Last week I was told that I don’t have enough experience in social media. Last week I was also interviewed about social media marketing for a social media marketing podcast (out soon). So here’s an interview with….ME, answering interview questions about social media.
Nothing, it just happened and became part of my job. I started my career in the early days of social media, coming out of uni at the point where everyone was first excited about Facebook – but it was still a very social platform rather than corporate. At a journalism internship I undertook just before my first “proper” job I signed up to Twitter because it was the fastest and easiest way to contact people for articles (it still is). I then worked at Holiday Extras, a British company that offers travel add-ons such as airport parking and transfers. I was in their short breaks division and it was there that I started working with Hootsuite to schedule lots of social posts across our different holiday brands, as well as our family brand Play’n’Stay and our Theatre Break Brand Show and Stay.
I wrote a book called How to Leave a Group Chat which discusses the pitfalls of social media and why you should use your smartphone and social media less, but ironically I am still on social media a lot. Most of the time I leave my phone in a different room, but then I’ll be on my computer where I use social and schedule marketing posts for my book, my poetry and work. It is very easy to get sucked in too. If you count YouTube as social media that would be my guilty pleasure. I enjoy longer documentaries as much as shorts from some of my favourite content creators. I love travel vlogs and DIY videos, and, more recently, videos with gardening tips.
I have, especially as my Twitter accounts are linked. Nothing big has happened there, I just deleted the post as soon as I realised. I can’t remember any specific examples, so sorry, no juicy stories there.
I’m not keen on photos and videos featuring me in them, but to promote my book How to Leave a Group Chat, I have had to get on with it and make that kind of content. I enjoy making videos – I have some great stuff on YouTube and TikTok.
When you do a lot of social media it can get monotonous, especially when you’re saying the same thing in 10 different ways for 10 different posts. But you can have fun with it as well, I have enjoyed running competitions online where people can engage in fun ways.
This is probably the strangest question that I have ever answered. I wrote a poem about my Nanna, called Nanna, it’s a fun poem that the priest read at her funeral and it made people laugh on a sad occasion. Nanna was the one raiding charity shops to bring me books and encouraging me to read and write.
I’ve managed to grow socials at every company that I have worked for, I have also run some great promotions that have increased our social followings, such as a fun early promote I did with the Queen of Twitter.
I haven’t had a job where I’ve not done 100 jobs in 1. I left university thinking I’d only be doing copywriting, but from the get go my jobs have been incredibly varied and introduced me to every part of communications and marketing. I can claim copywriting, SEO, graphic design, social media, web design, intranet, radio, video making, researching, creating policies, project management, running multichannel campaigns, public speaking, presentations… and because so many people want my advice I set up this Substack blog All About Digital Marketing to share my knowledge and expertise. I host guest bloggers too.
That’s a big question. It very much depends. I do come up with social posts and write them myself, some posts will be spontaneous. Some posts will be planned according to the objective of the campaign. For business posts I’d always get sign off because you don’t want backlash or to post something that the company wouldn’t find appropriate.
As the expert, and especially as I have become more senior, I always speak up when I don’t agree with another colleague, whether that’s a manager or someone else, and I explain why. Of course, in business I won’t always get the final say, so I have sometimes run with things despite this. Sometimes it has also turned out that someone else has had a better idea that me, that’s why collaboration is so valuable.
In my most recent role I had a great boss who really trusted me to know what I was doing, and trusted herself that she had hired the right person. She measured results by achieving targets and goals and on the whole didn’t mind how I met those targets and goals as long as they were met. We were pretty much on the same page - I care about meeting targets and goals too, and I love it when I exceed them.
I don’t have any paid ads running at the moment, but most recently I was using them on Google and LinkedIn.
Paid ads, increasingly, can get you seen by more people. In my experience they grow your followers a lot faster and because the social companies are greedy they’re increasingly limiting how effective organic social can be.
By slowing down, and I think that gets me more attention because when you are quiet, and then you post something, people are more curious.
I sometimes repost and re-edit, but when you are on the hamster wheel making something new, it’s easy to forget that you have some old content that is also really good and a lot of people won’t have seen it yet.
Social media seems to peak, and new platforms come along all of the time. Facebook used to be more effective, now it’s seen as an older person’s platform, but I find Facebook groups are really good – and they don’t need payment. If current platforms become too expensive, and newer, fresher platforms appear that are more cost-effective, people will go there. AI is also a game changer and predicted to become more intelligent, so there might be ways to bypass paid ads.
Usually ideas for me just appear out of thin air.
Sometimes if they are fun and sensible.
I used to. I’ve gotten better at switching off.
I used to really resist that in the beginning, but I realise that people won’t see everything so it’s advantageous to showcase your content multiple times.
YouTube
Opinions of things and people that we know nothing about. In the same way that a media story can be exaggerated, social can amplify that even more and everyone can have an opinion on something they don’t need to such as celebrities, a recent one was Ariana Grande’s appearance or Prince Harry visiting his Dad, leave these people alone and let them just do their thing.
One disadvantage of LLMs is that they began highbrow, because they were trained on the best literature, and because so many people worldwide have inputted into them, they have dumbed down. AI companies are buying books and destroying them, scanning thousands of books en masse to make AI better. This is a threat to our knowledge and reality, and it is unsustainable. Recently I had two submissions for my blog, two different people living in two different countries very far apart, working for two different companies, and the blogs were VERY similar in style. I accepted the first, and when I saw the second and put them side by side, I retracted my offer. The lesson is that if you only use AI content for marketing, your marketing will become bland and boring. AI for LLMs is also trained on stolen data, so if you replaced the entire marketing team with Claude you are at risk of lawsuits. There’s a lot of backlash against AI content too.
I have spoken to friends more technical than myself, and the conclusion is that AI is somewhere in the middle. It’s not as stupid as some people think, it’s also not as amazing as some people think. Having written How to Leave a Group Chat, which was finalised around the time Chat GPT was released to the public, I know from my research that it’s really important not to believe hype but to stand back and assess, what is this, why are we using it, how should it be used appropriately, etc., because if we just run wild, as we did with social media and later smartphones, we end up in a mess.
I wish people knew the hard work that goes into it, all the planning and the other related skills. Because often people think you magic social media and content out of thin air.
As above.
Experiment as much as you can and see what works.
No, but I only have so much time in the day.
I’ve seen many changes. Companies getting in on social when it started as a setup between friends. People connecting with their parents – in the beginning, if I had social (I was late to the party) no way would I have connected with my parents. The rise of content creators and vloggers. Advertising disrupting videos – there were none in the beginning. Different social media channels come and go. Entire cultures and expectations change – e.g., holiday used to be about you getting away from everything, now every second is documented in real-time.
People’s need to connect with each other and find others wherever they are. Also, many people are self-absorbed and social media has really highlighted this. Social media has also highlighted people’s competitive nature – e.g., everyone has to find the best photo for Instagram.
At the moment AI will advance it, or there could be enough backlash that AI’s role is reduced (or we could run out of water). MySpace is said to be making a return, that’s interesting. I think in the next 3-5 years it’s highly likely a whole new social platform could emerge that wins the race.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.