Audience First: Rethinking Your Social Strategy

Speakers: Katie Flynn, Ashley Rieflin

Let’s do it. Okay. All right. Well, welcome back to The Flynn Effect. After a six week break, we got a little busy around here, actually, and I were just talking about the fact that we’ve had lots and lots of new business opportunities, lots of client projects going on, so I will not complain about that one second.

But we accidentally took six weeks off. So sorry to our avid listeners, but we’re back at it. And today I’ve got Ashley Flynn with me. Rich Flynn. Yes. Okay. For, I’ll get back to the intro in a second, but for a while I thought it was re Flynn because my grandmother’s name was Marie Flynn, and she went by RI and it just stuck in my head.

You are actually correct. Oh, so the proper German pronunciation is RI Flynn. But for some reason, for the past few generations, we’ve told everyone and insisted on Flynn. And I think it’s because, my very German family during World War two wanted to sound less German. So for a period of time I would tell people re Flynn. But yeah, you I feel like you did tell me, right?

Yeah, yeah, it was just one of those things where I’m like, well, guys, we can’t complain about everyone mispronouncing our name when we mispronounced their own name. Got it. Okay, well, then I wasn’t totally wrong. No, I will answer to either one. Okay. All right. Good to know. But we’ve actually worked together for six and a half, almost seven years at this point, which is crazy.

And now you are an integrated media specialist here at Flynn. So working on all things from paid media, but you also have a big role in social media in terms of our actual, like, organic accounts that we run here. Yeah. And I know it’s sort of like a special interest for you, too. It’s just something that you, you know, stay on top of and, you know, keep up with the trends and all of those things.

So I figured we could spend a little bit of time talking about that today. Sure. And I think most recently in the last couple of weeks, even you delivered a lunch and learned for the staff on trends and social. So I thought maybe we could just start there. Like, what are the big things you’re seeing right now?

I feel like there are probably a lot of things that could be mentioned. But yeah, can we swear on this podcast? You can swear, okay, keep it to the like, you know? Yeah, I pg13 swear words. Perhaps I don’t know if I will swear, but I will say the current state of social does make me want to throw out some expletives sometimes.

And I think because social media for me is it feels very personal. I mean, social media grew up together, you know, with the way the ages kind of line up. So a lot of who I am today, was because of social media and because of that escape I found as a teenager. And, you know, we’re back then.

Social media is about being able to express yourself, right, and find your niche. Your parents weren’t there. You know, it was during a time where people trying to figure out their own identities. And now social is more of a place where you expose yourself. So it’s it’s become, very political and I think that the biggest trend that I’m seeing, and I think everybody can see, is the movement away from, genuine engagement and moving more towards.

And it it’s been moving this way for a really long time, but towards more artificial communication versus genuine communication. We see that with influencer trends. You know, an influencer used to be a genuine thing. Sure. They actually liked the product. You liked this person. You wanted to have their lifestyle. But there wasn’t a lot of incentive around, you know, adapting whatever brand or product they’re talking about.

It was more like, you’re living this lifestyle. You have this type of esthetic. I relate to that. I want to enjoy the same things this person enjoys or this community enjoys. And now influencers, you know, are being contracted by brands and so you always have to be, much more, vigilant with social. Now, what you’re seeing and what is genuine versus what is not.

Yeah. Like any, like, anything good. The business side of things, I think has just taken a much, much larger role, which makes complete sense. Right. Because I think what early influencers and brands who got in on it early were realizing is like, hey, there is a lot of money to be made here. This is a really smart marketing tactic.

But to your point, it does it does make that, you know, like genuine community of people that are maybe like minded or care about the same things or whatever makes that feel a little less, easy to spot, easy to spot, much more forced, I know. One thing I talked about in my lunch and learn is that you are really disturbing someone’s day on social.

I think more than, you know, TV ads or out of home or traditional media, no one’s going to social. People are going to social to interact with friends and family. We do a lot of research here at Flynn on audiences and how they use social and how their behaviors change throughout the years. And overwhelmingly, no matter what the platform is or what the demo is, people are on there for connection.

They’re there to see, you know, what their friends are doing, what the influencers they’re following or doing. They’re also there for some news, but they really are not there to have something sold to them. Sure. So there’s there’s that to be considered when you are going to be disrupting their day and disrupting, their reason for using social.

It has to be in a very authentic and, organic way. And we say organic social as being anything that isn’t paid, but, it has to be more than that. I have always really pushed, as you know, like quality over quantity. I don’t want to post every day just to say reposting and staying alive. There is value in that.

There used to be more value in that, but now it’s really if you are going to say something, make sure what you are saying is providing value to the person who is reading it. And don’t talk about yourself. You shouldn’t be brand first. You should be audience first in all of your content and all of your messaging.

You know, we may care a lot about, you know, what we’re doing our lunch and learns, you know, the day to day culture of Flynn. But our audience isn’t going to care about that unless they’re going to have a takeaway. You know, what can we learn from what Flynn is doing? That is going to make our brand better or is going to make us want to work with Flynn?

In the early days, when I first started working on social, one of the things I really, I think we even got teased about was there was a lot of dog content back that. Yeah. So, we were known for the dog content. But that was really a snapshot of our personality. Like, this is who Flynn is.

We have dogs in the office. We have, these really great events with one another in these gatherings. And we’re a close knit group that are fun to, not to fun to work with and would be fun for our brand to work with as well. So there’s value in showing that type of personality. Yeah. But again, it has to make sure that when you are sharing your brand on social organically, you are not being so self focused, because honestly, other people don’t care.

Right? And I think it’s interesting to you because so so to your point, as an agency, I feel like we keep up with our socials to accomplish the goal of, you know, making sure people can see some of our work and our personality and all of those things. But, we’ve always talked about how a big piece of it is just a sort of like a glimpse into our culture.

Right? So like clients, colleagues, colleagues, families, like, those are the people who follow us on those channels. And so we do tailor that content to be focused on them. To your point, for consumer brands, for example, you know, we get we get this question sometimes, like how much emphasis should I be putting on organic social. And I feel like it’s a really interesting time for that.

So organic is not actually something that we offer here for our clients. We focused on the page that we focus on the page side of things, because it can be very helpful for them to have somebody on staff who’s combing the comments and getting back to people and all of those things. And, you know, there are brands like Scrub Daddy, for example, who just do like an amazing job not only putting out like fresh original content, but really being on top of commenting.

And, and I don’t even mean responding to comments that they get on their content. I mean, like responding to viral video moments with clever things that other people then engage with, right? Like we’re seeing that become a part of a part of it, too. So, I guess that was a very long winded explanation to then ask, like, what do you see as the importance of, of the organic side of things, versus the paid side, like where do you see the value?

So there was a I had a really big take away a few years ago, the social media manager for Duolingo had came to Rochester for, advertising Week. She was at the time. I hope she’s still there. But at the time, she was like this little 23 year old, energized, young person and she really was really, emphasized the need of taking rest in the office.

Like she was just always like, let’s do this risky thing. Posted. Asked for forgiveness later. But one thing she emphasized that they’re organic social device. And Duolingo is organic social. It’s famous. Yeah, but, they just killed off and brought back the mascot, right? Right, right. Exactly. But what it would do, it was weird. It would remind people to go back to the app because they would be on social.

They would be scrolling. They see just an organic Duolingo post, and they’d be like, oh yeah, I haven’t done my lesson in a while, or oh, that’s really cool. I didn’t know I could do that in the app. Let me open it up again. Let me try it again. So it’s that constant, frequency building and again, that relationship building.

And just reminding people to go back to the app, not necessarily even adapt the app. But remember, this is something that can be part of your everyday life and also, I think that pushing viral content like that and really taking risks the way Duolingo did, helped build trust in the brand. So trust is a big thing is social, and kind of a buzzword that gets thrown around.

But it’s true. People are more likely to use a service or purchase a product from a brand that they feel they can trust, and a lot of that trust is first going to be established through the content that they’re putting out on social. Yeah, putting that best face first. Another thing that I always tell our clients, even, you know, even if they’re just doing paid media and don’t want to focus a lot on organic.

Yeah. Is that your your social profile is your landing page for social media. So even if you’re not going to be posting every single day, if you’re running paid ads, make sure that your profile is looking great, that you have interesting content on there, because people are most likely going to check that out first. You’re going to be fair through exactly.

They’re going to check that out before they even get to your website. So it’s important to always have that best face forward. No matter how much you’re investing in time or money on social. Yeah. No, it’s a it’s a really fair point. And it leads me to think of something because you had in the lunch and learned that we, we had a couple of weeks ago mentioned all of the, social media platforms of yesterday.

Yes. All the ones who are no longer with us, like mine and Myspace. So and, and I think also audiences are very different. Right. Yeah. So generally generationally we use different things and maybe on its face if you were to look at Gen Z and say like okay, they don’t use Facebook, right? I’m generalizing. I’m not actually saying that that’s true.

Although I do think that they use that a lot less than things like TikTok and Instagram. For a brand, then who’s let’s say only target audience is Gen Z, do they need to have a Facebook presence too? Like, how do you parse out where to be spending your time? Because I remember a few years ago, everyone was like, well, should we have TikTok or not?

And we were, you know, like, well, it depends on your audience and you know, where they’re spending their time and all of those things. And now it almost seems like you’re if you’re just going to, you can even start a TikTok if you didn’t already, you know, download the Apple Radio account. Yeah. Thank you. Again to all the the political ization of social.

Yeah. Yeah. So you might remember us from that lunch hour. My biggest thing for social these days is you cannot generalize or stereotype audiences. Especially with their social media use. Probably one of the biggest pet peeves of my career has always been like, oh, well, I don’t use that. So other people might use that, or that’s a young person thing.

Again, here at Flynn, we rely heavily on audience research. So even if I instinctively like, no, I’m like, oh yeah, no, that probably wouldn’t be, a good platform for that audience. We still start there because there’s going to be those nuances, and you really can’t generalize people based on things like age or, you know, even location.

Yeah. And and those trends are always changing. So, yeah, five years ago. Sure. Young people are on Facebook and Instagram and now not so much. But then you also have older people adapting platforms like TikTok. Oh yeah. My parents love TikTok. Yes, love. So you really not that they’re old. That’s not what I was saying. Saying the generation up.

Yeah. So I feel it’s important to think even deeper and beyond just your general demographics and think more of the type of content that you’re putting out there. You know, so for TikTok, yes, it’s a viral platform that, you know, many people across generations have adapted, but there’s some brands that just wouldn’t fit best there. You know, just because TikTok is a big, nice platform, I may not want my personal injury lawyer to be playing TikTok’s out there.

I say that, but then we have limited say. There’s some really good ones locally putting out some fun content. Yeah, so there’s certainly ways to do it. But I think you need to understand not only your audience as demos, but what are their interests? What are they doing on these platforms? Why are they visiting these platforms? I, I go back to one of my favorite, questions that we ask when we do audience research is why are you using social?

What is your motivation? And Facebook being a good example. And you know, kind of the King platform for so long is is really still the only platform that is very personal. I feel, compared to even Instagram now where you’re there to see real life people, you know, your friends, your family, people you know, and you have met while, places like TikTok, Instagram, you’re more likely just seen content from strangers who are just influencers.

Yeah, the algorithm doesn’t really show you the people you’re actually following anymore, right? And how many real life people are just posting on TikTok about their day to day? Like a lot, most TikTok content is people trying to push that content to a wider audience. So I think that has to be considered as well when making a recommendation to brands about where they should invest their time and what they should create content for.

Yeah. We also are no longer, in a place where we used to be where, you can just make one thing, one piece of content and share it everywhere. You really need to take the platform into consideration when creating that content. Because it’s not going to work, because the audiences are going to be different.

The motivation for using that platform is going to be different, and the type of content you’re going to appear with is going to be different. So there’s there’s a lot to take into consideration. More than just how old are you. Right. Right. Oh yes. And I was going to ask too about even content type. So, you know, there was there was a time speaking of Facebook or Instagram, where static image ads or carousels worked pretty well.

I think for the last few years, what we have seen is video is, you know, always going to get more engagement, right? It’s from a, from a recommendation perspective. Like if you have to pick a place to spend your dollars, because we know all brands dollars are limited. Right. It would you recommend video like is is that do you find that those metrics, in terms of performance are in fact much higher.

Also a complicated question. Honestly, video will get eyeballs and people spending time with your brand, but if you’re running an ad and your goal is to get people to visit your landing page, video may not be your friends. Because people video is going to have less clicks because people are taking the time to watch the video, but they’re not going to take the time to really click through, unless what you say is so impactful that they just are so intrigued and must learn more, right?

So your objective is going to be very important. A lot, for our paid campaigns. Usually what I do is I pair video with more of like an awareness objective. And then I will pair that with single image ads or carousels and thinking mostly matter. Yeah. Here. But for, for the types of ads that we want to drive action.

Really strong call to actions. Not much to distract them, get them to the page with a good offer. And hopefully they’ve already seen that video beforehand so that they’re familiar with the brands. And we built up that healthy frequency and we’ve already piqued their interest. But it’s definitely multiple. Multiple touches are really what you need, on social including organic.

So whether you’re paying for the the views or whether you’re just hoping to go viral, it’s how you’re building the content onto itself and telling that story. Awesome. I think that’s great advice. Ashley. Anything else that you would want to share in terms of tips or tricks? If you know somebody is running a social media account or, trying to figure out how to proceed with their brand, yeah.

So don’t be afraid to be yourself and social and make sure that you’re spending that time, really learning. Spend a lot of time on socials, see what other people in your space are doing. Don’t steal ideas, but build on those ideas and take risks. I think that the most viral social media accounts are the ones that took the most risks, who, weren’t afraid of, you know, a CEO being like, we shouldn’t say that.

That’s not brand safe, but understanding that we are talking to real people, who are using these platforms as a way to engage with other people. So you have to meet them where they’re at. And with social, I think we have to do that more strategically now than we ever had before. Yeah. Well, Ashley refund Riffling. Thank you very, very much.

So appreciate all of your insight and I’m sure we’ll have you back soon. Thank you. All right. What did you think, John?