting, funny, dynamic, and something that makes me think something that makes me ask questions. You know, we want the humanity behind it.

(10:21):
We don't want it to look like, you know, a huge studio production. Typically we want the content more so than the package, the delivery. We want it to really resonate with us and hear in our hearts. And so our expectations from a consumer side have also changed. So in order for brands to stay relevant, we have to change with it. So I'm gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I'm gonna talk about how you can approach this as your brand.

(10:52):
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(11:19):
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(12:04):
Okay, we're back. The first thing that I wanna recommend, if you're a brand and you're like, grace, I understand Andréa, you're saying social media isn't easy, but it is awesome.

(12:13):
So how do I actually leverage this to grow my brand? And the first thing that I recommend you sitting down and thinking about is creating a plan for change. I think sometimes we carve our social media plans in stone and we go, this is a plan. We're gonna stick with the plan, we're gonna work the plan. And that worked, you know, previously, and it's something that I taught previously. Now I'm like, okay, we gotta be flexible. We gotta be flexible with our plans as an agency in my company, we use Google Documents for that reason. It is not a pretty designed PDF because we're gonna have to change it next month. <Laugh>. And we're gonna have to re-look at this in a quarter. And I don't wanna have to redesign a whole pretty graphic for this. We need something that we can edit in comment.

(13:01):
We need something that we can work on in real time. And that's why we use Google Documents. So build your plan with flexibility in mind. It's also why we no longer plan out content a month in advance. Actually, I don't think we only ever had one client where we did a whole month of content. I don't recommend that you can plan it out, but be flexible. Things happen. We don't want to create content, post content that feels insensitive to what's happening on social media. We want our content to kind of fit with the feed, right? We want it to flow, we want, we don't want people to say, Ugh, this feels like it was written three months ago, right? We don't want that. We don't want something that like mentions, you know better mask up wear. You're, it's a, we're in the middle of a pandemic.

(13:47):
Hopefully that's over <laugh>. Am I jinxing guys? We don't want that. We want something that feels like this person just woke up and did this today. We want that. So how do we do that? We plan in flexibility. Second thing, we wanna make sure that we are nurturing authenticity with our audience first and foremost. I know, I know. And you know, that we're trying to make money here. And even when we see someone else and we know that person's trying to make money, we still want to be wooed. We still want to be romanced, if you will, right? So when you're creating social media content, I want you to create it from the perspective of nurturing authentic connection. So what does that mean? It means, especially as a personality driven brand, you are either creating content to connect or creating content to convert. And hint, hint, hint, both of those things can happen in the same post.

(14:51):
So that means being real. That means being relatable. Relatable content can be something that is trending. It can be a meme, but more often than not, it is a polished imperfection that comes with you being a real person. So, polished imperfection, what does that mean? How I would show up to a job interview may be a little bit different than how I look sitting on my couch at home. How I show up when I'm meeting with a client is different than how I show up when I'm hanging out with friends. The running thread through all of that is that I'm still me. I'm still me. So when I am showing up on social media, I'm reflecting that social media presence as a mirror. It's a representation of how I'm actually showing up in my business. What happens sometimes is we want social media to be a megaphone.

(15:47):
We wanted to look like we constantly have a filter on. And if that's not how you really look, if that's not how you really interact, there's going to be a disconnect between that person who sees you on social media and when they actually hire you and work in your business. So social media experience should feel like the experience in your business, okay? And that polished imperfection is key there. Content that converts. So, like I said, we don't wanna be sold to, but we're okay with buying things when that person fully understands what we're going through. So, for example, one of the things that we took out of our marketing recently was the word challenge. Like, are you having a problem? Are you challenged with this? Because oftentimes our clients aren't really, like, they're not, they're not new. They're not having a ha like they're not seeing zero results on social media, okay?

(16:41):
Usually our best clients come to us because they're like, Hey, I tried this and I know it could be better. Or, Hey, I'm doing this, I don't wanna do it anymore. Okay? So those are our best clients. So for us to really speak their language, we need to understand that we need to understand what they're actually going through. It's not that they're getting zero results on social media. In fact, if they are, it's actually very challenging for us to work with them. Cuz it's usually a product market fit challenge. Like, they may not have something that people are interested in to begin with. Our best clients come to us cuz they say, oh, we've seen some success, we wanna see more. Or, oh, we're seeing some success and we don't wanna do it anymore, right? So those are our best clients. So we in our content that converts, speak to those people because we wanna work more with those people.

(17:36):
So that's what I mean by showing up with authenticity on social media. The buzzword authenticity. Next thing you can do as a personality driven brand is leveraging other platforms. Listen, I you like Instagram, I know it, you know it. Most of my clients, when they come to us, they say We're primarily on Instagram. I know that, but Instagram engagement has gone down. So what are you gonna do about it? You're probably gonna try to leverage your content to other platforms. And this is where having a team is helpful, even if it's a virtual assistant who can take your Instagram posts and also put them on LinkedIn. We want to create an omnipresent social media platform to get the benefits of the work that you're putting in on creating content. So hire you a va, get your assistant to help hire a social media manager. Or if you don't wanna be on social media at all, hire an agency like mine to help you with this because we've done testing and when we take a micro video, like something created for Instagram reel, we also post it on TikTok.

(18:42):
We also post it on YouTube shorts. We post this Pinterest idea pins. We are maximizing the potential to reach more people. We're increasing your leads and that grows your business. Okay? So this is very helpful. If you're experiencing low engagement on one platform, leverage additional platforms. It's a little bit of an advanced strategy. I wouldn't recommend it to beginners, but remember, we are not speaking to beginners here. If you know, you know, I will also say we're using a new tool to test this out called Metricool. So y'all know previously I used to work with Sendible, still a great tool. We were having a few minor issues with it and we needed more posting options. So we're testing out metrical. We've been using that for the past few months. I kind of like it, I like their reporting as well. So that could be helpful for you as well if you're, if you're posting multiple platforms to start with the tool first, that can help disseminate this for you.

(19:42):
Last thing that I wanna talk about, last tip here as you're thinking about, okay, so social media is not easy anymore. It is awesome. So how do I move forward with this? It is to look at your metrics. I know that this isn't fun and I had someone recently tell me, it feels like stepping on the scale, okay? Feels like a weekly check-in, a weight check-in. It feels like diet culture. But I wanna shift that thinking just a little bit because I do see what you're saying. It does feel like stepping on a scale sometimes. And we have to notice what feels good in our body. If we're talking about diet dieting or if we're talking about being healthier. One of the shifts in this world, in this conversation right now is, okay, if we're not measuring our weight as a signal of success, what else can we measure as a signal of success?

(20:37):
And for a lot of us, that's how we physically feel in our bodies. Like noticing, huh? When I eat that food, I feel terrible. Or noticing, oh, when I walked this morning around the block, I feel great. Okay? So that takes practice and it's a skill that you have to develop. It's a new skill. So if we're gonna apply this to social media, that means noticing the posts that work well and noticing the right things about that. It's not followers. That's your scale, okay? It's not followers. Instead it's, oh, when I posted this, I saw 12 people share it when I usually only get one or two people sharing it. That's great. That's a great signal. That feels good. Or, oh, when I, when I responded to this post, I had a great direct message conversation that followed that. So how can I do more of that?

(21:29):
Okay. So it doesn't necessarily have to be stepping on the scale, right? But it needs to be an intentional noticing habit of things that are actually working for me on social media. And sometimes it's not looking at the metrics. We think it's not likes, it's not comments, it's not followers. Those are the scales. If we're not looking at likes, comments, followers, what are we looking at? We're looking at things like reach impressions, we're looking at shares saves, we're looking at DM conversations, right? Those are the things that move our business forward. We're looking at website traffic and views. We're looking at lead magnet downloads. You know, those are the things that move our business forward. So I suggest starting to notice how you can do that in your own marketing, in your own business and then teach your team how to do the same. So one of the metrics that we started measuring across the board for our clients is video views.

(22:26):
So we used to measure followers. Oh, we, you know, we got our followers average of this. We, we increase our agency clients average of this, number of followers this month. That almost means nothing <laugh>, right? But if we can say collectively in Q1 of 2023, our clients saw 4 million video views, that feels a little more significant. Okay? That's a consumption piece to it. We can dig, even dig into that as well. So social media is not easy anymore. No, that may not be the case, but it still is awesome. I've met some of my favorite people in the world on social media. Y'all know, I met my husband on YouTube. I met my biz besties on Instagram. I met my real life friends on Meetup. I'm counting that as a social media platform. I met my entire team through the internet. I have never met a single one of them in person. Though I am changing that soon at the retreat this year. The internet is awesome. Social media is awesome. So how can you continue to leverage it? That's a big question of the day. Stay tuned from our episodes because I will be answering it as we go along. That's all for today. Bye for now.