It Feels Like Work Because It's A Job
It sounds - and feels - like work, because it ... is?? Because your business is, presumably, a job??
I get that there are some days when you just can't find another TEN minutes, never mind twenty or however many it would take you to implement your recommendations. Nobody is going to maintain them perfectly every day. That really isn't going to hurt you, for all the same reasons that you don't need PERFECT attendance to earn a good grade ... you just need to show up and do the work MOST of the time. 👩🏫
But if you expect social media management FOR YOUR BUSINESS to feel like anything but work, I've got news:
It feels like work because it's your job. 🤫
Breaking Down "The Star-Spangled Banner"
I keep swallowing the "Mc" in McHenry, for reasons unknown to everybody UP TO AND INCLUDING myself.
Y'all try not to stage a reenactment of "the bombs bursting in air" this time, m'kay?? The smoke was so thick in Rivermont last night my eyes were stinging.
Be safe, DO NOT HOLD ONTO LIT FUSES, and enjoy your #4thofjuly2023 🥳 ✨
.
Automated captions are turned on, but I have absolutely no faith that FB will display them. Heavy YMMV on that one!
.
If you want a refresher on the song's context, here's a link from the National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/fomc/learn/historyculture/the-star-spangled-banner.htm
Do You Want The "Send Message" Button? It Depends.
[A Scholar | A Sports Bra | A Summer of Good Advice]
Recorded today between phone interviews for this summer's market research project.
Do you accept those "add button" recommendations? Why or why not? How do you decide?
Let me know in the comments 😉
[A Scholar | A Sports Bra | A Summer of Good Advice]
// 💻🤓
In my video last week I asked you "What Does M*ta Sell?" and I said we'd be back in a week to talk about it.
We got a couple of good answers!
@ljpack1 said "data" and Penny Freeman said "advertising."
Each of these is pretty good as far as it goes, but we can "finetune" a little bit further, and depending on your use case that finetuning can make a difference in the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Users' ATTENTION is what advertisers actually pay for (so that's what M*ta is selling!). In most cases, information about a platform's users is not being sold in any kind of unredacted fashion; rather, platforms give people paying for attention the opportunity to CUSTOMIZE whose attention they are buying by selecting a combination of factors that the platform then correlates against the information they've collected on their users (note that advertisers are pretty depended on the categories the developers have decided are salient and on the accuracy with which they've classified users based on account activity; both areas in my opinion have relatively high error rates).
WHAT ALL OF THIS MEANS is that any social media platform has a vested interest in #usergeneratedcontent because that's the thing that draws the attention that the platform can then sell.
Lots of people in #CulturalStudies have had lots of interesting and sometimes irate things to say about what this means for the #freelabor involved, and there's a pretty good piece out in @theatlantic 's newsletter this week that highlights some of those issues vis a vis the blow-up ongoing over at #Reddit - I'm not going to try and unpack all of that here.
What I *DO* want you to realize is that, because of this vested interest, the advice commonly given in social media communications strategy and especially in advertising (all advertising is communication, but not all communication is advertising) tends to be organized around GETTIN
You Are (Probably) Not On A Stage
[ A Scholar | A Sports Bra | A Summer of Good Advice]
// 🤓
Nobody wants to ask their questions when I ask what the questions are. EVERYBODY wants to ask me the questions by email the night before the essay is due ... or in my DMs, when the quarterly balance sheet is impending and they know they haven't made the $$.
Let's talk about what it means to INHABIT shared spaces, as opposed to staging a carefully rehearsed performance.
Talk to the person next to you. Ask for notes. Share your pencils.
Think laterally.
#digitalcommunicationstrategy #smallbusinesssupport #DigitalCulture #digitalhumanities #phdlife
[A Scholar | A Sports Bra | A Summer Of Good Advice]
// 👩🏼💻
Multi-billion $$ company, but you're not paying to watch this and I'm not paying to post it. So ... what's the product? 🤔 Leave me your best/worst answers in the comments, and stay tuned for MY answer - and why I think it matters - next week! #digitalculture #digitalhumanities #digitalcommunication
Don't Give Up; Give It Time
[A Scholar | A Sports Bra | A Summer of Good Advice]
Meta is super buggy - especially the FB platform. I'm so frustrated right now I could spit nails! But the two key things to remember are
(a) the same stuff is happening to everybody, so you aren't "falling behind" in any meaningful sense
and
(b) eventually (USUALLY) the tech teams do get around to fixing the bugs
I realize this isn't much help if you are on a tight budget and/or schedule, but the bugginess of the platform is a real factor we have to account for - if you don't, you'll never get a reliable assessment of the ROI for creating and ATTEMPTING TO SHARE content, whether the "investment" in question is time or money (or, depending on the kind of content you're making, the materials used in production).
Patience is key, but organizations with limited budget and manpower also need to calculate for the ACTUAL average time from concept to content distribution ... not the time it would take if everything went smoothly on the first try!
Meta has a vested interest in ensuring that people are able to post "content" on its platforms, for reasons we will get to in a different post.
In the meantime: Don't give up! Give it time.
The "Social" in "Social Media"
I need to make another post, sometime, about some of the other implications of the SOCIAL in social media for business and nonprofit outreach particularly. Today I just want to point out that, no, your social media feeds are not for YOU, personally and privately.
This DOES NOT mean that you cannot or should not choose what you post and how you engage to suit your own needs and preferences.
If you are using personal (rather than professional) accounts, then you absolutely SHOULD build your social media activities around what suits you - for the same reasons that I HOPE you build your offline social activities around what suits you! Hang out with people you like instead of people you can't stand; go to the kind of events you enjoy rather than the ones that make you want to pull a pillow over your head. But "SOCIAL media" inherently means a communal setting; social media differ from other forms of digital media precisely by the ways these platforms' affordances are structured to facilitate interaction.
[A Scholar | A Sports Bra | A Summer of Good Advice]
If you want to record your personal journey, but you don't want anyone else watching, then what you need is a written journal or a video diary (not posted online).
If you want to record your personal journey, AND you want to show it to someone/many someones, BUT you do not want to interact with the people watching your growth, then probably you are looking for some sort of website/blog with comments disabled/magazine serial kind of situation.
The SOCIAL in "social media" always matters.
#digitalculture #communicationstrategy #digitalhumanities
Building and Using Proxy Audiences
I always feel like it would be more accurate to say "proxy ACCOUNTS," because once things get going (some of) the people you find this way become part of YOUR OWN audience, and then they are no longer "proxies" for anything ... but I have found that when I say "proxy accounts," people think I am planning to set up a bunch of sock puppets and disperse them across the internet to do my bidding, and that is absolutely NOT what you want to be doing here.
Whatever you call this strategy, it does work - it will, in all honesty, probably work better if you hire my fancy digital ethnography to do the assessment of accounts for you; if you think you're good to handle the proxy setup but know you could use some help interpreting the "stuff" you find in the comments and what to do with it, hit me up: Data collection typically accounts for something like 70-80% of my bill just because it takes so dang long, so if you are willing to collect and send me EXACTLY WHAT I TELL YOU, then you can save quite a bit of money and still got a solid analysis with actionable recommendations.
Either way, try the "proxy" strategy - DO NOT SLACK ON THE COMMENTS - for a few weeks and let me know how it goes! #digitalmarketingtraining #communicationsstrategy #digitalculture
I know; I know. I've posted about this soooo many times already. But I clearly haven't posted about it ENOUGH, because I just saw a whole series of misguided entrepreneurs this afternoon.
Do the math I suggest in the video, and leave a comment if you have any questions!
Oh, and - your friends and family are probably NOT your customers, but what you can and probably should ask them for is an extra boost FINDING your customers. Emphasize to your pals that post comments in particular - even if they aren't "deep" or especially interesting or, honestly, related to your content - help to convince most social media platforms (including this one) that the post is something that more people will want to see.
A friend who will leave a comment twice a week is probably going to do more for your business (in public-facing fields, at least) than a friend who makes a purchase twice a year.
Don't be shy about saying so!
Look, I just have to say this again:
You do not want more followers at any cost, all of the time.
You do not want random people who have no interest in what you are doing following your social media accounts.
You do not want to participate in any of those threads in which people f0ll0w each other hither, thither, and yon.
You DO NOT WANT to "grow" your audience in every conceivable direction, merely for the purpose of increasing an abstract number.
***DISCLAIMER***
If your sole purpose in being active online is to "monet!ze" your feeds, then I suppose it is just barely possible you might actually want all of this ... I think it's unlikely, but it is POSSIBLE. In ALL OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, aka virtually every condition known to humankind, NO YOU DON'T, so cut it out.
You don't want all of that because having people follow you who never engage with your content drops your engagements rating.
You don't want all of that because attracting random strangers who have no interest in your content also attracts sp@m and b0ts.
You don't want all of that because having totally uninterested people allegedly viewing your business page screws your reporting all to hell and back.
And I know I have posted about this before, but GOSH DANG IT some of y'all just insist on banging on about f0ll0w-back threads every two days.
STOP THAT. It's bad for you, and it's bad for everybody who participates in your thread.
CUT IT OUT.
Now go eat your vegetables. 👩🏫
Who Needs X? A Client Example
"Who Needs My X?" is one of my favorite lessons to walk through with new clients, because in many cases it is truly transformative. You could arguably get similar results by trying to think MORE SPECIFICALLY about "Who is my audience??" but that approach gives you much less structure to work with and the reality is that most people don't "get there," conceptually.
And yes, I am giving business advice in my sports bra because this is summer in Alabama and I am #workingfromhome today, editing a bajillion articles for another #B2B 🤓👩💻
#smallbusinesssupportingsmallbusiness #smallbusinesssupport #communicationstrategy
