Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the account you know and some that you don’t to explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organisation, and individuals have achieved success in social media, all the tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heading the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

So, this week, I’m joined by Anu Hautalampi, a social media strategist and trainer who’s currently the head of social at United Nations Women. That’s a body that’s dedicated to the gender equality and empowerment of women worldwide. 

I actually first met Anu in her previous job, when she was head of social at Cambridge University. When she told me that she was moving to New York City to head up social at UN Women, I was fascinated. What an amazing position. We stayed in touch and, of course, in the only way that people stay in touch these days, on social media and sprung up a friendship. So, I’m really happy that she can join us today.

Before we get started, if anyone would like to check out the work that Anu and her team are doing, you can find it @UN_Women.

Anu, I am so glad that you could be here to speak with me. Welcome to Social Creatures.

ANU HAUTALAMPI Thank you so much, Cat. It’s lovely to be reunited virtually with you again.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. Absolutely. Anu, so, I mentioned briefly, too briefly, in the introduction what United Nation Women does. And for those listeners who are hearing about this arm of the UN maybe for the first time, it might be kind of difficult for them to gauge what realising such a meaningful and immeasurable objective actually involves. Could you maybe paint a picture for our listeners of what the day-to-day work of the United Nations Women looks like?

ANU HAUTALAMPI Certainly. So, from a social media perspective, which is, you know, kind of my area, it’s very much about advocacy and it’s about encouraging the women around the world who are doing important work and campaigning around women’s rights and women’s empowerment. So, the agency is very much focused on advancing gender equality in line with the wider UN plans of achieving it. You know, we’re still far from it. There’s no country in the world yet that has achieved gender equality. So, there’s a lot of work to be done.

And for anyone going on our Twitter to check our work @UN_Women or going on our Instagram at @UNWomen will see that a lot of the content that we publish on a day-to-day basis is there to inform. So, either show the progress that’s being done around the world or to share some facts around what’s still, you know, the reality for women in different parts of the world, or to encourage people to keep campaigning and, you know, to keep trying to make the world more equal every day with every action that we take.

CAT ANDERSON Thank you. I love that. I love that you’ve already as well honed in on the social side of things, because this being Social Creatures, we are here to focus on social media and the part that it holds as a tool for communication, promotion, and, in your case, activism.

Can I ask more personally: What made you want to become involved in this side of the conversation rather than maybe journalism, PR, or another branch of media? How did you get to where you are today?

ANU HAUTALAMPI So, I actually have quite a long and sort of varied background in communication. So, I have done a bit of everything that you mentioned there, Cat. So, I’ve been a copywriter for an ad agency up in Lapland. You know, selling the Lapland fantasy to tourists. I’ve also done a radio show from Delhi. I lived in India for a year, and I was doing that live for the Finnish National Radio, where I was going around different parts of Delhi and sort of reporting live to people before mobile journalism was actually a thing. So, this was back before social media and before smartphones.

I did a UN volunteer position with the UN Development Programme in Tanzania about ten years ago, which was amazing. I also did an internship with UNICEF in India before then. So, I’ve kind of had that exposure to the work of – of the UN as well as to some of the challenges that women face.

I think it’s also important to mention that coming from one of the most equal countries in the world that is Finland, I just feel that as a person who’s had the privilege of having a relatively easy life, let’s say. And I often think that growing up in a remote village like I did as a girl, had it been in most other parts of the world, there is no way I would be where I am today in terms of education, career development, freedom. You know, just freedom to do my own – make my own choices and have the kind of life that I want without many restrictions at all.

CAT ANDERSON I wonder if you could tell us about how social media directly helps the work of the UN Women and why it’s such an important tool.

ANU HAUTALAMPI Wow. Obviously, the reach is incredible. I mean, I think, across all of our existing channels, we’ve got a reach of about twelve million. I mean, that’s about twelve million followers, I should say. You know, the reach is higher than that. And on key moments, there are these opportunities for us to reach additional people. So, not just sort of the converted or the people who are already following us on a regular basis, but also people who might be less familiar, you know, with the issues or with the situation in the world or people who might feel like, “Oh, there isn’t anything that can be done.” That, you know, this is just the way the world is.

I think social media is an important source for information. It’s also a place for discussion. And I think this is a challenge for small teams like us. We have a very small team for social media, which means that we don’t always have as much time as we would like to have those proper conversations and engagement. You know, a lot of the time, I feel, in many teams, goes to content creation rather than looking at what’s coming back to us in response to those content pieces that we publish. And this is certainly something that I as a social media strategist—. So, if I put my strategy hat on, I definitely think it’s really important to think about also what’s coming back.

So, not just looking at the sentiment, which always should inform, by the way, what we publish next, but also trying to get back to people when they have valid questions, valid points.

Now, the topic of gender equality is not an easy one. So, if you go on our Twitter, you will see that some of the comments we get can be quite aggressive. But, you know, that’s also part of social media as well, is freedom of expression. So, people can voice their opinions, which I think is really important. And they can have quite a wide platform.

I would also like to mention video. The reason I’m such a big advocate for video is that you can show and tell so much. Obviously, you can also give the platform to other people to tell about their realities or to share facts, to have conversations.

And I would also like to mention Twitter Spaces, which is something that we’re quite keen on at the moment. We had a very interesting conversation when we had our campaign of sixteen days against gender-based violence in November. And one of our Ending Violence Against Women experts was answering audience questions from Twitter. So, we had collated some questions that she then answered. And I think that was a great way of also building awareness and increasing people’s knowledge on the topic.

CAT ANDERSON Wow, that was a very comprehensive answer and loads to unpack, but I love it. I wonder, just dialling in a little bit more actually. So, there’s so many larger goals and activities that are going on with social, and it’s something that comes up time and time again in this podcast, that it can be used in just so many different ways to achieve so many objectives.

But in terms of perhaps the specific key performance indicators or KPIs that you yourself measure the impact of your work with, could you maybe share a little bit about what your KPIs are?

ANU HAUTALAMPI So, in terms of growing reach, and I did mention that we are always looking to reach people who don’t already know about us, I think one of the key indicators that we certainly look at is shares and retweets. You know, are we getting into people’s networks? Is our message traveling further than our existing followership or our own bubble?

Another one is clicks. We want people to click through to our website and look at the stories and the information that we have available there.

Reach and impressions is an interesting one, isn’t it? Because we often are expected to give those big, big figures. And I think they still have a place. So, for example, #reach or #impressions is very important for campaigns to give an indicator of how far our message has traveled. 

However, being too fixated on that, I don’t think, is a good idea. So, what I personally look at is things like engagement rates. So, I always try to look at the number of reactions and likes, shares, and other things that people do on social posts in relation to the number of people who saw that particular post. And I think engagement rate can be quite a powerful indicator of what actually are the most popular posts. And trying to do a bit of analysis, you know. Why did they perform so well? What are some of the magic ingredients, if you like, that we could then take and use for future posts to ensure that they also are successful?

CAT ANDERSON When I was actually doing some research for this, I did notice that there are lots of accounts associated with United Nations Women, not just the core, centralised account. Are these run totally independently or is there a core strategy and approvals process in place? Or how do you manage so many different localised accounts?

ANU HAUTALAMPI I’m always interested in how different organisations approach this. So—. And particularly, you know, comparing, coming from the academic world where there’s a lot of freedom and then kind of coming on to a much more different kind of environment, you know, where I work now. So, the way the UN Women accounts are managed is they are all set up by us centrally at the headquarters. But after that, the country offices and regional offices run them freely. 

Now, whenever we are setting up a new account, it’s important that there’s a content plan. This is something we would touch upon. You know, is it sustainable? Who will look off to the account? What type of content will you be posting? Do you have a content calendar? Just to make sure that all the work that goes into launching a new account will then actually carry that account and help it grow.

I know there are organisations that are very strict about setting up additional accounts. And I think it’s good to practice care and it’s good to be strategic and planned about it.

At the same time, there can also be challenges around fake accounts. So, back when I was in Cambridge, this was one of the reasons we were very keen to get set up on TikTok and get our account verified, so that people would see, “Right. This is the actual, you know, legit university account.” So, that’s another part of this piece.

CAT ANDERSON I wonder, there’s obvious risk with having multiple accounts. But perhaps, what do you see are the advantages for it? Because it’s signs like it’s something in this role and your previous role you have decided to allow and you’ve set up the structures of rind it. So, I’d like to know what you think of the advantages of having the more localised accounts.

ANU HAUTALAMPI Well, if we think about it realistically just in terms of work, trying to share every piece of information, trying to centrally monitor every conversation, I don’t think, is possible. Also just having central accounts will not be able to provide the type of service, let’s say, to other parts of the house where they can, you know, engage with their specific followers on the themes that they are experts in.

Looking at the type of content that, for example, our country offices publish, it is very specific to the work they are doing on the ground or it is very specific to the challenges and issues that they are focusing on. I don’t think it’s realistic for a centralised account to be publishing that much content.

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

ANU HAUTALAMPI And that content would actually not necessarily always be of interest to a global audience. So, I think it’s important here to really come back to the strategic thinking around “Who is our audience?”, “What are the goals?”

The first question always is: What are you trying to achieve? How does this align with the organisational goals? And whilst we do have our shared mission, our shared purpose, of course, across the organisation, the programming and the actual activities will vary largely between regions and between countries.

CAT ANDERSON Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confused and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice.

STACEY WRIGHT Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, to your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

“Dear Stacey, 

“I’m seeking your advice around an upcoming campaign for my home fragrance client. They sit in the consumer-packaged goods or CPG category. So, they already struggle for high volumes of engagement. Sharing how you cover bad odours in your home is not exactly the most ‘Gram-able at the best of times.

“The campaign they’re planning centres around the fifteenth birthday of their first go-to market product and the creation of a limited edition birthday cake scented room spray.

“They are keen to make the campaign social first, focusing on social media activity without any investment or support from other channels such as out of home advertising on transport or TV spots.

“How do I tell them that their party might not be one anyone wants to go to, and how do I plan and create content that doesn’t give off wisps of desperation?

“Trying to have my cake and eat it, Ash.”

Wow. Okay. Well, I think the best place to start here is a “What’s in it for me?” approach from a user perspective. Some brands aren’t bothered about creating content just for the sake of it. You know, just to massage egos internally. When we work in agencies, the success of that content is often a reflection of our ability as specialist consultants to deliver those campaigns.

The first part of that is about branching out. Don’t just broadcast it. Work with advocates and influencers basically to show other people being excited about the project or the campaign. So, like, they’re the people at the party, right. And people are to want to come to that party. So, maybe think about creating something that YouTubers can unbox or actually have a little party pack that you can send out to influencers for them to create content for you.

For your own content, especially if you’ve got a small budget or next to no budget, get creative and – and think about what the demographics of your audience are going to enjoy. What do they consume on social that they get really excited about, and try and create content that resonates with. 

Can you get an illusion cake made that looks like the spray bottle? Is it cake? Is it a spray bottle? 

Can you light the candles on a birthday cake and spray them out with the spray? Blindfold the office manager and do a real cake versus the spray smell test. 

Or if the audience is a demographic with kids, maybe do a baby cake smash parody. So, instead of having a baby smashing a cake all over the floor, it’s actually cleaner and neater to use the spray bottle.

Find things that you’re going to get excited about, so that, you know, if you’re not already feeling the brief, but also find things that your social followers are going to get really excited about and want to share and interact with.

So, the important question, I think, at the heart of this letter is about communicating back to the client. It seems, in this example, that this is a novelty fun product that they’ve created. So, they might be open to these kinds of wilder ideas, unless I’ve just missed a trend about making your house smell like birthday cakes. 

And you might be surprised at their reaction. So, whether you’re having fun about it, they’ll see that you’re excited about it. And that will come through in your pictures to them.

However, if they do approach social media with a little bit of trepidation as a brand, I personally used to use these wild blue-sky ideas that frankly were never going to be implemented as a way to still have ideas in there that push the envelope and were creative, but seemed like more of a middle ground to them and less scary.

So, Ash, I hope I have managed to keep birthdays as a cause for celebration for you.

 And, listeners, until next time. Stay strong and stay social. Now back to the interview.

CAT ANDERSON Speaking of the overall objective, the topics that you deal with do tend to be quite heavy. They are important, of course. But they are heavy. I wonder: Is this something that you consider for the feed? Are there ever any moments where you could consider adding some levity, for example?

ANU HAUTALAMPI That’s – that’s so interesting. There’s a lot to unpick there. We are trying to have a balance between sharing facts and data, sharing stories of people, giving inspiration, then encouraging the activists who are out there, you know, doing work for gender equality and women’s rights. So, we’re trying to strike that balance.

We do have some quite, I would say, clever posts—and I can say this because I didn’t create them, so this is kudos to the team—that get a lot of interaction time after time. And so, that’s another thing that I think is really important, is to, you know, allow yourself to reuse assets that you have. If you have some so-called bankers, if you’ve got assets that, you know, do get a lot of engagement time after time, don’t shy away from using them. Because often, as social media managers or social media team members, you know, we – we want to be so innovative. We want to create something new all the time. But, actually, sometimes, it’s worth just looking at, you know, your content performance and looking over the past year or two years and saying like, “Right, these assets did really well. Maybe we should just keep them on our content calendar and look for opportunities to reuse them.”

So, we actually have a completely public Trello board with all of our content. So, if you do a little Google, you’ll find it. And there, you can see the approach that the team is taking to content planning, content management, but also repurposing of assets.

CAT ANDERSON That’s brilliant, you know, because right across marketing, people are looking for opportunities to find evergreen content and to have something that you can, you know, have for a long time on your site or something that very—. Yeah. It’s not going to go out of date anytime soon. And it’s actually really refreshing to hear you say that. I’ve actually never heard anyone talk so much about evergreen content on social, but it makes so much sense.

I wonder just talking about the heaviness of the content. And I – I really appreciate the balance that you’re trying to strike sounds perfect, actually, between inspiration on the hard hitting. Because something that I know from friends who work in charity or activists, compassion fatigue is a real thing, and especially with everything that’s going on in the world, but over the past number of years, even. We all know that looking at the news for too long, it can be detrimental to mental health. So, I wonder how you protect yourself with everything that you see every day.

ANU HAUTALAMPI I think, for me, definitely as a team leader, it’s really important to keep a positive atmosphere in the team, but also, I guess, a type of a blessing, is that if one goes in, you know, with a positive mindset, with a big smile whenever one can, that is infectious. And then, once you’ve got that team energy, even sort of the more difficult things become easier. I mean, this is not to paint some sort of la-la land picture. You know, the things will not go away. But let’s just say that it’s important to have that team spirit and be in it together and have that chat.

So, for example, we use Signal. So, you can share some of the stuff, you know, just to say like, “Ugh.” You know? “It’s a bit hard going.” Or share your sentiments. And then, that makes you immediately feel better.

There is often this idea that if one works in social media, all one does is, you know, look at Twitter news or Twitter updates nonstop. Now, that’s not the reality of it, really. Of course, it’s part of it. So, I will check in and I see all the horrible things that are happening in the world. But I think, for me, personally, being in a job like this, there’s a reason I’m in this job, you know. One way for me to deal with what is going on in the world is to try and do something about it. And that has very much kind of been the guiding light in my whole career. So, I’ve always wanted to work in something that has an impact on things that are important for me. In this case, gender quality. But also environmental sustainability. Because without women and girls, you know, the world will not survive.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, my goodness. What an inspirational answer. I have a huge smile on my face, and I really hope that anyone who’s listening to this does as well. Positivity, talking and sharing problems, and staying focused on the purpose of the work that you’re doing. You really are so inspirational. But I’m going to spare everyone from me fan-girling over you.

Changing speed for just one second. I think it’s really obvious that you are a woman who gets so much joy from life. And I know that your job is a big part of that. Could you tell us what is it that you get the greatest satisfaction from in your day-to-day work?

ANU HAUTALAMPI It’s working with the team. It’s – it’s going in, seeing the team, and doing something together. You know, being a greater sum of our parts.

CAT ANDERSON Another gorgeous answer. 

Well, it actually segues quite neatly into our next question, which is that, obviously, sometimes social media can be a little bit discouraging. It’s a wild and wonderful beast that can go in many different directions, but especially when it might seem that there’s infinite scope to your practical and ideological goals.

But putting that aside for a second, how do you celebrate your successes?

ANU HAUTALAMPI Well, one sort of example comes into mind. This is from when I was back in Cambridge. We were approaching one million followers on Instagram, and we wanted to celebrate it. And this was in the time of lockdowns in England. And I talked to Lloyd, who manages the Instagram account at Cambridge, about whether we might be able to do some projections on the Senate House, which is the so-called headquarters of the – of the Cambridge University. And he was able to pull a few strings. And we worked together with an AV company and projected pictures or screenshots of some of our Instagram posts onto the building, as well as the Instagram logo, our handle. So, Lloyd created this whole wonderful projection. 

And because the building is white—. So anyone who has been to Cambridge will know that it’s a – it’s a beautiful white building in the centre of the city. So, we did that protection, but the projection itself was not the celebration. It was the video we did of it that we then published once we hit that one million followers.

And I think I wanted to share this just as an example of, you know, encouraging anyone working with social media, really, to try and think of ways that you could celebrate together and do something physical. You know, for us in social media, it’s everything is so immaterial. But, actually, having that projection onto a physical building and then doing like a video of it, I don’t know, there was something very meta about it.

So, that’s an example of sort of a big way to celebrate. But I think, equally importantly, the small day-to-day celebrations. So, what I try to do as a team leader is, if I see someone do something really well, I will just spontaneously, you know, applaud it or I will give them credit. Whether it’s in a Teams call, whether it’s on our Signal chat, on an email, I think it’s really important just to recognise when people are doing a good job.

And it’s so easy to forget about that or start thinking that, “Oh, this is just the way it is.” No. That’s not just the way it is. That is someone doing a great job, whether it’s, you know, someone in your team, someone in the wider organisation, even a partner, or whether it’s yourself. And I think that’s really important, the day-to-day recognition of great work.

CAT ANDERSON The day-to-day recognition of great work. I really couldn’t agree more. A friend of mine once gave me some advice that has really stuck with me. Do you know, sometimes, when you hear a little nugget and you hold onto it forever …

ANU HAUTALAMPI Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON … which was to celebrate any moment that comes your way that’s worth marking, a moment in time. Even if it’s small, these moments should be seized and noted and made a whole big shebang of. And it’s a good thing to do. So, it’s great to hear that you share a similar sentiment.

I wonder: What is a key piece of advice that you would give to a fledgling organisation or charity that’s hoping to better their social media presence?

ANU HAUTALAMPI Definitely focus. Don’t try to do it all at the same time. Pick your goals, define your audience, and then choose the channels. Remember that social media is just part of the mix. It won’t solve all your problems, but it will support your work. Don’t try to go on all the platforms immediately. I don’t think that’s sustainable, especially if you have a small team. And do regular measuring. You know, set up sort of—. Set up some targets. Where do you want to be? You can look at your competition or peers. See how they’re doing. Look at their content. Look at how it performs. Make a plan, evaluate, and then readjust.

CAT ANDERSON The final question is a question that we’ll be asking all of our guests on this podcast.

ANU HAUTALAMPI Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON If you had to delete all of the other accounts that you follow on Twitter and you only have one left, who would make the cut?

ANU HAUTALAMPI Wow. If this is for the UN Women account, we absolutely have to follow the secretary general. So, there’s no way we can cut him off. So, he would – he would be there. 

If – if this is for me as Anu, I would follow Subway Creatures. So, there’s an amazing account of true, real-life clips that people have filmed in the tube, in the subway in New York, and you will see the most amazing things every day. So, I would highly recommend that. And that’s kind of your light relief, you know. That’s your comic relief of the day as well done.

CAT ANDERSON I love that. Although I’m slightly offended, ’cause you follow me on Instagram. But that’s okay.

Anu, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today and sharing the important work that you’re doing. So, thank you.

ANU HAUTALAMPI My pleasure, Cat. And thanks to everyone listening. And don’t forget to give credit to yourself and your team. And keep smiling.

CAT ANDERSON You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to today’s guest and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

Make sure you join me for the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media at @SproutSocial or by sending your social media to our agony aunt, Stacey, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening. And catch you in two weeks.

The post UN Women: Social-based activism on a global scale appeared first on Sprout Social.

CAT ANDERSON Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone. And, really, nearly anything goes. But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know. But that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know and some that you don’t to explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

This week, I’m joined by Finn Deasy, social media lead at the Royal Academy. For those who don’t know, the Royal Academy of Arts or the RA is an art institution based in Piccadilly, in London. It was founded in 1768 and has a pretty unique position as an independent and privately-funded institution that’s led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment, and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions, education, and debate.

But how does the Royal Academy relate to social? It uses social to bring art, both the appreciation and the creation of it, to the masses. It’s fun while being cultural, it’s historical while being modern, and it’s serious while being silly.

Intrigued? 

You’re not the only one as the Royal Academy boasts hundreds of thousands of followers right across all of its platforms. If you want to check them out, you can do so @RoyalAcademy.

Finn, welcome to Social Creatures.

FIONNUALA DEASY Thank you. Very nice to be here.

CAT ANDERSON I’m delighted to have you here. Because I think there’s – there’s a lot to talk about with the Royal Academy. And I think, probably—. The Royal Academy has been championing art and artists since 1768. So, I mean, is it fair to say social media’s a pretty new tool in your arsenal when it comes to the promotion and appreciation of art with these audiences? Perhaps, you could tell us how you use it and some of the results that you’ve seen.

FIONNUALA DEASY Sure. So, as you mentioned, the RA is in Piccadilly. It’s this amazing big building with tons of brilliant exhibitions, and it’s just a really beautiful place, all about kind of championing art and artists. And we just basically try and do that on social. So, we want to be a nice place where people can visit. They can see some art. They can learn about how to make a woodblock print or how to hold a paintbrush or, you know, see Grayson Perry wearing a nice dress, or any of the sort of amazing stories that come from this building that houses a ton of different activities. And we just try and tell those stories and share that across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.

There’s a lot of staff at the RA. A lot of people are doing—. They’re rt of curators, exhibitions. A Summer Exhibition every year. And we basically try and have social as a place where all of our colleagues can feed in and be involved, and we can try and reflect all the amazing work that’s happening on our channels and give our audience something that’s valuable. Even if you can’t actually come in to Piccadilly, you can still find something nice and arty on our feeds.

CAT ANDERSON Well, and I think you do a wonderful job of that, because when you explore your Twitter and Instagram feed, it kind of feels like having an art lesson with your – your favourite teacher. You know? There’s a really lovely mix of humour and genuine passion for art and also the world that we inhabit, but it’s all done in a very accessible way, which I think—. I don’t know. Sometimes, people could be forgiven for thinking art is very hard to connect with. And I love that you really put an effort on making it super, super accessible.

I think how you’ve used social then marries that. Plus, you know, it’s very obvious that you’ve understood social’s capacity to communicate and connect with audiences, like, at large. Was this a strategy then that the RA always had with social media or was it something that developed over time?

FIONNUALA DEASY So, in 2017, we had a bit of a sort of overhaul to celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth birthday. We brought in a new strategy for our digital content [unintelligible] very, like, journalistic approach. And then, in terms of social, we were trying to really create valuable content that worked for our audience wherever they may.

And in terms of strategy, it’s—. You know, we try and be really data-driven. It’s—. And, ultimately, you’re constantly getting feedback. And you can always tell how things are doing. So, I think it’s kind of reporting, listening to our audience, seeing what’s doing well, seeing what’s bombing, seeing what people aren’t interested in, and then using that to inform how we approach going forward.

CAT ANDERSON Would it be fair to say, as well as the data-driven side of things, you like to experiment? And, like, one such campaign that I think just seemed so fun and maybe it kind of gave me the vibes that it could have been a little bit of a “Let’s see if this works,” and then it absolutely snowballed into success, was the #RAFridayDoodle challenge.

So, for those who haven’t seen it, it’s where you invite your followers to submit a doodle on an artistic theme of your choice that week. So, there’s been things like windmills, lionesses, and hams. Like, ham. It’s so funny, but it’s such a – a lovely way to engage with your audience every week. Did that start off as a little experiment? And what are the strategic benefits to having, you know, silly, little fun campaigns like that?

FIONNUALA DEASY Yeah. Very much an experiment. So, that campaign began as the daily doodle in the dark depths of the beginning of lockdown when we essentially closed our doors and had to think of a way to keep our audience interested in us and art and also just keep them entertained. Times have changed a bit, and we’ve sort of coming back to some sort of normal—. We’ve gone to our Friday Doodle. So, just a weekly drawing event. And also, we try and focus on or use the Friday Doodle to really highlight our collection. 

Because I think a lot of people think of the RA, our strength is our exhibitions. So, people come to the exhibitions. But we do have an amazing permanent collection built up since, you know, 1760s of Michelangelo or The Last Supper or these incredible works that are on free display at all times.

But yeah. We use the Friday Doodle now to kind of share those objects and get people to draw them. I think, last week, we had the Venus de Milo, and we wanted people to kind of draw their own arms onto it and things like that.

RA-themed fun is the doodle. And it is, like—. Yeah. That campaign is totally the highlight of our week on social. We have this amazing group of people who draw every week and just super talented and really make our Fridays.

And in terms of strategy, it’s like—. It’s super authentic to the RA. We’ve got an art school, the RA School, which we mentioned, but it’s the longest established art school in Britain. And, you know, right now, we’ve got, downstairs, students making art. And so, in terms of the RA’s strategy, the doodle just feels like a Twitter version of that. We had Turner and William Blake here drawing our strategies and things when they were students here. So, to continue that on Twitter just—. It feels like a modern version of it. And anyone can take part. It’s super open. 

And we—. You know, it’s been great to watch the doodles get even more [unintelligible]. Sometimes share, like, older ones and “Look, how I’ve improved.” And it’s, yeah, very rewarding for us. So, we love it. And, you know, it’s nice to have an engaged group of people every week. So, there’s benefit in that, but also it just makes us smile. So, that’s important.

CAT ANDERSON I love that so much. And it’s so amazing to hear you had Turner and William Blake as students there. And I think what’s really great about the RA is, I think, it really challenges the misconception that art is only for, like, the upper classes and it isn’t for everybody. Because, more often than not, artists are not necessarily from the upper classes.

But you did mention the art school, which means I am going to have to mention that it got a very huge cameo recently in Bridgerton. So, like, the RA was low-key one of the—. Like, a pretty important storyline in Bridgerton this season. I wonder how that impacted you. And did you know about that? And was that something that you could incorporate into your social media strategy as well? Because, obviously, Bridgerton is such a huge cultural moment, whether you love it or hate it. It’s massive. And yeah. It was kind of crazy that the RA was a big part in it this season.

FIONNUALA DEASY Yeah. It was a – a big character. It was—. Yeah. It’s a surprise for us. We – we didn’t—. We didn’t—. Well, I – I wasn’t aware of that happening. So, it was, yeah, very exciting to get an email on a Friday about our feature. And we put out a little tweet. I think something like, you know, “If Bridgerton brought you here, welcome,” which is very, like, low-key. We saw some people coming to the website who were kind of wondering what it was and stuff. So, everyone was super excited to be featured.

And the RA had an interesting part, let’s say. Benedict Bridgerton is our newest alumni. And he had some good times at the RA. Some wine was drunk. Some shenanigans were had. But we are working on something with our archivist and librarian to maybe kind of fact-check our – our representation, shall we say, or at least just have a little review of it.

There’s a scene, I think, that is quite clearly at the Summer Exhibition. Netflix don’t sue me, but I think it’s the Summer Exhibition. The Summer Exhibition has a very distinct way of hanging where we pile the art on top each other and, like, get, like, thousands of fireworks in there. The queen’s there and things like that. So, yeah. It was good to see the RA.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, wow.

FIONNUALA DEASY Yeah. It – it was a surprise for us. But everyone’s very happy to be in it and happy to have people who maybe haven’t heard of the RA, you know, seeing it on Netflix. 

And the school still exists and is still open, and we have students right now who are RA school students just like Benedict Bridgerton. I mean, not just like him. They’re much better behaved. 

A lot of galleries in London, amazing galleries. The national galleries just around the corner. But we are the only one, I think, that still has this operating art school as a huge part of what we do. So, to have Netflix notice that feels okay. 

I basically want to do, like, a fact-checking piece about what Bridgerton did get right, what it got wrong, because we want to tell our side of the story, not just the wine drinking and the lecherousness.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. The shenanigans,

FIONNUALA DEASY The shenanigans. Yeah. Maybe not lecherous. The shenanigans.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. But some shenanigans are good, though. And I think that—. You know, what I think for what is a very well-established, respected arts institution, you aren’t afraid to introduce your followers to content that could maybe be considered a little bit indelicate or a little bit silly. Recently, you championed the work of, and you might have to keep me right here, Finn, on the pronunciation, Kawanabe Kyōsai.

FIONNUALA DEASY Kawanabe Kyōsai.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. You’ve nailed it. I’m not very good at that. But they’re a nineteenth century Japanese painter and a master of traditional and satirical paintings. And the RA decided to feature details of a painting of his called Fart Battle over a series of tweets. And I know people can’t see this on the podcast, but you’ve got a massive grin on your face there. 

So, these – these pictures showed figures farting at each other and wind leaking and exploding—that’s your quote—and farts blowing away heavy sacks of rice. There’s kind of no two ways about it. This is pretty bawdy content by most standards. But, you know, it’s fun. It’s playful. It’s silly. And I kind of wonder: Is that—? Again, is that something where you’re purposefully pushing people’s boundaries to shine a spotlight on this sort of art?

FIONNUALA DEASY The kind of bread and butter of the RAs are exhibitions, and they’re super varied. Last month, we had Francis Bacon and his super dark, twisted paintings, alongside Whistler and his very sort of his depiction of people dressed in white, alongside other artists. And also we opened, last month, Kawanabe Kyōsai’s exhibition, which is made up of Israel Goldman’s collection of this nineteenth century Japanese masters’ scrolls and prints. And he’s kind of gone quite under the radar compared to someone like Hokusai or, you know, these more renowned Japanese painters.

But Kyōsai was essentially a super bawdy. He was a sake-drinking, partying maverick, and, you know, as well as being a very skilled and brilliant artist. A lot of the work he was producing was satire. So, when you see the Fart Battles, that’s very much about kind of teasing people. And, actually, that – that tradition depicting fart battles goes back to the ninth century. So, it’s a—.

CAT ANDERSON What?

FIONNUALA DEASY It’s—. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been around. It’s not something that he made up. And, yeah, he does some crazy things as, like, frogs that are people and, like, all kind of used to satire and – and, like, Westerners as skeletons and all this [unintelligible] fun show.

All of the copy you saw there as pretty much taken from our catalogue. For every exhibition, the RA produces a catalogue with tons of background and information, and the curators of that show, RA Publishing, who we collaborate with a lot when we come to making exhibition campaigns. You know, if you want more Fart Battle, buy the catalogue. And it was fun, ’cause we could share that on April Fool’s Day to sort of ride that wave of, like, silliness. But it wasn’t April Fool’s. There really are Fart Battles currently, like, hung up in the RA, and they’re great.

CAT ANDERSON That’s amazing. But don’t you think it’s funny? ‘Cause, sometimes, we have people on this podcast, and they talk about the curation of what will work on social and maybe what won’t work. And, oftentimes, silliness really goes a long way on social. It’s amazing to hear that it’s not really social that’s created this appreciation for silly content, because fart battles have been around since the ninth century. Like, that’s what I’m going to be taking away from this conversation.

We’ve always had an appreciation for this silly content, and just social’s shining a massive spotlight on it now.

FIONNUALA DEASY A hundred percent. Yeah. We’ve always been fart-loving people.

CAT ANDERSON I do love that you shine a spotlight on this full breadth of content from the stuff that’s sort of classically beautiful and recognised right through to our fart battles as we’ve mentioned.

During the pandemic, your accounts promoted better mental health by encouraging meditation and offering followers relaxing images as well. And you mentioned that earlier that, you know, there was stuff that you were doing when your doors closed just to kind of keep yourselves busy as well. How important is it to offer a variety of ways for people to connect with your content?

FIONNUALA DEASY Yeah. We really had to adapt when we were making content that wasn’t sort of promoting people coming in. It was thinking about how we could be valuable to them at home or in any way. So, as you say, we did these sort of mindful Mondays. Things like slow pans with landscapes, with some mindfulness, breathing exercises, and things like that. You know, people really enjoyed.

Now, I think it’s—. You know, that’s been a good lesson that the RA can reach beyond the building and we can produce things that it’s not just going to be a good post if you’ve seen the exhibition. Like, even if you are in America or, I don’t know, Timbuktu, you can read our Instagram and read a nice story about Francis Bacon, and you don’t have to be in the building. And I think that’s, yeah, something valuable social can do in terms of, like, extending the brand and the reach. 

And – and I think we would want all our content to be really accessible and open for everyone. So, you don’t need a degree in art history to connect with our content. You can be very new to the RA and hopefully still kind of get it.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, that’s so nice. I wonder, actually, in terms of the stuff that you’ve maybe shared on social, like, are there any pieces that you’ve shared and they’ve really just resonated, like, in a massive way more than that you noticed?

FIONNUALA DEASY You know what people love? People love paintings and portraits of dogs, pets. Animals are super popular. So, that would be very engaged with content. But, generally, I think people like seeing, you know, artists they know. Like, our David Hockney exhibition was super popular on social.

CAT ANDERSON That’s so funny as well though, because, again, we obviously touched on how the bawdy content has been around since the dawn of time, way before social media. But everybody loves animal content on social media. So, it’s so funny that, like, from a classical art perspective, you can completely fulfil this desire for people.

Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice?

STACEY WRIGHT Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean is time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

“Dear Stacey,

“I’m keen to learn how to improve the engagement on my flourishing Twitter account for the primary school class that I teach. As far as the school goes, it’s pretty successful, if I do say so myself. It’s had praise for many of the parents and has also caught the eye of the education trust that we’re a part of. They want to use it as an example amongst other schools like ours of putting the community brand value into action.

“Whilst I’ve gained a couple of thousand followers already, making me celeb influencer status in teacher terms, I’m struggling, however, to foster any interaction on the post beyond a couple of likes. How do I encourage conversation and active interactions on my tweet to enhance that community feel and go full teach-fluencer with A-grade content?

“Your sincerely, Mr. Scott.”

Mr. Scott, seemingly gone are the days when your mom would only know what you were up to at school by going to parents evening. Let’s do a quick Social 101. Let’s get back to a few basics that will see you flying even higher in no time.

So, firstly, get back to the classroom. Twitter runs their own free academy called Twitter Flight School for social media newbies, and it covers all levels from the basics of tweeting right through to campaign planning and advertisement strategy on Twitter. Plus, you’re busy enough lesson planning and moulding young minds. So, it’s helpful that the courses are all broken down into speedy, very digestible chunks.

Next up, copywrite in quick wins. Firstly, use emojis. They’re eye-catching and [unintelligible] to grab attention. 

“Any questions?” Psychologically, people think that they should respond even if it’s rhetorical. So, use questions. And also use active verbs. It makes people feel part of the action and more likely to respond to your tweet.

For those of us who aren’t teachers out there, past tense could be “Class 4S really enjoyed World Book Day” compared with active verbs, “Class 4S are really enjoying World Book Day.”

Then, you can add a question at the end. “Who is your favourite fictional character of all time?”

The PTA will be all over that.

Once you have that down, also mix in some post types that are defined by engagement themselves. So, things like Twitter polls. And you can make it fun. Like, “Class 4S smashing there nine-times tables. How long did it take you to work out what nine times twelve is?” And give them options, like, “a couple of seconds,” “a couple of minutes,” “never going to happen without a calculator.” Really start to play with the audience that you have built up already.

Lastly, do a bit of promotion among your immediate community. So, get your tweets in front of people in a timely manner or where they may consume it more frequently. So, ask your web admin to add the Twitter feed to the school website or encourage parents and guardians to switch on push notifications from your profile, so that they see posts in real time. They’ll get a ping as soon as you tweet.

And also use a scheduling function where you can. Let’s face it, Mr. Scott. As sensational as you are on Twitter, you have more important things to do. So, rather than feeling the fear of “What do I post every day or this week?” when lesson-planning, add some questions or fun facts to drafts or post them later using the schedule function for those days when inspiration and patience might be in short supply.

So, Mr. Scott, I hope these pointers help make you top of the class.

Until next time, listeners. Stay strong and stay social. And now back to the interview.

CAT ANDERSON So, we mentioned Bridgerton, of course, which was, as you said, unexpected, but delightfully received. But what other partnerships and collaborations have come about as a result of your use of social media?

FIONNUALA DEASY So, I would say maybe not so much collaboration, but, like, ongoing. The daily doodles I have mentioned. We have this weekly group of doodler who, every week, will be doodling and sharing these amazing artworks with us, which is, like, a partnership because, you know—. And we need them.

And then, for our Summer Exhibition, which is the biggest exhibition in the world, last year, I think it was fourteen hundred artworks and that’s fourteen hundred artists, roughly, involved in that. And through that, we love to tell their stories. And most pieces of art have a good story behind them that works really well on social. 

Last year, there was this amazing painting that was this guy asleep on the overground in London. The artist got in touch with us to tell us that the story behind it was someone had taken a sneaky photo, as you sometimes do, on the tube. Then, a year or so later, they saw the subject of that painting walking around and they ran up to them and said, “I’ve – I’ve painted you from a picture.” And they became really good friends as they’re actually both artists. And we could tell that on social. And our audience just loved it, ’cause it’s so relatable and brilliant and surprising and, yeah, just really sweet.

And so, because we have this huge exhibition with tons of people and, you know, members of the public. You know, anyone can [unintelligible] our Summer Exhibition. There’s a lot of unexpected collaborations in terms of people bringing us these incredible stories that we can then use our platform to share. I think that’s kind of the whole point of the RA and the Summer Exhibition. And to extend that onto social just feels really natural and great to have engaged artists who want to share their stories with us.

And I would also say our Young Artists’ Summer Show, which is a bit newer than Summer Exhibition, and that’s for, I think, artists under nineteen. I probably should have mentioned that campaign, because we essentially share every week a piece of art by a young artist. And those have just been extraordinarily successful. People absolutely love them, which is unexpected in some ways, because we are—. At the Royal Academy of Arts, we have these associations with this traditional type of art. But, actually, you know, young artists should be celebrated. And the work they’re producing is so joyful. And that’s—. It’s not technically a Picasso. But to me, it’s just as good. And to be sharing it and having people enjoying that and wanting to engage with those young artists. Finding those artists, partnering with them, telling their stories, that’s probably my favourite part of my job.

CAT ANDERSON So nice to hear that. Again, even just being called the Royal Academy maybe signs a little bit intimidating. But for these young artists to share their art with a community of people who are – who know their stuff about art, but to get that lovely, warm reaction and for their art to be so well engaged with must be a really important moment in the life of a young artist.

And I think that kind of marries quite well into the next question, which is that, obviously, we’ve mentioned already that you’ve been supporting artistic endeavours since 1768, which is a very long time. What do you think that the artists of the pre-Internet era would have made of social media?

FIONNUALA DEASY The RA was founded by Joshua Reynolds, the artist, and a group of artists, and they essentially wanted the academy to be a place where artists could kind of meet up and paint and draw and make art. But also, they put on lectures for the public. And people could come to Summer Exhibition and everyone could come in and, you know, learn a bit about art and we continue that. That’s still totally what we’re all about, not just having amazing exhibitions, which is what people know us for, but also promoting the practice for an art itself. 

And I think, yeah, I think Joshua Reynolds, therefore, would probably like social media, because we’ve managed to reach a lot of people. You know, we make—. With our learning team, we make brilliant videos about different kind of techniques. And then, sharing them on social as well as on our website, you know, can reach a lot of people. And I think that would be—. The founding members of the RA, I hope, would be pleased with that.

CAT ANDERSON The final question that I have for you is a question that we will be asking everybody who comes onto this podcast, which is that if the RA had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on Twitter, leaving only one, which would it be and why?

FIONNUALA DEASY I think if we had to follow someone, maybe Grayson Perry, not just because of the phenomenal outfits, but also Grayson’s art club, the TV show that he does on Channel 4 with artists all over the country.

CAT ANDERSON It’s funny. When I asked that, I wondered—. Grayson Perry popped into my head, because I feel like he maybe embodies a lot of what the RA is about as well. That’s a great choice.

Well, Finn, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. It’s been really lovely. And I, for one, need to get my butt into the RA. I need to come and, like, check everything out. You’ve really inspired me. So, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. It’s been absolutely lovely.

FIONNUALA DEASY Oh, thank you. It’s been really nice to be here.

CAT ANDERSON You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Finn Deasy of the Royal Academy for joining me today and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

Make sure you catch the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media @SproutSocial or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt, Stacey, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you in two weeks.

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The post Royal Academy: A canvas for creative communication appeared first on Sprout Social.

Cat Anderson: Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone, and really, nearly anything goes. But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know—and some that you don’t—to explore the weird, wonderful ways that businesses, organizations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

So this week I’m joined by Kevin Crowe, the digital manager at ParalympicsGB. ParalympicsGB has been doing absolutely amazing work on social, so much so that it is one of the most followed—if not the most followed—Paralympian account on social, which I think is really, really interesting, so hopefully we’ll have an opportunity to get into that in our conversation.

Paralympics themselves grew from a small gathering of British World War II veterans in 1948, and it’s grown into one of the largest international sporting events in the early 21st century. The first official Paralympic Games, which were no longer open exclusively to war veterans, were held in Rome in 1916, in which 400 athletes with a disability from 23 countries competed.

These days though, thousands of competitors from over a hundred countries take part. And we should mention that the British Paralympians did the UK proud at this year’s competition, realizing 13 top five finishes, which is the most ever by a ParalympicsGB team at a winters games. If you would like to follow what the ParalympicsGB team is up to on social, you can search @ParalympicsGB for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, or @ParalympicsGB_official to connect on Instagram.

Kevin, welcome to social creatures.

Kevin Crowe: Hi, Cat. Thanks for having me.

Cat Anderson: Well, thank you for coming. We’re delighted to have you. Jumping straight into the questions, Paralympics are organized in parallel with the Olympic Games, which means that both summer and winter installments are happening every single four years. And we just had the 2022 winter games this year—which have just completed—so I wonder if this is like a bittersweet moment for you, for the – the athletes, for the organizers, and for the administrators alike. Are you enjoying this opportunity to decompress? Or are you already chomping at the bit and impatient for the next event?

Kevin Crowe: [laughs] Like, the— Enjoying having my sort of feet on the ground, definitely. It’s been a – a crazy six months. The Tokyo 2021 Games—as it – as it ended up being from 2020—followed by the winter games in Beijing within a six month period. It’s unprecedented, and we hope we don’t have to do it again, but it’s been, you know, kind of a wild ride at the same time.

Paris 2024 is the next Games, and it can feel like a long way off, but also, you know, our teams are already on the ground in Paris. They’re talking to the Organizing Committee about the Village, about our preparation camps. We are starting to talk about our sort of social teams, logistics, and all that, so we sort of— We’re straight into the next thing, really.

The great thing about working on a Paralympic Games is that they go all over the world, and the next one is a new place, and Tokyo and Beijing were so different in lots of ways to the ones before, you know. They’re on Asian time zone. And Paris, you know, Milan-Cortina afterwards, you know, we’re back in Europe on, you know, similar time zones, and we’re sort of all systems go. And it’s hard not to be excited to see how some of those young athletes who came through in Tokyo are going to sort of fare in Paris.

Cat Anderson: Yeah. Oh my goodness. I do think sometimes when we chat to people like yourself who maybe work on a big event, it’s easy to think that all of your work is focused on that one moment. And because a lot of the stuff in between events maybe seems a little bit more—I don’t want to say invisible, but it’s a little less obvious for people—but it sounds like you’re straight in to planning for the next event.

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think once upon a time it was a big  conversation around, like, ‘what do we do?’ You know, ‘how do we stay relevant between Games?’ And I think one of the things we really try and do is – is help athletes build their own channels and to create public figures out of our Paralympians. The most impact that they can have on society and – and on the Paralympic movement is if they’re, you know, celebrities, household names, you know, equal to premier league footballers or your rugby players, or, you know, the Olympians from Team GB.

Like, now we have hundreds of athletes going to our summer games in between times. You know, they’re on celebrity TV shows. They’re on Strictly Come Dancing. They’re on Dancing on Ice. They’re going in the jungle. You know, so there’s lots of touch points for them to stay relevant and for the conversation to continue.

We get involved in lots of other projects at ParalympicsGB, working with different partners, like Scope on research projects, working with the national governing bodies as they go to their world championships, and things like that. You know, there’ll be sort of natural drop-off, I think, in between the Games, but actually to provide content and insight into what our athletes are doing in those in-between times is just as interesting as those big moments themselves.

Cat Anderson: Yeah, definitely. Do you mind if I just ask— You mentioned Scope. What is Scope? 

Kevin Crowe: So Scope is the UK’s leading pan-disability charity. So they provide support and campaign and lobby Government across disability issues, spanning all – all the impairment groups. A lot of people might have seen sort of a – a video series that they did a few years ago called ‘End the Awkward’, which was really cool.

So it was disabled people talking about the awkward questions that they get asked and sort of the language and the humour that is sort of waiting in the wings every time people are feeling really awkward about a subject. And so they’re really great at doing stuff on social like that, but, you know, behind the scenes, providing that support to disabled people.

So we work with them. We’ve got a memorandum of understanding with Scope to work together around sort of social impact, really—so Paralympians getting involved in their work, but also us using the benefit of their research and their communities to sort of inform the work that we do outside of the sort of pure sport stuff.

Cat Anderson: I love that you’re talking about how you are promoting these athletes and Paralympians to become household names, to be in the public eye. You’re definitely much more than just the Olympic sports, the Paralympics themselves. It’s a lot more about promotion and visibility of disability in British society, would that be correct?

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, totally. I mean, we are in the game of increasing representation of disabled people in the public eye, you know. Really what we’re trying to do, you know— We’re trying to create the environment for our athletes to win at Paralympic Games and be the best sportspeople they can be.

But also, you know, we want to harness the power of that to – to create change for disabled people and, you know, discrimination, misunderstanding, perhaps, people ignoring, um, disability issues or, you know, designing society in a way that excludes disabled people, that can only happen where people aren’t aware and don’t see disabled people in the same way that every other form of discrimination happens.

So, you know, one of the most straightforward things we can do is fill the Internet, fill Twitter, fill Instagram with images of disabled people doing amazing things. You know, they might not always be winning. They might not always be, you know, creating an amazing viral moment. But you know, the pure fact that you’re seeing disabled people on your timeline has an impact on you, because the more that you see disabled people, the more that, you know, you become aware that disabled people are part of the society and there are lots more disabled people than you probably thought there were. The simple fact of that will have an impact on the way that your attitudes to – to disability—

And also for, you know, other disabled people in the UK, you know, be they young kids or they, you know, be they, you know, people who have never watched Paralympic Games who are retired, you know, seeing somebody that you can identify with, that you can relate to, you know, not just at a Paralympic Games on Channel 4—although that’s amazing, and that’s by far the biggest kind of moment that we have—but seeing them on your Insta stories or on your TikTok feed or on Twitter, you know, that’s the most powerful thing, is like, ‘I can see someone like me doing something that I didn’t think was possible for me’. I think that’s really the magic of the Paralympic Games.

Cat Anderson: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and that visibility piece is just so huge. And I think that you’ve obviously done a great job on that, because the ParalympicsGB has the largest social media following amongst international Paralympics social media accounts—outside of the International Paralympic Committee, of course—but to put it into context, the ParalympicsGB Twitter account has a quarter of a million followers, whereas—not to single out any particular account—but the US Paralympics Twitter account is less than a fifth of that at 41k. What do you attribute that engagement and audience to?

Kevin Crowe: So, yeah, we’re the largest Paralympic team on social. I mean, obviously I’d love to say, you know, I just— I’ve just done such a fantastic job.

Cat Anderson: [laughs]

Kevin Crowe: But there’s – there’s lots of reasons. And I think, you know, the Paralympic movement, where we are today, you know, is still really young. So having London 2012 in the UK, you know, having the opportunity for thousands of people to see the sport live and having Channel 4 as this amazing broadcaster that really changed the way that Paralympic sport was presented on TV. I think it was previous guys’, on other channels, it had been a bit of an afterthought tagged onto the Olympics. It was done in quite a straight kind of sporty way. And Channel 4 saw that there was this opportunity to do something totally different with Paralympic sport and to make it really stand apart from – from the Olympics.

In the UK, there was an ad campaign that they ran before the Games—which was just after the Olympics had finished in 2012—that said, ‘thanks for the warm-up’, and there was just pictures of Paralympians kind of looking sort of wicked, just looking really badass and kind of like this moodily lit— And it was just like, wow, okay, this is a whole new thing.

And there’s The Last Leg, which is a TV show in the UK on Channel 4, which is still running and is one of the biggest things on Channel 4 with, you know, disabled talent fronting it. And it’s a comedy program, and it’s got really sort of— It’s got its own take on talking about sport and about disability. And that sort of context in the UK is kind of where ParalympicsGB sort of lives.

So there’s a whole ecosystem around the ParalympicsGB Twitter account, for example, which means we can engage on Twitter with The Last Leg‘s Twitter account, for example. When The Last Leg is on, we can engage with all those sort of comedians who are part of that.

You know, the London 2012 Paralympics had Coldplay, you know, performing at the closing ceremony. It was a big moment, and we can have a – a relationship with Coldplay on – on Twitter where we— you know, Coldplay can engage with stuff we’re doing about that – those moments.

And it kind of built towards Rio and has continued to build, you know, during Tokyo. Sometimes it happens organically, sometimes it happens because we are reaching out to people, but I remember on the opening ceremony of Tokyo— And you’re kind of— You’re never really sure, ’cause there’s that big gap, and there was a really big gap, because Tokyo Games was postponed. You’re never really sure. Kind of, ‘Is the audience still there? Are they still going to be engaged? Are people going to watch it this time?’ Until it happens, you don’t really know. And on the first day, I think, I glanced back at Twitter, and Marcus Rashford—who, at that time, was right in the middle of his campaigning and, you know, really changing things for people in the UK—he was probably the, you know, the hottest property on Twitter, and he’d retweeted, like, everything we’d put out that morning, and he was engaging with athletes, and we were just like, ‘wow, this is incredible’. And I just think other nations don’t really have that, and it’s come from that.

You know, that ecosystem’s really great, so we can engage with other public figures—the interaction between other sporting figures, but in – in other industries too, like, you know, comedy is a really big – big one. So that enables us to have that growth on Twitter, and obviously we work on cross-promotion between our channels. The growth elsewhere, it’s taken a little bit longer, but we’re still, I think with the biggest Paralympic brand outside of the IPC on – on every channel.

And I think the Facebook audience was really there from London 2012 and continued to build. I think it’s a unique proposition in terms of the sort of global picture, Paralympic sport. And the way that we look at our accounts is that they exist in this ecosystem within and sort of outside of sport, which enables us to sort of talk to different audiences and to sort of reach more people.

Cat Anderson: It’s so interesting to hear that response, because now that you mention that ecosystem, it seems really obvious, but I hadn’t really thought about how all of those pieces fit together around societal visibility for people with disabilities. But you’re absolutely right. Like The Last Leg—you’ll have to forgive me; I can’t remember the names of the hosts—but for people who maybe aren’t familiar with it, I think it’s like there’s three regular hosts and two out of the three have a disability, but they regularly— Like, comedy, you mentioned, is a huge area, and there’s now, in Britain, there’s quite a lot— Like, there’s good visibility for comedians with disabilities, as well.

And then, as you’ve also mentioned, Channel 4 is an amazing partner, and I think they do a lot of amazing work on visibility for lots of marginalized groups. They’re very good at like pushing representation to the forefront. So that’s so interesting.

Whilst your work does centre around the Paralympics themselves, a large part, as we’ve mentioned, does involve advocacy and combating stereotypical narratives around Paralympian sports. I do think that something that we hear a lot is that Paralympians are often heralded by media as superheroes who’ve overcome their disabilities to participate in the Paralympic Games. The word ‘participate’ is often used in the place of ‘compete’ when describing Paralympians, as well, so there’s – there’s quite a lot of language around Paralympics and Paralympians that I think a lot of people are still learning about. And I think, more broadly, people are still learning to have conversations about disability correctly. How does the work that you’re doing on social media help with this, and how much of this is pertinent to the work that you do?

Kevin Crowe: So conversations around disabled people on social media, around disability as a subject, you know, they’re quite often around something negative. So they’re either about sort of challenges which people face or around policy and sort of government support and welfare and cuts and social justice and discrimination and sort of things that, you know, are, I guess, negative and not – not necessarily appealing.

So what sport does, it enables a space to have super positive conversations led by disabled people about their lives, doing something amazing, being themselves, being funny, being, you know— We just try not to talk about inspiration and inspirational people, because I think lots of athletes just really hate it, and I think it’s the sort of saccharine, kind of, almost, like, paternal sort of reaction that people have to the Paralympics that sometimes can just feel like not helpful to the conversation. You’ve got a real platform to talk about disability and have disabled people front and centre of – of conversations and that you just don’t have in other walks of life.

So I think that sort of crossover with – with comedy is really great, because what you don’t want to do is have really earnest, like, ‘We are talking about disability, and we are doing it in the correct way, and you must use the terms that we tell you are correct, otherwise you are cancelled.’ That is not the way to do it.

We need to have people feeling comfortable and interested in talking about the Paralympics and doing it with passion and authenticity. And so we have the language that we use and we sort of use the language of the social model of disability in the UK.

So we, we don’t talk about someone having a disability, and then that is their, you know, their medical condition, which is, you know, causing them to have less access to sort of society in terms of, you know, people have impairments and they are disabled by virtue of the fact that society is not built around their needs. Whereas society is built, you know, around someone who, for example, has the use of both their legs and they can walk up stairs, but you know, a wheelchair-user can’t access that pub because it wasn’t built with them in mind.

So the lack of a ramp is what’s disabling that person, not their actual physical condition. So we try and use the social model. We think it’s a really progressive way of talking about our bodies. But that being said, we have team of over 200 athletes for the summer games, for example. Not everyone’s going to agree that that’s how they want to talk about their own bodies, and not everyone’s going to think that – that that’s the right way of doing it, and that’s absolutely cool. People need to have ownership of that.

And, you know, we try and use our own tone of voice to align with kind of what Scope are doing, for example, what, you know, the disability community in the UK is sort of telling us when – when we reach out. So that’s really important. But I think the other thing that we can really do in that space is create Paralympians’ and ParalympicsGB’s sort of public image as equal to that of any other sort of sports star, of any other celebrity, something that really straightforward is, you know, we want all our athletes to have blue ticks on – on Instagram and – and Twitter, for example, and on TikTok, because that gives them that verification in the eyes of their followers. That gives them that level of public profile, creating a brand that feels premium.

So we work really hard on the ParalympicsGB brand to make it look and feel, you know, equal to sort of the Team GB Olympics side—to, you know, other sports brands—so that our athletes are seen as professional athletes, which they are. They are paid to do their job. They work, most of them, completely just on being an athlete, and you know, they are elite athletes in their field.

And so even just doing that is revolutionary because, you know— I think you talked about sort of using the term ‘participate’ rather than ‘compete’. Yeah. That’s absolutely one part of, sort of, the perception of the Paralympic games, but I think we’ve come really far, certainly the last 10 years. So, you know, we are coming up for the 10-year anniversary of London 2012, and I think athletes, you know, more than ever are seen as equal to their Olympic counterparts.

And, you know, the level of competition has just really, really sort of grown and grown. It’s clear to people that, you know, this is not a sports day for disabled people. This is elite professional athletes doing amazing things at the peak of their abilities. And if you don’t want to watch an athletics sort of event, or you don’t want to watch a game of wheelchair basketball, even just the knowledge that, okay, there’s a professional wheelchair basketball athlete who’s getting paid to do that job, who might have a – a commercial deal with a sports brand, who might feature in advertising on their TV or on social. That’s kind of revolutionary, ’cause that’s like, okay, you know, disabled people can do that too. And that’s awareness. That’s representation. And that’s how you change perceptions.

Cat Anderson: Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call ‘Signed Advice’.

Stacey Wright: Right. I’ve got my cup of tea, and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

‘Dear Stacey, we are a big pharma group focusing on healthcare innovation globally, but we’re trying to distribute localized content to different regions independently of each other before the development of a group-wide social media strategy. Our representatives in each market were able to create their own localized Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts updating them as and when they individually saw appropriate. That means our business now has near to 130 profiles across 45 country managers. Working in the pharmaceutical industry means that we’re highly regulated, and so maintaining governance procedures over these countless channels is a logistical nightmare. Each of the territories is also very protective of their profiles. They are unwilling to merge or remove their presence in the spirit of one unified consistent group entity on social. How do I make sure that they each feel heard and have some autonomy for their region whilst also keeping risk and legal teams happy. From Matthias.’

So, Matthias, I see this all the time, where there’s multiple profiles for each and every country or having countless child pages on Facebook or lots of different showcases for each country on LinkedIn, and it just creates a world of confusion for the social media users, as well, as to which one do I follow.

When we’re talking about representatives in each country, I can’t avoid suggesting employee advocacy, uh, as a solution here. Instead of having multiple profiles on lots of different networks, create a roster of influencers from your own country managers, so encouraging them to be the face of the business for their region as thought leaders. This both creates a cadence for them resharing and amplifying your group-level content to their own networks.

We all know individuals and people-led accounts appear more authentic and therefore drive higher interactions than brand-level accounts. They own the content for their own region whilst also triggering a need to roll out some new training from yourself or guidance that will help with that compliance and branding issue.

You can return the favour by highlighting them on your global pages with profile pieces, so maybe short interviews or fact cards about them. And then you can localize that content to the relevant audiences on those platforms that offer targeting—by, say, language or location—for those individual posts.

If you have to keep a multitude of satellite accounts like you have now due to internal politics, I’ve been there. Create guidelines, roll out regular training sessions, and create social champion meet-ups within the team so you can create internal comms channels for them to highlight successes and inspire the wider team. Have assets that are designed on-brand but are flexible. Thinking about tools like Canva where you can create editable templates that maintain the look and feel but also the compliance you require.

I hope that this helps you explore a world of more possibilities for your global social teams, Matthias.

Until next time, listeners, stay strong, and stay social.

And now back to the interview.

Cat Anderson: I wonder about representation of all of the athletes. So how do you choose who you’re going to promote on your channel? Do you have a policy that all of the athletes are going to get equal amount of promotion? Or— Yeah. How do you manage that?

Kevin Crowe: For a summer games and you’ve got 220-odd athletes, you know, you’re never going to get sort of equal coverage of every single athlete, but what we definitely try and do is allow every athlete to have some visibility on our channel, covering their results in some way. We definitely try and give equal coverage across the sports, so— And with that, you know, that lends itself to giving equal coverage across the impairment groups, as well, as a national team.

You know, we’re always trying to reflect the nation, as well, so we are talking about trying to give equal representation across men and women, across ethnic diversity, across impairment type, across the nations as well—so obviously Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England—so we have to think about all of those things.

Within the team you’re always going to have athletes who are more up for doing stuff on social. And, you know, you’ve just got to run with that because they’re the ones who are going to be more engaging, and they’re the ones who are going to enjoy it. But it’s not always the ones that you think.

There are bigger sports that get more coverage, you know, outside of our channels. So, for example, athletics and swimming and cycling would sort of be the three that are a bit more sort of well-known, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, if you win a gold medal in swimming, that swimmer’s necessarily going to be the one getting the headlines or getting the most engagement on social.

You know, our boccia team, for example. You know, Adam Hills—who’s the presenter of The Last Leg—he calls the boccia team, like, the rock stars of the Paralympic games, ’cause, you know, quite a few of them are using power chairs and you know, David Smith—he’s, like, the sort of the leader of that team—he’s um, the most decorated sort of boccia player, and he’s got, like, blue and red spiky hair, and he, like, just sort of like shouts and cheers all the way through games, and he’s – they’re a character and, you know, he loves sort of being outspoken on social. And when he gets in front of the cameras, he’s like, fantastic.

So the audiences really pick up on that too. And, you know, they want to see the Paralympic games. A lot of people come to it and they’re like, ‘What? It’s— Okay, what is this?’ and ‘Is it the same as the Olympics but there’s disabled people doing it?’ And it’s like, ‘How can we show our audiences that, you know, our, our athletes are kind of distinct?’ And so when people are distinct and have that sort of great personality, we want to give them a platform to show it.

But yeah, it’s definitely something we think about, sort of trying to get that level of coverage kind of nice and even.

Cat Anderson: And I guess with sport, like, it’s part and parcel that there are going to be moments of triumph and then moments of disappointment, as well. But how do you cope with disappointment on your channel? Is that something that, you know, you don’t necessarily shine a spotlight on so much? Or is it something that you acknowledge as well? 

Kevin Crowe: Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s part of sport, right? If it was just an undiminished stream of medals, I – I don’t think anyone would care. It’s part of it. And to be honest, and if somebody works in social, like, a moment of disappointment or heartbreak, those are the moments that can be more powerful for an audience. Because if you’re watching on TV, for example, and you can see someone is just, like—’cause maybe they fell in their race or something and they’re totally heartbroken and they’re lying there.

I’ve got an image from Tokyo in my head of an athlete, Kadeena Cox, and the rain was pouring down in Tokyo, and she was just lying, exhausted on the track. And at those moments, the audience want to reach through the TV and put their arm around that athlete and, you know, say, ‘It’s okay. We are proud of you for getting here.’ That’s the magic of sport, really. And social just lets you do that, doesn’t it, right? So you can go straight to that athlete and find them and do that.

And so having a great photo of that moment, or a quote, or, you know, if it’s a video or a bit of reaction or it’s them later on, back at the village, kind of reflecting on it, their followers, all they want to do is just be there and tell that athlete that it’s okay. Cause that’s that human response, isn’t it?

That, that emotional thing of, you know, the – the triumph, but also the disappointment in sport. So you can do that really simply, and you don’t need to write long copy about how, you know, they’ll be back and— You can let the images kind of do the talking and let the athletes sort of respond to the talking, but those moments, so they’re really important to cover, but they’re also just some of the more powerful sort of moments you can have, too. Especially because in the summer games, you know, a lot of medals are won, so there’s 19 sports, there’s 200-odd athletes.

So, you know, there’s light and shade, right? So there’s those moments of great joy, and the moments of sadness are really— They make it dramatic, I guess, and they help that narrative kind of flow, but also, you know, in disappointment, there’s usually a victory of some description, you know, whether it’s getting there, you know, the journey for Tokyo and they – they lived through a pandemic, and they were training on their own, and they couldn’t travel, and a lot of our athletes were sort of the people who were isolating much longer than everyone else, because they were on the vulnerable list or whatever it was being called at the time, getting there and kind of doing it. There’d be a victory there, or it might be a personal best, or it might be, you know, athletes are getting much better at just talking authentically about themselves and whether it’s their mental health or whether it’s a goal that they had.

You know, there’s a great video of Ellie Robinson, who’s a short stature swimmer, who gave this amazing speech by the side of the pool in Tokyo that went totally viral across Channel 4, about just owning the moment and just being super proud and what had taken to get her there. And she was, you know, in tears, but it was just this fantastic moment.

So those, you know, if someone wins their fifth gold medal, that is a great moment, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes it won’t have that sort of connection that just a pure sort of raw human moment can have. 

Cat Anderson: Yeah. Gosh, there really are the peaks and troughs of the human experience then. Like, in terms of the content that’s landing on your lap, we’ve got these enormous victories, and then, as you say, those moments of poignancy that probably— I mean, everyone can celebrate together, but I think everyone can commiserate together, as well, so it’s, like, wonderful content for social, but really powerful content generally for any human.

This is a big, fat question of: what is your favourite part of what you do?

Kevin Crowe: The games are just— They’re an emotional rollercoaster for every single person who’s involved. So we’ve just talked about the athlete experience, you know, that goes for the families of the athletes and the support teams, but you know, working on social, you know, you’re usually doing ridiculous hours for those, like, two weeks or whatever, that period, it’s like 20-hour days for the most part, and it’s – it’s exhausting.

So when something amazing happens, I mean, it’s fantastic. And during the games, I sort of manage the social accounts myself. So I’m doing most of the publishing and all the copy and everything myself. I mean, that is such a buzz.

I remember in Rio, we were following kind of the story of Will Bayley. He’s a table tennis player, and you might have seen— He was on Strictly Come Dancing, actually. It was it a couple of years ago now. But he— Yeah, in London, he – he hadn’t quite got there and he’d changed his classification—which is how the impairment groups are grouped together in the Paralympics to sort of enable competitions to take place—so he’d changed level of his classification. He was thinking he wasn’t going to be in the running, and then in Rio, he kind of had incredible, incredible games. Won the gold medal. He was up on the table, like sort of celebrating, which he got a yellow card for which I had no idea you could get in table tennis at Paralympic Games…

Cat Anderson: [laughs]

Kevin Crowe: …but he got – he got booked, and he was, like, screaming and jumping on his coach.

And I was in our little office in Rio, and I was just, like, crying my eyes out. I was like, ‘this is the best thing ever’, ’cause we just kind of followed his – his journey to that point, and it was fantastic. And the media were in the room sort of with us and yeah, the guy from one of the papers was going, ‘this is going to be front page news tomorrow’.

And it was like— Those moments are pretty special and that, you know, I don’t know where else they really exist. Whether you feel like it’s a real privilege to be the person to tell the world about it to a certain extent on your channel, but also just to see the response then on social. So just, you know, seeing people sharing it and commenting and – and liking it and it getting out there is so cool.

Cat Anderson: Are there any resources or social media accounts that you would recommend for listeners to refer to if they wanted to educate themselves on the portrayal of athletes with disabilities and disability awareness in general? 

Kevin Crowe: So, I mean, there are— We’ve talked about Scope, and there are other organizations that are impairment-specific if you are sort of interested in certain types of impairment groups. So that’s all fine. But I would say you follow the athletes because the athletes are normal disabled people with an amazing job who, you know—

We’ve got lists on our Twitter, for example. You can go to our Twitter account and go to our lists. You can find all the Tokyo athletes, and you can find all the Beijing athletes. And I just say, you know, follow— If you’ve heard of a couple of athletes, give them a follow, because I think then you are in real conversations with real people, and you know, you’re seeing, kind of, you can interact with them yourselves, and you can see how – how they speak about themselves and how they present themselves, and that’s definitely the best way. Because no one wants to sit and read a list of rules about how to talk about something or— Because, you know, it’ll change, and you know, language changes and shifts, and sort of being connected to real people is the best way. 

Cat Anderson: I have a feeling that you’re going to absolutely hate the final question, which is a question that we ask all of our guests on the pod. But if ParalympicsGB had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on Twitter leaving only one, which would it be? And I feel like you’ve given so many shout outs to so many accounts that choosing just one is going to be difficult. But what are your thoughts?

Kevin Crowe: Well, you can’t, I mean, you can’t pick an athlete, can you. That’s crazy.

Cat Anderson: No, probably not.

Kevin Crowe: There’s too many – too many great athletes. I mean, um, I would follow Rosie Jones. Rosie Jones is, uh, an amazing comedian. She is somebody who I don’t think cared about sport at all. So she’s someone who started off working on The Last Leg, actually. So— And, I think she was sort of part of the backroom team, and she was doing some writing, and she’s a brilliant stand-up.

And Channel 4 are really great at kind of working with talent and getting them involved in the Paralympic games when – when they come. So they really throw everything at it. And Rosie was part of the presenting team. So one of the things that they did for Beijing 2022—which is the winter games that just happened—was they had an all-disabled presenting team for the first time. So they are really great with being disabled-led, but also having disabled talent behind the camera.

Rosie was the roving reporter in Tokyo, and we would see her kind of at the venues cheering on her athletes. So she’s absolutely hilarious on Twitter and Instagram, particularly. She’s got this great running joke with Nish Kumar, another comedian. She just lies down next to him, gets someone to take a photo, and says, ‘This man keeps pushing over poor disabled, um, women. He needs to be stopped.’

Cat Anderson: [laughs]

Kevin Crowe: So they’re, they’re great friends, but it’s just a brilliant, brilliant running joke, which kind of encapsulates the— I guess the attitude around the Games that that’s really unique is that, you know, it’s disabled people talking about themselves and owning their own sort of narrative in a way that, you know, nondisabled people do all the time, but disabled people are quite often just put in a box and spoken about. And so Rosie’s a really great follow on – on social, and so, yeah, she’d be my choice.

Cat Anderson: I am so delighted that you said Rosie Jones, ’cause when we were talking earlier about comedy, she was front and centre in my mind. She is such a good follow on Twitter. Like, she’s so funny, and just generally I think she’s absolutely fantastic. So that’s possibly one of the best answers we’ve ever got. It’s a fair play.

Thank you so much, Kevin, it’s been such a joy to chat to you today, and I really appreciate you taking the time. 

Kevin Crowe: Amazing. Thank you very much for having us.

Cat Anderson: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Kevin Crowe of ParalympicsGB for joining me today and of course to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible. Make sure you catch the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcasting platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media, @SproutSocial, or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt, Stacey, by emailing signedadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post ParalympicsGB: How sport and social have a societal impact appeared first on Sprout Social.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know and some that you don’t to explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all the tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

This week, I’m joined by John Peterson, who’s the man behind the Twitter account @OrkneyLibrary. I first found Orkney’s Twitter account a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon the very real and hilarious beef between them and their neighbouring library of Shetland, Ireland. What can I say? It’s not every day that you see libraries bickering with each other over Twitter. I came for the drama, but I stayed for the content.

Orkney has grown its following into the tens of thousands with its blend of genuinely interesting insights and then charming and silly humour, all while earning fans and PR from right across the globe. They are the literary darlings of British Twitter and have secured their place as a must-visit destination on many of the biggest book launch tours.

If you’d like to have a look or follow the account while you’re listening, you can find the handle @OrkneyLibrary.

John, welcome.

JOHN PETERSON Hi.

CAT ANDERSON I’m going to start by choosing a tweet from one of Orkney’s thirty-five thousand tweets that they’ve posted. One which I love.

JOHN PETERSON Gosh, is it that many?

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. So many. And I think it gives an insight into the personality of the account pretty nicely. So, this was a tweet that was accompanied with a picture of a book, which had a stamp of another library’s name on it. I’ll read it first.

“A book was just returned that thought it was a loner,
but it wasn’t ours at all.
A book that left it’s home in Tucson Arizona,
for some Orkney Library balls.

Get back, get back,
get back to where you once belonged.”

Now, there is a lot going on in that tweet. We’ve got global library banter. We’ve got the Beatles. And then, of course, the Orkney Library balls. Can you tell us the story behind this post?

JOHN PETERSON Well, the – the book got returned to the mobile library, and it was in a bag of whole lot other books that somebody had dropped off. The mobile library driver noticed this library stamp, which is what most libraries do. They have a stamp with their library name on the – on the sort of edge of the page block. And it was Tucson, Arizona. So, she brought it to me. And it’s just a immediate word association. You see, Tucson, Arizona, you think Get Back by the Beatles. It just seemed like an obvious lead-in. And everybody’s been watching The Beatles: Get Back, you know, documentary series. And it was just—. It just seemed like a perfect way to go.

You know, this is the sort of thing that turns up all the time in libraries. You either get tremendously overdue books, which, you know, is always kind of interesting just because of the sort of time context thing, or – or, you know, books that have traveled a long way. In this case, sorta for four thousand miles or something, you know.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. It’s crazy. So, that’s a tweet that I love. But for those who maybe haven’t interacted with your account before, John, could you tell us a little bit about what the Orkney Library Twitter account is like and why people love it?

JOHN PETERSON Like I said, we’re a library and an archive. So, we try and talk about stuff that’s happening in the library, stuff that they’re doing in the archive. We have a mobile library, so we often post about where it’s going, which is a good way of showing off Orkney, as well as keeping people up to speed with, you know, where it’s – where it’s going to be. We talk about the different services and some of the things we do for the community that we’re serving. But also, we try and have fun with all those things as well and share them in a kind of entertaining way, so that it’s – it’s useful, hopefully, but also gives people – even people who aren’t here have something—. You know, they have something to follow and to give them a bit of an understanding about where we are.

CAT ANDERSON Can you tell us a little bit about, for people who maybe don’t understand what you were talking about with the—? I think it’s safe to say famous Orkney Library balls.

JOHN PETERSON The library in Kirkwall, we’ve got a kind of paved area in the library with benches and trees and stuff. I suppose they’re just a sort of architectural element. They’re cast concrete balls, but they’ve kind of got a sort of theme all of their own. People come and visit us. They take photos on them and stuff. And we post things about them on – on social media from time to time. But they’ve just kind of become associated with us a bit.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. I know that I was looking at some of your tweets that had the most likes, and the ones that describe the Orkney Library balls always get lots of likes. But for reading it right without the picture of the architectural element, it definitely is a little bit with innuendo.

But maybe we’re getting a little bit too into the weeds here. Let’s zoom back out, and could you tell us a little bit of about Orkney and Orkney Library? So, paint a picture for our listeners. Where are you, and what is the library like?

JOHN PETERSON Well, Orkney is a group of islands—an archipelago is the proper term—just off the north coast of Scotland. Orkney Library and Archive, which is the – is in Kirkwall, which is the main town, and it’s been around for years. It’s kind of a official—. The date it started was 1683. So, we’ve got it as our main library. ‘Cause we’ve got a population of about twenty-two thousand. So, we’re not that big a place. But an island community. Quite rural, surrounded by the sea. A lot of farming. Which it’s just quite a unique place as all islands are.

CAT ANDERSON So, to what extent does social media play a part on the life of Orkney? Can you gauge that at all?

JOHN PETERSON Social media, generally, I mean, it’s – it’s here. You know, like everywhere, there’s loads of people use it and businesses use it and organisations. It’s – it’s just like everywhere else. It’s—. For us, it’s just a way of showing what we do and talking about the stuff we do, drawing attention to stuff. But also, you know, we have a bit of fun with it—. And I don’t know. Show the side of the library and the archive as well, actually, that people maybe don’t know or definitely can’t always get to. You know, by definition, a lot of our followers aren’t in Orkney. So, you know. But people are always interested in – in books and in libraries and in archives, old photographs. All that kind of stuff. And so, it’s just a good way of talking about that, you know.

CAT ANDERSON Would you say that you’re the social media sweetheart of Orkney?

JOHN PETERSON No. I – I – I definitely wouldn’t say that. We just do our thing. There’s loads—. There’s quite a few really big accounts doing stuff. ‘Cause it’s—. Orkney is, you know—. It’s really picturesque, and it’s got a really strong tourist industry and loads of history and actually loads of really good food producers and craft producers. And, you know, it’s just—. It’s that kind of place. And so, there’s loads of stuff happening, really, on social media.

CAT ANDERSON You’re maybe my sweethearts of Orkney then.

JOHN PETERSON Oh, well, we’ll take that.

CAT ANDERSON That is as a personal thing.

JOHN PETERSON We’ll take that.

CAT ANDERSON But it is interesting, because I think Orkney—. You mentioned it is. Orkney Library is quite an old institution. But also in terms of how long you’ve been on Twitter. You’ve had a Twitter account since 2009, which was actually only three years after Twitter launched. So, it was quite early in the life cycle of the platform. Can you tell me a little bit about why Orkney decided to go on Twitter and why it became such an important part of the library?

JOHN PETERSON When you look around, and lots of the people we interact with, which are, like, other libraries and archives and museums and stuff, I know it’s a lot of them where it was around the same time they started to get onto social media. I think it was just starting to become a thing beyond, you know, personal accounts, and the organisations and people were starting to get involved with it. And so, I think that was about the time it really started to boom. 

You know, I mean, we had a website like everybody did. But it was just a way of communicating more with people. You know, that sort of faster way of getting information out there and just showing off, showcasing the library, you know, and – and what – what we were doing, what we were about, ’cause we were advertising stuff that was happening. It’s worked, you know. And it’s – it’s good fun doing it as well. So, I mean, it makes it more fun. You’re always learning stuff doing it as well. And, sometimes, you know, you could come up with something to talk about in social media. And it’s a way of, you know, exploring things as well, because there’s so much information and knowledge out there where the people who follow you. So, there’s, you know—. We put stuff up, and stuff comes back to us as well with it. You know, it kind of works in a very sort of organic, kind of interactive way as well.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. I love that. Because I think, so often, when people start, especially an account associated with a business, you want to immediately have tens of thousands of followers. And I think Orkney is a really good example of experimenting, having a little bit of fun, having a mixture of content out there, and then growing and growing. Because I think since you obviously started the account, there’s twenty-two thousand around thereabouts, people on Orkney. But your followers are coming up to around the seventy-eight thousand mark. So, many of your followers aren’t Orkney residents. Do you know who your followers are, and do you have an idea of how far your reach goes?

JOHN PETERSON Not really. We never really analysed it that much, to be honest. We kind of just—. We just kind of keep on going and see, you know, who comes along and who, you know, who comes in and who gets in touch and stuff like that. But I mean, obviously, they’re—. You know, the majority of them aren’t in Orkney. So, they’re – they’re all over the place. And that’s really nice as well, actually.

CAT ANDERSON I think you’re being really modest, because I know exactly the type of people who follow you, and you get lots of famous authors following you. I know that you get lots of nice positive attention and—.

JOHN PETERSON Oh, yeah. Yeah. We do get that as well, which is great. It’s been a huge benefit, actually, because it’s brought, you know, authors to come and see us. And, you know, a small, relatively difficult and expensive place to get to, you know, compared to traveling around on the mainland and things like that. Then, you know, I’ve – I’ve spoken to other libraries who really struggle to get included on author tours and things like that. I mean, there, I suppose, is a bit of a novelty that have come into us as well. But, you know, we’ve been really lucky in that way. And then, they follow us and interact with us and stuff. 

But then, we’re – we’re talking about books and doing stuff for books. And it’s all that world. You know, it’s books. And you don’t think about it too much, because if you did, you probably wouldn’t be able to post anything. You’d be going, “I can post this. Such and such is going to see it.” You know? But we don’t really think like that. We just do it and hope that it’s okay.

CAT ANDERSON Well, it definitely is, because I think—. I mean, there’s people like me, I’ve never been to Orkney. I found you years ago, as I said, because you were making fun of Shetland Library, and I thought that was absolutely hilarious. And I actually think I saw it in press as well. And I think that’s another thing where, because of the blend and the humour and the interest and the genuine niceness of everything that you’re posting, it’s just such a lovely feed to read.

JOHN PETERSON Yeah. The thing with Shetland as – as well. You know, just fine. I mean, they – they are very similar in terms of their—. I mean, they’re also an island group. Same virtually location. They’re further north, which they’ll always highlight that they’re further north than we are. But they’re trying to do the same thing as we are. They’re you know, trying to promote what they’re doing, show the sort of challenges of providing the services they provide in – in an island kind of setting. So—. But it’s just good fun every now and again to have to kind of needle each other.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, absolutely. You know, you do have a beautifully nuanced tweeting style. Like, there’s a lovely blend of content that you put up there, which we can chat about. But at times, you know, you’ll have a naughty joke, and then there’ll be a lovely black-and-white photograph of Orkney and its citizens throughout the ages. And, of course, there’s lots and lots of content about books as well. Do you think it’s that combination of humour and nostalgia, Orkney pride and literature, is that a reflection of your own character and what speaks to you? Or do you try and keep it separate and embody the library?

JOHN PETERSON It’s probably both. You know, like I say, it’s a library and an archive. So, the combination of showing off stuff from the library and stuff from the archive is kind of – is definitely trying to embody that. But it is also stuff that interests me. I mean, even the – the silly stuff, the really bad puns and jokes and stuff, it’s the sort of stupid stuff that occurs to me just as I’m going about my day, you know. So, it’s not like—. I’m not sitting with a pencil and a pad, trying to come up with a pun. It’s just stupid stuff that occurs to me sometimes or silly stuff or whatever. So, I think it would be impossible to do otherwise. It would be a real grind in your brain trying to come up with stuff.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, I totally agree. And I think that’s what works really well on Orkney, because, I will be honest, I wouldn’t have thought that the archive stuff would particularly appeal to me as much as it does. But it’s because of, I guess, your way of framing it and saying like, “Oh, look, here’s this guy falling down the slopes. Here’s this man who loves his dog.” Like, really, really—. Like you – you inject a lot of humanity into the archive pieces.

JOHN PETERSON And the archive photos. There’s loads of amazing photos. And you kind of feel that you need to add something to them. And we usually do explain what the photo actually is, but we’ll quite often have a bit of fun with it as well. The archive’s got sixty or seventy thousand, you know, images of – dating right back to the sort of 1850s, I think. Maybe even slightly before that. But the – the—.

Anyways. So, often, you just come across some lovely, you know, sort of photos or – or just ones that are quite funny. I mean, you’re not really making fun of them. But there’s just that thing, you know, with old photos. Very serious faces or – or – or just – just funny stuff. And so, sometimes, you say something kind of humorous as a sort of launchpad for showing the photo. And then, explain actually when the photo was taken, who took it, what it is. And so, you start to catch people on the first thing and then tell them more about it. It’s just kind of a style we’ve developed. So, very rarely do we just straight post the photo and say what it is. Although, occasionally, you do come across that lovely photo of William Houston with his dog, where it’s just a lovely photo of a guy with his dog.

Lucy, who’s one of the archivists, you know, will give me her phone and say, you know, “I’ve just found this – this email or pop up.” And it’ll just be a grateful or something that she’s come across. And everything in the archive or, you know, there’s new stuff coming in all the time, but stuff is catalogued. But it’s not, you know—. It appeared on a list somewhere. But when, sometimes, you open something, you go, “Wow.” You know? “There’s this amazing.” And it’s maps or old letters, you know, or old photographs. All sorts of stuff. And so, there is an element of that. So – so, often when it comes to me, it is the first time, you know, I’ve seen it.

CAT ANDERSON Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice.

STACEY WRIGHT Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

“Dear Stacey,

“I’m relatively new to my role, coming from a successful beauty brand to an up-and-coming aesthetic therapies chain. My manager is pressuring me to replicate the large Instagram following of a frankly rogue cosmetic clinic, and is enthralled by the vanity metric of the audience size rather than whether or not the audience is interacting with their content.

It seems that our competitors in question might have bought their followers since they number over three hundred thousand followers, but achieve less than twenty likes on an average post. Meanwhile, I have daily emails from my manager requesting that I publish operational information to the social feeds about opening hours and booking advice, which only damages the genuine engagement we’re hoping to build. 

I’m getting deep frown lines that could serve as a perfect before pic for our own treatments. How can I inject confidence amongst my senior comms team to focus on long-term growth with authentic brand advocacy, rather than using dark hat social tactics and gripping green content from said celebrities?

Seeking thriller, not filler, Emma.”

CAT ANDERSON Uh, Emma, this is something that I think comes up a lot, and we hear from a lot when we are working in social media. And, in fact, one of the most viewed pieces of content on our blog is How to Grow Instagram Followers. 

Firstly, start with some internal education and back it up by data. Take that competitor, use a competitor tracking tool to follow their growth in audience. Did they amass followers in one go or is it a steady growth over time that they’re having?

Secondly, see how much advertising they’re actually putting out there. Go onto their Facebook page, find the page transparency section, and look at their ad library and see how many ads they’re running. And that will include across Instagram as well as other Facebook placements.

And lastly, how many people are actually visiting your profile and seeing that follower number. And this has a follow-up question to your manager. Do they actually care about other people seeing that number of followers, and is that a brand reputation issue, because they feel like it’s too low for how they perceive their brand?

If it is the case that they’re worried about brand reputation tied to that follower number, try and switch their focus to those big interaction numbers that also have that behavioural, economic science behind them. So, maybe it’s how many views on a reel you’ve had. And Instagram Reels is a really great place to start, because lots of people are consuming them, but very few people are actually creating them, which means you’ll get high volumes of people that don’t even follow you seeing that content straightaway.

Comments on posts would be my second area to focus on. As humans, we love to dive into the conversation and see what’s happening. So, comments underneath feed posts is another really strong metric to look at.

Last but not least, shares of your content. How many people are recommending your piece of content to their mates? A bit like when I log on to Instagram at the end of the day, and my inbox is full of cat memes, how much have people done that and sent your posts to their mates?

So, it might be the case that, actually, your senior leadership team just aren’t that social savvy and they’re not used to do social media as part of the marketing mix. Think about traditional marketing tactics that you would use to grow a customer base and apply that in the same terms to them for your following. So, you might have promotions that you want to push out to people through a street leaf letter in traditional terms. That could be a story post that’s more highlighted in the top of your feed. It’s more direct.

In terms of getting in front of your followers, you might do a direct mail campaign to the doors of your customers. That’s, like, boosted feed posts. That’s boosting that content to get in front of them in their feed, very much like pushing it to the letter box of their door.

And lastly, you might look at partnerships. So, with influencers, I would always say position them as doing a partnership with another business. They get paid for what they do. And then, they’re sharing their content to new audiences for you on your behalf.

So, that education piece is great for those long-term tactics to grow your following. But if you are in need of those quick wins to appease people day to day, in the example that you’ve given in the letter with the operational messages being pushed, and you don’t want to put them on the feed, try and shift those to the Instagram stories. Stories are timely. They time out after twenty-four hours, but they’re also highlighted more prevalently at the top of the feed, so you’re likely to get a better impression rate and you can go back to that team and say, “Look, how many people saw this. Isn’t it great?”

Secondly, if it is a quick win on followers and comments, then we know that those follow-and-comment-to-win campaigns on for yous can be really effective, but they come with a warning. Those engagement rates can be really high, and it’s hard to often come back from them. If you’re comparing your day-to-day activity with those competitions, it’s often not a fair benchmark to have.

Most importantly, as well as all these tactics, is to be confident. That confidence you want to inject into your stakeholders, have that for yourself. They hired you as an expert in social, and it’s just as important that they support you in feeling empowered to take the social media in the right direction and give you the opportunity to focus on that big content [unintelligible] that you want to and then, hopefully, then turn those deep frown lines into smile lines instead.

Emma, other listeners, I hope that’s given you some helpful insight. Until next time. Stay strong and stay social, listeners. And now back to the interview.

CAT ANDERSON But it’s interesting. We’ve touched on a couple of things here like the different content types that you share and then also a little bit of playing into trends that are currently happening on the Internet. I know that Wordle has become a big part of Orkney’s existence in recent times. Correctly so.

JOHN PETERSON Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody’s doing it. In fact, that was the same thing. ‘Cause the first I knew about it was it coming up on social media. Everybody’s doing this thing. So, it’s a bit of a zeitgeist. Like, you think, “How can we talk about this or use it?”

So, we’ve used it in a few different ways. So, it’s a good opportunity to put your take on it. We did do a kind of Wordle grid using books, and it was one of those things, actually, because the people who got it got it straight away. And this was all the people who were playing Wordle. And the people who hadn’t started playing Wordle yet were like, “What – what is that?” You know, they didn’t get it at all. But I quite like that. I quite like, you know, the “if you know, you know” kind of thing.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. I love an “if you know, you know,” except when you don’t know. That’s the worst.

JOHN PETERSON No. I know. But – but there’s always somebody really helpful who tell the people.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah.

JOHN PETERSON You know, there’s always—. You don’t have to. Somebody will go, and they’re talking about this thing, you know, which I just quite, like, leave it and let into it. I tell them.

CAT ANDERSON A hundred percent. Obviously, community plays a big part in the people that you follow and how you’ve grown your following. But what other tips would you give to people who want to grow their accounts in the way that Orkney has grown? Are there any little pointers or strategies that you would recommend?

JOHN PETERSON I think just be consistent. Try and post regularly. But not, you know, not – not too much. I think, sometimes, we quite often—. I’ll have days where we – we don’t post that much or – or even a day where we don’t post at all. And I think that’s probably better than posting too much.

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

JOHN PETERSON But also, don’t go for weeks on end putting nothing up. So, try and get involved in it, because, I think, by doing that, as well as the fact you’re – you’re feeding into the same for the people who follow you, you also—. It helps you develop your own idea of what you’re going to post, and it helps you develop, like, a kind of a eye or an ear for what would make good content. And I think it’s from doing it. It’s seeing what kind of the reaction you get, reacting to that. And also keep an eye on what’s happening and what other people are doing.

You know, you get all these funny things. We do quite a lot where it’ll be, you know, National Sandwich Week or something, and, you know, we’ll try and feed into that or do something related to that, or like the Wordle or thing or any of these things. 

But, you know, how often is that? Keep an eye on that sort of stuff, because, sometimes, that’ll give you an idea of what’s going to – what’s going to be trending later in the day. You might be able to feed into it. It doesn’t have to be related.

You know, we’re quite lucky in the library, because you can do nearly anything with – with books. There’s books on everything. That’s by the definition of what a library is. So, we always have books on stuff. But—. So, you know, try and come up with a different way of feeding into it. See if you can grab people’s attention a little bit. And just use what you have. You know, that’s different about you or what your thing is, because that’s – that’s what you have, and that’s what makes you kind of unique as an account. And try and think about anything you’ve got, really, that’s different.

I mean, way back at the start, when you were saying about, like, us posting stuff to do with the balls, which – which I [unintelligible], that’s something we have the other – other people don’t. Now, we’re at the point with that where people all over the world on holiday come – go anywhere and find, like, anywhere where there’s, like, spherical bollards. They’ll send us photos of them. I mean, honestly, I – I joked years ago. “We could make like a coffee table artbook of these balls from all over the world.” Because it’s people just sending them from everywhere. So, you know, that’s like—. I— I—. Well, they’re not unique to us at all, because they’re everywhere. But we’ve made a bit of a thing of them. 

And so, it’s when people see them, they go, “Oh, I’m going to,” and they snap a photo. And we get that every summer. You get tons. Sometimes, people send one, and I go, “I know where—. We’ve been sent them before, and I know where they are.” It’s like an aficionado of – of that. But yeah. That kind of thing. Try and carve your own niche.

CAT ANDERSON John, could you tell me maybe what opportunities and connections have arisen then as a result of the Twitter account for Orkney?

JOHN PETERSON Well, it’s—. Like we said before, it’s, you know, we’ve been followed by lots of authors and stuff, which has been really good for—. And publishers as well. So, that’s been really good for getting writers and stuff to come and do, like, author events, book launches. That kind of stuff. And we’ve sort of connected with loads of other similar accounts, [unintelligible] libraries, and things like that. You get a bit of a online libraries community, I suppose, ’cause—. And you get to know the people who run their accounts, who, you know, is – is great, too, to begin where it’s just, you get to meet the people behind that a bit, which has been really good for sharing ideas and bouncing off people. 

It’s because it’s made us better known. Even just people coming in who come to visit and they’ll make a point of visiting to buy one of our famous tote bags. You know, you just get this thing where people would never have done that before, and they would come in and – and do that. And so, you get the sort of Orkney, like, big logo places. People post photos of it, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. It’s just made a much sort of wider community for us to operate in than we would have just where we are.

CAT ANDERSON It’s something that I like to see as well, because you’re an account that I followed for a long time. I really love when you do see big authors interacting with you. Like, that is exciting. I feel like, in the literary sphere of Twitter, you’re definitely very well known. So, that must be exciting.

JOHN PETERSON Yeah. It’s really good. And like I say, when – when you can bring these people, you know, they’re willing to come and visit. It’s amazing. We ran this sort of online book club thing where one of the – where Pan Macmillan, the publisher for a while, called the Hurricane Book Club, which is still running in a slightly different way, but that came to us through, I suppose, social media. And it was a kind of book club where we had meetings, physical meetings, but also the questions and the points people made. Discussion of the books were posted online. So, it created a kind of online element, too. And just things like that that have come along and, you know, all helped raise the profile of – for us, but also just of libraries and books. And so, it’s worked for us.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. It definitely has worked for you. And as a long-time fan of your account, I think you have absolutely nailed that lovely, organic feeling of life in the Orkney Library and Archives. And I love to watch it.

I’ve got a final question, which is a question that we’re going to be asking all of our guests on this podcast. If you had to delete all of the others and only follow one account on Twitter, who would it be?

JOHN PETERSON Wow. This is tough.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. No pressure.

JOHN PETERSON No pressure? Okay. I think if I – if I was going to save—. And when we interact loads and we have a lot of fun with the National Library of Scotland, which is based in Edinburgh, which is obviously our national library, and we have a lot of fun with them. They’re trying to do the same kind of stuff as us. I would hate for them not to be there. 

But there – there are loads of other great accounts out there doing stuff. And, you know, you can do—. I think if you’re looking to lighten up your social media feeds, you could do a lot worse than follow – follow, you know, libraries, archives, museums, galleries, just places like that, because they’re all having a lot of fun. They’ve all got interesting stuff. And if nothing else, you know, they show you nice things. You know, they’ll show you whether it’s art or photographs or books or just lovely stuff. And there’s beautiful libraries all over the world, posting amazing stuff. So, you could do a lot worse than follow that stuff. Follow less news and politics and more libraries and museums.

CAT ANDERSON John, thank you so much for the time today. It has been absolutely lovely to speak to you. I have really enjoyed hearing about how Orkney has grown its following with all of its wonderful content over the years. It’s just—. It’s been fantastic. So, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

JOHN PETERSON You’re very welcome. It’s been great to speak to you, Cat.

CAT ANDERSON You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to today’s guest and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

Make sure you join me for the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media at @SproutSocial or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt, Stacey, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening and catch you in two weeks.

The post Orkney Library: The little library with the big literary following appeared first on Sprout Social.

Cat: Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favorite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for everyone and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know, and some that you don’t. To explore the weird, wonderful ways that businesses, organizations and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies.

And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

So, this week I’m joined by Michael Sladden, who’s the COO at Mob. Mob, if you don’t know, is a food media platform, whose mission is to inspire young people to cook exciting, high-quality dishes that do not break the bank.

I found Mob during the pandemic, where I was instantly a mega fan because of the high-quality content, the delicious recipes, and they’re focused on making sure that everything could be easily replicated in your very own kitchen.

If you want to see what Mob’s getting up to and try out some of these recipes for yourself, you can connect with them across all of social media at Mob, M-O-B.

Michael, welcome to Social Creatures.

Michael: Hello, how are you doing?

Cat: I’m great, thank you. I’m so looking forward to talking to you because I really am an absolutely massive fan of Mob and I deliberated bringing up my cookbooks to show you, but I thought that might be a little bit fan girlish. So, I’d spare you that.

But I explained in the introduction a little bit about what Mob does, but perhaps, you could tell our listeners in your own words, what is Mob, and what’s your mission?

Michael: We want to help young people predominantly at the moment in the UK, but sort of eventually around the world, help them get back into the kitchen and make it enjoyable, and make it something that people really want to do.

And also, bring sort of like a more youthful, I guess, slightly more cool (very much in inverted commas) — cool elements to cooking. I think that a lot of other areas and spheres like sports and music have those sort of cult figures and that real like amazing focus on branding.

And we saw that that doesn’t really happen in food and we wanted to be that brand. So, that’s what we’re up to, yeah.

Cat: I love that. And I love the grassroots elements of Mob as well and its origins, which is around like your founder Ben was at uni when he realized that his fellow students weren’t really cooking and he wanted to change that.

And yeah, I think it’s really obvious, you’ve mentioned there that focusing on young people to get them cooking is a big part of your mission. But having a community is another part of the stuff that you do.

You’re always asking for community feedback on your channels, the cereal wars; like which is the better cereal and things like this. Is your community only young people? And how has growing that community been part of your strategy?

Michael: In the first instance, Ben wanted to start a social media platform. And I think social media is a place where as you know, community is born and continues to grow. And I think that when building out a platform like we’ve been doing on Facebook or Instagram, you create these sort of sub communities.

But I think like tying those all together to this larger community, which is people that engage in cooking our recipes, inviting their mates around for dinner, it’s all about community.

It’s not just in the sense of like our audience or our community, of course, but like the communities that they create cooking our dishes is something that we don’t have control over, but it’s something that we want to inspire.

So, community means so many different things to us. And I think as we grow as a business, what those communities look like and how they’re shaped constantly changes, and it’s also adapting so you can keep giving those communities what they want, whether that’s in terms of the food that they want to be cooking.

At the moment, there’s a recession around the corner and people are short on funds and that’s something that we want to address and something we want to help with.

I probably should say this, that Mob is a brand that sits under Mouth Group, which is essentially, a group that we’ve developed in order to host multiple brands because we’re identifying the need for communities in different areas.

And we’ve also very recently launched a new vegan platform called Bunch. We’re working on an app called Peckish, it’s sort of like, I guess there’s a little bit of a exciting titbit of exclusive reveal.

It’s out there, but essentially, we’re going to hard launch it soon. And the idea of that is pulling everyone together to share their recipes in a way that sometimes isn’t championed by Instagram, as Instagram really focuses on the people that are already doing so well.

So, we’re always identifying communities and looking to serve them essentially and do it in a way that we think is appropriate and helpful, and also, interesting and entertaining too.

Cat: I’m interested as well. You did mention the cool element a couple of questions ago. How can you make cooking cool? I do think that you do it, but I’m interested given that you like specifically called it out, how do you sort of create content with that lens?

Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think a lot of that comes just down to sort of our brand positioning and the tone.

Ben, our founder is self-admittedly obsessed with brands and really draws inspiration from the likes of Vice, Boiler Room, Nike, looking at those brands and seeing what they’re doing and trying to lend that brand tone or that kind of vibe to what we do.

And there are many areas where Vice might be able to go slightly down, the more grungy, cultural route, that’s something that wouldn’t sit well with our audience.

So, it’s that balance of like what we think is great and also what our audience want. And I think that the reason I say “cool” because I think that it’s also a word that we would never use in an official sense.

But I think it’s just looking like what is to be cool or what is to make a cool brand. It’s something that is fresh, something that is vibrant, something that’s changing, something that listens to new voices and people coming through the ranks in terms of new chefs and people with new ideas, and try to draw from as many places as possible to take inspiration to create what we think is a really exciting and visually …

Yeah, cool, is the word, is the reason why that word exists, and that’s what we are trying to do.

Cat: And I think as well, you mentioned there about trying to create stuff that’s new and exciting and compelling. And I think I heard a story about your founder Ben way back when was slipping recipes into pizza boxes when he worked at Deliveroo, which in itself, is a really cool, interesting kind of unusual thing to do that would be attention-grabbing. And it’s like quite a nice sort of little origin story.

But it’s very clear that social has always been at the core of Mob, it is where I found you. I wonder if it’s like where most people have found you.

I just kind of wonder, has there always been a clear social strategy form up from the beginning or is it something that has evolved over time, and what would be like your main goals behind your social strategy?

Michael: Oh, it completely evolves over time. TikTok, for instance, wasn’t as much of a thing. I think it was around, but no one was using it anywhere near to the extent as like they are now back when I joined the company, which is around three and a half years ago.

So, a social strategy that doesn’t take into account amazing new platforms that are coming out is one that I think is sort of doomed.

And it’s something that we’ve always been looking to do is to be super flexible. About two years ago, every single food video that we did would’ve been short from above with a really expensive almost cinema level camera. And that’s what the internet wanted at that time, and TikTok has come along and completely changed that.

So, we have very quickly adapted our strategy. So, I would actually say that a strategy that doesn’t take into account the ever-changing nature of social media is one that is honestly doomed.

Instagram changes their algorithms and their feature sets like almost every week and to not adapt would be almost … I don’t know, it would just not be wise.

So, for instance, there’s this guy on Instagram called Adam Mosseri and, in his bio, it says he’s the head of Instagram, but he does these stories and these posts about the features and what they’re doing as a platform.

So, we often watch those videos and get excited about the things that are coming up, obviously, that then changes our strategy quite dramatically. And we’ve actually never had a marketing department, which I think people are quite surprised at.

We’ve never had a department that is solely focused on growing the platform because it’s essentially, what we all do full-time, is we work together to grow the platform. So, that is obviously something that we will need as we grow.

And we do have a small social team now that are growing the out, but it’s something that we haven’t really been hugely focused on.

Obviously, we really care about the growth. It’s important, there’s many people incoming into the community as possible to us, but obviously, we want to make sure that we’re doing the right content. And there are easy ways to get lots and lots of views. And sometimes, we decide not to go down that route.

So, a lot of it is by feel and adapts essentially every other week. Yeah.

Cat: I absolutely agree with you that being adaptable on social media is not just an advantage, it’s a necessity.

But at the same time, I think what’s quite interesting about Mob; there’s a very strong brand stamp on your content.

And I think as well, it’s really nice to see that you do include like kind of bloopers and a real sense of a relaxed feel, which I think as well, probably goes very hand in hand with the fact that you’re trying to encourage people into the kitchen. Like if it’s too formal and terrifying, that’s going to maybe put them off.

I kind of wonder, is that something that can stop people from taking you seriously as a business, or doesn’t really bother you in that manner?

Michael: It doesn’t really bother us. I think we really do focus on the content. It is Ben’s vision for the brand. It sort of ends up with the content that we make and it is relaxed.

It’s the reason that we actually are able to essentially build a community of people who in sort of the marketing world are quite famously hard to talk to, which is people who are sort of like in between the ages of 18 and 35. It’s something that we do because we make content that people respond to.

You see companies try and make social media content, you can tell it’s been shot on an amazing camera and then an editor’s come in and then like cropped it to make sure that it’s vertical.

And you just look at that and think it’s just not what people want these days. People aren’t interested in this like very glossy production style. For people to engage, the content needs to be engaging. And that is now shooting things on mobile, being really personable, having like lots of personality in that content too.

So, I guess if people don’t take us seriously because of that. So, then I would probably recommend that they check out their own social media strategy, if that’s something that they’re in, because they might be missing a bit of a trick.

We deal as a business with serious people and they seem to be very excited about what we are doing. I guess, it’s sort of disruption in the industry. And I haven’t really come across anyone who doesn’t like what we do, which is so humbling and so flattering because we just turn up and we really just try and do our best, and try and make amazing content. And to hear that it resonates with people is just brilliant.

Cat: One thing I have been dying to talk to you about is that there are a lot of people who are really excited to work with you. And it’s not unusual to see collaborations happening.

But Mob has had some unbelievable collaborations recently, like real chef’s kiss moments. Like honestly, as a consumer, I’ve seen them and been like, “That is perfect.”

So, I think one in particular that I just thought this is so wonderful was with Aldi. As most people in the UK know, they are fabulous on social media. Like they really are hilarious, they’re both social media darlings.

But that’s like just one of a number of brand collaborations that you have. I wonder how much are they a part of your strategy and what are your goals around that collaboration work?

Michael: Well, they’re an absolutely huge part of our strategy. It’s how we make money is through brand partnerships. And because we host those partnerships on our socials, you have a decision to make, in some instances.

Do you work with a brand that you’re not comfortable working with and take the money and damage the brand a little, or do you go and look for amazing partners that you really believe in and serve your audience amazing content to the point where people actually celebrate those partnerships.

And Aldi is just a classic example. It is a supermarket that has such an amazing mission, amazing ethos. It’s so relevant to people in our audience and just generally across the UK, but also, across the world too.

And it’s just brilliant that we can have those conversations with these brands and they’re open to working with us. We find it again, really humbling and incredibly exciting.

And especially when the end result is just really great content and creating a user journey where not only do I know the recipe, but I also know where I can buy the ingredients, and I know that I can get them for a budget. Like it’s a really helpful piece of content. And it’s something that we really focus on.

Again, this is very much Ben’s area, but he works so closely with our partnerships team to make sure that we are identifying brands that sit well with our general mission. And I think that that’s why that attention to detail really shines through on the content that we make. Because a lot of work goes into. It really does.

Cat: I think you can see that as a consumer, it feels really intentional in a world where there’s lots of kind of unintentional collaborations or collaborations where you’ve just got … I shared it on my own personal Instagram and said like, “This is like the collaboration of dreams.” Which is God’s honest truth. I would never share about a collaboration on my own personal Instagram, but I did with that one.

Going back to the content for a second, you are on all of the major social media channels, including quite recently, YouTube. So, I’d be interested to hear why YouTube sort of came later. It kind of seems like quite a natural fit for you.

You mentioned about not just cropping content to fit, like how much cross-pollination is happening across these social media channels? And like how are you coping with understanding the nuances of each platform and the different users there?

Michael: So, I’m very glad that you asked that question because it demonstrates that we maybe have been more successful in making people think that we launched the YouTube channel three months ago.

It’s essentially not exactly true because we launched our YouTube many, many years ago, but then decided that we didn’t quite have the resources to do it properly. And we had to prioritize.

So, probably good to just note that in order to do all these things, you really need to be working with incredible people. And there’s a lot that goes into that too.

Coming away slightly from the brand element, and really maybe this is more, my area is making sure that we have brilliant people surrounding us and working with us to help us create incredible content for these specific platforms.

So, our head of content Jake, his background is working in radio. He works for Global, also works at Capital and they had a huge YouTube presence and he joined the team to give us an understanding of how we can make Mob appropriate content on YouTube.

The synergies are that we have the same similar recipes across the platforms, but we adapt the way that we communicate those recipes based on the platform that we’re on.

It really is a full-time job for a number of people, making sure that the content that we’re making is properly tailored to those different platforms. And I think again, you can very easily spread yourself very thin and make sort of average content across all platforms.

Or you can really focus on one until you have the abilities to focus on another. And it’s all about, I guess, resourcing and being true to your brand and to your vision and mission and not trying to do everything at once.

We’re now, in a position luckily, where we can start to do everything at once because we’ve built out that team, bringing in people that know those platforms inside out, making sure that they keep tabs on what’s changing and what’s working.

And then developing that content over time and building it and responding to the feedback from your audience, which is another amazing part of social media, is that you have that instant feedback loop on every platform.

So, if people don’t like it, they will tell you and then you can decide to stick with your guns or you can change. And generally, we decide to change because the feedback’s normally really great.

[Music Playing 00:16:09]

Cat: Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex, even the hardiest of social media users.

Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call; Sound Advice.

Stacey: Right, I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it is time for us to take a break and cozy down together.

This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today:

Dear Stacey, I own and run a little cocktail speakeasy, which as well as slinging delish drinks has had more and more requests to host weddings in the last year, leading us to want to take our bar on the road.

We’ve invested in a Horsebox Trailer Conversion to take our cocktails to functions and events, which is a very different offering and atmosphere from our little basement bar.

So, now we’re ready to launch for wedding season with a diary full of bookings. We’ve been going back and forth over the question that asks, do we start a new dedicated social media presence for this project?

As it aimed at a different clientele has a different look feel, and even menu, we are nervous about sharing content for this new part of the business on our existing social media.

But we also want to capitalize on the existing following that we’ve worked so hard to build up over the last few years.

So, new project, new social, or evolve our existing? Look forward to hearing your thoughts, Tom.

When I was leading social for clients, I used to get this question all of the time for new business developments and also product ranges. The big question in response to yours, Tom, is how much time do you and the team realistically have to dedicate to creating a new social media presence.

If you are launching this new project and running the existing bar, I’m guessing not so much. If you do have great support from your team and they’re social-savvy, then I’d say, go for it in terms of creating new social profiles. If that’s your gut feeling, you’ve clearly got a great business head on you.

However, if it is a seasonal business, like if you’re only imagining this for summertime, for weddings and festivals, then may be switching your focus to existing channels during these periods is a better use of your audiences and profiles, and think about different networks in addition to what you already have.

So, what I mean by that is keep your existing channels, but maybe add Pinterest. So, you can mix in wedding content and functions content on there, and then may be add a Twitter to join any chatter around festivals that you might be attending.

That way, you can harness your existing audiences by sharing the new content on your pre-built social media presences, but also, reach those brand new audiences by creating and engaging with contextual content around those live events and functions.

But let’s talk weddings specifically. I’ve already mentioned Pinterest here for your new mobile bar, which is a must, but a dedicated Instagram solely for weddings could also be really lucrative.

Namely, because wedding guest posts a lot from the big days that they attend. And especially, I imagine if it involves your delish cocktails. So, creating a place to collate and harness all of that user-generated content can be gold.

You can bank these assets from the wedding guests, and not only will the photos keep your profiles looking up to date and active all year round, but they’ll also provide inspiration for new clients who might be planning their own celebrations.

So, Tom, I hope this sees you raising a glass to even more success on the road and on social this summer.

Until next time, listeners, stay strong and stay social. And now, back to the interview.

Cat: Yeah, I think it’s so refreshing to hear you talk about you maybe had the YouTube channel going prior and it wasn’t really resonating as much because I think that’s something we always try to talk about on this podcast, that the road to success and social isn’t linear and it’s often not incredibly easy all away as well.

So, I wonder actually, if you would like to share any other sort of lessons that you have along those lines, like what other like difficulties have you encountered?

Michael: Yeah. So, I think talking about TikTok, we launched our TikTok maybe three times. Essentially, with TikTok, we uploaded a video, didn’t do well. We were like, oh actually, maybe we’ve sort of missed the market, deleted it. I think we then did it again.

And then our third attempt, or maybe it was fourth, I can’t remember exactly, ended up getting around 10 million views and it just goes to show stick at it. You don’t pride an ego — leave that at the door when it comes to social media, like you have, again, that instant feedback loop. There’s nothing more telling than the performance of a piece of content.

And I think it goes back to adaptability of strategy. Again, we were probably supposed to launch TikTok at this one time. It just didn’t go well. So, we sort of went back to the drawing board. Could we do this better? Could we do this differently? Tried it again.

And I always think sometimes you look at maybe a brand social media and you can see sometimes they just absolutely nail it. And you see these brands, these huge brands.

You talk about Aldi, you talk about people like Ryanair that have clearly just got a really engaged social media team that are just really in the sort of the weeds of what people are enjoying on social media.

But you see other brands who clearly are just sticking to their guns and they’re just sticking to what their maybe creative director who has been at the company for so long and maybe doesn’t understand social so much, them pushing through certain creative decisions that just do not land.

And the reason that maybe you don’t see that stuff is because you would never be served it because it’s not really that engaging.

I think there’s a lot to be said for experimentation in social media, but there are limits to that. You don’t want to obviously offend anyone or do anything that could be seen as problematic.

That is another thing that we make sure that we are always communicating about making sure that our content’s like incredibly inclusive and sensitive too, so that’s something else that we discuss.

But yeah, you need to experiment and you need to take certain risks in order to build out a social media strategy. And I think our sort of launch of TikTok is indicative of that.

Cat: Oh, my goodness. I couldn’t agree more with you. And I think that that’s a real advantage in the world of social media to sort of lead with personality and you guys definitely do that.

But moving outside of the digital realm for a second as well, it’s kind of easy to think that Mob just exists on social media, but that’s also not the case at all. You’ve got a whole line of cookbooks. As I mentioned earlier, you have a traveling food and you collaborate with schools, musicians, and charitable organizations to teach, tour and line stomachs around the UK.

How do you balance between the huge levels of work that you’re doing on social, where I guess is where you’re finding the majority of your growth and momentum being built digitally with all of this non-digital work as well?

Michael: I guess there are different answers for those different areas. The truck was made because we wanted to have those touch points with our audience. There’s nothing more special than meeting the community.

And we did a few book launches, met a lot of sort of The Mob, and they came down and there was clearly such an appetite for these touchpoints and some of our partners and our brands we were working with were also echoing, like it would be amazing if we could work together in the physical space.

So, now, we’ve got an events team of four, which is amazingly exciting. So, there are lots of really exciting events coming up that we think everyone should hopefully love lots of amazing food, great music, that kind of thing.

On the cookbook side, it’s such a natural progression for us as a food brand. We’re really getting into an amazing rhythm of creating really engaging, wonderful cookbooks that really represent our brand.

And yeah, the school stuff, the charity stuff, just stuff that we really want to do. I think we are really ambitious and we have an incredible, incredible team and I think people really buy into the mission.

So, people come into the company and really want to help us develop that vision. And yeah, we’re looking to hire people, so we can focus even more on like charitable partnerships and to really then focus on sustainability in a way that we haven’t been able to do before and all of these different areas, which is yeah, just really exciting.

Cat: It’s so great to hear how values-driven Mob is. Like it sort of almost sounds like everything that you do is very intentional and the core values of the company is baked into almost every decision. Like everything you’ve described seems to be coming from a really good place of moral fiber, I would say.

I wonder what is in store for Mob, because you’ve kind of detailed this huge growth over quite a short amount of time. So, and you’ve mentioned that you’re very ambitious, so I have no doubt that you’re all aiming for the sky.

But I’m wondering what that entails, what you can maybe tell is about. And particularly with social media, are there any big plans in the pipeline?

Michael: Yeah, there are lots of big plans. So, Mob, obviously we’re on this trajectory is like make amazing content, make better content.

We’re really interested in creating almost like a hyper-engaged community. We’re looking at a slightly sort of like subscription-led model where we can offer even more amazing content that’s maybe more bespoke to the super Mob fans, the ones that really want to engage on a new level.

We are also creating other brands too. So, as I mentioned earlier, we have set up what is called Mouth Group. And the reason we called it that is because the mouth is the thing that speaks and communicates, but it’s also the thing that eats. And we thought it was representative of the world of work that we are in.

And we also have Juice, which is our talent management agency, where we represent a number of different chefs on our roster. People like What Willy Cook, Ixta Belfrage to name a few, some amazing chefs, and help them grow their platforms. And are constantly talking to them about what they want to do and how we can help them on their journeys too.

So, it’s really community is at the heart of everything that we do. And now, that we have Mouth Group set up, it gives us the freedom to act in a way that isn’t necessarily constrained by Mob’s identity and Mob’s mission.

We can start building other things that maybe aren’t suitable for like Mob’s branding or Mob’s position. And we want to make sure that Mob can stay so pure. So, we don’t want to distill it with all of these different, crazy ambitions that we have.

So yeah, more brands, more exciting things, potentially looking to go abroad, loads of conversations. We’re constantly talking about ideas and it’s so exciting.

And on a personal level, I just absolutely love being involved in those conversations and being able to bring myself to growing this thing out, because it really is amazing to come to work, into every day and to be part of this mission for sure.

Cat: I love to hear that so much. And I totally agree with you with hearing from an actual fan. That’s embarrassing for me to say, but I am a mega fan.

And so, I’m glad that you’re catering to the super fans, especially when you’re looking at social media metrics, you can see the numbers growing, but it’s nice to sometimes hear from the individual who loves your stuff.

One final question that we have is one that we ask everybody on this podcast, which is if Mob had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on Twitter leaving only one — and we can maybe make it for Instagram. Because it’s more like your realm I’d say or TikTok; which one account would you leave and why?

Michael: God, that’s such a hard question. And also, because I don’t want to upset anyone. Twitter, I imagine what would happen there, if that became something we had to do, I think Lucas, who’s our, I guess, would you call him our tweeter? I guess that’s technically what you could call him.

He’s our Senior Content Editor. He writes all of our articles. I imagine what he’d probably do is just follow himself and unfollow everyone else.

So, that’s my sort of get out of jail free card answer for that one. Maybe I’m a bit stuck with that question. There’s just a few people that we would continue to follow.

Cat: Well, it totally tracks. You’re really focused on community. It’s a community of people you’d still want to follow, and that’s totally cool.

Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. As I mentioned, it’s a real pleasure.

Michael: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.

[Music playing 00:28:31]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Michael of Mob for joining me today and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you can believe it, this is the last installment of the first series. What a journey it’s been. My thanks to all of you, our beloved listeners, as you’ve helped us dive through the weird world of social media.

If you’ve enjoyed the series, we’d love it if you could take the time to write and review on iTunes.

We’ll be back next year with more stories from Social Creatures. So, until then, stay social. Bye.

The post Mob: A delicious digital blend of cool cooking and conscience appeared first on Sprout Social.

RICH MYERS Hi.

CAT ANDERSON Before we get into the whole big story about Sprinklegate, could you tell us a little bit about Get Baked for those of you who don’t know about you? Like, how did you start and why are you different from other bakeries?

RICH MYERS Yeah. Get Baked started actually in 2011, when I was early twenties. Twenty-one. And it was from an idea that I had to create a delivery service of sweet stuff, because, you know, delivery didn’t exist. Deliveries didn’t exist. There was no way that you could just get desserts delivered. It wasn’t really a thing. It wasn’t a market. Whereas, now, it is everywhere. We set that up very quickly from my momma’s kitchen, and it took off really well. We went viral on Facebook quite regularly about then when Facebook was sort of a bit of a different place. Although we still do extremely well on Facebook. Where people struggle, we really don’t.
So, yeah. We’re a dessert-led bakery business. We’ve got one site currently. We’re looking at sort of quite rapid expansion over the next twelve months, as well as being a sort of dessert with kind of an attitude and a style of humour and a brand in general. And we sell a lot of merchandise. So, I guess we’re also a merchandise company.
Essentially, we’re—. We – we make desserts, really. You know, that’s what we do, really, as a core. And if we can’t do that well, then everything else is just never going to work anyway.

CAT ANDERSON Well, that is true, I have to say. But as someone who does not live locally to you and hasn’t had a chance to try the cakes, it is interesting that I am a follower. And I think your point about being a brand is really accurate, you know, and it is definitely about an attitude.
The story of October last year and everything kind of changed for you. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about what happened at that stage?

RICH MYERS We were using American-imported sprinkles, which a lot of—. So, there’s a certain aesthetic that you get from using American sprinkles that some bakery businesses are very bothered about and some aren’t. And then, we are one of the ones that aren’t very bothered by it. And this is not to be remotely disrespectful to any bakeries, but the ones that tend to care about the way their sprinkles look tend to be the ones selling better stuff.
A lot of guys in London have the same feeling that I did towards the sprinkles. We were using sprinkles that were a lot more expensive than you can get in the UK. I mean, we could have spent, you know, considerably less money than we were in using British sprinkles, but we weren’t. We were using the good stuff. And we were buying them from the UK. We weren’t buying them from abroad.
Anyway, it turned out that these sprinkles had an illegal number in them, which wasn’t allowed to be used in – under EU regulation. So, somebody knew that. I don’t know who. But whoever it was, they reported us to Trading Standards. And then, we, one day, randomly got a visit by Trading Standards, who literally came in and said, “Hi. I know this might sound ridiculous, and I’m sorry for having to do this, but you’re being investigated for selling illegal sprinkles.”
As ridiculous as it all is, it was very unpleasant at the time. It was quite intimidating. Nobody really wants to be investigated by Trading Standards, ’cause it’s not very—. It’s not nice. And you also think, “Well, what – what – what is this going to result in?” Like, it sounds silly, but where will it end?
And then – then, we were told we couldn’t use them pending investigation, which we didn’t. We didn’t use them anymore, which affected our products, ’cause we used them quite a lot. And then, essentially, they came back to us and said, “Yeah. We have confirmed they are illegal. You can’t use them. And they all need to be destroyed.”
And then, somebody picked it up on Twitter. Somebody with hardly any followers, which is kind of the unusual thing. We have never used Twitter. It was not a platform we utilised. And then, it just blew up really from there. Then, I capitalised on it, essentially, from that.

CAT ANDERSON Of course, it makes so much sense that that would have been scary, because it’s, like, integral to your business that, you know, you can continue to operate. But as you say, you capitalised on it. Your response wasn’t one of fear. So, I think your response got a lot of traction online. Also, in the press and on TV. And Sprinklegate ended up trending worldwide.
Would you be able to tell us a little bit about—. Again, for those who don’t know, what was your response online? How did you decide to play that out? And then, why do you think it got so much traction?

RICH MYERS So, the way I build an audience, and the way we successfully build a following, is by me and our followers having an enemy, whether it’s Dan, who Dan is another enemy of ours, which you may or may not know about. Or this Cher Lloyd, which is an older one. Cher Lloyd is from 2011. Or Trading Standards. Or this Danielle, who is a female version of Dan.
But, essentially, if we don’t have an enemy, I create one. And if we do have an enemy, then I utilise it. And, essentially, the way I played it online was I was going to take on Trading Standards and make as much of it as physically possible. So, that’s all I did, really. All I did – all I did was capitalise on the press and then make sure that everything was to the absolute, maximum volume it could have been, which it – which it was.

CAT ANDERSON I think that’s a really interesting insight, because I wasn’t aware that that was necessarily the play. But what was really refreshing—and I wonder your thoughts on this—is that it seemed like a highly un-media trained response.
Like, in a world where people—. Like, something like that happening. Like, Trading Standards coming in and being like, you know, “You’re under investigation for your sprinkles.” I mean, there are other businesses that might have, like, hidden away and been ashamed. Whereas your outburst was, like, so furious that it was actually—. It felt really, really authentic, you know, because, in a way, it was—.

RICH MYERS You know what? And it totally—. It totally—. It – it absolutely was. It was totally authentic.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah.

RICH MYERS There was no—.

CAT ANDERSON And that’s the thing. I’m So, this is something that I’m obsessed about on social media, ’cause I think the more authentic it can be, the better. And I think that’s why people really liked it, because it was not only like, “This is totally ridiculous that they’re being investigated for sprinkles.” It seems so trivial. Like, no disrespect to the sprinkles. Because, obviously, I understand what you’re saying they make the cakes better. But it’s so trivial.
And you’re being investigated. And then, your outburst as well was so absolutely correct. And then, also just was that funny juxtaposition of your fury over this tiny, little sprinkle. I just thought it was, like, a perfect comic moment. And I think because you—. It just felt so authentic as opposed to things where it’s, like, a very hyper-drafted release, you know. And people were like, “Okay. We can get behind them.”
So, I don’t know. Like, I’d love to hear what your thoughts on, like, the authenticity piece are.

RICH MYERS What happened as it all snowballed very, very quickly. It was actually the BBC’s biggest article, worldwide, of the year, which is insane.
But a few PR companies got in touch. And one of them rang – I spoke to on the phone, ’cause I thought, “Oh, maybe I need someone here.” Although I really had—. You know, I didn’t—.
I remember she said, “I’ve have got to be honest. You’re playing this all wrong. I think that you need to take some advice, because you don’t want to end up in a position where you regret things you’re saying before you have considered saying them.”
And I said, “I think you’re in the wrong industry.”
When you’re involved in something like that and you’re coming from a point of being authentic, because you actually are, there’s no wrong way to do it. Because all I was doing was saying what I felt and doing it in a way that I knew was going to work on the medium as it was being delivered, if that makes sense.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, a hundred percent. And I think, I mean, to the PR person’s perspective, I can see why it could be like you’re inviting crises and, you know, scandal.

RICH MYERS Yeah. But that was what I—. That’s—. Yeah. But that’s exactly what I wanted. The – the more problems, the better. That’s what I wanted. I wanted as much. If the CIA would have come off to me, then I would have been delighted.
Crisis is where I like to live, to be honest, in terms of—. ‘Cause all that – all that does is go back to what I said about a common enemy.

CAT ANDERSON And I think, you know, as much as you say that you like to live in crisis, which is brilliant, this was not uncalculated on your part. You know what I mean? To what you just said. You that this was ultimately ridiculous. And if it was something where it was much more serious, you wouldn’t have been inviting dark chaos into your life. But I think what’s interesting then—.
So, this, as you have mentioned, was picked up by press around the world. Can you tell us a little bit about how your social media accounts were affected?

RICH MYERS Facebook, I think, we were always sat around fifty thousand. And then, since Sprinklegate, we gained about twenty-thousand in about forty-eight hours. And then, Instagram is what really blew up. So, we were new to Instagram. So, we only had, I think it was, about four thousand followers. And then, we went four thousand to about sixty-eight thousand in a day.

CAT ANDERSON That is so insane.

RICH MYERS And in terms of engagement, obviously, you know, your engagement on Instagram is dependent on how many followers you have and how well received it is. It’s as simple as that. And it’s the same with Facebook. We don’t tend to post content that isn’t well received. Because if it’s not going to be well received, I won’t post it.

CAT ANDERSON Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice.

STACEY WRIGHT Hi. I have got my cup of tea and I have got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, to your trickiest digital dilemmas. Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you have sent my way today.

“Dear Stacey,
“Yesterday, Jeff from operations sent me a one-liner email, asking how to install two-factor authentication on his new phone, so he could access all the work systems he needed.
“I should probably clarify here that I’m a social media producer. Read: categorically not IT. I pride myself on being a helpful supportive person and building great internal relationships through the organisation. But the taps on the shoulder and the “Can you just” messages about our online systems are getting me properly hacked off.
“Why do people think that, because I work in social media, I have the ability to fix their online account issues, and how do I avoid people thinking I have a ‘computer saves no’ mentality?
“Seeking a hard reset for these requests, Mo.”
Mo, I can identify so strongly with this letter, because, once, in a previous employment, my CEO—well, his security team—decided to ask me, at eleven p.m., one night, if I could remove images of his house from Google Earth.
I really wanted to reply that I’m not a black ops hacker or on the board of Google to be able to do that. And I also think that the perception of other social managers also depends on where you work. So, coming from the arts and B2C brands, often, I just go, “Oh, she’s just paid to post pretty pictures” rather than actually being mistaken for an IT consultant.
But let’s flip that perspective for a second. So, Mo, if you’re a social producer, you’re always asking operations, like Jeff here, for access to locations for maybe livestreams or you’ve got loads of [rush-y] hardware and wires, and, you know, you’re editing videos in the palm of your hand on a phone. Maybe Jeff has just got confused, because he sees you with this techie glow around you all the time.
But as you mentioned in the letter, that strong relationships throughout our business are really, really important for social managers, ’cause we often need access to areas. We want the best content coming through. So, I feel like the real question underneath this is actually a little bit more profound in how do we more effectively communicate what the role of a social media person or team is within an organisation. But more importantly, what is the value of what we’re doing?
One way to really start to tackle that effectively is to start showing the results more. So, instead of being “Look at what we created. Here’s a lovely piece of content,” “Look at the impact of this piece of content. This is what it drove. This is how many people store it. This is the perception of the business now from us creating it.”
And maybe ask from your people team or your HR team, like, how far and wide they can disseminate those successes throughout the business, which is going to have a great impact for your team, but also, like, raising your internal profile.
In addition, you might want to use a traditional IT technique of “switch it off and switch it on again.” So, switch it off by creating those boundaries and saying no in a professional manner and leading people to seek that support elsewhere, because it is not in your role. Then, switch it back on again, by having your intro down. When you meet new team members, set the tone. “This is my job title, and this is what I do.”
So, when I meet new people as a solutions engineer here at Sprout Social, that job title can be a little bit mystifying for people that don’t work in tech. So, I often follow it up with “So, I’ll be your expert tour guide through the platform today, and I’ll also act as a consultant on the best workflows for your team day to day and in achieving those social media goals.”
You can create the ideal framework of reference for your role and own it.
Mo, thanks so much for emailing your social media quandary to us today. I hope that’s been helpful in resolving your case of mistaken identity.
And until next time listeners. Stay strong and stay social. And now, back to the interview,

CAT ANDERSON You say that you’re not an expert in social media. But, you know, the Instagram.

RICH MYERS I’m not. I’m not.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. But, you know—. And I do think I see – I hear your point, because I do think when people think about experts in social media, there are – there’s so much to unpack, you know, and there’s lots of different ways …

RICH MYERS Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON … that people can be successful, some of which you’ve mentioned. But I honestly think that, at the core of social media success, is about having your own—I’m going to sign a bit salesy here—but, like, your unique selling point. Like, what is unique about you? What makes you stand out from other bakeries? You know? And I think your tone of voice is something that you’ve, you know, like, really, really worked on and you know what’s going to work for your brand, so.

RICH MYERS Nothing that we—. Nothing that I do on social media is anything that I’ve worked on is purely knowing how to write certain things in a certain way and understanding humans. If it wasn’t on social media, it will be in another form. It’s just that the social media is the way of getting that out in the modern world.
So, it’s not something I have worked on. I don’t sit there trying to construct posts for half an hour. I don’t think, “Is it the right time of day to post it?” I don’t really do any of that.
I write a post that I would – the way I say it, and then it is right. The reason I think that it is – is good is because of that. I’m able to write in a very relatable way for our audience. And I think that that comes across as being something that’s constructed. But, really, to be totally honest with you, it isn’t. It’s just the way I write.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. Because the tone of voice of Get Baked, you’ve mentioned it earlier, it’s like an attitude. So, it can come across as—. Actually, how would you describe the tone of voice of Get Baked?

RICH MYERS It’s dry, sarcastic. It’s genuine, it’s unapologetic, and it’s honest. And I think also the main thing, it’s quite self-deprecating. I think that helps a lot.I think what Get Baked is to me, what I think it always will be, and I think why it’s—. There’s a – there’s a reason why a normal Facebook page with a normal following of however many—seventy thousand—would put a post on and get very little engagement. ‘Cause most do. And there’s a reason why we don’t. It resonates in a certain way with a lot of people, I guess.
I think one thing that we don’t do, which in my opinion is where a lot of businesses fall down on social media—I don’t want to be judgy of other people’s social media, but a lot of it I find quite cringy—is we don’t really have a lot of [chintz] our social media. So, there’s no—. Or necessarily posting random things, you know. If it’s on there, it’s on there, because it’s worthy of being on there. If it’s not on there, it’s because it shouldn’t be there.

CAT ANDERSON [Chintz] is – is an interesting way of describing it. But a lot of businesses would speak just as bluntly, if you don’t mind me saying bluntly. ‘Cause it is kind of blunt. It’s just straight to the point.

RICH MYERS People think, because we have a bluntness, that we would be offensive. We would never—. If you look, we have never, ever and never – we never will offend a group of people. People think we’re going to go off the vegans. I’m not—. That’s absolutely absurd to – to even consider doing something like that in business.
We might be blunt and sort of humorous, but we’re not stupid. I mean, there’s a big difference between knowing your audience and thinking you know your audience.
There’s a business—. I mean, I don’t want to talk about anyone else’s business, but there’s another business that they actually messaged me to tell me they were doing this, which I found strange anyway. But they have – they have essentially copied our style. They’re a desert business. They have – they have started using our – even our phrases on social media. And they – they have started trying to change their social media approach and basically copy Get Baked to the point where people have sent me links saying, “Have you seen this? It’s funny.”
And it is quite funny. But because they don’t understand the intricacies of how to do it, it comes across as extremely offensive.

CAT ANDERSON You mentioned that, you know, you might be blunt, but you’re not stupid. But I think it’s also important there. The other word that popped to my head is that you’re not mean either. Like, it’s not intentionally trying to isolate people. It’s very much a tone of voice that’s adopted, so you can—. You do stand out. You’ve got loads of international followers. I have seen your story and I have seen Get Baked picked up. I acquainted with Get Baked from an account based in New Zealand.

RICH MYERS Yeah. We’re quite big – we’re quite big in New Zealand.

CAT ANDERSON You know, like that’s amazing.

RICH MYERS Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON But I do think it’s – it’s interesting to hear you talk about this. ‘Cause, obviously, there is a very fine line then between getting that balance right, you know.

RICH MYERS There is. It’s very—. It’s very, very fine. It’s very difficult to replicate, which I like – I like that. And I think it’s, you know—. If you’re going to have a – a dessert business, it’s difficult to enjoy it day to day. If you can’t have fun with what you spend most of your time doing, which what most people spend most of the time doing now is being on the phone, so if you can’t do that in a way that you actually get fulfilment from and you actually enjoy it. ‘Cause I really enjoy it. Like, I get a lot of enjoyment from posting. It’s not a chore. It’s not like, “Ah, I don’t know what to do for content. I don’t know how to.” You know? “I have not posted properly in a while. The engagement is down.”
I get—. I see that all the time. One thing that I can’t – I never understand is when businesses, they’ll do a screenshot of their engagement with like, “Oh, I don’t know if anyone else is feeling this, guys.”
Like, our engagement, for me, that is, like – that’s the biggest in social media is talking about your metrics. Business owners that talk about their reach and stuff is the most cringe-worthy thing in the world for me. I’ll just—. I think not having to worry about social media for your business is a gift. And, really, if you don’t have a decent social media following in a customer-facing business, you’re essentially dead.

CAT ANDERSON Well, it is definitely the way the world is going. And so, to speak slightly in defence of people who do worry about the metrics, I totally understand why they do. Anything with a number attached to it, you inherently, as a human, want to build that number up.
But what I find quite interesting, and some of the people we have spoken to on this podcast, is, you know, we’re exploring conversations and stories where people or brands have gotten massive and talking about it on a real recurring theme. And I think it’s almost, like, the magic potion of social media is that people are authentic. And the other thing that you said there, which I just love, is you have fun with it.
Because I think, again, on social media, it’s different from television. It’s different from print. It’s different from all of the other mediums where you can connect with your audience. And you can connect with them all throughout the day, any day of the week. And if you’re not having fun and if you’re not being yourself, it’ll get dry very, very quickly.

RICH MYERS Yeah. A lot of people ask me all – all the time, “What do I do on social media?”
I say, “Well, firstly, who are you? Should you be posting on your social media? ‘Cause if that’s not your skillset and you’re not good at writing posts, you shouldn’t be doing it. Firstly, you should be paying someone to do it, because it’s very important. And every time you’re posting something, then think about it from the perspective of the person that’s reading it.”

Because businesses just become, “Here’s what we’re selling and here’s how much we’re selling it for.” And I very, very rarely talk about price, very rarely, because it’s just boring. You know, very rarely do we say, you know, “Buy it now.” I don’t post like that, because that’s the way everyone else does it. I don’t consider any of it really. And, really, we are a social media business. We don’t pay a penny for any ads. We don’t – we don’t have any marketing budget at all. And I don’t think we ever will, really.

CAT ANDERSON Isn’t that wild? Like, isn’t that wild that you, as a dessert business who sells cakes, you are, you said, a social media company? And yet, you know, you’ve never spent a penny on advertising. You’ve never, like, had a marketing budget. Because you have—. “Now, I got this huge online community.”
Can you tell me about how that affected your business then?

RICH MYERS I mean, directly in terms of levels of trade, it hasn’t, to be honest. ‘Cause we were busy anyway. And there’s only so much we can produce from one site currently. So, it – it hasn’t affected the business in terms of instant revenue.
But in terms of opportunity, obviously, it’s resulted in large amounts of exposure, which have resulted in other things. So, I have signed a book deal, which I think I probably would have done eventually, but I – I wouldn’t have done this soon if Sprinklegate didn’t happen, ’cause it gave me that level of exposure. So, it’s – it’s affected us in that respect.
And then, it’s obviously given us a worldwide audience, which has meant that we sell more merchandise all over the world instead of just in the UK and it’s meant that we can feasibly think about actually opening locations in other countries that probably wouldn’t have felt like a possibility before, unless it was a lot further down the line.
In terms of the sprinkles, that’s resulted in launching our own sprinkles brand, which is a separate business to Get Baked. It’s not going to be under the Get Baked brand pillar, because, for a couple of, like, business-y reasons, but also because it will still be voiced very similar to Get Baked. And we’re going to have a lot of customers that are bakeries, ’cause we’re going to sell sprinkles to both consumers at home and also bakers that use them on their products. We will, therefore, be sharing a lot of their images of our sprinkles on their stuff.

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

RICH MYERS And we don’t want to do that on Get Baked, because we will be sharing—. Not that they’re competition, but we’ll just be sharing images of baked stuff that isn’t ours, and it’ll a bit confusing.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. It’s like a bit of a conflict of interest, really.

RICH MYERS It’s like a conflict of interest. So, it made more sense for us to have a separate brand. The brand is called Expensive Sprinkles. And I liked the idea of Expensive Sprinkles, because it’s ridiculous.
I don’t think anyone in the history of retail has ever thought to name their product “expensive.” ‘Cause even if it is expensive, you don’t call expensive. You call it luxury.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah.

RICH MYERS It’s just like the whole strapline of expensive sprinkles is that they’re extortionate and they cost a fortune. They’re expensive. There’s no getting around it. They just cost a lot of money. And if you want them, you want them. And if you don’t—.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. No two ways about it.

RICH MYERS Yeah. Which is great in a lot of respects, because it means that we can charge you a premium for them, because they’re expensive sprinkles. So, yeah. We—. With—.
Expensive Sprinkles is – is launching as soon as we have received the expensive sprinkles, which are coming from Costa Rica, which is—.

CAT ANDERSON An expensive location.

RICH MYERS Yeah. It’s very—. It’s all – it’s all very expensive. And we—. Our first shipment is five – is five tons.

CAT ANDERSON Five tons …

RICH MYERS Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON … of sprinkles from Costa Rica? This is suitably absurd.

RICH MYERS I’m like – I’m like the – I’m like the Pablo Escobar of – of confectionary. It’s quite funny, though.
The funny thing with sprinkles as well is the – the – the smaller volume you sell them in, the more the margin. So, it’s actually—. It is like drugs. It’s like selling drugs, really. I mean, it’s—.
But we’re selling them in glass bottles, which is quite unusual. And it’s another element to have fun with on social media. What we’re essentially doing is marketing it like a perfume. Like, a really expensive Dior perfume, for example. So, it’s going to be sort of—. It’s going to look like a perfume Instagram. But instead of holding a bottle of perfume, it’s a bottle of sprinkles.

CAT ANDERSON I love that.

RICH MYERS Yeah. And that’s – that’s the – that’s the sort of aesthetic we’re going for.

CAT ANDERSON My final question is: What did you learn from this whole palaver, and how did social media play a role in everything that went down?

RICH MYERS It would never have carried anywhere without social media, because that was the only place. Well, that is the only place where anything becomes anything now, really. We’re in a – we’re in a world where if it hasn’t gone viral in some degree online, it hasn’t happened. So, there’s that. I mean it’s played that role in the respect that it made it a thing, which is everything.
And then, what I have learnt. [unintelligible]. Genuinely, I really – I really haven’t.

CAT ANDERSON I’ve learnt nothing from this.

RICH MYERS I—. Honestly.

CAT ANDERSON That’s—. No. I – I trust you. I just—. I love the honesty of the response.

RICH MYERS Rather than tell you what I have learnt, I think what I would do instead of that is probably give someone advice if they’re going through a similar situation, where they find themselves in a position where, for whatever reason, they end up with this – with a global audience inadvertently, is to absolutely forget everything apart from that for the time that it’s happening, because you only really get one chance to maximise on it. If you don’t do it while it’s happening, you will never catch it ever. It’s gone.
I could have happily had an interview from the BBC, gave an interview, done a couple of interviews, and just sort of left it. And it would have been fine. And that’s probably what most people would have done, which is it would have been a terrible mistake.
Or I could have do what I did and then result in things like being on this podcast, signing a book deal, doing pop-ups in America and, potentially, you know, massively growing in the business. So, yeah. Maximise it.

CAT ANDERSON You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Rich from Get Baked for joining me today and The Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.
Make sure you catch the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.
You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media @Sprout Social or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt, Stacey Wright, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.
Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post Get Baked: How fury can win you fans appeared first on Sprout Social.

CAT ANDERSON Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone. And, really, nearly anything goes. But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know. But that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know and some that you don’t to explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

So, this week, I am joined by Graham Goodkind, the founder of the multi-award winning agency, Frank. One thing that I personally really love about social media is its capacity to surprise and delight. And, oftentimes, this is with moments of absolute madness. 

A perfect example of such an occasion was when the Internet, as a whole, became obsessed and also maybe a bit horrified when Weetabix and Heinz baked beans did a campaign together. If you missed it, it was when Weetabix oh-so casually suggested the unusual pairing of serving their biscuits with a tasty and savoury topping of Heinz baked beans.

Now, to say this caused a bit of a ruckus is an understatement. It caused an absolute massive brand pile-on to begin with. So, we had the likes of the NHS. We had Toblerone. People around the world debated whether this food pairing was heaven or hell. And let’s not forget the press also went absolutely bananas for it as well.

If I’m being totally honest, I don’t know if I would have been able to look at that campaign at the start and have predicted the absolutely enormous reaction it had. So, that is why I cannot wait to talk to Graham, today, as the founder of the agency behind this gloriously mad and perfectly genius company.

If you want to see what else this incredible agency has done, you can follow them @WelcomeToFrank.

Graham, welcome to Social Creatures.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Thanks very much for having me.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, I’m – I’m delighted. And I’m absolutely going to burn your ear off with questions. So, apologies in advance.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Okay. Well, hopefully, I can do them justice. I’ll try my best.

CAT ANDERSON Well, before we just get really into the nitty-gritty of this particular campaign and your feelings about social …

GRAHAM GOODKIND Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON … can you tell us a little bit about Frank in general and what it is that your agency does?

GRAHAM GOODKIND Frank is a all-around consumer agency, specialising, really, with consumer brands, products, services. So, lots of food, drink, hospitality, alcohol. All those sorts of clients. Just kind of anything and everything. A bit of consumer technology, some financial services targeting any brands that need to target a consumer audience. We’ve been going for twenty-one years. So, we’re really old boys and girls in this industry and constantly trying to come up with ideas to keep us and our brands relevant in today’s world. 

And that is all underpinned by a keyword, and a keyword that I’m probably going to say too much today, which is Talkability. And our whole creative process, our ethos, the way the agency was set up twenty-odd years ago and still runs the day is to come up with those ideas, campaigns, moments, stunts, events that are those, if you like, watercooler moments, the stuff that you’re going to share with your mate’s be it via WhatsApp, on social media, or down the pub.

How do we come up with those ideas that become those talking points that you’re going to talk about? And, obviously, you know, what we’re going to talk about today with Weetabix and beans certainly was one of those.

CAT ANDERSON That’s the perfect word. I wasn’t sure what word you’re going to say. But Talkability. This campaign. Like, holy smokes. It was spoken about by everybody. If there is someone who hasn’t seen this campaign, it was massively, almost innocently simple with how straightforward it was. It was a – a plate with Heinz baked beans on top of two Weetabix rusks, with the caption, “Why should bread have all the fun when there’s Weetabix serving up @HeinzUK Beanz on Bix for breakfast with a twist?” And it went absolutely everywhere.

I would love to know. How did you come up with that?

GRAHAM GOODKIND Okay. It was surprisingly simple. And I would have to say, as someone that loves great creative thinking in this business, the best ideas are very often the most simple ideas. But the – the sort of root to it, really, and – and why we came up with it and the whole backstory is important, because it’s very relevant. 

Weetabix as a brand, so, we’ve been working with them for a number of years now. And one of the things that’s very important for them is their strapline, which is Any-Which-Way-A-Bix, which is the fact that you can enjoy your Weetabix kind of however you want to. There’s no rules about it. Sure, the traditional perception, you might have it with a bit of milk and a bit of sugar or a bit of honey or whatever in the morning. But, you know, there aren’t any rules really attached to it. And that’s what Weetabix wanted to build on and established. And they spent a lot of money above the line in their advertising and other form of communication expressing that.

So, the ongoing brief to us, and it’s a part of an ongoing campaign, this – this piece of work was: How can we amplify that? How can we make that relevant? So, we wanted to do that in a – in a talkable way. 

And we looked at—. One of the things we looked at and we started getting interested about was these unusual food combinations. This came as a result through a lot of different social listening as well, whereby we were getting consumers emailing or actually commonly getting in touch via Twitter or other social media channels with their Weetabix recipes and how they enjoy their Weetabix. And it just got us thinking that maybe there’s other ways of doing it.

So, Weetabix and beans actually came as part of a number of different food combinations that we put together. And what we’d done is we’d done them officially. So, our idea was, “Look, we’re going to go to a few different brands.” Heinz Beans was one of them. But we’re going to go to a few different brands and efficiently pair up with them.

So, we have a number of other brands that we’d engage with and we’d had their official social media accounts endorse that combination. And we did some shots.

The – the trick was that made this a phenomenon, and you used the word and it’s kind of a good word, was the pile-on that happened. And the scale, really, as well as being Weetabix and beans was definitely our icing on the cake, if you like, of the different food combinations. The way we released it was quite deliberately engineered. And that was – that was the whole kind of media strategy. The media plan is we thought, okay, instead of just releasing Weetabix and Innocent, Weetabix and Marmite, Weetabix and a peanut butter brand, instead of just staggering them a bit, we did it all on one day and in one go, because we want to create that feeling that one brand was piling onto another, was piling onto another.

So, where it got us was that pile-on becoming viral beyond viral in terms of the amount of other brands that decided to get involved in the debate. So, on the one hand, there was the brand strategy about how do you show the versatility of Weetabix? The fact that consumers can enjoy it any way which they want, which was really important from a brand point of view. And then, there was the executional strategy, was we got one, you know, fun, silly, random idea in terms of Weetabix and beans. How do we then amplify that? And our plan was by actually engaging other brands to make it seem like you were jumping on the bandwagon, and one was leading to another one, and, hopefully, it would lead to more and more, which is obviously what transpired. And it did.

And you have to remember the timing of this. This was all when we’d gone into another lockdown. So, that mood of the nation was a bit “Oh, my God. Here we go again.” A bit miserable, a bit down. We – we – we needed a bit of light, relief, and a bit of a respite from the kind of COVID-induced boredom that we were all in. And, you know, we sort of picked our moment in time obviously absolutely perfectly.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, amen. Oh, my goodness. I have about a million questions off the back of that. But I’ll just start with maybe the most simple one. When this did start to blow up, and it certainly did do that, could you have anticipated how big it would have got? Obviously, as you said, there was a strategy there to have the four different examples with other brands. And I love that you’re like, “Right. We’ll – we’ll deploy them all on the same day, so we have that big impact.” But it really went bananas.

GRAHAM GOODKIND And it’s hard to envisage that that’s going to happen. I can’t say, “Yeah, yeah. We knew it was going to get” …

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … “you know, five hundred other brands piling on within the space of a few hours. Yeah, yeah. We knew it was going to get picked up by just about every national media and newspaper.” You know? And – and that, you know—. Of course, we didn’t know that.

But—. And as the same and a lot of the time in – in PR when you, you know, release great stories on behalf of clients, you know, sometimes, it – it just goes better than your wildest ever dreams. And this was an example of that.

CAT ANDERSON We’ve said a couple of times now about the pile-on. And a phrase that I learnt quite recently that I both love and hate is “branter.” And it sounds like it’s something that you were aware of before. You know? You’re like, “Right. Well, we’ll pair up with these other brands and try and – try and inspire that brand pile-on to happen.”

I’d love to hear, like, what your thoughts are as an agency. What are your thoughts about branter? ‘Cause it’s getting massive these days as well, isn’t it? Everybody wants a bit of branter.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Absolutely. Now, Frank, you know, for a number of [plants], we’re looking after their – the social media side of their communications. And it’s kind of you thinking of if – if a brand was a famous person or a celebrity and they were tweeting and/or posting on social media, what would they say? And that requires quite skilled members of the team to assume the personality of that brand.

And Weetabix, it’s a family brand and, you know, it’s kind of been about for – for over a hundred years. So, there’s—. There’s—. They just got to get the tone right. But it is a big thing. We do it now for a number of clients. And, you know, people just have to put themselves in their headspaces. It’s – it’s almost like you’re personalising a brand and bringing it to life as a person.

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND And it is—. You’re right. It is a new word. I’m not sure whether the descriptive verb for “brand banter” happened before or after Weetabix. But maybe, like, Talkability, maybe I’ll claim that one as well.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. [crosstalk].

GRAHAM GOODKIND You’ve just given me a good idea. I’m going to go off and register the trademark now.

CAT ANDERSON Well, if you register to trademark, that, I – I want in on it.

GRAHAM GOODKIND We’ll share it.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. I want in on it. Thanks. But yeah. I – I think you’re so right, by the way. I was nodding furiously when you said that it takes a lot of skill, because I think another aspect about the branter thing is that you’re definitely being a bit cheeky. And if you’re being a bit cheeky and also representing the brand, there is a bit of a fine line there.

You mentioned there that Weetabix is a family – a family brand as well as a family business. So, in a way, because this campaign was so divisive, it just blew people’s minds. But it also—. Everyone could have an opinion of it. And you know, it was absolutely risk-free in a way, you know. Like, I know—. I – I have it down here that Israel’s official account said, “Finally, something that all Middle Eastern countries can agree on. Just no.” Which is, you know—. That’s hilarious that accounts like that are even weighing in on it, you know.

GRAHAM GOODKIND I mean, that – that, to me, was the – the thing that amused me most and made the campaign work. You’re right. The state of Israel, the official state of Israel. It was towards the end of the day. And I thought, “Look, job done.” 

Sometimes, in – in this PR career, over – over the number of years, you know, you – you’re promoting brands. You’re not doing anything that’s really going to change the world. You’re just having a bit of fun and trying to flog more of your client’s stuff. But, you know, to actually go some way to solving the Middle Eastern peace. You know, the – the – the situation in the Middle East that has never had a solution in all these years, and one – one funny tweet from Weetabix can – can do that. But that’s right. They said that, “Finally, something that every Middle Eastern country can agree on. Just no.”

And then, they did offer the advice. “Want to know how you can upgrade your Weetabix?” Their suggestion was hummus.

You know, Scotland also said, “Speaking as the country who gave the world such culinary delights as haggis and deep-fried confectionary, we can confirm this is, in fact, a step too far.” That was Scotland speaking.

Toblerone said just on the national continuum, the national theme, Toblerone said, “We’re from Switzerland. So, we’re staying out of this.”

Shakespeare’s Globe got a bit more punny about it. They go, “To bean or not to bean. That is the question.”

Again, all posting, you know, the actual original Weetabix and beans tweet.

The NHS, obviously, this is at the time of COVID as well like we’ve discussed. During the lockdown, actually took the time to tweet this, “That tweet should come with a health warning.”

Greater Manchester Police. I like this one as well. Again, speaking, you know, using their brands. I thought this was quite good. The Greater Manchester police said, “We’ve bean”—oh, okay; the pun—”looking into this after a number of complaints today, due to its serious nature, we’ve passed this over to our major incident team who deal with cereal killers.”

See what they—.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, no.

GRAHAM GOODKIND See what they’d done. 

Then, Wimbledon, the official account of Wimbledon, the lawn tennis association. “Quiet, please.”

Skyscanner said, “This is worse than the people who clap when the plane lands.”

Google – Google said, “Look at what – at what you’ve done now.” And they had a photo of a Google search with Weetabix and beans coming up top of the predictive search results because of that story.

Guinness World Records gave us the record for the most random breakfast combination ever. 

And Pfizer, again, at the time of, you know, COVID said, “Haven’t our scientists worked hard enough without having to come up with an antidote to this?”

So, it was kind of far and wide brands just, you know, just getting in on it. I mean, obviously, either – either they loved it and no one had a lot else to do that day. But it certainly kicked off, you know, a phenomenon. I mean, certainly from an evaluation point of view for us, it was – it was literally billions of – of – of shares …

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … around the world. 

So, we had that the next day on all the broadcast media. It really hit home. And then, we had all the national newspapers in the morning and stuff like that. That got you more traditional PR coverage as a result of the fury and the pile-on …

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … that happened on social media the day before. 

And then, the next day, which was something quite unbelievable, which has never happened in, you know, all the campaigns, and we’ve run some really good campaigns over the years, is that actually an MP got up in parliament to decide to raise it in the House of Parliament as an – an issue that needed debating in the chamber, because, apparently, it was even more divisive for the country than Brexit. I mean, literally, this guy was – was bringing it. I was thinking, “What? It’s just – it’s just kind of weird talking about this in a brainstorm a couple of weeks ago. And here is, like, in a [unintelligible] and recorded in time forevermore as – as being on the agenda of the House of Parliament.

You know, I think for any PR campaign to be the subject that’s debated in – in a House of Commons is – is incredible. 

It was also, like—.That weekend as well, afterwards, it was on a quiz question on – on whatever the Ant and Dec quiz show was. And I’ve seen it on …

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … several other quiz shows. You know, has been asked in which – which breakfast cereal was combined with beans to do [unintelligible]. It’s like a really quiz question on …

CAT ANDERSON Yeah.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … on all these game shows now. It’d probably be on University Challenge in a few years’ time. Who knows?

CAT ANDERSON I mean, if it’s on University Challenge, you’ve definitely done well. But I think it’s—.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Leave it a couple of years, ’cause it will be, like …

CAT ANDERSON But—.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … history or something like that [crosstalk].

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. Like, “Ooh.” Yeah. But, I mean, if it’s a quiz question, you know, it has very much permeated into pop culture now.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON A pop culture legend.

Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice.

STACEY WRIGHT Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way to.

“Dear Stacey,

“I’m going to cut right to it. What the hell do I do with TikTok? It seems like all the bigwigs in our organisation got together on an away day, maybe tried out a few dance routines and filters, and now I’m being asked for our TikTok strategy for 2022. But it feels like the ask has come out of nowhere.

“Our call channels are currently YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. As a charitable non-profit, our content also tends to be more serious and informative, geared up to drive awareness. Plus, usually has a lot of compliance and governance reviews in advance of publishing.

“Where would we start? We’ve seen charities have great success on there. So, I’m keen to explore TikTok as a new platform for us, but feeling the pressure of where to begin.

“Hoping you can help me silence the PR alarm bells in my head, Ana.”

Ana, I hear this every single day from our customers. And it does sometimes feel that our bosses are asking us to jump on these social media bandwagons, right? TikTok is huge. And now they want to be part of that bus.

So, important questions to ask yourself and of your stakeholders is: Where is this coming from, and why now? Did they really cook up this idea on an away day? And also to yourself: Where are you in your social media strategy in terms of that journey right now? Do you have the resources to bring in an external, maybe creative agency to help you with this? Do you have the time to be exploring a new platform?

And when considering this, think about what you can test in terms of content in the platforms you’re already using. So, if it’s YouTube, can you test out content in YouTube Shorts? If it’s Facebook, can you use the Stories function? In Instagram, can you see Reels, because, you know, we often see TikTok videos reshared in all of those environments?

And then, if you’re more B2B, and it’s LinkedIn, you could ask yourself: How much video am I creating on LinkedIn? Is this a channel that we should be considering full stop? Because video production is so timely and costly in terms of resource.

So, all of these questions give you a foundation of how much work it’s going to be to create a new content strategy for a new platform. And—. But also you can start to test things on what works and what doesn’t.

But bringing it back to TikTok specifically, the key thing here is around personality. What personality would your brand/organisation have on TikTok? And by this, I mean, who does your brand want to be? Can you give them a presence in terms of thinking about a celebrity and then imagining what content you would like to follow from them and use that as the guide for your posts? Then, ask yourself: What content is appropriate for us?

Some brands will be more adventurous. Some won’t. Let’s say that TikTok tends to err towards the more adventurous of brands.

Ana, thanks so much for emailing your social media conundrum. Hopefully, you’ll turn those bigwigs into TikTok superstars in no time.

Until next time, listeners. Stay strong and stay social. And now back to the interview.

CAT ANDERSON I wonder, with Frank using Talkability as your unique selling point, and that’s what you’re going to try and drive, how would you pick, without giving away too much of your patented secrets, what’s the recipe of Talkability and what role does social have in – in that recipe?

GRAHAM GOODKIND I mean, it – it’s a good question. And there is a recipe. I’ve kind of given away the – the secret sauce several times. But we have a sort of creative process that we use at Frank. We look at the conventions and we look at the culturally embedded biases and conventions, which shape the standard approaches to doing things in that brand space. And then, we look at how we can disrupt those conventions to forge something radically new or different.

So, you know, I guess applying conventions, they’re very simply the Weetabix and food combinations other than milk, sugar, you know, perhaps butter or cheese were normal conventions in their space of the brand. You know, we—. It’s a completely new convention, a completely new way of – of doing it.

So, that’s—. Looking at conventions is one part of the Talkability process. Another part is looking at perceptions. And we look – try and ask ourselves questions. What happens when we look at the brand or the category that the brand operates in through another lens? So, that’s method two.

Method three is visualisation. And a brand’s imagery is very important. And thinking about what one could do from that perspective can be very productive. I mean, actually, if you look at the Weetabix and baked beans simply short image, it went global in ten minutes. And also if you know, we didn’t even use any Heinz branding in that, by the way. It was just sort of baked beans.

And the last thing to look at when you’re looking at how to come up with ideas with Talkability is look at the zeitgeists. And that’s getting to grips with the spirit and mood of the times. And that’s core, I think, to having an idea with viral potential.

I think you’ve got to look as well of a bit of what sort of ideas are shareable? You’ve got to look at the elements and ingredients of stories that we’re actually going to share or talk about and why we’re going to do it. And, normally, they have a lot of different things. You know? Sometimes, they have a bit of controversy. So, I guess this was a controversial food choice. Sometimes, they have a bit of celebrity attached to it. It might – it might be something that makes a story make-able. In this case, there wasn’t really any celebrity endorsement. But celebrity brands, if you like, were endorsing …

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … about it as a bit of a “man bites dog” as opposed to “dog bites man” element to it. So, something a bit unexpected. Something with a bit of humour tends to be something we share. Something, too, with a bit of purpose, tends to be something we share. Or charity. So, it needs to have at least one of those ingredients for you to – to kind of want to share it.

And if you, you know, just simply put—. If you go through a newspaper today and you look up, you know, other than situations like Ukraine where you’ve got hard news stories about some bad stuff going on, but if you look at the consumer stories, you’ll normally see one or more of those elements of, I used to call them, make-ability that actually mean that they get on the media agenda. And, therefore, you know, if they’ve got the other bits that you talked about from a – I talked about from a Talkability point of view, put those two together, and there you have our process. And that’s kind of the process, really, in a nutshell, of how we do things.

CAT ANDERSON Graham, I’m really glad that you shared your secret formula with us. And honoured. And I’m sure all of our listeners will be as well. Because I do think, so often, even on this podcast, when we have discussions about moments that have gone, you know, incredibly massive, a lot of it – a lot of the times, they are quite simple, light, funny little moments, you know. It’s not overly complex.

But I also did wonder, with this particular campaign, if the UK doesn’t have a particular type of appetite, no pun intended, for the more surreal marketing. Everybody always talks about, you know, when Cadbury’s had the gorilla doing the drums back in the day.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON And you’ve got like the meerkats with Compare the Market and stuff that is a bit strange. Is that something that you as an agency intentionally tap into or is it innate, because you are British? Or what do you think about that?

GRAHAM GOODKIND I mean, I think it’s a very good question. I think, actually, just – just FYI, we also were behind the – the meerkat campaign with Alexander Orlov and brought him to life. And I think became the first ever …

CAT ANDERSON Oh, no way.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … non-human to be interviewed by The Sun. 

CAT ANDERSON I didn’t know that.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Yeah. So, we kind of did that campaign back in the day as well. So, funny you mentioned that.

But I think you’re spot on. I mean, as an agency, and Frank, I’ve set up offices in America, we set up an office in New York, and in Australia. And the thing I noticed is that the sense of humour and the tongue-in-cheek bit that you refer to in terms of that uniquely British humour, it didn’t really translate at all.

When I took it to other countries, in America, it went down like a [unintelligible]. There was no irony there. And a lot of these campaigns are very ironic. You know, the Weetabix and beans campaign is, you know, very ironic in terms of its taste. And, you know, so was the other campaigns that you’ve mentioned.

In Australia, I think, I learnt that definitely, there, it’s closer. And I think the closest fit culturally in terms of the British way of thinking is over there. But I think, you know, for other countries, it’s not even close. And you go to Europe, and they just look at you with a bit of a bemused look that this is happening.

And I think you’re right. There is something unique about this country. I think it’s kind of the reason why I’ve – I’ve – I’ve sort of settled in – in – in my old age, I guess, to thinking that, “You know what? I love doing this sort of work. And I think it’s only going to really work in the UK.” And I think, as you said, it’s very relevant.

And it’s difficult to explain what that is. You sort of either get it or you don’t get it. And you know … 

CAT ANDERSON Yeah.

GRAHAM GOODKIND … things that are – are right or – or not right. If you actually had to intellectualise it, it’d be quite hard. You just know it or you don’t.

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND And you know when you get it wrong by the fact that it doesn’t get much pickup. And you know when you get it right, and you get a success like Weetabix and beans.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned that sort of intangibility. ‘Cause, again, that is something that’s come up in other conversations with people where there is – there’s lots of things you can do to sort of predict the success of something. And this, obviously, was a huge success for you. But what are the success metrics that actually matter to Frank?

GRAHAM GOODKIND It was quite interesting you say that is that I don’t think there are any, to be honest. I think the big problem has existed in PR forever and social, you know, more recently is “What are valid metrics and what are good ways of evaluation?” I guess, with this Weetabix and beans campaign, the best evaluation is the bottom line. It’s not always possible. And with – with other campaigns and – and a lot of campaigns aren’t directly linked to the bottom line, we saw week on week a fifteen percent uplift in Weetabix sales by Sainsbury’s. So, you know, we can pretty much assume that was a uniform thing. But that’s what they reported. You know, that their sales were up fifteen percent, you know, in a time when there wasn’t really any activity going on apart from the social media stuff. 

You could see a massive effect in terms of sales with this. But this was, obviously, a, you know, like you sort of say, I wouldn’t say necessarily once in a lifetime. I would say—. I would say—. I always like to say that this is the second-best campaign I’ve ever done.

CAT ANDERSON Well, I mean, you know what I have to ask now. What was the first best campaign that you—?

GRAHAM GOODKIND The best is yet to come.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, I love that. Oh, wow. I really – I really fell for that, didn’t I? 

GRAHAM GOODKIND Yeah, you did. You did [crosstalk]. So, that was really good.

CAT ANDERSON I do wonder, and, obviously, in an ideal world, everyone would be coming to Frank to get all of this insight and professionalism and amazing campaigns on success ultimately. But there maybe are some brands out there who are going to be starting out. They don’t have the budget yet. Do you have any advice for people who maybe want to elevate their digital output, but maybe still have to go out alone for a little while?

GRAHAM GOODKIND Well, you know, I mean, test and learn, test and learn. I mean, for each brand, it’s going to be different. See where you’re getting a bit of traction or a good response, or, you know, a sort of tone of voice or a way of doing it or a creative idea that’s resonating. And then, keep on developing on that. Keep on honing that, I think, is probably a good way.

As I said, at the start, if Talkability and/or viral-ness is your – is your objective—I mean, it all depends on what your objective is, really—then, think about some of the things that I talked about from the four different levers, if you like, you can play with in terms of what are the roots of an idea that’s going to have Talkability. Have a think about that. You know? 

Is your subject matter that you’re communicating on social media, is it something you want to talk about because it’s obviously interesting to you? Think about is that interest really interesting to anyone else?

It’s always the kind of problem that you get with clients a lot of the time, is – is something that is so immensely interesting to them, actually, you as the in-between person, between them and the consumer, you actually think, “Well, really, it’s not. I know I get why you’re interested in it, because you would be, wouldn’t it? It’s your job. But it’s not gonna be interesting to anyone else.”

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

GRAHAM GOODKIND So, think about that general stuff. Are you passionate about something you’re interested [unintelligible]? Is anyone else going to be? And if not, what you need to do to that to make it interesting to get shared.

CAT ANDERSON Brilliant. Thank you. Our final question is a question that we’re asking everybody on the podcast, and you can answer on behalf of Frank the agency or yourself, Graham Goodkind. If you had to delete everyone that you follow on Twitter and just have one account left, who would be your one follow?

GRAHAM GOODKIND Well, since I’m the – I’m the owner of Frank, so it’s the kind of one and the same kind of entity, I would make this a personal choice, and it would be the official Arsenal Football Club account. Being a mad gooner and Arsenal fan, that would have to be the one that I’d keep.

CAT ANDERSON That is absolutely loyalty. I love it.

GRAHAM GOODKIND Absolutely.

CAT ANDERSON Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. It’s been absolutely brilliant. Thank you, Graham.

GRAHAM GOODKIND No. You’re welcome. It was good fun. Thanks for having me.

CAT ANDERSON You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Graham Goodkind of Frank for joining me today and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

Make sure you join me for the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media @SproutSocial or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt, Stacey, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening and catch you in two weeks.

The post FRANK: Winning over the world with Weetabix appeared first on Sprout Social.

Cat: Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favorite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone and really, nearly anything goes.

But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know, and some that you don’t. To explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organizations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies.

And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

This week, I’m joined by Ocean Clarke who’s an Account Director at Fanbytes. Fanbytes is an award-winning social media and influencer marketing agency. Specializing in TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, Fanbytes creates what they call scroll stopping campaigns, using Gen Z influencer talent from the UK.

They’ve worked with loads of brand giants, such as Deliveroo, Clinique, Vestiaire Collective, McVitie’s, Universal Music Group — that’s just to name a few. And their success has reached even bigger heights over the past few months. So, I am dying to hear more.

In the meantime, you can take a look at Fanbyte’s work by connecting with them by using @Fanbytes on all of the usual social media channels.

Ocean, lovely to have you here.

Ocean: Lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.

Cat: So, perhaps, first of all, we can start with the basics. We spoke a little bit in the introduction there about what Fanbytes does, but where might I have come across some of its campaigns, and how do they look, and what makes your content so distinctive?

Ocean: Sure. So, in terms of the type of campaigns that we run, generally, every campaign is quite different and will kind of primarily depend on the client’s objectives for that campaign, their goals. Generally, it will be across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.

We also do account growth for our clients and content creation. And often, our campaigns also involve an element of paid media. So, I guess we try and take a more integrated approach in the campaigns that we run.

What makes us generally quite different? I’d say is we don’t necessarily like to work on campaigns whereby we’re working with influencers who are like holding a product up next to their face. That kind of heavily promotional ad-heavy content, we find doesn’t really work as well.

So, one thing for us is just really making sure that we are driving value within the campaigns that we run. So, whether that’s providing educational content, inspiration, entertainment, a bit of light-hearted, comedic relief on TikTok, for example — that’s something that’s always super important to us.

And the other thing would be just kind of making sure that the creative is at the heart of the content that we are creating. So, we tend to be quite bold in the terms of the influencers we work with and also, the creative ideas that we utilize within our campaigns.

Cat: I feel like you’ve mentioned a few real key terms here. So, bold (check), creative at the core of everything that you do (check) — all of these, probably slightly more emerging platforms, all of it kind of aligns with Gen Z in the house.

This is something that is pretty integral to Fanbytes, isn’t it? Like how much is Gen Z and the magic of that particular generation part of your team and the company identity?

Ocean: I’d say it’s a pretty key part actually. So, if we take our founders, for example, they’re within the Gen Z demographic themselves. So, yeah, I’d say it’s definitely part of our identity. It helps us to shape the way that we think, the way that we strategize and also, the way that we approach campaign briefs.

I’m lucky enough to work with some really inspiring Gen Z colleagues as well. So, I think that’s really important is actually just being able to bounce ideas off each other and it always helps in terms of our campaign planning as well. So, yeah, I’d say it’s definitely an integral part of our company.

Cat: And why do you think Fanbytes decided to focus specifically on Gen Z influencers and targeting Gen Z audiences? Is it a case of we are Gen Z, so we know how to speak to these people or was it a gap in the market, or maybe a combination of both?

Ocean: Sure. Yeah. So, I feel like Gen Z consumers are a pretty fascinating consumer group. And I think for a long time, businesses have really struggled to actually understand the behaviors of that group, to learn how to successfully engage them.

Gen Z make up around 30% of our world’s population. So, they have also massive spending power, so super important to brands. I think one benefit that we have is actually being able to understand how Gen Z consumers behave online and how this relates to the kind of content that they want to consume.

And I guess understanding the way that Gen Z think, behave, act is so important. So, as a consumer group, they are digital natives. They’ve grown up with technology, they’re very used to using their phone for absolutely everything they do in their everyday life.

Whether that’s ordering their dinner to turn up at the door within 20 minutes, ordering something for their home that arrives the next day; the way that they behave is very different to other generations. And I think that’s something that’s really key when looking to actually advertise to that group.

They’re also the most diverse generation in history and that’s in terms of race, gender, sexuality. So, yeah, they definitely expect representation from brands and also, within advertising campaigns too.

So, I think in terms of the way that this audience behaves, it’s quite different to other generations. And that’s, I guess, why it’s a key focus for us. Our founders are also Gen Z, so I think there’s definitely kind of a gap in the market there in terms of knowing how we can engage these audiences where other brands or companies might really struggle.

But that being said, we do also manage campaigns that target other consumer groups. So, not every campaign we manage is Gen Z-focused, but it’s definitely, I guess, we have kind of expertise within that.

Cat: It absolutely is a gap in the market, and honestly, just listening to your answer, I feel like I got the echoes of the hundreds of times people have asked me like, “Oh my goodness, how on earth do I reach Gen Z?” Like it just seems to absolutely bamboozle so many companies and brands. So, I think what Fanbytes is doing is really bang on the money.

And with that said, I’d be interested to hear a little bit about who are the influencers that you work with? Like how do you select influencers to work with? And also, I’d love to take in a little bit more to your point about how just holding up a product and saying like, “Ooh, I love this” is a bit nuff and doesn’t work.

So, maybe you can tell us a little bit about how do you get influencers involved in these campaigns in a way that feels a little less icky?

Ocean: Yeah, for sure. Like it’s always going to be a challenge. And I think to be honest, even the word “influencer” has been a bit of a dirty word within the industry. I know there’s a lot of people that don’t actually like being called influencers. They’d prefer to be called creators or key opinion leaders, or just experts within whatever their niche may be.

So, I guess in terms of the way that we work with influencers, I think a lot of the time within the industry, there’s been this view that influences means, for example, reality TV stars, Love Island celebrities. But the influences we work with are quite different to that.

So, it’s anyone that’s managed to organically grow a following across whichever platforms that may be. So, in terms of the influences we work on campaigns with, they tend to be quite different depending on what the individual creative is, which platforms we’re activating on.

We’ve worked with musicians, dancers, athletes, sports stars, core enthusiasts, comedians, artists — anyone that is an expert within their niche, or has something to say that resonates with the audience.

What we look for when partnering with influencers? There’s so many elements to consider. So, I guess originally, kind of looking at the content that they create, will that resonate with the audience, will the creative work on that channel, need to look at the data. So, in terms of their own demographic, who we actually going to be hitting by working with this influencer.

We need to look at the quality of content, the type of content that they create about. And also, I guess, just kind of more in terms of the actual influencer themselves, what are their own values? Does that align with the creative? Does that align with the brand? So yeah, lots to consider, I’d say.

Cat: Yeah, for sure. But it all sort of makes a lot of sense having that more holistic view of what’s likely to work and looking at the data, that’s how you approach all other types of marketing. So, it totally makes sense to do that with influencers.

And I think that it’s a part of the industry that is still really developing. So, what Fanbytes is doing, this signs streaks ahead of what a lot of other companies are actually doing, which is exciting.

But speaking of what user up to, obviously, in the introduction, we mentioned some of the amazing brands you’ve been working with, but I’m interested; could you tell me, maybe what’s been your most successful campaign so far? And I mean, I can’t help. I’m like an old crusty millennial.

I did see that there was one that involved George Michael, which caught my attention. I was like, “Who doesn’t love George Michael?” So, I don’t know. Maybe you could tell is what’s been your most successful campaign so far that people might have seen.

Ocean: Absolutely, yes. So, in terms of the campaigns that we’ve run generally, I guess, it’ll kind of depend on what the client’s goals and KPIs are for that campaign in terms of how we deliver success.

But yeah, the George Michael example was a really great one actually. So, we partnered with Sony. The kind of challenge of the campaign was to re-release George Michael’s song, Careless Whisper, which was actually released back in 1984. So, basically, predates oldest Gen Z by over a decade.

So, the way that we did this was by partnering with macro comedy and lifestyle talent across TikTok. So, like really relatable profiles who could basically use the song within their content. And in terms of results, we managed to achieve over 14 million views, which is incredible. We also partnered with meme pages across Instagram to basically reshare the content, so great for views.

And then we managed to achieve over 125,000 pieces of user-generated content. And I think the reason that we were able to do that was just by really making sure that the creative was relevant to that Gen Z audience group. So, we had lots of people, including the song within their content that they’d be creating kind of on a daily basis.

By doing that, we managed to make the song relevant to Gen Z audience, which is, I guess, exactly what we wanted to do with the campaign. And we’ve seen this happen quite a lot with songs that were released in the eighties actually becoming popular on TikTok in our day and age, which is really exciting.

So, yeah, I think TikTok has a real connection to the music industry. And we were able to kind of capitalize on that within this campaign.

Cat: Also, Careless Whisper is a banger, like an absolute banger of a tune. I love that. And I think that trends are like the new viral really. Like it used to just be that like a tweet could be shared and liked so many times or a YouTube video could be watched so many times.

But I think the way virality has moved into platforms like TikTok and Snapchat is that people will jump in and get involved and get engaged. So, it’s like way more powerful for a brand to kind of be tied up within that.

I think a lot of the work that you’re doing also signs very much like brand awareness, which as you correctly say, can be difficult to measure success from. But it would be completely remiss of me to not mention that you do have data at the heart of everything that you use because you have your own tool called bitesights.

So, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your data tool bitesights, and how that helps with your campaigns.

Ocean: For sure, yes. So, in terms of the way that we approach campaigns, we always want to be data-driven. We want to use as much data points and insight as possible when planning our campaigns. It’s something that’s incredibly important.

In terms of our bitesights tool, so it basically allows us to track things like hashtags, influencers to seeing like who’s up-and-coming within the space whose accounts are growing quickly, who should we work with on up-and-coming campaigns.

It also helps us to look at topics that are being discussed on particular platform. So, which conversations can we tap into when working on a particular campaign? So, it’s great for, I guess, also tracking trends before they blow up on the platform, and working out how we can actually utilize those trends within our content.

[Music Playing 00:13:50]

Cat: Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex, even the hardiest of social media users.

Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits, in the part of the show we like to call, Sound Advice.

Stacey: I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cozy down together.

This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacy, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right, let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

Dear Stacy, we’ve been a little late to the party on social media as our business has relied heavily on word-of-mouth referrals for decades. We are a discreet little salon that focuses on hair loss and hair replacement, priding ourselves on the confidentiality of our client base.

Hair loss can cause a lot of anxiety, self-consciousness, and can be very traumatic. But when our clients come in and have treatments, they leave beaming with confidence.

So, my question is how do we create more brand awareness on the quality and uplifting nature of our work when our clients want to remain anonymous?

We have a few clients who don’t mind us taking before and after photos, as long as their face is covered or unrecognizable, but this is infrequent. And so, we struggle to have content to update our profiles very often.

How do we put more volume and oomph into our social like we do with our clients’ luscious new locks? Look forward to hearing from you, Jess.

Thank you, Jess. And firstly, I would say, start communicating who you are as a brand. So, create some introductory content that is always pinned to your profile. Maybe stories, highlights on Instagram or pinned posts at the top of your Facebook feed.

When I say this should focus on you as a brand, that’s because not everyone will want to have the exact same results. So, it should convey the experience they have when coming to the salon as a whole.

So, content could be meet the team, have interviews with you and the other team members, what they can expect from an initial consultation, frequently asked questions from other clients, video tours of the salon, or even product explanations and benefits.

This content could be created as simple DIY videos that you produce on your phone, just yourselves presenting to camera, or they can be professionally produced depending on the budget that you have, but the more authentic, the better. Share your personality and how you make your clients feel at ease.

If you’re struggling to get photos from clients, maybe focus on their reviews, telling you and your audience how it feels to come into the salon. So, how does it feel to work with the team? And most importantly, what is the effect of the treatments on them emotionally?

You can sign it off with just initials for discretion, but ask them to add a location to so you can share the breadth of how far people actually travel to come and take up your services. You can present these little quotes on design templates, again, either really simple ones, using free mobile design tools or have them created professionally.

If they’re even wary of giving you a full review, maybe you can just ask the client how they’re feeling at the end of a treatment and just focus on one word. Even just highlighting the word “amazing” alongside a teammate’s name and the treatment that you gave, it forms a regular content stream for you to have like reaction of the week. Something that has a regular cadence, which can be really valuable.

But do continue to ask and collect those before and after pics. But you could also try new formats of them. So, stuff that will give you extra reach and views more than static content will.

So, this could be short, close-up videos, showing the transformation, or maybe even carousels, showing the whole process of the treatment so that users have to scroll through.

So, Jess, I hope this helps you reinvigorate your social feeds as much as you boost your client’s confidence. Until next time listeners, stay strong and stay social. And back to the interview.

Cat: I just wanted to pick up on a point you said earlier about how Gen Z is the most diverse generation in history, which is obviously, absolutely fantastic and exciting, and presents a really cool opportunity. But I wonder does it make the works that you’re doing significantly harder?

Ocean: I think so. Yeah, because there’s a lot of cultural sensitivities that we need to be aware of when managing campaigns and looking to target Gen Z groups in terms of the way that those audiences think, like they expect brands to work with influences who represent multiple groups. And that’s in terms of ethnicity, sexuality, genders.

So, it’s something that we always need to be aware of when working with our clients, is actually making sure that our campaigns are representative. There’s also, when you look at the actual opinions and behaviors of this group, they’re very passionate about politics and environmental issues or sustainability, whether that be racial injustice.

So, we definitely need to be quite sensitive in terms of the brands that we’re working, and within our creatives as well.

Cat: I love that though, but it’s also like being sensitive is one thing, but it’s also that Gen Z is pretty aware of what’s going on and will not give any brands any leeway for bad behavior really. Like I think it’s really good that Gen Z really holds brands accountable. Would you agree?

Ocean: I would, yeah, 100% agree. I think the way that Gen Z could even see it now is that brands should understand and know that these issues might exist. So, they need to be very aware within the way that they advertise to these groups.

And yeah, they absolutely, Gen Z audiences absolutely will hold brands accountable if they feel like they’re not stepping up to the mark, which I personally love. I think they’re one of the most fascinating generations and yeah, I kind of love that they won’t let brands get away with it nowadays.

Cat: I know in my introduction as well, I mentioned that you’ve had quite an exciting time recently, and I know there’s been some awards, but also, that you were actually acquired by Brainlabs, which is a digital-first agency in May of this year, which is really exciting.

I’d love to hear about all of the excitement of the past six months or so, but I’d also like to know how did that development come about and what did that mean for the business?

Ocean: Yeah, I think we’re in a really exciting time at the moment. Actually, it’s still quite new for us. So, Brainlabs offer kind of performance marketing and they are absolutely brilliant at what they do.

We, I guess, are bringing our own kind of creative expertise within the influencer piece. And the idea is that we can really kind of work quite closely together in order to deliver campaigns that are far reaching.

And take, I guess, a bit more of an integrated approach in terms of the work that we do for our clients. So, yeah, I’d say being able to utilize the incredible products that the Brainlabs team has built over the years will help us to think more strategically when planning campaigns.

Cat: Another exciting project that I saw is that you’ve launched a fund to support black creators and businesses, which I’d absolutely love to see. Could you tell us a little bit more about that and why that was a focus for the company?

Ocean: Yeah, for sure. So, the initial reason that our founder, Tim, launched the impact fund was to break the cycle of underrepresentation of black businesses and black creators, basically by providing marketing support.

So, if we look back to 2020 in terms of the Black Lives Movement, and there was loads of conversation around underrepresentation and racial injustice and inequality within the industry; this is particularly so within the advertising industry as well.

It’s something that has always been really important to our founders who are incredibly passionate about actually helping the industry and kind of giving individuals a step up within the influencer marketing industry as a whole.

The conversation around diversity and inclusion is definitely stepping up, which is brilliant to see. We all know how important it is, but I do feel like a lot of the time, there’s more kind of being discussed than is actually being done. And the way that it works is we basically give £5,000 campaigns to black business owners and we partner with black creators on those campaigns.

So, we’re able to actually provide value to both the creators by paying them and also, to businesses as well to kind of give them a step up within the industry.

Cat: I think that’s absolutely fabulous. And you’re so on the point. I don’t think that there’s anybody who would disagree that encouraging more diversity in pretty much every single industry is a good thing.

So, it’s great to see that you’ve taken such an active step in making sure that this value is actually realized in the work that you do. So, kudos to that. I think that’s absolutely fabulous.

Well, Ocean, we’ve got to our final question, and it’s a question that we ask everyone on the podcast, which is if Fanbytes had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on social media leaving only one, which would it be and why?

Ocean: I feel like this is so tricky because this is literally what we do, is social media. But I’d have to say, and this might sound like quite a dull answer, but it would probably need to be some kind of informational resource that we could use to basically know what’s going on within the world and within our industry.

So, accounts like The Drum are brilliant for this. We can look at what’s going on, on different platforms, what’s going on in terms of the marketing industry. Cause the one thing about our industry is that it changes so frequently. You really do need to keep up to date with what’s going on in the social space.

So, that I think definitely helps us to be able to stay ahead within our space.

Cat: That’s so funny. Do you know of all the answers that we’ve had, I think sometimes people are like, we’re going pick our best pal or an account we really like. But of course, it makes so much sense for you to be like, “Well, this is mission critical. We can’t afford to not have access to our social media points.” So, I love that yours is a very strategic answer.

Ocean, thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us today. I think the work you’re doing is super cool. And yeah, it’s been really interesting to learn a little bit more about how you go about absolutely charming Generation Z. Thanks so much.

Ocean: Thank you so much. Great to chat.

[Music Playing 00:25:31]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Ocean of Fanbytes for joining me today, and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

Make sure you catch the rest of the series by subscribing on your favorite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media at Sprout Social or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt Stacey, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post Fanbytes: Masters of Gen Z Marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

CAT ANDERSON Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone. And, really, nearly anything goes. But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know. But that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know and some that you don’t to explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all the tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

This week, I’m joined by Dave Goodman, communications lead for the Eurovision and Junior Eurovision Song Contest. To say that I am excited is a huge understatement as a lifelong fan of Eurovision. I love Eurovision, because I think it is the total perfect embodiment of everything that’s fun, diverse, beautiful, and, frankly, a little bit mad about Europe.

Social media is increasingly part and parcel of the whole Eurovision experience as well. And, TikTok has now been announced as the official entertainment partner for Eurovision. So, I can’t wait to hear about that.

I should mention that we are recording this a few weeks in advance of the finals. So, we don’t know the results of this year’s competition yet. But if you would like to follow Eurovision on social—and, of course, why wouldn’t you?—you can do it on every single platform, @Eurovision.

Dave, welcome to Social Creatures.

DAVE GOODMAN Thanks very much for having me. It’s great to be here.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, I am going to absolutely plague you with questions. So, yeah. Get settled in.

I think, just to kick it off, for maybe people around the world who don’t know what Eurovision is, for people who have watched it, many of us will remember watching it and being totally absorbed by the music, by the colour, by the whole spectacle of it, but what does Eurovision mean to you and what are your earliest memories of it?

DAVE GOODMAN The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s largest live music event. So, it’s huge. It reaches over a hundred and eighty million people every year who watch the two semi-finals and the – the grand final. But it all began, of course, in 1956, with seven countries in a tiny theatre in Lugano, Switzerland. And it was mostly a radio show back then. So, it really has grown and grown and grown over those years from those seven countries to forty countries, which we have this year.

And for me, it’s part of my cultural heritage, I think. And the same for many, many Europeans. In every country you visit, everybody has a relationship with this event, because it’s like Christmas. It comes around once a year, and three generations of people who’ve grown up with it.

For me, Eurovision as a kid was watching with my family on a Saturday night. It was staying up late. It was my mum ironing in the corner, because she always used to iron on a Saturday night. And for me, my first memories really, well, of – of a TV show that was not like what I was used to watching in Britain, where I grew up. In Manchester, in England. It was something different. It was glamourous. It was distinct. It was different languages. It was different television presentation. It looked different. It felt different. And there was a sense, even when I was a kid, I was part of something bigger. I was part of an event where millions of people in countries I’d never heard of or seen or visited, were watching the same television programme as I was. And that – that really got me as a kid. 

And over my teenage years, it became more palpable, and the interest became more and more intense in this great event that united people, that was just special and something different and exciting and dramatic. And there’s so many fans of Eurovision who write about it, blog about it, podcasts now about it. They say the same thing: It – it connects them with other people.

CAT ANDERSON I couldn’t have said it better myself. You said it’s like Christmas. ‘Cause it is like Christmas. I think it might be more hotly-anticipated than Christmas for a lot of people. But that whole thing about it being something that brings people together, I totally agree with you. I think it makes me feel more European. I feel like I get to taste so many different types of cultures from just watching it.

DAVE GOODMAN And it’s beyond politics. You can win this competition from anywhere in Europe. It is not a political competition, and it’s beyond the boundaries of the European Union. And there’s obviously been a lot of talks since Brexit in the United Kingdom about why is Britain still in Eurovision. Because the European Broadcasting Union, who I work for, which is the world’s leading alliance, in fact, of public service media, has existed since 1950, before the EU even existed. And our territories go well beyond the EU’s territories. We have fifty-six countries in our – in our union and forty countries in this year’s song contest. And, of course, there’s only twenty-seven in the EU. 

So, this is a European project that goes beyond the European borders and is watched internationally now, thanks to YouTube. Thanks to TikTok this year, where we’re going to be live streaming for the first time. This show is huge globally now. It’s really important to note that this is now a global event. It’s not just about Europe. And Eurovision is – is actually the network of satellites that the EBU runs. That’s why it’s called Eurovision.

But, of course, we’ve always had more than just Europe in the competition, and we are certainly watched across the world now in every country. In every country on – on earth, there’s somebody watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Even in North Korea.

CAT ANDERSON I feel like the pride that you have in your job is so palpable. And I hope that I’m matching your pride with my jealousy, because what an amazingly fun job.

You mentioned the first Eurovision in Switzerland all those years ago, and it seems like a communications team might not have been existing at that point for Eurovision and certainly not in the way it is today. Would you be able to tell us a little bit what your role involves and how that changes across the course of the year?

DAVE GOODMAN Yes, of course. I mean, it’s interesting. Even my friends, when I talk to them, they can’t believe that there’s a job working on the Eurovision Song Contest year-round, that I have an annual salary to work on the Eurovision Song Contest. “But it’s only once a year, Dave. It’s only in May. What are you doing the rest of the time?”

Well, you’ve got to think of it this way. Do you think the Olympic Games generally have seven years to organise the Olympic Games? And, of course, it’s an enormous international event. Well, the Eurovision Song Contest is – is a pretty big event. It involves, as we’ve said, forty different countries. Sometimes, more. That’s forty different broadcasters from around Europe. And that is – that is eleven months, essentially, or even ten months to plan for the following year. Because, of course, the unique thing about the Eurovision Song Contest is that if you win it, you host it the following year. The winning broadcaster, and its broadcasters that compete broadcasters who are EBU members, public broadcasters like the BBC in the UK, SVT in Sweden, ARD in Germany, they win the contest as well as the song and the artist. And the trophy goes to the artist, of course, and the songwriters. But the broadcaster wins the right to host. So, they have ten months, really, to put it together, because we move into the arena the following year, in April. So, that we have to start the preparations that early.

So, what I do all that time is the moment we have a winner on Saturday, the 14th of May this year, and on the Saturday night of every year, we start work the following day on what we do next year. And we get together very quickly with the new broadcaster. And there are certain things that have to be done by certain points in the year, preparations in communications and social media. That’s things like announcing the host city, announcing the venue, the presenters of the show, the content of the show, ticket sales for the show. All of those sorts of things that are sort of the nuts and bolts.

But also with social media, we are keeping this brand and this competition alive year-round, because whilst we, of course, obtain millions more followers during the event weeks in May when people are watching the television and they’re aware of the show, we want to retain that. We want to retain those followers the rest of the year, and we want to engage them for the rest of the year. And that’s what we do with our social team. We are always active throughout the year using our archive using the sixty-seven years of Eurovision history that we now have, and also following the artists from recent years as well and just keeping that engagement going throughout the year.

CAT ANDERSON Wow. And there, I was maybe slightly at the start of this conversation, thinking, “This must be really a nice cushy job for a couple of months of the year.” But now, I’m wondering how you get anything done in such a short amount of time, because there’s so much to cover there. 

And as you rightly said, keeping the brand of Eurovision alive is such a huge thing, because fanship is massive in Eurovision. So, it’s something that people are as passionate as they would be for their favourite football team. Maybe more with Eurovision. And so, I wonder, on social media, is there a degree of diplomacy with that? You know, if you’re showing something from the archives, from one of the older winners, I guess, as Eurovision, you can’t show any bias.

DAVE GOODMAN Yes, absolutely. It’s almost like I look at it—. I—. My previous career before I did this was as a journalist, and I worked in politics, of course. And I see Eurovision sometimes like a general election in that you have different candidates and you have to make sure that you are fair and you are balanced and you will give as much airtime as you can to each of those candidates.

And, of course, the broadcasters around Europe have their own social media channels where they can promote their own artists. But we want to promote every artist equally. And so, we endeavour to do that during the competition period, which is from – really from December through to March, the songs are chosen. And from March, they have to be submitted. From March through to May, it’s a period where we have to be very, very aware of the amount of exposure we’re giving to each of the artists and each of the songs.

But you’re right. We get—. We have extremely active fandom, an extremely vocal fandom. And if there’s ever a slight mistake, which we try to avoid, they seize on it. They know everything.

And, of course, if we put out a video about Bulgaria, they’ll say, “Where’s the Serbia video?” So, there’s – there is that sense of fairness that we do build into our coverage and our content. And we do what we can to get it right. But there’s a lot of heritage to cover here. There’s a lot of songs and a lot of countries. Over fifty countries have taken part in Eurovision. Some of them don’t exist anymore. So, we have a lot of archive to explore. 

And making that archive relevant to a younger audience, because in a lot of countries, they think Eurovision is an old-fashioned TV show. It’s old. It’s dated. It’s for old people. It’s not anymore. Our social channels are dominated by sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. And that is why we’re live streaming on TikTok and why we’re on YouTube, because we know that young people don’t necessarily watch linear television so much. So, we want to reach those people, and, of course, make content for them that’s relevant about the artists and the songs of more recent years.

CAT ANDERSON I really love that you’re working with the artists to share their story a little bit more before an act comes on. And I mean, let’s be real, often, Graham Norton is chatting over it. So, we don’t even get that much of an opportunity to learn about the artists. But I wonder what you think about Måneskin, who won last year from Italy, had a huge social media following in advance, and they won because of the public vote.

So, for anyone who doesn’t know, Eurovision is there’s the song performances and then, there’s a period of voting where all of the different countries will vote for each other that, in more recent years, the public vote has come in, which is why the general public couldn’t vote for all of the different acts. And last year was a real moment where, with the public vote, everything turned completely upside down … 

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm. 

CAT ANDERSON … because Italy wasn’t doing that great, but suddenly they were streaks ahead …

DAVE GOODMAN Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON … of all of the other competition.

DAVE GOODMAN Well—.

CAT ANDERSON All of the other acts.

DAVE GOODMAN Well, we changed that in the last few years, the voting sequence, because it is a music competition. And the public, of course, are important and need – and need and should have their say. And that is why you saw last year, Italy, Måneskin, fifth, I think, if I’m right, in the jury vote. And once the televote had been delivered, they jumped to the top of the scoreboard. And they are one overall, because they have the most overall number of points from the juries and the televote. 

And that is why we changed the sequence, because you have that moment where you do not know until the very last vote is given who has won the Eurovision Song Contest. And Måneskin were fantastic winners for the Eurovision Song Contest, because already they had a social media presence, already they’d won San Remo, the big Italian music festival that’s the biggest TV show in Italy and the inspiration for the Eurovision Song Contest. So, it’s great to be back in Italy where it kind of all began.

They’d already had that success, and their song was already popular. But they used social media very effectively to promote their song. 

And streaming is massively important for Eurovision now. Songs come out in January, February, March time will gain ahead of steam on the streaming platforms. Because, again, once upon a time when I was a kid, you couldn’t hear these songs before the night of the show or maybe on a Sunday afternoon on BBC2 if you were lucky when they preview them. But now, of course, they’re everywhere. And that’s what we want. We want them to be hits. We want people to know these songs. And we encourage the broadcasters to do good, strong, engaging social media around their act, because it not only creates a buzz in their own country around their song, it then means that the people who are behind the song of their own country watch the TV show and engage with our platforms as well.

So, it’s massively important, social media, for all of the artists taking part. So, we do what we can to encourage. We do workshops, in fact, with our participating broadcasters. With the platforms. We did them with Metta this year. With TikTok. We did them with Spotify and also with Google as well on best practice on those channels to help them promote their own artists and their own songs.

CAT ANDERSON Well, I experienced watching Eurovision in years gone by where you would only be introduced to these acts on that night.

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON But if you can have a favourite going into it or, like, you know, you’ve had a good look at who all the finalists are, that makes you super excited to see them, you know. And, like, let’s be real, if you’ve seen one country’s loads of times, they’re going to be maybe the person you’re more likely to vote for at the end of the night.

DAVE GOODMAN Yeah. Totally. And, actually, what we find now with Eurovision, and this is why it’s changed as an event, is that the songs are not as, shall we say, instant as they possibly were in the days where people remember Boom Bang a Bang, and Diggy-Loo Diggy-Ley. And – and when songs had to be very, very melodic, very, very up-tempo. Or ballads did very well or sung in a language that was widely understood from around Europe, and why we saw most of the winners in the first, you know, few decades of the contest being English language or French language songs. That’s not the same anymore. And what we’ve seen in the last few years is – is broadcast is taking a chance, is broadcasters sending authentic artists and songs from those artists that they believe in. 

And Måneskin was a prime example of that. That’s the music they make. That’s the music they perform. They didn’t make that song for the Eurovision Song Contest. They didn’t write it to appeal to the entirety of Europe. They took it to a music competition in Italy, where that was the music they wanted to bring, and they won that competition, and they brought that to Eurovision fully believing in that song, fully invested in that song. And because of Måneskin and – and because of artists like Daði Freyr Freya from Iceland, who had a huge viral hit with Think About Things in 2020. We didn’t have a contest that year. Because, of course, with COVID, we had to cancel the very first and hopefully last time. But that song became a huge hit through social media, through Spotify, through the streaming channels. 

So, these songs live outside Eurovision. And because these songs do well at Eurovision now, if you’ve not seen Eurovision for years, watch it now, because it is not the show of your childhood. However fabulous that was, it’s totally different now. And because those acts are successful, the following year, the broadcasters take more chances. A lot of these artists already have social media followings.

And, in fact, this year, the United Kingdom’s act, Sam Ryder, is plucked straight from TikTok. His success is entirely from TikTok. He has thirteen million followers on TikTok globally. He is the most followed musical artists in Britain on TikTok. And he is going to sing for the UK at Eurovision. And he’s not going because he has a song he wrote for Eurovision. He’s going, because he loves Eurovision. He’s been given a platform in front of two hundred million people. He already has a platform in front of millions of people, because he’s created it for himself on TikTok. But here’s a new audience he could find through television and through the Eurovision Song Contest who might not have found him already. 

He sees the benefits of that. The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, see the benefits in that. And that’s where we’re going now. You know, songs are coming. Artists are coming from different areas. They’re not coming from the traditional backgrounds that we used to see. And, therefore, social media is massively important for the success.

And if you’ve heard these songs, some of them require a number of lessons. Like, all songs, the more you hear them, the more you love them. And some of them are not in your face Boom Bang a Bang-ing at you, because, actually, that doesn’t make for a great song contest, but it also, musically, isn’t relevant. So, actually, yeah, there’s pop. Yeah, there’s some fun. But there’s a lot of introspective songs in this year’s competition. There’s a lot of melancholy. There’s a lot of—. I think somebody called them sad bangers, I think, is a good expression to use. And sad boys songs. And things like that, you know. And – and sort of music that Billie Eilish is producing. Eurovision has always reflected the music world around it. And, sometimes, it was a bit behind the times. But, now, totally reflecting what’s in the charts and what’s successful internationally.

CAT ANDERSON Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice.

STACEY WRIGHT Right. I’ve got my cup of tea, and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it’s time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

“Dear Stacey,

I’m really struggling to get timely approvals or, sometimes, any approvals for the social content for our heritage fashion brand. The go-to for our creative director is big, luxurious, and cinematic content assets whilst my brand manager would like to see more sharper, punchier, creative content that provokes comment and interaction, trying to push the brand into a new era.

I am stuck in the middle, unable to be reactive. I can’t jump on any trends, because both need to approve the content I suggest, and they just can’t see eye-to-eye. How do I get everybody on the same page and, ultimately, get more social-friendly content out onto our pages faster?

Fashionably frustrated, Rina.”

Rina, so, I know first-hand what it’s like being at the bottom of a creative funnel when you’re relying on a full design team to actually give you that content production and deliver your KPIs. 

The first thing I would say is education. Use analytics and competitive analysis and any industry reports you can get your hands on to set the scene. If you’re not pleasing your social audiences, that can be damaging to the brand vision as a whole.

Make sure your creative briefs are backed up by these insights and start talking about the social networks they are active in as if they’re different global locales, which require a different cultural sensitivity or relevance. What I mean by that is social managers need to be multilingual, not just in the traditional sense, but also need to translate that creative brand concept into a language and culture of the networks that it’s going to be published to. So, is it in a format and a tone that is going to resonate with the audience on each of those different social networks?

Ask your creative director: Would you use the spring-summer campaign imagery in August, say, in Oceania markets? No. Because it’s not culturally relevant for them at that time. So, why create wide-format cinematic contact for TikTok, say?

Most importantly, get a formal approval workflow in progress. This communicates to the two managers that their opinions are important, but so are your timelines. And close the loop with data lead feedback. What worked well? What withers in the feeds, and what is actually never even seen by those social audience? This lays the foundations for test-and-learn approach to social content that is imperative when we work in these ever-shifting spaces.

So, Rina, I hope some of these ideas can help you get heritage trending in new ways for you. Until next time, listeners. Stay strong and stay social. And now back to the interview.

CAT ANDERSON As I mentioned at the start, we’re recording this a few weeks before the final. But the buzz is already starting. And I have seen a few articles where people are now trying to say, like, “This is who we think is going to win. This is what we think the top ten is going to be” based on YouTube views or based on followers. I think that’s kind of an interesting way to look at it. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on that kind of approach of people here now you’re trying to exploit that close relationship between what happens on stage and what happens on social media to actually project the results.

DAVE GOODMAN I think there’s a lot to be said for that, because, as we’ve said, if the songs are out months in advance, and they’re on our YouTube channel as soon as we – we get them from the broadcasters in mid-March, when they have to submit, and, of course, then they’re on Spotify and some of them, you know, on Spotify and other streaming platforms for months before that. So, they might well have been a hit in their country already. 

And yes, you can see how many millions of a song has had on YouTube. You can see how many streams it’s had on Spotify and the other platforms. So, it is a good indicator, but not the only indicator. Because, interestingly, why Eurovision is still special and why it’s still a show to watch, and it’s a TV show, is that you can take a song that is very popular as a radio song and you can put it on stage, and it might not work. So, you can look at what’s happening now on social media. And we do ourselves, because we also would like to know where we might be going next year. We would like to prepare certain broadcasters for that inevitable or possible win. So, we look at all this as well. Like, everybody watching this show is as in the dark as everybody else about what will resonate on those nights, the semi-finals.

Remember there are two semi-finals and the grand final. But those songs might resonate in a different way than you think. Because you’ve seen a music video. You’ve only heard a song. You haven’t seen it performed. So, yeah. It’s fascinating.

And what we do notice and what we’re looking at a lot more is, after the semi-finals, where are those songs being streamed? Where are those songs now popular? And they do give you, certainly in the event week, a good indication of where the public, not the music, not the juries, but we obviously have from the semi-finals, we know what the jury results are, but we don’t publicly publish them until after the whole show is completed. So, it doesn’t prejudice the grand final, of course. But we do get to see, after the semi-finals, what songs are resonating. And, sometimes, it’s a surprise. Sometimes, it’s, “Wow. Oh, that’s—. Yeah. Well, of course. Look at the staging in that song. That’s why that song has done really well, and it’s lifted that song.”

So, yeah. It’s a better guide than we’ve ever had before. It won’t tell you exactly who is going to win. And, sometimes, the songs that haven’t done that well prior to the show do well, because of the TV performance and, following the show, become huge. And I think I am right in saying Ukraine’s song last year was, yes, certainly, well thought of, but became massive after the show.

CAT ANDERSON I was just thinking that when you were talking about how the voting system has changed. If I may give you a compliment, I have not realised how perfect the voting system is now, because then it means that you’re giving the general public, actually, the space to have conversations on social media as well and to react to things. Because, again, pre-social media, you might’ve got together with a group of friends. You might’ve gone to a bar. You might be watching it with your family. So, you’re having a limited conversation where everyone’s like, “Oh, my God. That was amazing” or “Oh, that was awful.” And that will influence you. But now, with social media, that’s exploded out to this huge level.

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON You know, people are watching it one eye on the screen, one eye watching the Twitter reaction …

DAVE GOODMAN Yeah.

CAT ANDERSON … which can also help then make that public vote or the televote absolutely crazy. So, I feel like that – the way that that’s been set, so there is time for that conversation to happen on social media and then potentially impact the vote at the end. That’s perfect …

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON … ’cause it means you’re having that conversation with millions of people.

DAVE GOODMAN Yeah. Exactly. And that whole thing of joining audiences together in different countries that used to be only done through the television where you had that sensation that you were watching something that was being watched in tens of different countries, that now is on social. That conversation. You can connect with those people. Twitter is awash with comments particularly, because that’s the type of platform Twitter is. It’s where you give instant reaction. So, Twitter is massively important to us.

But certain platforms are good for certain things. And, obviously, we have comments on the YouTube live stream, and we have comments all running through all the videos that we publish on YouTube. But then with TikTok, of course, we want to have fun with the artists. And our live stream on TikTok this year, we’ll also provide something exclusive where we’re going to have backstage footage of the artists coming on and off the stage. So, we’re going to be able to see what they look like and their—. When I say it out loud, it’s probably not something that’s appealing to them. But their anxiety, their nerves, their fear, their excitement before they go on stage …

CAT ANDERSON Mmhmm.

DAVE GOODMAN … and when they come off. And that will be exclusively on TikTok. So, there, again, you will be able to comment on the live stream on TikTok as well. And then, of course, on Facebook and Instagram, you can interact there as well. We’re going to be doing Instagram lives. We’re, of course, going to have loads of video on stories. We have an older audience on Facebook, but we have a very engaged audience and a huge reach on Facebook. It’s our most followed platform, and we use that to really use as an information platform, but also as an engagement platform, because you can comment under the articles. But that sort of instant reply that you get, and certainly on the nights of the event, is really, really important to us.

And – and I think it’s really important every year. We aspire, and we are ambitious to work with all the platforms to take what they have and make our experience, our engagement better by working with them. 

And one of the other things, actually, we’re doing this year for the first time is fantasy Eurovision, which is actually an Italian concept that they do with San Remo. And we’re going to be doing that on Facebook where you can choose your own successes that Eurovision choose between the different songs and—. Yeah. Essentially, an interactive fantasy Eurovision experience. So—. And I can see your excitement. So, it’s all about change, and it’s all about, every year, making our offer different. And we are—. Because we are a television show that changes and we want to be—. And we are the biggest, best, most technologically advanced entertainment show in the world, we have the same aspirations and the same ambitions for our social channels. And every year, we want to – to make what we produce better, more engaging and get more and more followers of this fantastic event.

CAT ANDERSON I am still trying to process fantasy Eurovision, which, as a person who’s not so into sports, my jaw hit the deck there. It’s like, “Yes. Finally. Something” …

DAVE GOODMAN Exactly.

CAT ANDERSON … “that I can get on board with.”

It’s really great to hear the spirit of experimentation as well. And as you say …

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON … knowing which type of audiences are on different platforms and, like, bringing that experience in new and wonderful ways to them. So, it sounds like an awful lot of work.

DAVE GOODMAN Yes, it is.

CAT ANDERSON I can’t wait to try it. Like, see it all.

DAVE GOODMAN It is an extremely huge body of work. And we don’t have an enormous team, but about twenty-two, twenty-three, give or take working full-time or part-time, during the event weeks in the host city. And that’s producing thousands of hours of content for multiple platforms.

And, of course, there’s a new platform every year. I mean, Reddit. Not a new platform, but we’re doing a lot more on Reddit this year. We’ve just done fan favourites on Reddit. You know, what are your fan favourites? And we’ve made a Spotify playlist, because we’re on Spotify with playlist of the artists, their favourite music, the songs that inspire them. So, it’s everywhere. I mean, when I talk about it, I can’t believe we’re doing all this.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah.

DAVE GOODMAN But we – but we are so passionate about this, because people are not on every social platform. You know this. They’re not going to see everything you do. They might only be on Facebook. They might only use Twitter. So, we have to provide an offer, and we want to provide an offer on all the platforms that is appropriate to that platform and those audiences, so, we can share the joy of Eurovision everywhere we possibly can.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, wow. I—. Joy is the right word, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I now just want to go and put on that Spotify playlist. I want to get ready for Eurovision now. I want to go and start thinking about what I’m going to wear or who we’re going to have around for the party. It’s just so lovely to have something that is so joyous, you know, and something that’s so open to everyone, because I feel like it is accessible. And the work that you’re doing is so great at taking that night and making it way bigger …

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON … way more accessible to so many people. So, fair play to you, Dave.

DAVE GOODMAN Thanks.

CAT ANDERSON And we have one final question …

DAVE GOODMAN Mmhmm.

CAT ANDERSON … which we ask everybody on this podcast, which is: If you’re to stop following everyone that you follow on the Eurovision account, which would be the single account that you would continue to follow?

DAVE GOODMAN Well, that’s difficult.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. It is.

DAVE GOODMAN That’s like choosing between your children, isn’t it? Who’s your favourite child? I think ultimately Eurovision is about the songs, and it is about music, so, I would say in terms of the one platform that I would continue to follow would be YouTube. So, all the shows and all the songs can be viewed there. And it is ultimately a TV experience. A visual and audio experience. And, again, I’m not choosing this based on anything other than the importance of the music and – and seeing the music as well as hearing the music. But it’s a terrible question. And we would never …

CAT ANDERSON Sorry.

DAVE GOODMAN … never want to – never want to cast out our other children. They are all as precious to us as – as – as each other.

CAT ANDERSON Oh, well. Thank you so much, Dave. I feel like I’m obsessed with you now. I want to talk to you about who’s going to be in your Eurovision – fantasy Eurovision. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I have loved this conversation.

DAVE GOODMAN You’re really welcome. And I hope you very much enjoy this year’s show and also all the stuff we’re doing on social. And we can come back and talk about that another time. But yeah. It’s great to have someone who’s passionate about Eurovision. I always see myself as a bit of an evangelist for Eurovision. It’s good to find people who – who don’t need persuading. So, it’s been lovely speaking to you.

CAT ANDERSON You, too. 

You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to today’s guest and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible. Make sure you join me for the rest of the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.

You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media at @SproutSocial or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt, Stacey, by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.

Thanks for listening, and catch you in two weeks.

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The post Eurovision: The cultural phenomenon’s perfect duet with social media appeared first on Sprout Social.

CAT ANDERSON Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone. And, really, nearly anything goes. But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know. But that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know and some that you don’t to explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies. And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

So this week, I’m joined by Owen Williams. A social media strategist with just about the most interesting professional experience ever. In a career spanning 20 years within the digital sector, Owen was previously the social media lead at BBC1 and BBC Wales, as well as the head of editorial strategy for BBC Content Social.

Nowadays he’s the finder and managing director of Siml, which helps publishers maximize creative content, but above all focuses and makes social media simple. We’ve got Owen here today to talk about chatterboxing. So, if you’re not familiar with that phrase, that’s when people weet about a show while they’re watching it, so they’re connecting with others and sharing hot takes and opinions and jokes all as fast as they’re happening on screen. With one eye on the TV and the other on your phone screen, it is a genuinely great way to watch TV. 

Owen is also one of the funniest, energetic people I’ve met in a long time. So I literally cannot wait to hear what he has to say today. If you would like to follow his personal account, you can do so @OwsWills. 

Owen welcome to Social Creatures. 

OWEN WILLIAMS Wow. What a lovely introduction. What way to start!

CAT ANDERSON Owen. I do think if we’ve had a guest on the podcast who lives breathes and enjoys social media, as much as you do, I’m struggling to think who that could be, which is brilliant.

And it’s so exciting, so it makes me wonder, what is it that excites you the most about social media and how and when did you come to the decision to make it the focus of your career?

OWEN WILLIAMS I was a television producer, I was children’s television producer for many years. I know, I look really young. It’s Polyfilla.

It’s all held together, thank you for saying as much. Back then, I was getting commissions for shows for S4C, a Welsh language channel. We were making this cookery series nominated for children’s BAFTa and it was hilariously funny. My approach was emotive content that would resonate with the audience. Of course, social media didn’t really exist back then, there wasn’t a theory or a strategy really that was being shared about how these things worked.

But I was, I was creating content around a TV show called Cariad At Iaith, which in English means “Love For Language”. And it was a group of celebrities placed in this amazing sort of glamping resort in west Wales. They put them there to learn Welsh over the course of a week. And I sort of captured this because I felt it could be resonant for an audience, mostly on Facebook, some on Twitter as well, mostly on Facebook. And it really drew an audience, people really engaged with it. This was 2010, 2011, was pointing people to the Facebook page and to the Twitter channels, which is very, very early days – quite revolutionary back then really.

I was attended a conference, it was a sort of working group conference over the course of a few weeks. Um, course for a few months think it was. Not long after we finished TX on Cariad At Iaith series and the lady given the conference asked, “what have you seen on social media, the internet that has really struck you recently”. And this girl put her hand up and she said the thing that’s really, um, struck me was the social media for Cariad At Iaith. The guy leading the, that sort of lecture just laughed and said “Owen did that” and she went, “You did that?” I went, “Yeah” And she went “It’s amazing!” I went, “Is it?!” I didn’t have a frame of reference. 

You know, I was working on social content for various outlets at that point in time, but then down BBC Wales in 2013, it was the first ever social media lead there. The head of news and current affairs at the time called me The Axe Man because within three weeks, I’d axed about 30 different Twitter accounts a they shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and they were terrible! It dawned on me very quickly that there was a rationale for what we did and how we did it, but I just needed form of words. I recognized that emotive content worked on audiences and worked on people, but I couldn’t structure it in my head and I’d never really given it due consideration and I did a lot more digging and I’ve come up with this concept in time.

It’s something I’ve seen in various places, but Information, Identity and Emotion – that’s my holy trinity of making content go viral. And that’s, I do talks on these things nowadays, but information how does a piece of content better inform me, and I’ve just sort of gone, “Right, how do I sort of put this through as sort of a filter for it to make sense to people and for it to make sense to those people I instruct in talks and seminars and keynotes, how do I drill down and go, right? What’s the nub of this?”

CAT ANDERSON I have a million questions for you. I think before I go down the rabbit hole of television and social media and how they overlap, there is a chance that our listeners will be furious with me. If we don’t talk more about your recipe for going viral on social, so remind me again what it was there was… I know it ended with emotions. Was it information? What was the middle one?

OWEN WILLIAMS Go on, have a guess. 

CAT ANDERSON No, I should know… Information…

OWEN WILLIAMS Iden… uh, information. 

CAT ANDERSON Oh, Identity? 

OWEN WILLIAMS Yes, yes! You’ve got it. Information, Identity and Emotions. So it’s a sort of Holy Trinity, as I describe it. How a piece of content better informs me about the world around me. And when I say me, I don’t mean me, Owen Williams or you, Cat Anderson. I really mean the individual, the audience member. And I talk a lot about audiences cause that’s my BBC background. It’s the individual that perceives that content once it’s published. So you wanna put yourselves in their shoes and honestly, so many social professionals would do a lot, lot better by placing themselves in the shoes of the person who’s about to view their content rather than going no, no, I’ll just type this.

Information, how a piece of content better informs me about the world around me. Identity, how a piece of content better informs me about myself and fundamentally, Emotion. How a piece of content makes me feel. And what I’m talking about in feel is they’re actually heightened emotions that sort of forgive the filth, but arousal emotions, they’re elevated emotions, you know, it’s that dopamine hitting your brain.

It’s delivering more powerful emotions than you just sort of are general sort of smirking. You really want to elevate these emotions, right? Whether that’s horror or excitement or you turn them on in some way. Those arousing emotions actually work exceptionally well because, I talk about this as well when I do keynotes, but that idea of it being social media – yes, it’s gotta be about people – but when someone perceives content, it becomes selfish media. It’s me, me, me, media. It’s how does it affect me? What does it say about me? What does it say about the world in which I live and how does it make me feel – information, identity, and emotion, all of those things. And that’s the reason content goes viral. That’s the reason dog owners see USGIs coming home from Afghanistan and the dog jumping all over them. So it’s all of those things and that’s a very simplistic version of, but if you can deploy that strategy in what you do. 

If you want me to talk about the big cats thing, I will at length because that is a crystalline example of that trinity working in practice. December 2017, I had marketing approach me with creating and said, “Hiya and welcome. We’ve got this new series called Big Cats, we’d like to put it on social media. And I said, oh, okay, so Big Cats sounds interesting, can I see that? And they said, “Yeah, yeah, of course. We’ll send you, we’ll send you the first few episodes.” “Well, great great great. Can you tell me the trailer as well?” And what they’d cut was a, was a sort of wide screen television trailer with this long language. Look at a landscape at the start, this, this Savanna with these big cats running these lions running in the far distance taken from a helicopter way off, you know, so it was not disturbing running across Savannah. I was like on a screen, the sides of a matchbox, I cannot work out what I’m looking at, those first 3 seconds are so vital. 

During this trailer, about 20 seconds in, this little tiny wild cat emerged from beneath a leaf in a forest. And I went, “That’s what you put at the start of the trailer, that’s how to drag people in!” They went, “Are, you sure?” I went, “Sure? Sure?! I know it!” Anyway, that’s what they did. And they made this square version and it was fabulous. And this two and a half, 3 million views. What we eventually got was these collection of videos that were. So powerful and so resonant that every August 8th, and of course every lesson will know that’s International Cat Day. These videos get released again, and it is the same source video on the same channel on the same, uh, Facebook page. And they just propagated once again to the majesty of Facebook crossposting and you’re talking about videos with upwards of 350-360 million views by today. And that’s, what? Six years later? But they are incredibly powerful legacy evergreen content for the BBC there.

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. It makes so much sense. You know, when you think about stuff that does go viral for all sorts of different reasons – you’re right. Because on different levels and different scales, you’re like, oh, those three elements are totally adhered to, but, um, as you know, as I mentioned in the introduction, we are going to talk about chatterboxing.

I really love watching either something maybe controversial or just, you know, the Olympics happening live or eurovision is a big one, and you see what’s happening on Twitter. For an uneducated outsider, I would think this would be a big thing that TV producers are thinking about, like “How can we make sure that we inspire a conversation? How are we gonna think about how social will run alongside this program?” Is that the case? Is it something that on the inside TV producers are thinking about?

OWEN WILLIAMS The pressure is such on television producers, particularly in the, in the non SVOD, sort of in the non-streaming world, the pressure is such on them to deliver the TX show, the transmitted show, that other things often fall by the wayside. What you would end up doing was end up in a meeting with marketing a few weeks before transmission to talk about what we could do on social and ctually we’d missed the boat by then really, because what we should have been doing is working with a commissioning editor way back when it was commissioned to ensure we got the best out of things.

We did work with the commissioners there and we’d work with the Independent Television Company. But again, getting someone in there right at the outset to work across, it was, was slightly more difficult because it was a slightly looser sort of thing. What I love though, is taking that sort of theory and going, “Right, how can we not necessarily take the program itself and distil that onto social, but how can we draw out elements of that show? Or how can we talk around it in some way?” 

Some early examples of the stuff I was doing at BBC Wales way back was there was show called Hinterland, which was like a Scandi-Noir cop drama. Really dark, set on the Ceredigion coast. See these wild sweeping vistas, beautifully shot. And, I just started playing with it on BBC Wales social media, and just talking about the fact that in one shot they’re in outside Aberystwyth, Borth way, and they take a road and they end up in Aberystwyth. But you can’t go on that road toward Aberystwyth because we know that road. So you could talk about that on social media and people from that area be killing themselves laughing because yeah, you can’t go that way. That’s, that’s just a decision they’ve taken. And also, in Borth right, this tiny town, the Aberystwyth coast, with one single train line running through it, doing this one shot about four trains ran through there’s like one a day and people are just going, “Where are these trains coming from?!” And the other thing was most people in it had a beard and a bobble hat on. So you guaranteed to have a murderer when there’s a beard and a bobble hat, so I was playing on these themes. And this was sort of 2016, and the marketing department were like, “You can’t do that! You gotta have respect for the source!” five years later, everyone’s doing it because it’s this extension of brand, as it would. It’s recognizing the audiences that are engaging with a concept of an idea, and then you’ve gotta run with it.

So for example, with Big Cats at BBC1, I went in with this argument that. We’ve got the science of these cats and that’s really important. So we need to fold that in, in some way. But in the first episode, in the six-part run, the audience just went, “Oh my God, look at the tiny floof! Oh my God!” And I went, “Yeah okay, that’s what we need to do.” And then one evening I’m sitting in my hotel room and it’s on a couple of people, started posting pictures of their cats watching the show Big Cats and I just went, “I’m just gonna do it – #CatsWatchingBigCats”. And I think you can still probably find that on Twitter, #CatsWatchingBigCats and that’s me running BBC one, and I just said, “Send us your cats, watching Big Cats.” And we got thousands of photos. And the following week then, we got people sending dogs and I said, “Send us your dogs watching Big Cats.” And there they were and I’d comment on these, on these cats and retweet them and people just thought it was amazing. 

I think if you are too closely aligned with the content, the difficulty is for producers and commissioning editors and television is letting go of the thematic driver that they want to parlay to the audience through dint of having spent money and time and energy and resource on making this beautiful thing they’ve made for television at half an hour long. And you’ve got some social producers sitting there going, ah, look at his bobble hat. That’s really difficult for commission edges.

You have to work directly with each other, but you also have to recognize that people’s disciplines are so, so – they come from two different angles, but they both want to achieve the same thing, which is enriching people through the power of the brand. 

CAT ANDERSON Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex even the hardiest of social media users. Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call Sound Advice.

STACEY WRIGHT Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean is time for us to take a break and cosy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Right. Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.

“Dear Stacy, I’m writing to you from a financial services company aimed mainly towards small businesses to offer tax advice. I’ve managed to secure a budget as part of our VAT and tax returns campaign launching soon. But this will be the first time that we will be creating and launching social media advertising.

The objective is to drive new, qualified leads so LinkedIn feels like the safest bet, but as it’s so specialized and the competitive space, I have concerns that we will burn through the budget too quickly. What questions should I be asking our media agency to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for success and not a 0% return rate.

Aiming to spend money to make money,

Sav.”

Sav, I know how much those Cost Per Clicks on LinkedIn can sting, especially if you’re not used to them. In terms of questions. The first one I would ask is, “How and why has the budget been portioned in that way?” If the budget has been allocated by your internal team to then present back to the media agency. 

I would ask, what is the Lifetime Value of a customer and what conversion rates do you normally see from other channels, if this is the first time that you’re doing social advertising? This will indicate a benchmark of what success looks like and therefore give you more questions to ask the agency to keep you on track.

If the budget split has been proposed by the agency, asked them why they’ve portioned it that way and given you a certain percentage for social media. They see customers day in, day out. They know what successes look like for social ads and for your sector. And then you can start to ask those follow up questions around creative, “What works well? What doesn’t?” And if you have creative assets already produced, what’s their thoughts on it?

Then you can start to ask, “How can we measure the success of these in flight while the campaign is running?” And “What are the options to optimize this campaign while it is running?” This is all linked. So if you have one version of an ad, yo u’re a bit stuck – you have that one ad you can run for the whole campaign. But if you have multiple options, then you can start to add flexibility and change maybe the format, the placement, copy, the narrative of a video and how that paces, if you want. And then start to talk to them about budgets. Will it launch with a high daily budget and then drop down as the campaign wears in or will it ramp up towards a key moment? So in your case, have a tax return deadline date?

I’d also ask why is LinkedIn right for this campaign? Yes, it’s very powerful, especially in the B2B space, but what about all the small business users that are active on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter to promote themselves? They’re on those platforms to market, to their own audiences. But they’re also available in those networks to be marketed to by you.

YouTube is another option here as well, search history can tell a lot about a person, including things probably they don’t wanna admit about themselves, but it could be a good place to start targeting small business owners from there too. Whilst leads are the most powerful metric in this case, always, I suggest having followers as a soft target for social ad campaigns. It’s great to engage with people using the marketing team’s wallet, but followers are not only free to reach the majority of the time once they follow you with organic content, but they also offer a wider pool of warm leads for your next campaign. 

Sav thanks so much for sending in your social media quandary. I hope this will help you not find campaign planning for social media so taxing. Until next time listeners – stay strong and stay social. And now back to the interview!

CAT ANDERSON Something that, again, has come up on this podcast is that people acknowledging that sometimes there is almost an innate sense with social media, for what will work and what will not work. And I think it’s very interesting to hear you talk about then how TV producers who are, you know, making a piece of art where it’s a sweeping Savanna, and it’s really beautiful and gorgeous, but how that program is going to be interpreted on social. Actually, we’re gonna have to find a little silliness moment or the moment that will capture our social media viewer’s attention and we maybe only have half a second to do that. 

And I know you mentioned there as well about people in Wales. I think that’s such a thing. When you see a program that’s been filmed in a location that you know and you go, well, that’s not right because I’m originally from Belfast and Line of Duty is terrible for that, like they’re all over the shop. 

I wonder, you did some work with line of Judy didn’t you? And you made a particular, a particular social media experience off the back of Line of Duty, which was totally separate from the TV show, I believe. Could you tell us a little bit about that little magical moment?

OWEN WILLIAMS BBC Creative were making, so they do all this amazing stuff for the BBC, they make it, or in house make all their promos and things, and they’re stunning by and large. So, what we did was we created this Easter Egg hunt, this sort of scavenger hunt, these digital Easter Eggs. The trailer had this QR code on this magazine. And if by some chance you scanned the QR code, it took you to a Google Doc, this letter from the Chief of Police about the department in Line of Duty.

So, there was a, a hidden link in one word in that Google doc, but it was knocked out of context in the sentence, but it was just a bit of a strange addition to the sentence. Anyone who scrolled their mouse over the word here would go to a prescription. And that prescription existed on this little sort of image dumping ground, where you could skewer a link.

There was a Morse code buried within this prescription image you saw. And the Morse code is a web address, but you can’t build the web address until, you know what the Morse code’s gonna be, and you can’t build the Morse code until you’ve, until you’ve got other things. It ended up being nominated for Promax award, um, in London, so there’s big award ceremony for promotions on TV and film. I didn’t even know it would be nominated until quite recently, but I was, it was a blew my mind that’d be nominated. And it was just this, just this such a deep experience. 

But the earned media thhat came off the back, and by earned media I mean just this, this media that we didn’t plan, but ended up being written about not only the show, but about this audience sort of pedagogical journey that people went through, these learning journeys. The people who saw it adored it. We could track the links as well. So four and a half thousand people scanned this QR code, which doesn’t seem massive, but the media came off the back of it was enormous. Four and a half thousand meters scan the code, about 200 people completed the whole thing, because it was just so hard to do, really hard. It’s worth having a look at Reddit for the line of duty Easter Eggs, because all of that comes off the back of this insane idea. And then this crazy person in Wales going, I think we could make this work. 

CAT ANDERSON I wonder, what is your proudest social media moment to date?

OWEN WILLIAMS Oh my God. You should broadcast the silence. Um, 

CAT ANDERSON A rarity, a rare moment in your life, Owen. 

OWEN WILLIAMS Is it social to say that I was one of the two individuals who pitched and subsequently won and by won, I mean, it was approved, we are the reason that the Whales, Scotland and England flag emojis exist on handsets and devices worldwide today. Is that socially enough?

CAT ANDERSON Yeah. Tell us that story. How did that happen?

OWEN WILLIAMS Wales famously got to the semi-finals of Euro 2016 in France. Amazing for Wales football. I was running BBC Wales social media throughout that, and that was fantastic in and of itself. But, before that started, I had no idea how long it would take to get an emoji onto people’s devices, but I thought there’s no harm in trying this.

So, I got together with Jeremy Burge and Jeremy Burge is an Australian man who ran a site called Emojipedia. So we worked together. We wrote this paper, submitted it to Unicode, who are the authority on keyboard characters and they’d come together to decide which characters should exist. Emojis were evented in Japan and they were character sets that you could access through key presses, now it’s really easy to them, emoji keyboard. But they get added to every now and then, but we were like, right, we want these to exist. We essentially wrote this paper and laid out the reasons and the rationale and how it could be done. We think it would get use. And it is not a transient thing. It’s a historic thing and, you know, I had people saying to me, “How’d you get the Tardis emoji? I was like, “You can’t, it’s a transient thing”  and they approved it. You can’t just have a transient thing. You can.. they’d other methods of doing that kind of thing, like Twitter, hashtags, um, but the… We got that. And it is the most exciting thing.

There’s a sense of weirdness to it because it’s really associated with what I do. And it’s such a strange one for me to think about this idea, that they’re the reasons that we wrote a paper and they’re the reasons these digital ephemera exist everywhere for everyone and are used constantly. It’s just… That, in short. 

CAT ANDERSON I mean, that’s an amazing one. Our final question. And this is a question that we’ll be asking everybody on the podcast. If you had to delete everybody that you follow on your Twitter account but leave just one account. Who would it be and why

OWEN WILLIAMS Cat it would be you. just you. Nobody else. 

You’re such a liar!

CAT ANDERSON I am. You barely tweet. Damn you. Um, no. Hugh Edwards, Hugh Edwards Uh, the BBC news anchor. Hugh and I have this… Bizarre sort of professional, personal working relationship, or I DM things to him. I sent him this picture of him standing in front of the Welsh flag and for reasons unknown, this image shot way up the tree in BBC and the BBC asked him to take it down and Hugh being Hugh and rather brilliantly, he told everyone on Twitter, he’d been asked to take it down and he made news headlines that he’d been asked to take it down on which part, Welsh Twitter, and there are many of them, Welsh Twitter, sort of,  jumped on board and changed all their Twitter handles to “I’mHughEdwards” or changed their tweets to “I’m Hugh Edwards” and put his name in like “I’m Spartacus”. And I just went right, I’m gonna have some fun with this. So I changed my name to Hugh Edwards, I changed my avatar at Hugh Edwards, I then tweeted as Hugh Edwards and put up all these images of him doing amazing stupid things as Hugh Edwards. 

Like him on a motorbike “I’m Hugh Edwards”, on a Panigale Ducati, “I’m Hugh Edwards!” Jaws of.. Jaws of Steel. “I’m Hugh Edwards.” Bloody, uh, “Suns out guns out” all this stuff. And it was hilarious. If, and as a result met the guy we got on like a house on fire, and now we wanna make a show together by the way, but that’s hilarious. And during the chat with him, I took his phone off him and unbeknownst to him. I just tweeted the words, “Hugh Edwards” from his phone, cuz he didn’t think I could get 10,000 likes in an hour. And I got 10,000 likes about 20 minutes, but Hugh Edwards, October 1st, last year I tweeted Hugh Edwards from his phone and went crazy. As a result. I believe that October 1st, every  year now is Hugh Edwards day nationally in Wales and every where, but his editor called him News at Ten going, “Are you… what are you doing? Do you know, you’re Googling yourself on Twitter?!” It was just insane. I was just so yeah, possibly Hugh, or you… or my wife.

CAT ANDERSON Owen thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. 

OWEN WILLIAMS You’re welcome. 

CAT ANDERSON You’ve been listening to social creatures with me, Cat Anderson, many. Thanks to Owen Williams, Siml, for joining me today and Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

Make sure you catch the rest in the series by subscribing on your favourite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode of Social Creatures. Every two weeks, you can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media @SproutSocial or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony and Stacy by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com. 

Thanks for listen. And we’ll see you in two weeks.

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