S4 E2: The New Rules of Visibility in 2026 - What's In, What's Out

0:00Hi everybody, welcome to Built to be Seen. For people ready to show up. I'm Toby. And I'm Kaz. Are you ready to be seen? Welcome back. So today we're going to be discussing the new rules of visibility in 2026. What's out and what is in? So lots of changing going on. Lots of change. I was quite interested with some of these points that we've kind of put together that we're going to be touching on bits of AI, bits of how visuals are changing, how much of your personal self to be sharing and what to be sharing more of. I know I was like... But we'll start off with frequency. And that actually, looking at the way the algorithms are favouring things at the moment, posting more is not necessarily better.

0:54Yeah. Which we've just signed, we've all just got our head round, need to be doing more, need to be doing more, need to be showing up all the time. But there is a balance as to how frequently is actually going to keep you in good circulation and keep pushing you in front of the right people versus overstepping that line and you're actually losing some engagement and interactions. And diluting the message as well. So it's all about being more intentional, I think, with what you're putting out. So I personally have noticed this. So over the last, when I first stepped onto the site, I'm just going to use LinkedIn as an example here.

1:32But when I first stepped onto LinkedIn a couple of years ago, it would favour when I post it more often. Yeah. Like, so I'd try and post most days, definitely midweek. You'd see my face popping up. But recently that has dipped a bit. And I'm like, ah, interesting. But I've been speaking to other people who have got clearer messaging, but are also posting a bit less but consistently so yeah two three times a week with a consistent I know every time their post pops up that's them talking about that subject in some way their own their own opinions in their own way again but that subject and and they are seeing a better return at the moment so it's really interesting because I think let's take the pressure off of trying to be absolutely everywhere and let's instead think about what we're sharing and where.

2:27I've got an experience that's kind of the reverse of that I've probably spent less time on LinkedIn in the last two months than I have for the last two years just posting occasionally and I've actually found people commenting and more engagement with those whether that is intentionally that I know subconsciously sorry that because I haven't posted a while I'm framing things slightly differently or the messaging is more specific because I've sat down to get that odd post out so it's landing differently with people or whether it is just actually it's been shown to to more people for that reason yeah I don't know well I don't I think with yourself you're really good like if I go on your profile and I just look at your profile I know exactly what you do yeah doesn't it I'm not going on there I mean like what does headshot I mean it's the clues in the name first of all what does headshot toby do not a clue right so i know exactly what you do so whenever i go on there again i see you pop up i'm expecting you to talk about that specific subject yes in some way yeah but you do it again and with your own opinions in your own style in your own way of doing it which is really engaging to me so i like i will instant it's not just because we did a podcast together but i will instantly like you do some great videos and I'll click on them because I want to see like what's going on what's the narrative like it's entertaining even if I'm not wanting to buy at the minute or go and get photography done with you right now I'm intrigued to see what you've created next with it so I'm kind of staying relevant in your sphere even though at the moment it's not something you're looking for yeah but as soon as I'm ideal isn't it yeah as soon as I am then looking yeah you're the one I'm going to go to because you've been keeping me visually engaged and in your storytelling engaged for that long but also the second and there's a lot of photographers out there and I know again we do the podcast together so maybe there's an element of that in there but the second anybody needs a photographer in Lincolnshire you are the first person that I mentioned and even people have asked in London and I've been like you forget David from Lincoln he'd go down to London yeah Yeah, because I just know, like, I know I've seen you, you're top of my mind, you create amazing stuff for your own platform, your own channels.

4:48I know, and I've seen the stuff you do for clients. I know you will do them justice and really well. I'm like, you're the one, you're the one that is needed. Go and get over to Toby. Like, this is the one you need. That's really good to hear. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, you didn't pay me. She didn't say it was off air. It's interesting that though, that even if you've not worked with someone before, getting referrals through a connection that you've not necessarily done work for, but it is that building of the reputation that's achieved that is really interesting. Like it's so powerful, isn't it?

5:26Yeah. So I guess if we were to kind of do an action step for every point that we're going to share today, would we say don't worry about how frequently you're posting don't think you have to be showing up every day with something new and therefore the content you're sharing is diminishing in value think first about who is your audience what is it right now that you need to share with them and tell them and focus on that yeah get super super clear yeah and schedule and get in advance those posts so they're going out regularly because again someone sees you two three times a week on on linkedin as a platform that is enough yeah for you to get that consistency and it's enough for you to not then burn out so you're going to be doing it in the next six months it's interesting that you said about like your experience with it as well and how you've boosted things recently because of showing up less i think an element of mine as well is because there's been the change with quirk and marketing labs combining and stuff.

6:28So I've gone very much from just one specific message of personal branding to a bit of a mix of SEO and PPC and some other digital marketing as well. So it has diluted the message in a bit as we've gone through this period of change. So again, my next month's content, I don't know when anyone will be listening to this. So if you go on and look at my month's content, it might be a different month to where on now. But if you go on at the right, this specific time that I'm posting next month you'll see I'm only doing less posts and I have a specific focus now of marketing labs digital marketing and my first month has been showing the humans because I still want to keep that human element in there that personal branding side of stuff but it is showing the humans behind marketing labs is kind of like almost my first series slash bunch of posts that I'm doing yeah yeah and so again my messaging over the next month will get a lot clearer so I'll be intrigued to see how that kind of affects the stats as well I'm sure I'll show that share that in a future episode as well so I think the next visibility in this is out and definitely out is and I've seen this a lot recently on my social media AI shaming and I had to include it in this episode because it is paying me off so much it's constantly yeah so AI is a new tool that has come into play right and it's the future potentially of how the world's going how technology is going so in my view I have started fiddling playing tweaking learning just exploring some ai tools and i utilize them and i i do use them in my daily life as well as daily working life and it's never perfect at first because it's a new tool so i don't know what i'm doing with it i am learning and i'm trying to get better at it and i'm seeing where it's good and where it's not good so there's experimentation in there as well why hate is the people going online at the moment that are like in the comments section or in their people's dms that are like don't use ai why are you using it it's almost like this ai shaming yeah and i know there's a lot of fear around ai and fears of job losses and will it replace me and all of this so i get there's a lot of scared people out there but i don't think we need to shame humans for the use of ai i think there's enough shame as a human upon us we need to be encouraging and helping educate how to use it better maybe i think we would be surprised how long we have had it integrated into what we do and on a day-to-day basis or around us at the supermarket walking down the high street places we go where it's been implemented and has been for years that we just weren't aware of it's only now that we can actually access it and use it that it feels shameful or laziness or but actually yeah you're right there are so many fantastic uses for it otherwise it wouldn't have evolved as quickly as it has so yeah I don't know why people want to bring people down they are the same people that will probably comment on a video you've shared of yourself talking to camera and tell you that you're rubbish you know it's the people that kind of yeah yeah so it's like back to be kind people do you really need to leave that comment and then also just move on if you don't like it so for those of you who don't know headshot toby studio is based here in spark house in lincoln they offer flexible office spaces business mentoring and even have virtual offices if you're not quite ready for a full-time desk as a sole trader and a photographer with lots of equipment it was really important i found somewhere that had space for me that was affordable so that I had plenty of room to grow my business in a way that was scalable.

10:36And Sparkhouse may just be the perfect solution too for you. Get in touch today by emailing sparkhouse at lincoln.ac.uk. And you'll also find our email address in the show notes below. So I think we can, instead of like shaming with AI, we can kind of flip the narrative and say, okay, so if we're all having a play with it and we're all exploring it and we see something that isn't the best case use for it yeah how can we maybe within our area of expertise and our narrative that we're sharing share better ways of using it so like for me through the digital marketing world and personal branding space like there'll be ways that I'll be using it that I can then share with other people to enable them to maybe use it in that way too once I've found what's worked and what's working really well like same for yourself yeah definitely there are there are parts of of my process, certainly on the editing side, where there are certain implementation of AI things that do things better than I trained and learned to do.

11:45And my skillset still doesn't reach the standard of what it offers. There's still manual input. I still have control over how much it does things in terms of editing photos and things like that. But there's certainly an area there that has just bridged a gap for me sort of thing. But I think, yeah, the sharing is really important. Tell people about tools you're using that you've found useful. Don't hold it close to you and then just hope nobody will know it's AI and try and pass it off as your own because that's where people do shame and think. This podcast wouldn't have, we wouldn't be at the point where we are now recording episode whatever if we hadn't implemented a tool that we put into Premiere Pro and it cuts it all.

12:28It identifies you're that camera, I'm this camera, and when we speak, it chops it all and cuts between the camera. That's halved our production time. Yeah. And this isn't a profit-generating task. This is publicity, this is visibility for us, this is value sharing. So it makes sense to do that and save time there, rather than me manually cutting between cameras. Yeah. We talked about the shorts, you know, using tools like Opus Clip. We put our podcast episode into there. It generates all the shorts with subtitles. It tells us which it thinks is going to get the most engagement. I recently shared that with, I did a long form video for a client, about 30, 40 minute interview.

13:14And also shared the opus clips with them, which, you know, yeah, could have been a markup for me to have gone to provide some short versions of the video. It's going to cost this much. but actually it hasn't taken me any time to do it's probably done it more efficiently than if i'd have done it anyway so like everything pros and cons but it's how you use it yeah and how you then help others to use it in a good way as well not just breaking them down because we're all trying our best out here we're all trying to do a million things and if some tools can help us oh hallelujah so that brings us onto our final point virality going viral trying to chase what content is going to suddenly take off and get us millions of followers that's less likely to happen now yeah it's it's such a big focus and such like a phrase that's kind of banded about if you're in the marketing space like anyone coming to you is chasing this but I get it because like with everything in business and life like the more you can do the more you can make the more you can earn the more the more numbers we attach numbers to everything don't we so obviously then like the bigger a post gets the more we're like we've nailed this visual thing online like we've nailed it because we've got millions and millions and millions yeah that's great but is what you have to offer are you going to get anything back from that like what do you want what do you want first of all there was having a really good conversation about this yesterday in the marketing labs office like asking clients like what do they want is it sales is it more leads is it more um brand awareness if it's brand awareness then possibly getting larger numbers is a good thing but again only if what you're doing and offering is I think about links and knots air ambulance for example when I think about this because links and knots air ambulance clues in the name they are links and knots and when they're going for more awareness is it worth them going viral in America viral in london yeah no because the people in london are going to be supporting the london air ambulance so actually their awareness yes needs to spread and be big but it needs to be big in that geographical location um there was another um company that i was talking to the other day we do some of their seo and their ppc ads for so the google ads and things which is great very specific very targeted we can get the exact people they're looking for based off of those things but then they were like again how can we get our socials more buzzing and and more on our socials and I had to have this conversation with them where I was like what you do when you create and you sell they sell a physical product that they make they can only make that build that in the UK right so again yes getting more reach in the UK is great but do they need to be in Africa and America and Thailand no they don't do they they just need to be bigger in the UK so you need to look at your audience and where they're kind of hanging out to know where how big you need to get and the other thing with virality as well is like the specific people that you want to talk to so So again, within this company, this company can build this certain product in the space of the UK.

17:03That's a big range. Yeah. But this product is a specific product. So when I was talking to them, I was like, it's great that you want to do this and get bigger on Instagram. But someone like me will be watching your reel on Instagram because you're bigger and you've got more likes and more followers. So I see it. I don't have a house or a property big enough to put what you're selling in. So there's no point in targeting me with it either because it's wasted. So you've got all these eyes, but they're all the eyes that you don't need or want anyway. So yes, in some cases, bigger, viral, better is great, but not in all cases.

17:44And a lot of cases it isn't. More targeted again, more concise is better if you can. and again looking at the we talked about in a different um part of this episode but like different um like just getting real clarity on who you're speaking to will help more than trying a trend for the sake of trying a trend to get bigger numbers i sometimes find if you try and focus on what other people doing or focus on what seems to be getting engagement or what advice on algorithms you know to be successful with algorithms are suggesting i might produce video and then just go but it don't sound like me now do you know what i mean i'm trying to hit these markers but i haven't done it in my own way now so it's sometimes it's a it's a sacrifice of authenticity and what how you might do things to try and fit system that then you're just adding to the noise that's already out there and actually just being individual and just gaining organic followers of people that are buying into what you're talking about is of more value.

18:56Numbers won't be so high, but... It probably went viral and was a trend in the first place because it was novel. There was something novel about it, something that stopped us in our tracks from watching every other thing that was the same. So if you try and recreate that, it's already lost its novelty, hasn't it? so you're not going to be able to um it's potentially going to take you loads of time which could be better focused somewhere else yeah loads of resources that could be better focused somewhere else as simple as the other day i said to this company i was like well so your posts are actually performing pretty well the organic social media that they're getting out to the world is is good and they're doing well so keep doing that but maybe reduce the frequency of it so again the three a week on certain platforms I said but then how about you know you're trying to push this brand forward and get the awareness for it but your personal LinkedIn profiles are empty and we know that LinkedIn gets 550 % more visibility on your personal profile than your business profile so you're putting stuff on your business profile on there you're putting stuff on your brand page on Instagram you're doing all this branded stuff but then your own one but would get naturally more visibility and more likes more follows more shares all of it is dead absolutely dead and you're getting nothing on it and people would watch that more than they'd watch your business pages i did say the caveat as well to them that like don't just reshare the company stuff on you it's got to be personalizing personal opinions and stuff drip feed that in every now and again if there's a cool project that's on your normal feed that you could uh cross promote but don't rely on that heavily and because again people are following you for you not your brand page people aren't following your brand page anyway so if you turn your page into your brand page people aren't like that it just becomes a mess yeah yeah so yeah stop chasing virality and get more intentional we hope you've enjoyed this first episode of the built to be seen podcast used to be brand new if you're still searching that out there keep following along on our instagram page which will be soon to be changed to built to be seen and ask us any questions about visibility online being seen getting out there ask us anything and we will um endeavor to answer them all in the podcast as we go along here's to branding we're not doing it see you next time