Shownotes
Welcome back to Branded: your comprehensive guide to creative branding!
In this episode, we dive deep into the world of social media branding, focusing on the emergent platform Threads alongside other established networks. Are you feeling overwhelmed by the need to establish your brand on multiple social media platforms? You're not alone! Sara Lohse and Larry Roberts break it all down for you, offering insights, strategies, and personal anecdotes to help you navigate these digital waters. Highlights: 1. Initial Impressions of Threads: Larry talks about his recent experience speaking at an event in Florida and his observations about Threads since its launch. He compares it to Twitter and highlights its community’s initial positivity and unique features like muting specific words and phrases. 2. Privacy Concerns: We discuss the privacy implications and the potential drawbacks, such as the inability to delete a Threads account without also deleting your Instagram account, sparking a conversation about data security and concerns. 3. Seamless Branding Strategy: Both Sara and Larry emphasize the importance of integrating personal branding with professional branding. We share our personal approaches to maintaining consistent branding across platforms and the need to engage authentically with your audience. 4. Automation in Modern Living: Larry shares a cautionary tale about data and technology's grip on modern life, using an example of a fully automated house that was shut down due to a false report. 5. Engagement and Social Media Best Practices: We wrap up by discussing best practices for maintaining active engagement on social media, underlining the necessity to respond to comments and interact with followers to build and sustain a successful brand presence. Key Takeaways: 1. Understanding New Platforms: Larry explains how using new platforms like Threads can offer unique opportunities for early adopters. The app’s focus on positive interactions and customizable content filters can create a refreshing user experience. 2. Privacy and Data Security: Concerns about data privacy are discussed, with Larry explaining the risk of linking personal and professional profiles. He stresses the importance of being mindful of how and where our personal information is shared. 3. Personal and Professional Branding Integration: We highlight the significance of aligning personal branding with professional efforts. Sara shares her strategy of merging posts from her personal and branded accounts, advocating authenticity in engagement. 4. The Importance of Human Connection on Social Media: Larry emphasizes the role of human interaction over corporate branding, suggesting that brands incorporate personal stories and employee highlights to foster deeper connections with their audience. 5. Consistency and Engagement: Engaging thoughtfully with your audience is crucial. We stress the importance of responding to comments and maintaining active conversations to boost engagement and build a loyal community. We recommend leveraging tools like Metricool to manage and schedule social media posts effectively and focus on specific platforms where your audience is most active to achieve the best results. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review! Check out our new resources page at listentobranded.com for tools and tips to elevate your social media game. [embed]https://youtu.be/ujoggHYwpV0[/embed]Transcripts
What is happening, everybody? I'm Larry Roberts.
Sara Lohse [:And I'm Sara Lohse. And this is Branded, your comprehensive guide to creative branding.
Larry Roberts [:And on this episode of the podcast, we're going to be talking about how you can build your brand on various social media platforms.
Sara Lohse [:Everyone is talking about this new Threads app, and I know you were just speaking at an event in Florida about Threads, and please tell me whatever it is that you said down there, because I have no idea what I'm doing.
Larry Roberts [:Yeah, you know, it's been out about a week since we started recording this episode, and I've been playing with it a little bit. And to be honest, I was super hesitant about even downloading it. But when I started reading that, there were 100 million subscribers on there in the first five days, almost set in, and of course, I had to go download it, so I started using it, and it literally is a Twitter clone. It's just Twitter. But they've got some other things in place to make it an overall more positive experience. And some of the cool things that I like, well, for one, it's brand new, and people know it's a Twitter clone. And people also know, at least if you share my views, that Twitter is pretty much an online cesspool. And so when you go to Threads, everybody over there is being super nice. Everybody's cordial, everybody's posting little positive motivational quotes. And it's just really, I don't know, kind of foo foo right now. But some of the cool things that they've built into the app to help it maintain that positive feel over time is that you can actually mute, well, not just individuals, which is kind of similar to blocking, but you can actually mute certain words and phrases. So if there are certain topics that you never want to see anything about politics. If you don't want to see those horrible politics posts that get out there and all that negativity that surrounds that, you can go in. And put in certain words or names of people that you never want to see in your thread and you never have to interact with that or even consume any of that content. So I think from that perspective, it's super, super cool. I think it's interesting from that same perspective, though, that you can also find yourself in a bit of an echo chamber, because if you don't want to see what's going on outside of your bubble, well, you're not going to see it. It's really nice that it has that customizable feature to it that I haven't seen really anywhere else. Because typically, I mean, if you're following somebody and they post something that you don't necessarily want to see, you're still kind of stuck seeing it because it shows up in your feed. But now you don't even have to deal with that, and you can mute those words without having to mute that individual person. So that's kind of cool. But overall, I don't know if it's going to replace Instagram or if it's even going to have any legs. Because, I mean, let's be honest, of course it's new and it's shiny and it's got all these cool things. But one of the things that's really negative about it is that if you open a Threads account, you can't delete that Threads account without deleting your Instagram account.
Sara Lohse [:I don't get why people are freaking out about that as like just delete the app. You don't need to use it. Does it really matter if your account is out there?
Larry Roberts [:Well, if you don't delete your account, then all your data is there. So some people may be concerned about that because if they use the app and for instance, they have a different profile, maybe they're leveraging Threads for a different aspect of their brand. Maybe they're using Instagram as their branded social media site and they're using Threads as their personal social media site. Now, if I wanted to delete that personal information, that account that has my personal information and detach it from my branded information, I can't do it. So while I can delete the app, it's going to delete everything. So even if I just delete it off my phone, my account is still there. All that personal information is there. It can still be found. It can still be researched. It can still be leveraged to train other social media platforms or other AI models or a variety of different things. Who knows what they're going to use our data for? Then there's also the skeptics that go, dude, seriously, they already have all my data.
Sara Lohse [:Kind of what I think. You're on Facebook. Nothing is sacred anymore.
Larry Roberts [:And that's where I met too, because you know and I know a lot of the people listening or watching, they don't necessarily know. But I live through Amazon. Everything I do is through Amazon. Grocery shopping, clothes shopping, anything I need. I literally get delivered to my house through Amazon. You think Amazon doesn't have every little tidbit of my information? And just like you mentioned in between Amazon and Facebook and whoever else that you're on, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, and I'm even on Twitter. Haven't used it in years. But I have an account over there. Your information is everywhere. But we're starting to see, at least I'm starting to see, especially in the talks that I give, revolving around AI and revolving around our data. More and more people are getting concerned about their data and the data behind not just their personal lives, but their branded lives as well. And there's some really interesting examples that are starting to pop up. And even just recently, a gentleman, his entire house was automated through Amazon, and there was a delivery driver that thought he heard something come from the gentleman's ring doorbell. That was a racial slur. So he reported the gentleman back to amazon, and within two days, his entire house was shut down. And I'm talking everything. All of his appliance ran through Amazon and Alexa, his door locks ran through it. His security system ran through it. His entire house was going through Amazon. So when they shut his account down or froze his account, he couldn't even get his house. He was completely stuck. And he appealed it. They finally turned it back on, but then he made the mistake of going up against Amazon and he went public. Guess what happened? He turned around and canceled his entire account. So now his entire house is shut down. I'm sure he's recovered over the last couple of weeks, but this just happened, things like that. People are going, oh my gosh, my personal information, my data, it's out there. How exposed am I? And then we have these new social media platforms that are popping up. And we know that Meta has a history of taking our data and doing a wide variety of things with it and profiting off of our data. So I think that's where the concern comes into play, Sara, is that these new social media platforms that we feel we have to be on to build our brands and increase our overall footprint of awareness, it could leave us in a very disadvantageous position if we're not careful.
Sara Lohse [:Yeah, that house thing is mind blowing. And I'm going to lose half our audience when I make this reference because I don't know if anyone remembers it if they're not my age. But there was a Disney Channel original movie that came out when I was a kid called Smart House. And it was before all of these automations and everything were happening. So it was a super high tech house and everything was automated, and the house ended up freaking out, wanting to be the wife of the dad who lived there or something, wanted to be the kid's mom and just took over everything, locked them in the house. I don't remember. This was so long ago, but these were supposed to be, like, warnings, I think 100% the same with, like, Wally warning us to not completely rely on technology and destroy our planet. Why aren't we listening?
Larry Roberts [:Because we're human.
Sara Lohse [:That's why we're into Disney.
Larry Roberts [:It's funny you brought that up because I started watching this show recently. It's been out for three seasons on Apple TV called Mythic Quest, and it's all about a development company, a software development company that builds an RPG game, you know, and I'm sure people that know me know that I'm still a World of Warcraft nerd. I still play wow every day. And so seeing this show come on Apple TV, I was like, oh my God, this seems so cool because it's very wow esque. It's like the development side. Well, they have a writer on staff that's probably in his sixty s, and he's very eloquent in everything that he says and is writing the story of these characters and the game itself. He's very in depth and very descriptive. Well, he was going on strike for some reason, and what did they do? And this is three years ago before we even this was this series. This is in season one. They brought in an AI robot to write the backstory in his place. So basically what they did was they brought chat GPT into the office before we even knew what it was to do, exactly what we're using chat GPT to do today. There's a lot of teas in that. It was almost alliteration there, but not quite. But it's just interesting to see that, yes, there are all these warning signs that are out there as far as technology goes, and, well, we tend to not heed those warnings. And now here we are again getting bombarded with more and more social media platforms. And in our defense, we're looking to build a business. We're looking to build a brand. We're looking to establish ourselves and get ourselves out there. And we hear when we look at other high end creators and high end marketers like the gary vaynerchuks and the alex ramosis and the list goes on and on and on, that you have to be on all these platforms, that you have to create all this content. I mean, I found out just the other day that alex RamosI puts out 250 pieces of content a week, and he has a goal to double that. So just knowing those numbers, I mean, that was very, very shocking for me because I think I'm crushing it. If I post twice a day.
Sara Lohse [:I go for like three a week. And I'm proud of myself, and that's.
Larry Roberts [:What most people are doing. But then we also sit back and we go, man, how do these people make it so big? How do you become the next gary vee? How do you become the next joe rogan? How do you become the next alex RamosI or bradley or anybody else you want to name it's by being everywhere and in mass amounts. And we fall into that trap, and we end up giving away a lot of our IP, a lot of our personal information, and a lot of our opportunity to differentiate ourselves from our brand.
Sara Lohse [:Do you think we need to make that differentiation? This is something I think about a lot because I kind of consider my brand to be me, so I don't actively try to make that separation. I do have separate social media accounts, and I do post to my branded accounts as my brand, but then I just share them back to my personal ones because I am my brand. My brand is just me. So I don't necessarily need to or feel like I need to make that differentiation, but I don't even know if I'm doing that right.
Larry Roberts [:I basically do the same thing, honestly. You know, I'm in the red hat. Twenty four seven. I sleep in the red hat. I shower in the red hat. I was in the freaking ocean yesterday, and I was in a red hat. Hoodie and the red hat. So I'm literally a part of my branded. It is me. But at the same time, if we're building a business around that brand, there has to be a delineation, because people look at you and you're representing your brand, but what does that mean? And that's where our professional brand comes into play. And that's where we start presenting our business and our business offerings as our brand as well. I recently just started posting on my branded page on Facebook. I never did before. I ran everything from the personal side, and I think that was solid for the first few years because I had to be established first because I'm at the front of my brand. I am the brand. But now the business is becoming more and more the brand. What I provide, whether it be speaking engagements, whether it be course creation, whether it be podcast launches, whether it be consulting or coaching, whatever those offerings are, all of the above, they're part of the brand. And that's where the business side of your branding and the business or the professional side of your social media posts need to come into play.
Sara Lohse [:I think it's especially important if you don't own the company that you're working for. And it scares me to see people that really base their branding on a company that they are not intrinsically tied to. Because if you lose your job, if you decide to leave, like whatever it is that you're no longer connected to that company, you just lost your branded. So it can be a really kind of hard line to walk between how do you still represent the company that you work for? Because you have to. That's kind of part of being an employee. But how do you do that without merging it with your identity?
Larry Roberts [:That's where you have to step in and be your own brand, where you have to step away. I had to do that as well. I didn't step away from corporate until January of 2021. And here we are. What are we in July of 23? So it's just been a couple of years where I was able to separate and start building and branded my business side up in my business, not my corporate business. But there had to be that delineation, and you can start that while you're still out there working your full time job. You basically have to in all honesty, there's no way for you to just I say no way. There's definitely ways, but it's a stretch to think that you can just cut off from your corporate life if you've been a corporate individual your entire life and then jump in and be an instant entrepreneur. It doesn't work that way. You have to lay that foundation and you have to grow into that. I mean, I started my company in 2017, and it took four years to get to the point where I could go, okay, cool, I'm out, and put in my two weeks at my corporate gig to do it full time. So there's definitely levels and there's definitely progressions, and you need to draw that delineation, and you need to establish yourself on whatever platform it is that you want to build your brand on. And each of the platforms, they obviously have their own audience, and those audiences are constantly evolving as well. We don't need to tell our audience how old I am, but in looking at the demographics of Facebook, and looking at the demographics of Facebook, you could probably kind of figure it out. But that's where I get the most traction. I get a ton of traction on Facebook, ton of engagement on facebook. I get Mediocre engagement on LinkedIn. I get even less engagement on instagram. I get pretty decent engagement on YouTube. But it really depends on where my audience is. And I think so many times people get caught up trying to build these brands that be everything to everyone instead of figuring out exactly where your brand fits in this mass of social media. There's so many platforms, but we have to understand each one and understand which is the better benefit for our brand.
Sara Lohse [:That's definitely true, but we also, I think a mistake that I see a lot of people make when they are building that personal brand or just building that professional brand is putting all of the focus on the company and especially on social media. That is just going to hurt you because people don't want to interact with a company. They want to interact with a person. So you need to have that humanity. And I think that's also one of the reasons why I don't really make too much of a differentiation. I want my brand to look like me because I don't want you to work with a company name. I want you to want to work with me as a person.
Larry Roberts [:I thought you were going to say, because you're a robot. I was like, oh, that explains a lot.
Sara Lohse [:I just got to go plug myself in. I'm getting tired. But I purposely don't make things look like me, even if it is by my brand, because the people who support me support the human behind my brand.
Larry Roberts [:Sure.
Sara Lohse [:Even if you look at my professional social media, I've posted things for father's day with my actual dad. I posted a blog for my own birthday, like, things that show me as a person and not just like, oh, the company is a year old. It's like, no, Sarah is 28 years old. Happy birthday to me. I want to put myself kind of at that forefront. And you'll see the trend anytime you try this. If you are posting from a company and you highlight the employees of that company versus the company itself, the interaction of that post will skyrocket compared to anything else.
Larry Roberts [:Yeah, we all want to attach on an emotional level. When we're talking about launching podcasts and helping podcasters build their brand, that's one of the key things that we lean into is people want to attach themselves emotionally to something. And one of the common mistakes and I don't want to get off on a podcast tangent here, but one of the common mistakes I'm going to anyways, one of the common mistakes that people make is they want to just highlight their guests. They bring their guests on and they kind of hide behind the microphone and then they let their guests take over and run the show and they expect to build an audience that way. And unless you're bringing on brand name guests, that's not a way to build a podcast. People come back for consistency, and the one consistent thing is you. They come back for you because they want to make an emotional attachment to you. They look forward to what you bring to the table. They look forward to hearing what you provide, your insights and understand your backstory and how they relate to you with their backstory. So it's the same thing with a brand. And just like you pointed it out, Sarah, it's the same thing when a corporation or an enterprise level company focuses on the employees. They get much more engagement with a human than they do with a logo or an image or some other brand identifier.
Sara Lohse [:Yeah, everyone needs a lead with people, and especially on social media. It's called social. Companies aren't social, people are social. So I think the biggest mistake that we can make on social media is to try to appear as a company.
Larry Roberts [:And that's why you don't see when promoting things. Most of the time you're not going to get engagement from like quote cards or little graphics because people don't care unless the quotes are really, really cool, unless it's something that somebody else said but that has a name attached to it, that already has a brand to back that quote up. But even then, it's difficult to find any kind of engagement there. And it's because, just like you said, Sarah, people want to engage with people. And I think that's a big mistake, too. When it comes to building your brand on social media, you emphasized it's social. So that means that you're not just looking for engagement from others, they're looking for engagement from you right back to them. So you have to engage. I cannot tell you, and I don't understand why it took me so freaking long to figure this out. But once I started responding to every comment on my posts, guess what happened?
Sara Lohse [:They increased.
Larry Roberts [:They got more attention. The algorithm went, oh, cool, people are talking on this thread. There's engagement from both directions on this thread. And I'm not talking about threads, the app. I'm talking about just any kind of conversation on any platform as a thread. I'm using it as a generic term here, but it's the same thing. Get back out there. If you're really looking to build you your brand, your business and you're doing it on social media, you have to engage. And you're like, Larry, I don't have time to engage. Well, then you don't have time to build your brand on social media. You have to make time and whether it's I saw Sarah's about to speak, so I'm on a tangent, so get in here, Sara.
Sara Lohse [:Go, go.
Larry Roberts [:No, I'm out.
Sara Lohse [:I was going to say before you started your tangent, when you said something like when you started to talk about responding to things, my first thought was, you are so great at that because I notice every time someone does comment, you are one of the first to respond. Even if it's like one of my posts that you're tagged in, you respond. And that's something that I struggle with because I feel weird doing it and I got to work on that. But it's funny because we know that's how it works. If I get tagged on something on LinkedIn, I get a notification saying increase exposure by commenting on this post or respond as favorite daughter media to increase engagement. They tell you to do it.
Larry Roberts [:Yeah, it's not a secret.
Sara Lohse [:Don't do it. What is wrong with me?
Larry Roberts [:It doesn't have to be anything. You don't have to be super insightful with every post. Just say thank you and tag the person that commented so they know you responded. Just say, hey, I agree. Just say something. Don't just throw an emoji or some crap like that. Put some words on there. Write a sentence, write a phrase and tag the person that commented. So A, they know that you responded and guess what's going to happen then. Odds are they may come back and comment again. Next thing you know, you have a conversation. And if it's somebody that's not one of your regular followers that happens to comment on your social media and believe me, if you start this level of engagement, you will see people that you've never seen on your post start to engage. And guess what? You start to engage with that person on a deeper level, then it becomes on a personal level. Then they feel comfortable and they know and they like and they trust you. And guess what happens now? They may start asking about your brand, then they may become a client. So there's all these opportunities and all we have to do is make the time to do the things that count. And that in a social media atmosphere, is engage.
Sara Lohse [:Mic drop.
Larry Roberts [:That was a mic drop. Man, I had no idea I was this fired up today.
Sara Lohse [:Yeah, no, you're in the zone right now. I think we got to end the episode now before you go on another tangent and take like an hour.
Larry Roberts [:Fair enough, man, because, yeah, we've been going for a minute. But hey, one of the things that we both want to leave you with before we do that is time is very precious. We are very limited on time, and it can be overwhelming to comment on all of these different platforms, especially when you're starting out. And one of the tools that we like to use is called metricool. Sarah, tell us all about it.
Sara Lohse [:Yeah, I just started using Metricool recently and it's really great for just kind of one stop shop. You post to Metricool and it sends all of your different platforms. You can schedule it out. And it's been really helpful for me to actually remember to post to make sure that it goes to all of my profiles. So it's been really helpful for me. If you want to try it, we do have a new page on listentobranded.com of some resources for podcasters and there's a link on there. It is an affiliate link, so you'll give us a dollar. Thanks, we love it. But go check it out. Check out some of the other resources we have on there and hopefully they'll be helpful for you, too. Let us know if they are cool.
Larry Roberts [:Deal. Thank you so much for that, Sarah. I tell you, this was supposed to be about threads the whole episode. We're like, let's go talk about threads. And it really just turned into a social media and growing your brand on social media post. But I think it's critical for people to understand you need to go out to these social media platforms, engage on them, figure out where your audience is, and then focus on those. Even if you're using a tool like Metricool, you still have to set time aside to create these posts and schedule them. But if you know where your audience is, you don't have to be everywhere. So figure out where your audience is, focus on that audience, and grow that platform or those two platforms, and you'll see tremendous results if you grow on those platforms and you engage on those platforms.
Sara Lohse [:Mic drop again, going to break your mic today.
Larry Roberts [:I'm glad. It's? Sure. SM. Seven b. And we have a no, we don't. We don't have but anyways, listen, everybody, thank you so much for this episode. We love coming and giving you branded each and every week. And if you found some value in this episode, do us a favor. Smash that subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening or watching on so we can continue to bring you these episodes each and every week. Once again, I'm Larry Roberts.
Sara Lohse [:I'm Sara Lohse. Let's see.
Larry Roberts [:We'll talk to you next week.
