Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
Good morning and welcome to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Andy Lambert, social media entrepreneur author of Social 3.0, founder of ContentCal, who then sold it to Adobe Express, and he's now the senior manager of product at Adobe Express. Welcome, Andy.
Andy
Hello. Lovely to be on.
Esther
We're so glad to have you here. Today we're talking about what's new in social media. And this episode could go on for about an hour and a half, but we'll try to keep it succinct and down to the 20, 25 minutes that we're usually on for. So, let's start talking first, Andy. Tell us about your book, Social 3.0. Where did it come out of? What information does it have that's still relevant today?
Andy
Yeah, so social media does change a lot, and we'll talk more about that as we get on to it today. The reason I wrote Social 3.0 is that there are some fundamental underlying principles that are non-changing for how we both market our businesses and approach social media. And I think there's often too much nonsense in the world of social, too much hacking or click bait or things that we're trying to do just to trend Jack, where actually the businesses that should use social media correctly should think about social media as a business strategy, not just a marketing tactic. Quite often, social media is pushed to the side, given to the most junior member of a team in a larger business or just another admin task. A business owner needs to, Oh, just chuck it out on social. Social media is far more impactful than that. So it's based on that narrative, some non-changing principles, typically written through the lens of businesses that are selling to other businesses, because that's the context that my whole career has been in, B2B-orientated marketing. And in particular, B2Bs don't take social media as serious as they should do, in my opinion. So that's why I wrote it.
Melanie
Brilliant.
Esther
Yeah, I would agree with a lot of that.
Melanie
I don't know if you could see for those of you who are on audio, obviously you can't, but on video, we're nodding our heads away quite avidly. What drove you to write that book at that time?
Andy
Purely on the basis of having gone through the journey of building ContentCal, which was a social media marketing business, built that over the course of five years with a few others of us, and sold it to Adobe in 2021, which you already alluded to, Esther. And in doing that, I learned quite a bit about mostly what not to do from a marketing perspective. So then we've got, finally distilled it into, if I'd read that five years ago when we started, I would have wasted far less time. And the spoiler alert here in this is that the bit that mattered the most as it came down to growing our business was the people that we This is a good example. We're collaborating on this podcast right now. The main thesis is thinking beyond your feed. I think we spend most of our time thinking about, Oh, what post should we put out this week and what should we promote? We're always thinking about ourselves. We're always thinking about But actually, the more impactful thing is when we think about who we want to serve. So who are those that are most respected by the audience we want to serve? Work with those. And of course, we didn't have budgets for influencer marketing, but we created A podcast, a webinar series, guest newsletters, everything that we could do to create in partnership with others, people that were also respected by our target audience. I cared so deeply about that. Basically, the spheres of influence of a market I got absolutely obsessed by. That's what made me write the book because I was like, I wish I'd read this when I were starting out.
Esther
Where can people find this book?
Andy
Classic Amazon. It's a self-published, Joby. So I make precisely three pence per sale, so it mostly goes into Jeff Bezos's pocket. But either way, it matters a lot. All of the profit, which is tiny that I do make, basically, it's, as Amazon self-publishing is delightful in a way, but it's not a way of making lots of money. But all the profit does get donated to UNICEF anyway.
Esther
Lovely.
Melanie
That's nice.
Esther
That's nice.
So you alluded there a little bit, you mentioned Content Cal. Explain a bit more about what it is, was. Is it still around? Can people still use it or has it been absorbed completely by Adobe?
Andy
Yes, completely absorbed, but I'll explain it. Let me give you the 30 seconds story. Products work best or products can be most successful when you felt the pain yourselves. So we were a agency building social media content for other people and planning that content on a Google Sheet. So planning the content on a Google Sheet, sending it to clients saying, Is this okay? This is what we're publishing for you next week. Can you approve it? Yada, yada. And still to this day, all around the world, this is how teams and agencies operate. But we built this because it was a huge pain for us. Then we started using it with our clients, and then our clients started going, Oh, this is pretty useful. Really easy. We've got a shared collaborative calendar where we can see everything. And guess what? It's also going to do the posting for you as well. So that's how we started. Funny enough, given the name called Content Cal, it does what it says on the tin. And then in 2017, we started taking it to market properly as a stand-alone business. And it was very hard to carve out a space in the market. It's incredibly populated. If you say social media management tool, Hootsuite, Buffer, all of them. There are millions, not quite that many, but it feels like it. How could this little company in the UK with three of us try and cut through? This is all about, one, because we understood user pain so well, particularly for these smaller agencies, we could serve them really well. We could tell a great story. We knew their pain. Our marketing approach for those smaller agencies meant we got a nucleus of customers of which we could grow from. We That's also made me very passionate about the concept of minimum viable audience, because when we're starting out, you try and serve everyone. But actually, if you choose the most focused audience you can, serve them as well as you possibly can and craft all your narrative for those, it means those network effects, spheres of influence that we were speaking about earlier, you get those ripples of referrals that go through a market much more successfully. So again, that's why I wrote the book. All of these mental models started to form. Anyway, so long story short, business grew. We raised investment, grew it to about 60 employees, etcetera, became a thing, became one of the fastest-growing products in the space. And in 2021, Adobe approached us. We fell off our chairs, as you can probably imagine. But the deal got done in the end of 2021 for a number that wasn't disclosed, but it was big. At that point, the difficult time happened. A lot of our team members are 60 members of staff. Naturally, a company like Adobe doesn't require sales and marketing staff. It's got a rather good engine for that. Then all of the capabilities of ContentCal over the course of 2022 to where we are today have been built inside of a product that you can see represented by my T-shirt is Adobe Express, which is Adobe's lightweight design tool meant for everyone to to be able to use. So not like Photoshop and InDesign, etcetera, which is for your creative pros. This is for anyone from making a flyer to making social content. So now we've got the end-to-end flow of creating. You can create your social graphics, create them on brand, create your social videos, yada yada. You can plan it out in the collaborative calendar, which still exists today, all for free, by the way. So we can actually do all of this stuff for free, which is pretty phenomenal. And all of the analysis piece we've just added it as well this past week. And all of that can be done for free. And I think for someone, I'm sure like all of us, we care a lot about empowering small businesses, helping them grow, etc. So when you're backed by the might of someone like Adobe and then can make everything that you've created free, it's a pretty wonderful place to be. Hence the reason I'm still here, because it's very much aligned to the mission I have.
Esther
Wonderful. And for that, okay, so it's free. Buffer also offers free for three platforms. Does it have a limit like that or is it more open or less restricted?
Andy
Yeah, we're not going into the gory detail, yes, it's more open than that. Of course, there are still some tiers of payment, but from doing all of the publishing across six different networks, unlimited amounts of it, by the way, and the analysis and the social content creation, so the making of designs, making of videos, yada, yada. Yeah, all of that is entirely free.
Esther
Brilliant.
Melanie
So what's new in social media?
Esther
It's only taken us 10 minutes to get to the actual question.
Andy
We'll get to that. What's new? Where do I start? LinkedIn is having a moment, is probably point one. LinkedIn seems to be, by all measure of the data, because I'm a complete data nerd, as I We met not so long ago, Esther, and I spoke about all this stuff. So if you're ever interested in social media data, give me a follow because that's the stuff. But most people aren't because they have a normal life. LinkedIn is something that's performing incredibly well right now. Across all the baselines, we're seeing engagement go up, we're seeing video views go up, we're seeing post impressions go up. All of that is wonderful. We're actually also seeing active users, so people actively posting, go down, which is very rare. What you're seeing is an incredibly opportunistic gap that is appearing where more people are coming to the platform. LinkedIn's overall viewership is up. LinkedIn announced their, or Microsoft announced their quarterly results just last week. Overall viewership is up, but people are still a bit afraid of posting. So there's actually a good, what you call attention arbitrage. There's more attention than there is content to surface it. That's why LinkedIn content still continues to perform a week after it's posted.
That's just not the case on other social networks. So that's point one. LinkedIn is doing really well. LinkedIn is pushing video heavily, so lots of opportunity there. Threads is now at 350 million users. Feel free to interject with any questions you have because I could just go on-.
Esther
Keep going. Keep going.
Andy
So Meta now have a lot of confidence in threads. In the last earnings announcement, Zuckerberg called out threads as like, We think we're creating Meta's next biggest social platform right now. I think I take that statement very seriously from a man. Not everything I love about that man, but there are some things that he knows, which is building social networks. There's a lot of confidence in that, and particularly more tactical approach is that ever since threads have released the ability to tag topics in your post in the same way that you could with add hashtags and follow hashtags on X, topics are actually a much more pragmatic way of following specific areas of interest topics, ultimately. You can only have one per post, which I think is a much more sensible way. No more like hashtag stuffing and trying to hack those things. I hate it with that stuff. Now you can add those tags to your profile. They released that last week. Now it makes it easier for you to be found based on the topics of your own personal interests and easier to find your tribe, if you will. We're seeing a lot of that micro-community piece start to build, which I love, actually. This is still being social media, still being focused on the social graph.
Esther
It seemed to lose its way for a while there, didn't it? It seemed to be more ads and boosts and paid content. And you still find a lot of that at the top of your feed, where it's, especially on specific social platforms, it will be pushing the ads more than community-based things.
Andy
And I think that's still going to happen, but we're seeing a bifurcation of what's happening across social networks. So yes, there is... I think social media is generally becoming more entertainment-led, where, like I was talking about the other day, where YouTube Shorts, Insta Reels, TikTok, etcetera, and to a degree, LinkedIn with video are becoming less driven by your social graph. So LinkedIn, and sorry, all social media channels aren't really bothered about showing you content from your friends. We see that as a bad thing, but social media networks look at the data and see that, well, most of us engage with content not from our friends, conversely, because actually content surface from across the broader universe of content actually tends to be more engaging. Whether that's good levels of engaging or whether it's just click-batey, curiosity sparking content. I don't think all of this is perfect, by the way. But anyway, like I said, bifurcation. So one side more entertainment-led, where social media networks, particularly around short form video, have more akin to Netflix than they do a social network of old. Because it's just like, here's some entertainment, like Esther, Melanie, here's the things that you told me that you like just by scrolling, staying or giving it your attention for a little bit is what we think and we've inferred that you like. Have more of it. Because they want to keep you on site. That is what's driven. Sorry, Melanie carry on.
Melanie
No, I agree. I can see it's becoming more interest-led than friend-led, definitely. What about when it comes down to... It says recording here.
Andy
Interest led as opposed to social graph led.
Melanie
Yes. Also, I think the one thing I wanted to ask you is, do you see conversions becoming an easier thing to do in social media now than it was, say, 5-10 years ago?
Andy
When you say conversions, what do you mean? As in sales, clicks to something?
Melanie
Sales, yeah. Sales or clicks to something because initially it was a great awareness tool and it's always been known as a very, very top funnel area of marketing. But because of this interest-led progression? Do you think we can now bring people down to the conversion area better?
Andy
It's a really interesting question. In certain circumstances, I would say yes. Let me I'm going to answer that with a yes, but. The but is, I still think that the bigger opportunity is still an awareness driver, and we've actually got more opportunity to drive awareness than we ever have before. Because it means you can get thousands of views on your content with no followers. So that's an incredibly liberating place to be for small businesses, because actually it's not just about who can get the biggest social graph, who can get the most followers, it's actually who can create the best content and most interesting content. So I think that actually, if you think about it from that perspective, content quality is going to win, is going to still be the primary awareness driver. That being said, depending on... This is very industry-specific, though, Melanie, the way I answer this. People are more ready to shop on social than they ever have been before. Just one look at TikTok shop will tell you that. We're also seeing shifts in social search, so social is becoming more intent-driven as well. Again, topical relevancy is a thing that's key. Making sure you've got good keywords in your caption is essential to showing up in social search. A good clue as to why this matters so much is that even TikTok are starting to sell search ads in the same way that Google sponsor searches. And if that doesn't tell you that user behavior is shifting, I don't know what will. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. But again, it's really context and industry-specific. So if you're selling products to consumers, then I think social represents more of an opportunity for conversion it ever has done before, if you use the shopping features right, et cetera. But I think for the majority of businesses that might not sell directly to consumers, I still think about certainly the short-form video-focused platforms that I've just been speaking about more as a as awareness and a way of driving impressions, driving views on your content. Does that make sense?
Melanie
Yeah.
Esther
So you mentioned there about making the more entertaining or educational.
Andy
Yeah, entertainment.
Esther
Just invent words at this point. How do B2B companies do that? Because it is a lot more boring selling services than selling products.
Andy
Yeah.
Esther
On the whole.
Andy
It can be, but that's where your creativity wins out. And this is where, going back to, again, first principles, the stuff that I talk about in the book is like, as long as you understand exactly who you want to serve and you've been nearly obsessed with the problems that they face, the things that they're interested in, then the content should not be boring. The content is only boring if you talk about yourself, because that's what people find boring. But if you understand the nuances of the market that you're serving, say, content for social media managers, for example, could be boring. It could be like, the best time to post is 8: 00 AM in the morning. Okay, fine. Yeah, whatever. Or it could be a sharing means of what it's like to live as a social media manager. When your boss ask you to approve a content, approve some content at 8: 00 PM on a Saturday. That's things that will resonate with people because I feel seen. And that's all just about understanding the humanity of social media. And we get fixated with data and hacks and optimization. But the fact is, right now, this might change. We're still dealing with humans. We're still selling to humans, and we still, in the main, have social media channels dominated by humans. Sometimes I'm not sure about the trajectory of it. That might well change. I don't want to go down that route because I'm not that thrilled about some of the things that are happening. But in the main, we're still trying to appeal to people. We're still trying to engender some form of emotion. That emotion is trust, predominantly for B2B, and that is about, how much do I understand my audience? Do I understand them enough to entertain them, to make them feel seen? And do I understand them enough to help them do whatever it is that they're trying to do better? And that was the vector that we majored on when we were doing content, how we went out of our way to create interesting, relevant, and educational content in collaboration with anyone else in the industry that we thought was doing good stuff. That would be my answer to that.
Melanie
Okay, that was actually a very robust and interesting answer. Thank you very much, Andy. How about what else is coming out soon? Is there any new products or services or tools or anything-.
Esther
Or platforms.
Melanie
Platforms, anything that we need to know about that's coming soon? Because I know this is going to be out of date. I know we're not making this very evergreen, but we're tapping your knowledge and everybody's getting it here for free. So this is the time to get it, Andy.
Andy
All right. My mind is racing through everything that's happening right now. Not especially new, but fairly recent and showing incredible signs of growth. So again, back on to LinkedIn, newsletters performing incredibly well. So not brand new, but they continue to invest in them and they've made a whole bunch of updates related to data and stuff and the analytics that you can get. I honestly think it's one of the most underutilized growth tricks on LinkedIn because... I want to caveat the way I just said growth tricks, because it only works if you produce Good quality content, though, because creating a newsletter, as you know from as your creators of a podcast, create any long form content is hard. So I think trick was probably the wrong word to use because it does take time. But either way, The most magical thing about LinkedIn is like, one, you can choose your audience. You can, quite frankly, find them, connect with them, and away you go. And as soon as you launch a newsletter, everyone gets notified of like, hey, do you want to subscribe to Melanie's newsletter? No other social channel offers that opportunity. So again, not hugely new, but I think a huge amount of opportunity. Secondly, thought leader ads, again, on LinkedIn, especially if you're going after the founder-led brand approach. And quite frankly, unless you're a massive organization, having a face behind the business is utterly essential for growth. I agree. I'm very Well, glad we all agree on this one because I'm incredibly keen about how we humanize the brands that we are building. I think that's going to be increasingly important as the competitive space is only going to get busier in so many industries as a result of AI. It's never been easier to create a product, create marketing. It's You can't really replicate. Even though you could use something like Hey, Jen, to create a digital avatar of yourself, ultimately, you can still tell that's not quite right. So it's really important that we humanize our brand. I think And that's where thought leader ads are incredibly powerful, because to your point earlier, Esther, ads are still a piece of social media, and we can't ignore them. It's still a part of it. But given how heavily LinkedIn are waiting thought leader ads, yes, you need to pay for them, but it's a wonderful opportunity for you to promote your own narrative and get that into your target audiences feed.
So I think there's a huge amount of opportunity there. And probably the final thing, I'll give you three, and something that, again, I think is going to be incredibly important as social media evolves, because I didn't quite round out the point that I was mentioning earlier. I'm conscious I'll keep this short. We said there's a bifurcation in social. So one side is more awareness-driven, focus on entertainment, more akin to Netflix, et cetera. But I didn't mention the other side. The other side is where we're seeing more and more fragmentation of social to micro-communities. I see Threads, Bluesky, et cetera. And one of those is Substack. So we don't really talk about Substack as a social network, but it really is. So what started as a newsletter platform It's quite hard to get going because you've got to get people to subscribe to your newsletter. It's taking me a long time to grow a fairly modest subscriber base on Substack, but they're increasingly rolling up more and more social features. So there's live video feed, there's the short form video feed on Substack, too. The thing I find most delightful about Substack as it relates to a small business is that we don't need a million followers to be successful. Actually, we just need customers. The delightful thing about Substack is that you keep the data. When people subscribe to you, your newsletter, you get their email addresses. It feels like a much more healthy thing to be promoting and building a community around, whether that's through video, whether it's from newsletters, or I host my podcast on Substack too. But all of the data is yours. I think that's a very important moment of realization of, okay, yes, We do need to play to the social networks' tunes that they create for us to go, Okay, short form video, we will create it. Yes, we know it's important. Yada, yada. Let's go broad with it. But also let's play a bit by our own rules, knowing the fundamentals of, Okay, we'll drive some awareness, but how do we get people down our funnel, so to speak, and be able to keep hold of that data so that we can do other things with that. Anyway, I'm going to stop I'm talking now.
Esther
No, don't. It's been amazing. It's been really, really entertaining and enlightening in a lot of things. I hadn't realized the Substack was now classed as a social media platform, or maybe it always had been. I know a lot of people my age and in their 40s who are turning to Reddit for their information and for things like that. So we have to widen our view of what social media platforms we use or we consider or we look at. But as business owners, do you still think it's the main big ones? It's still Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X. Are there any that are taking over those four spots or any that are coming up and making it into five or six big hitters?
Andy
I would say not really. Those big ones don't really change. It's always, again, incredibly context-specific when you think about, Okay, what channel should you focus on as a business? My advice would vary depending on who you're targeting. But if you talk broader big picture, Facebook and Insta are still the biggest, but YouTube has two and a half billion monthly active users, and there is so much opportunity on YouTube. And YouTube subscribers are hard to grow, for sure. I wish I'd taken YouTube more seriously a long time ago, if I'm honest. But YouTube Shorts is a bit of a shortcut to start driving viewership in the short term. One final little tip, because I can't help myself, is that YouTube at the moment are offering three months free of a tool called repurpose. Io, which allows you to take content from one platform to another. You search it on Google, you'll find it. Youtube are very keen on getting people very active on Shorts, and they're giving away a lot of reach as a result. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. But to answer your question, the big movers don't really shift.
Melanie
Well, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. It's been a pleasure today, Andy.
Andy
Pleasure.
Melanie
Never know quite what to expect in our podcast because we don't create the questions beforehand. We just have a natter. I've got to say, you have just given us a huge amount of information. So thank you so much.
Esther
Gold.
Melanie
Yeah, definitely. I hope the listeners have got their pen and paper. If you haven't, play this back, take this information today. As he said, it does depend on where your audience are, where you are in your funnel and everything else. But there's so much that you can actually try and do with your social media if you apply yourself properly, if you give yourself time. And if you use tools like... Let me think. Any takers?
Andy
I'm just holding up my jumper here.
Melanie
Oh, Adobe Express. Sorry. Yes. Anyway, that's all from us for now, but we'll be back next week with another podcast. Bye-bye.
Esther
Bye.
You know we're going to need the merch, Andy. We're going to need to add that to our merch.
Andy
Yeah, I'm going to need to-.
Esther
Just have to.
Andy
I need to figure out how to speak to the merch gods here. Figure out how we can do that.
Melanie
We like mugs.
