Ep 7 - Platform Exploration: Making the Most of Social Media Trends

Speaker A [00:00:00]:

Welcome back to the Cold takes popular opinions. Podcast. I'm your host, Trevor Robinson, here with my buddy, IRA Sharp. What's going on, IRA?

Speaker B [00:00:07]:

Hey, Trevor. Going pretty good, man. Just had a good 4 July, so good stuff.

Speaker A [00:00:12]:

We're we're back in the swing of things, man. And one thing I'm noticing is that the, the crazy world of online media does not slow down. And that's gonna be a few topics that we talk about today if you just want to dive right into it.

Speaker B [00:00:24]:

Yeah, let's do it, man.

Speaker A [00:00:26]:

Awesome. So I have three things I want to talk about specifically, and I think this might help some of the listeners here as they kind of navigate a few decisions or they're wondering what's really going on because you might hear some of these things referenced or start popping up if you're any user of social media. But we have I'm going to call this a cause and effect happening here. And really the big news is that Instagram is rolling out a new my understanding is it is a standalone app that will release, it'll probably be released by the time you listen to this episode, and it is called Thread or Threads, I believe it is called. Do you have any insight on this at all? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

Speaker B [00:01:10]:

No idea at all, to be honest.

Speaker A [00:01:12]:

Okay, so let me give you the little backstory here. So it is going to be a new standalone app by Instagram. And the way that it is being promoted is it's an app to share ideas and trends with text. So what that really means is that this is going to be Instagram's text based conversation app. Or if you're wondering, yes, it's essentially going to be their equivalent to Twitter. Now, if you're not familiar what's happening in the world of Twitter, elon took it over. I have various opinions on if it's good, if it's bad. Everyone thinks he's running it into the ground. I think he's made some great changes. However, he did just recently make a very large change where he put limits on the amount of tweets users can see on any given day. So I believe if you're a verified subscriber to Twitter, you have the Blue membership. I think it's capped that you can only see 6000 tweets a day. And so that threw a lot more ripples, I guess, through the community of upset users now because 6000 tweets is not a lot if you're scrolling through really fast. And so Mark Zuckerberg, his Mo is striking when the competition is showing weakness. And so he decided to roll this new standalone app out, which is called Threads. And the reason I think it's called Threads is that and this is a great name for it, because Twitter started gaining a lot of popularity over the last 24 months of users creating what's referred to as, in the social media world as Threads. And what that essentially means is the bunch of tweets threaded together. So instead of the 240 character limit, what people would do is they would have a series of tweets. So if you're thinking about like LinkedIn, you've probably seen the carousels. This would just be the text based form of carousels. And so now that I think Twitter has gone through all these changes, a lot of the die hard Twitter fans are really upset with what's happening. And Instagram decided to hop on this and they are now rolling out their own app, which is going to be essentially the Twitter competitor.

Speaker B [00:03:31]:

I got all kinds of questions, man. I don't know if you have answers or not. So why the 6000 limit from Twitter? What is the premise of that?

Speaker A [00:03:42]:

So, to the best of my knowledge, from what I saw, a tweet from Elon, now this could have changed, but I believe he had mentioned it was a precaution put in place to prevent scraping. That's the best of my understanding. I guess there was a lot of people scraping Twitter for different things. I do know Elon is very protective of the platform. Now, I know that one of the first things that he did was in the old Twitter pre, Elon, they had API access open essentially to anybody for free use. And one of the first things that Elon did was actually removed that and started charging these companies. I think it was like $42,000 a year or a month, $42,000 a month if they wanted to use the Twitter API. And so what that means is companies let's just pick on Kootsuite, for example, which is like one of the largest social media scheduling platforms. If they wanted to have the access to allow their users to schedule their Twitter post in advance, they now had to pay $42,000 to do so. So it upset a lot of these small businesses and actually forced a lot of these smaller platforms. They can't afford to pay that. That's an insane amount of money. So that was one of the first things he did. And I think this is another way that he's putting these measures in place to try he's trying to fight this concept of bots and scraping. So who knows? I'm sure there's a bigger picture for it, but that's the best information I have.

Speaker B [00:05:15]:

Yeah, I was just curious. So I get the bot thing. I'm curious, how many tweets does the average Twitter user read in a day? I mean, I use Twitter, right? But I'm not reading anywhere close to 6000 tweets. So this is a big old nothing to me, right? From a user perspective, is this a big thing? I mean, are you a Twitter animal and read 6000 tweets a day or scroll 6000 tweets a day?

Speaker A [00:05:44]:

I don't I think this is the classic case of individuals upset because he made an announcement about a feature or something related to the app and you're always going to have the lynch mob out there with their pitchforks.

Speaker B [00:05:59]:

And I don't think Twitter, ironically, is the place you typically find that lynch mobile, correct?

Speaker A [00:06:06]:

Yes, that was very accurate. And I just think that in general, I would love to know who those users are that are hitting that limit. Because to your .6 thousand tweets, even the pace at which you can scroll on Twitter, that's a really long time frame. And I would argue that if you have to, number one, if you're hitting the 6000 limit, I think one of two things are happening. Number one is you need to take a break and go outside and get some fresh air. Because that probably takes I would love to know how many hours that would take of just non stop scrolling. But number two, I would say that if that's the case, you either are A, probably following too many people and need to unfollow them because you're getting irrelevant content in your feed, or option B is that you're engaging with tweets that you don't really want to see the content for and it's messing up the algorithm. So the recommended tweets in the for you section of Twitter, you might see things in there and you can go down that rabbit hole. Now, 6000 tweets, that's a lot. I would love to know the number of how long that would actually take. I use Twitter a decent amount. I think there's some great creators on there and some great information. But again, I'm on Twitter maybe 30 minutes a day and I would imagine I don't see more than 1000 tweets. I'll be shocked if I see more than 500, to be honest.

Speaker B [00:07:26]:

Yeah, that's what I would think as well.

Speaker A [00:07:31]:

So that's the first thing, right? So that app is rolling out and I think it's going to open up some interesting dynamics and I want to come back to that. But I also want to mention really briefly, there's been some big changes in the world of LinkedIn. So one of our previous podcast episodes, we talked about this identity crisis that LinkedIn is having, knowing what they want to be. And they may have listened to that podcast because they just rolled out some more changes that make no sense at all. Where again, I don't know if this has even been confirmed, but people are saying that they made algorithm changes, and I think it stemmed from an article from maybe it was Social Media examiner or one of these.

Speaker B [00:08:11]:

That's not true. It was our podcast. It was our podcast.

Speaker A [00:08:13]:

It was our podcast. Okay, well, somewhere along the line someone caught some wind here and now it's spreading like wildfire that LinkedIn made an algorithm update. And really the highlights of it are that they're trying to limit these Facebook style posts and they're going to start showing you more content from your first degree connections. In addition to that, it comes on the heels of the move to eliminate the carousel uploading and things like that. So I think they did have a vision in place. Now here's the challenge of where, again, I don't think this makes too much sense from the actual user standpoint. A lot of LinkedIn members just don't have a ton of connections. And that's why I've been telling all the clients that I've worked with from day one, you got to be adding ten to 20 ideal connections in your ideal audience every single day because you got to build that network up. So now LinkedIn is saying, hey, we're prioritizing your content to show it the first degree connections. So I think in nature this could hurt LinkedIn because this might sound terrible, but I actually don't think first degree connections, I don't think people understand how bad of an experience that's actually going to be if that's the only content you see. The best content comes from those typically not in your network that you end up ultimately bringing into your network, and especially on the LinkedIn platform, where it tends to be a lot of your colleagues or former coworkers that you're connected with and a lot of them just aren't even posting content. So I think it's going to be an interesting dynamic there. The other thing that they mentioned is that they are trying to highlight and reward expert based content. That's really what they want to get to is like the thought leaders, highly experted type of content. Now, this is kind of a double edged sword because on one hand they're saying, we're limiting the reach now to your first degree connections, whereas there's just not many people on LinkedIn creating high quality content. So I don't know how it's going to work out. So it's going to essentially demotivate these people who put this high value content out if they have the wrong or smaller network. That's the first problem. The second challenge, and this is really what doesn't make a lot of sense now, is that LinkedIn is rolling out AI generated posting ability for milestones. So basically somebody has a milestone. Now you're going to be able to use AI to essentially write a post to them or a comment to them and so forth. So this kind of goes against what they're saying is, we want high value content, yet they're rolling out the ability for AI posting. So again, it kind of goes right back into the you took a step forward in the right direction, but now you're two steps backwards again because you're bringing AI into this and you're back at this identity crisis. So I don't really have any other thoughts on I think a lot of people are making a big deal about this. I think it's just another day at the Office of LinkedIn where I don't think it's going to impact too much until LinkedIn decides one way or the other what they want to be. And it goes back to the conversation on the previous episode about the Ginormous identity crisis that they have.

Speaker B [00:11:26]:

Yeah, I mean, man, I could definitely see that being a challenge because if it truly is focused on first year connections, how do people organically grow a user base? How do you see new content? How do you find new people? It really seems like it goes against a lot of what the platform is built for, because it's really those second and even third tier connections, seeing something from them or them seeing something from you and making those connections that I think makes the platform great. And the fact that the stuff doesn't just die in a day or in an hour or whatever else from being conceived, like a lot of social platforms is great in the AI generated content, if that's really the case. I had an interesting experience the other day, Trevor, on LinkedIn, because I'm on the board of Advisors for IIoT World and I've been on the board there for like ten months, something like that, a long time. And I forgot to put it on my LinkedIn profile. So I put it on the other day and I actually asked LinkedIn not to advertise it. They do like exactly. And I did it like, I don't know, 1011 o'clock at night. And I went to bed and I woke up in the morning and I was like, what the heck happened? And turns out they posted it anyways. And I had like, I don't even know how many DMs and all this other stuff going on, and I really didn't want it because it's something that happened months ago. And it's like, yeah, I'm all for announcing new positions and these kind of things. This was something that had, quote unquote, jumped the sharp a long time ago. It was not my intent to push it out, but to even then add more to that with AI generated content.

Speaker A [00:13:11]:

Yeah, it becomes a challenge because theoretically, I always ask myself, why is LinkedIn pushing this out? I don't care that so and so has a work anniversary. Hey, I'm happy for you, IRA, that you got a new position, but I don't really care in the grand scheme of things. But I think LinkedIn does push that because it gets a lot of engagement. And it gets engagement not because it's interesting, but because I think to the average person, it makes it super easy to comment on. And so it adds that dopamine hit to people feeling like, hey, everyone, say congrats. I got 100 comments on this, whereas the comments are kind of irrelevant. I mean, people are just saying congrats, which is nice, but it's not really what people want to see when they log onto the platform. And to that point, I think another interesting thing, and you mentioned this, is like, how's content going to get discovered, right? And that becomes the big challenge here, is I think it's going to demotivate people if they're creating this high quality content and it's not getting pushed out past their own connection, it's going to create this platform where it's not going to be enjoyable. And I think the thing that made LinkedIn enjoyable is the shift from that everyone just looking for a job to the evolution to now you've got some actual valuable content being posted in the form of thought leadership all the way through. Where I think the future is heading is that you've got to be able to showcase yourself and what makes you unique, because content is a commodity, information is a commodity, and especially in the age of AI and these tools. And so what's going to allow people to actually have an impact is when they can show things that are like them and something related to their personal life or their family or something that's not just subject matter, expert content or opinions. And so I don't know, I think this is going to be really interesting. I think it's a step in the wrong direction of how media in general is evolving. And I'm really curious to see how this unfolds and how fast that they kind of reverse the change here, if this algorithm change has even taken place. You never know with these things. It's going to be trial and error. But it leads me to the main thing I wanted to talk about here today before I go to that. Any final thoughts on this one, IRA?

Speaker B [00:15:34]:

I was just trying to look it up on Twitter and I hit my limit so I couldn't read the next post. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. No, we're good. I had no other final thoughts there. We'll see where it goes.

Speaker A [00:15:46]:

Good. All right, well, I'm going to call this section the Call to Action that I want everyone to take. And so this is more about a mindset and expert advice that I can give. And that is when a lot of people I see and companies historically are notorious for this, aside from the elite of elites, but a lot of companies fall into this trap of what I'm about to talk about, and especially a lot of individuals do as well. And I understand and I'll kind of explain why they fall into this issue. But the issue at hand is that a lot of individuals and companies sit on the sidelines and don't jump at the early opportunities that present themselves and specifically in the realm of social media. Now, I'll give you an example. Here is this new Instagram app threads. Anybody who listens to this or any company that listens to this should be going all in on this on day one at least, putting together a good, honest effort for 30 days to learn it, to get a jump start on this. When new apps roll out or new features, the platforms tend to reward you as an early adapter for that what happens. I see a lot of times, though, is that we as humans kind of play this game of like, well, it's scary. We don't know how it works. Let's just kind of sit back and especially companies, I see this all the time. Let's just sit back and evaluate it first and see how it goes. And that's a great game plan ten years ago, but we're in the era where information is our attention is incredibly hard to capture, and any opportunity that you have to get more views and get that jump start that could be the difference between exploding your business or just becoming another individual that's on the platform but that struggles like everybody else and is just an everyday, average user. An example of this is if you could go back in time during COVID in 2020 and have started TikTok, you would probably have 500,000 to a million followers now just because at that point in time, it was popping off and there was just more viewers than there were creators. Nowadays, if you hop on TikTok, it is hard to get views. The average video back then probably got thousands of views. The average video today probably gets 100 to 200 views. It's very difficult now because everybody sat in the sidelines and then they waited for the next person to jump on, and then they finally said, okay, everybody else is on now. I'm good to go, right? And I think in the era that we're in, media in general, those who take the leap first and take a lot of shots are going to be the ones that get rewarded. And so there's the general saying that I like, which is, in this world, your graveyard should be bigger than your house. And essentially what that means is you should have more failed attempts of just trying these new things than successes, right? Because that means when things come out, you're taking the shots and taking the chances, and you're okay if it doesn't work out. I think what a lot of people do, though, is get so caught up saying, what's not part of the game plan that I laid out three years ago for our company strategy, or I'm so invested in my personal brand on LinkedIn that I don't want to try this new app. I don't know if it's going to work yet for me and my industry or my audience isn't on it. That's my number one pet peeve. My audience isn't on it. You never know until you try. And there is a massive advantage to being a first adapter. And so I think we're hitting a pivotal moment where we don't see these opportunities very often, where a new app rolls out that is by a large company that has the foundation. Like, you see all these apps, like whether it's like The Truth Social, like the Be Real, all these apps that if anyone logically looked at it, you could understand for one reason or another. It's not going to get mass user adaption, but when something big comes along, like an app from Instagram, twitter has already been successful for an eternity, it seems like. So the concept is proven. Now you're throwing that concept behind the firepower of an app that already has hundreds of millions of users. There's a big opportunity here. And so that's my call to action is even if you think I don't have anything to talk about or I don't know this app, I would recommend anyone listening to this give it a good, honest, hard effort for 30 days, try to figure it out. Because if this thing pops off, you're going to be really thankful that you are an early adapter and we're able to build a following pretty quick because.

Speaker B [00:20:30]:

That compounds well, I think it goes without saying, Trevor, we'll see you on the platform.

Speaker A [00:20:38]:

I will be on the platform day one, and I don't know what I'm going to talk about yet, but I have 24 hours as of today to figure that out. And I think that's the approach is that I'm taking the approach of I'll figure it out as I go. I'll look for signals, I'll see what's working because nobody knows what the culture of it's going to be yet. But the mindset that I think you need to adapt, and this is in social media in general, is that you have these opportunities and you have to figure out what's going to work. And I'm okay with failing to start, and I think that's a mindset that a lot of people don't have and a lot of people will give up too early. Yeah, it'll be interesting.

Speaker B [00:21:21]:

I think I'll end up on the platform as well. And I'm not one to do much of these platforms, but I've been primarily a LinkedIn user, and I did the clubhouse thing, but I caught it late. Right. And so not that it mattered, probably in today's day, but there is an audience there, but it's not as strong as it was for in the very beginning and things. So, yeah, I think I'll be checking it out and seeing what's there and seeing if we can make it work, what it's all about. So excited for.

Speaker A [00:21:54]:

Yeah, and that's a great point you bring up about clubhouse. And so I think a lot of people, even with clubhouse, I was telling companies, get on clubhouse, build the thing. And a lot of companies waited until it was too late because it was new and they didn't understand what was happening in the grand scheme of things. And so what I've found, though, with that is a lot of the people that and companies that built communities there and hosted regular shows, even though the platform itself disappeared, they now have transitioned over with their audience and they've taken that audience into new platforms like LinkedIn, or over to YouTube or over to live streaming or one of the other tons of options that are available. And so it doesn't have to be that if the platform dies or doesn't work, you lose everything. You have to be directing your audience over to different approaches in terms of, hey, I'm on Clubhouse, but hey, follow us over here on LinkedIn as well. Hey, join our newsletter here as well. We have to make sure that we're diversifying and directing those audiences to the other platforms as well, so that we're not over reliant just on that one main platform. So the last and most important thing, and this is more of a mindset thing and an approach, and I think a lot of companies fail at this as well as users, is that when new platforms roll out, we have to embrace them and hop on them early versus taking the approach of sitting around and waiting to see if others have success. Now, this could be others in your industry. This could be seeing if other companies have success on it. The first mover advantage in the modern world that we live in is massive, and I cannot emphasize the importance of that enough. For example, if you joined TikTok in 2020 during the pandemic and you were posting and learning the app, you would have probably a million followers today. Just because back then, that's when the app was gaining a lot of momentum and people were sitting on the sidelines because at that point, they were afraid to get on video and do silly dances. Nowadays, if you go on, it's become essentially achieved a mass adaption. And so what's happening now is more people are hopping on the platform, but their videos are getting 100 200 views now versus the thousands they used to get back in 2020. And so those who are brave enough to just lean in and try a new platform reap the rewards back then, and the same holds true, I believe, personally, with this new Instagram app threads. Now, there are apps that you should look at and say, I don't think this is going to be sustainable, because you can't just throw yourself all in on every new app that comes out. However, if you pay close attention, you'll understand the apps that you should give it an honest take on. So for example, if you look at the app like Be Real, if you did any logical thinking or critical thinking, you would realize that that app is just not going to have mass appeal to catch on just due to the basis of what the purpose of it was. If you looked at something like Truth, Social or one of these other hundreds of apps that popped up, you would realize they're not going to have mass appeal. However, in this moment that we're in, with Instagram threads rolling out, the concept is proven, which is these threads. It's basically the Twitter clone, but it's backed by Instagram, which has hundreds of millions of users they know what they're doing. It has mass appeal already. And so my call to action for any company or listener out there is you need to go all in on day one and figure it out because everybody else is going to be figuring it out on day one as well. What I think will probably happen is most people will wait a month before they dip their toe in and then most companies will wait for six months after they have all their board meetings to say, hey, we should build a strategy for this platform and it's going to be too late. And so those who are the adventurers and that seek out and try to learn things from day one and are those early adapters, they are going to have a massive, massive opportunity and advantage in front of them. So if you're listening to this, I would encourage you to hop on Instagram threads, go all in on it for 30 days, try to learn the platform. Everybody else is learning it with you. But if you really focus on it and give it an honest effort, I think you'll figure it out. And then you can pull back. And in two months, you can say, this isn't working, or It's not for me, but you're going to be better off taking that mindset and that approach rather than sitting on the sideline. Saying, well, let's see if our audience is on it. Let's see what this turns into, let's see if it's worth the time, et cetera. And I see a lot of companies take that mentality because they want to protect their time investment where any good social media manager or even anyone that has a personal brand, their approach and thought process is going to be, I'm going to hop in on the trends and ride the waves and see what sticks. And my graveyard is going to be bigger than my house, meaning I'm going to have more failures than I do successes. But ultimately that is what you need to take from an approach standpoint, because if you're having all those failures, the success that you do have for the one platform that kicks off, you're going to be incredibly thankful opposed to catching the wave late. So that is my alert. And the mentality I would say is nobody knows what to do on day one of this platform, so you're going to be learning with them. And I would just take the approach of starting off by repurposing existing content that you have. If you're not creating any content currently, I would just try to create some content, figure out what value you can provide to people in the form of a thread, and then just study others on the platform as it goes. So that's my call to action there. What are your thoughts on that, IRA?

Speaker B [00:27:44]:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's good. I do think you got to be careful jumping in too many different places, thinking. About, like, the clubhouse thing. I mean, I think that was a great platform and it was the right time for the right thing and jumped on that and did a bunch of things there. And I was late adopter on that. But I think had I jumped on earlier, I think it could have been good. But to the point of that, as you build the audience, you could always take it somewhere else. It's just about being active and regardless, you can learn something. I think it's just being cautious of not going in on everything, but going in on the things and placing your bets appropriately. Yeah, for sure. You got to diversify, you got to stay ahead, you got to keep on the trend. So I think it's great advice.

Speaker A [00:28:28]:

Yeah. And I think for most people listening to this, I think they might be creating a little bit, but the vast majority might be in that case where they're fearful of jumping on new platforms because they say, my audience isn't there, or, oh, it's Instagram, or I don't like this platform, or whatever. And the best advice I can give is that when it comes to social media, you cannot have any emotional connection to these platforms. I've been a big fan of LinkedIn. I've went through phases where I hate LinkedIn. I am just focusing my attention on where the attention is. And yes, you might have a long term platform where it's a long term goal, but if you go on these other platforms, one might pop off, but you do have to be a little bit more selective in that process. But I think what a lot of people do is they might create an account and then they'll kind of sit on it and watch from the sidelines. But man, if you start creating early on, you could reap a lot of benefits. And let's just say you go on Instagram threads and you build 10,000 followers up. You could take that then and start promoting your audience to your newsletter. You could offer them something to follow you on LinkedIn. You could direct them over to your YouTube channel. You were essentially getting free distribution to new audiences where you can start to direct them to other platforms such as Clubhouse, that era back then, a lot of the early adapters, they went all in on it. I know some companies that went all in on it, and they built great communities, great clubs, great shows, and then they just started transitioning that audience off of Clubhouse and over to their YouTube Livestream Show or to their email list or all these other platforms. And I also know companies that hopped on late and just tried dabbling with an event once a month or something and they wondered why they weren't getting the audience or attendees that some of the early clubs did. So I just can't stress this enough that being a day one early adapter, we don't have many of these opportunities out there in our lifetime. In the world of social media, where a proven company is making an announcement that they're essentially building a standalone app based on a proven concept already and telling you the exact release date of that, that just does not happen. So this is an anomaly.

Speaker B [00:30:47]:

Yeah, for sure. And we'll see where it goes. It'll be interesting. So I'll get out my string and get my threads rolling to see what tapestry I can come up with. How about that? There's my first post.

Speaker A [00:31:00]:

We'll see. And then hopefully on the next episode, I'll let you know how my journey is going. I have no idea yet what I'm going to post about, but just like everybody else, I'm going to be exploring. And one of the things I try to tell people is, don't be afraid to ride the trends or what's successful, even if you think it's cringey, because the you know, if if I post something that I think is cringey 10% of the time, but it equates to 90% of my views or audience, I'm happy with that. So just put yourself out there, test things, be willing to fail, be willing to adapt, and I think you'll see success, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. So hopefully on our next show, I'll be able to update you on how the journey has been so far for me.

Speaker B [00:31:44]:

All right, man. Sounds good.

Speaker A [00:31:46]:

All right, well, that's all for today. Any final parting words?

Speaker B [00:31:50]:

I guess just be comfortable being uncomfortable and getting out there and seeing where things go, and I look forward to hearing about your threads, and I'm going to get on the platform as well.

Speaker A [00:32:00]:

And see what's up.

Speaker B [00:32:01]:

So, yeah, I look forward to our next discussion and see how things are going.

Speaker A [00:32:05]:

Awesome. And if you listen to this, go follow me over on Instagram threads at the handle at Trevrob, and I'll probably cut this out if I can't get that username. So all right, guys, thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye.