Is Your Social Media Strategy Outdated? Why Engagement Isn't King (and What Actually Is)

0:00So if you're thinking like, oh, I'm going to do this social post to send everybody to my site and all look at God, all this engagement, all these likes, all this stuff, it didn't work. But here's the other thing I thought was interesting. Posts in general, the number of posting is down significantly and it's just been in a steady decline. So what we're seeing is that social media, I think people are starting to realize that if I post and I'm a nobody, nobody's going to see it. So what's the point? So social is essentially becoming an entertainment feed rather than a social channel.

0:38hey everybody welcome to business lunch with your hosts ryan dice and myself roland frazier it is good to be here with you and ryan it's good to see you what's happening i um found an interesting article that i wanted to run by you um that is it's about uh like trends and social media and stuff like that so entrepreneurs and investors might might think that as sudden this sounds like more of a marketing thing. It doesn't really apply to me. But I think it applies really to any brand that is out there actively doing stuff on social, which probably should be only about everybody. And given that I know that you put forth a much better social media effort than I do, you are so much more famouser on the internets than I am.

1:21I thought it'd be fun to get your take on this. So I sent you the article. I'm guessing you didn't read it though, right? I just got it this morning. I did not have a chance. I'm going to summarize it for you. So it's from our friends in social media today. And the headline is, Report finds no correlation between social media engagement and content readership. What it basically tells us is what we always knew to be true. The people who are liking, sharing, getting really, really enraged about a particular piece of content. nobody's actually clicking through and reading the content. They're only just looking at the headline.

2:01So this is more a study about click throughs than it is about the actual consumption of the content. Correct. Because they're engaging with it, but they're not reading it. So what it found is that basically nobody is reading anything on social anymore. And a couple of the other takeaways, just like three big takeaways that I'll throw out as a, does that make sense? You're going to be able to look like. Not completely because maybe because I just, I would like to have a lot more information about the study if it's that. I get it if it's, so YouTube video comes up and says, click the link in bio or follow this link if you want.

2:45Instagram says click link in bio, et cetera. And nobody's doing that. They're only engaging on the platform itself. But if they're not reading the content or consuming the content on the social itself, and they're just basically going through and clicking a like without consuming any of the content, that's a different thing. There was no correlation. So basically there's no correlation whatsoever. You would think that a post that gets a lot of engagement, a lot of likes, a lot of comments, a lot of shares, that it would also get a lot of readership. It doesn't. Between the piece of content itself, that more like on a piece of content on say Instagram, more hearts on Instagram does not mean that people were reading the content any more than if there were no hearts on it?

3:38Correct. So basically nobody's reading any of it. So here's the thing, and it deals with click-throughs, but I don't think you can make that conclusion on the last part though, that nobody's reading any of it. Cause I think that there might be people that go through and click like to like a whole bunch of things because they're playing a gamesmanship thing or something like that. Um, or there might be people like me who I will read a lot about what I want to read about. Um, interestingly enough, I don't almost never read my own feed. I read the thing because I, you know, because that's my stuff, right?

4:15I, um, but I typically have the people that I'm following and stuff. I will go and look at their stuff and I will read it and I'll forget to like it. And then I'll, I'll feel guilty. I'm like, Oh, I got to go back and I got to like that because it was good, you know, and I don't, I want them to know that, but I, I don't, I find it difficult to believe that, that no one is really reading any of it anymore or, or viewing it, let's say. I know that I saw the CEO of Instagram said that most people are in stories and not in the feed. And I think that there are things like that. But I know just from looking at comments and stuff that there's quite a few people that are engaging, at least on the two that I'm on the most, which would be YouTube first and then Instagram.

4:59There's a lot of a lot of discussion. So I don't know, man. That's interesting. What I'm basically saying is that social is not a good source of web traffic, if that makes sense. So then it goes click-throughs, which I do believe. Yeah. It's impacting click-throughs, but there was also an impact on basically somebody would comment on a video even though they didn't watch it. I think we already kind of knew that to be true. They're going to comment. My favorite is the people that review products that they've never bought. It's like, looks too expensive. One star. Yeah. So that, so I guess a couple of takeaways, the first one to me is something that we already knew.

5:42Like people, just because they're engaging with a piece of content does not necessarily mean that they clicked through and read the content. Right. So if you're thinking like, oh, I'm going to do this social post to send everybody to my, to my site and all look at God, all this engagement, all these likes, all this stuff. You didn't, it didn't work. Um, but here's the other thing I thought was interesting. posts in general, the number of posting is down significantly. And it's just been in a steady decline. So what we're seeing is that social media, I think people are starting to realize that if I post and I'm a nobody, nobody's going to see it.

6:14So what's the point? So social is essentially becoming an entertainment feed rather than a social channel. So to even call it social media anymore is kind of like silly. And we're seeing that the posts are in dramatic decline. And there's a chart on the page that kind of shows how average posts per user is down, even though overall engagement is up. So everybody's happy to engage with somebody else, but the number of people, you know, posting about like, here's the sandwich I had today. Because it's fricking work to post. I mean, it's like, it is a job to post. I want to, you know, I have a personal hobby that I'm very interested in and passionate about that I wanted to create a YouTube channel for.

6:55And, you know, I, I did the research and looked and found the gaps in the market and all that kind of stuff. And then, and then I was thinking about it and I'm like, man, if I do this the way that it is supposed to be done, you know, if I, you, you kind of have to commit. And I think you're at least once every couple of weeks, you got to post a, you know, a, you know, a substantial video, if it's YouTube, um, do I want to do that? You know, do I want to commit to that. And, and it's actually, to me, it's actually really good, Brian, because there's so much crap that's out there. Like, and, and with AI, I think the risk of crap times infinity exists also of people that are just creating auto post algorithms and things like that.

7:39But, but I do know, and it's kind of cool because I, um, I have a few different things that, that I track and I know you do too, um, you know, that I stay like I use, um, X or, um, or Instagram or YouTube for my consumption of the content. And, um, and it's still really good. It's still really good, but I, I, I wonder how much the influencer, you know, the person who's, you know, Oh, I need to take pictures in front of the vertical flower wall in front of this restaurant and, you know, show this picture of the burrito that I had half of and all that kind of stuff. I'm guessing that's way down because the return on it is, you know, nothing.

8:23But for the people that are actually having, like, I use it as a community for, and there are repeat poster slash influencers within those little mini micro communities that are having conversations back and forth. And so I'm guessing it's not really applicable to that. It's more the big picture of kind of the, you know, the influencer world. Does that seem to be from what you read? Yeah. So the takeaways were posting is down, click-throughs are down. All these different social platforms, specifically the feeds are turning into purely entertainment, which makes sense because also the follower stuff is going away.

9:03You don't see who you follow anymore. You see who the algorithm tells you to see. And I think that that now means that just because you're able to build a large follower base in the past, that meant that a lot of people were going to see it. You're going to have good engagement. It doesn't mean that anymore. And so what, what we are seeing is the middle influencer. It's just getting gutted, right? You still have people and brands. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all of that. I, and I would lump them into the middle. You basically have professional influencers. You have professional creators who they're getting all of the attention and let's call them what they are, their talent, right?

9:41In the past, we would just refer to these folks as celebrities. They're the stars on TV shows and, you know, movies and, and, you know, radio, they're now getting all of the, all the, all the viewership, all the engagement is going to them. You still see a little bit at the bottom where it's like, Oh, I know that person, you know, they're still going to show you a little bit of your feed. So you see the most famous people at the top, you see the people you actually know at the bottom, and the entire middle has been gutted. And so what this article talked about is that actual social conversations have shifted away from the public channels themselves, and they're moving into private channels like DMs and private groups.

10:19And so the name of the game now is not, you know, how do we create all this engagement in our posts, But how do we just get people on these channels to how do we have conversations there and, you know, DMs and in more private groups that can be created, certainly in Facebook. Those can be created there. They're started. X has started to do some of these were with subscriptions and things like that. So it's interesting. It's now just gone massive, massive, big or tiny, tiny micro. So I'm just curious from your perspective, I think it might be interesting. How do you think this impacts the social strategy or the influencer strategy of a brand?

11:01Let's just say. Well, I think the first thing is that, and to me, I believe this is a huge disservice that all the social medias do. And I know that they do it for the commercial reason of if a brand wants to access customers through the platform, they want it to be through ads. whereas I might subscribe and I did long ago subscribe to several brands and then I realized that I was never seeing their posts so the only way for me to see the posts of the brands that I care about is to actually go to the brand's feed to go to the brand's site account which is very very annoying as a user experience that I can't create my own feed with the stuff that I want that, like that's to me, how great social would be, would be that you say, I want to see the feeds of these things.

11:53Plus they're going to give you discovery through suggested, you know, accounts and posts. That would be great. But for me, I never see any of the brands and miss out on a lot of cool things like coupons and specials and, you know, news and stuff like that. If I think that I'm going to get it through social. So, um, so I think number one, you need to know that it's not, you don't want to do that as a brand. You want to do that as a human, you know, as a person who isn't, you know, a representative of the brand or a face of the brand, not as the brand. Then the second thing would be, we do find that it's very, very effective to post content and then to, to encourage people to go to the Lincoln bio.

12:32We do still get a lot of traffic from that to our challenges and our book sales. But much, much more from our paid ads that people like will do a paid ad and then people will see the paid ad and not necessarily buy from that. They'll come over to the organic and then from the organic, they'll go to the Lincoln bio or they'll consume enough there to decide that the next time they see the ad, they want to buy the thing. So I do think it's supplementary and, and, um, and additive. It definitely helps enhance, um, the ability for people to get more of a feel for who you are before you buy. The other thing for us is that then also anybody who interacts, um, that we can identify gets DM'd so that we have a direct conversation that's starting to happen as soon as possible.

13:24And that's a tremendous place to sell. and I will say that if I had to do all of that, I would have no life. So, so I have a team, you know, you, you have to have people that do that for you. If you are not, you know, going to have no life, particularly if you're going to be on multiple social channels. So, so I guess it, you know, I think it's still, if you have a company, you want to have brand representatives that are, or brand ambassadors that are the people who are in human accounts, name, you know, name of people accounts, as opposed to a branded account, they would be sharing content of the brand.

14:04They would be, um, interacting with people who, who do engage so that if you do, you know, if somebody does like something, then it is definitely good for you to be able to reach out to them with a DM, especially, and there are softwares that will do that for you automatically. And then also I think social for search by hashtag. If you search by hashtag for like in one of our friends in the real estate business, basically we'll search for real estate investors and then they will, and another one does it in the e-commerce, they'll search for people that are doing FBA and pictures of themselves in front of their inventory in their garage and stuff like that.

14:46And then they'll DM them and say, Hey, it's great to see all the things that you're doing. I found this and this to be helpful. Would love to chat with you about it. And then that starts a dialogue that leads to a sale of some product or event or something like that. Those all seem to be still very effective strategies. The idea of I'm going to post five times a day and have a link in bio, and that's going to drive people to my website or even direct sales, I think is tough. Yeah. And what we're doing is we're just going back to the way that media has always worked, right? If you think about every single media channel, whether it was a newspaper, whether it's prints or TV, radio, there was always talent.

15:34There was always the show that you were listening to, the entertainment, the thing that you're going to, to be, you know, entertained. Are you not entertained? Right. There was always something there to entertain you. And then there was advertising that was inherently interrupted. Right. And as much as we say, we don't like that, that has just been a tried and true formula forever. There are people, you know, there are companies whose job is merely to entertain you. And that is their thing. And that's what they're great at. And they get paid by the advertisers who are willing to appear in and around your entertaining content.

16:04And there's going to be breaks in between where they're going to go. Those breaks used to be commercial breaks. now they're basically a scroll break, right? So I'm going to watch this. And as I scroll down, here's going to be something else that looks kind of like the other stuff, but it's obviously an ad. And I think it's time for brands to decide, are you the talent or are you an advertiser? And to be real with the fact that you're probably not that talented, not compared to the Mr. Beast of the world and the other people out there doing these incredible things. So just own the fact that you ain't that good.

16:36So you're probably not going to win organically, especially in a post follower world. When this whole game is no longer about build followers because then they'll see it. Social is not email. If you, if you build a list of email subscribers, you're going to send those people an email and why you got to compete in an inbox. You got a shot on social on all these different social channels. You don't have a freaking shot. Like you're just not going to see it because you're not that good. And the only, and they know that you're going to try to pull them off platform, you know, meta, you know, come on, Instagram, like they know you're going to want to pull them off platform, you know, go to the link in the bio that's going off platform.

17:16They don't want you to do that. So they're going to amplify the content that serves their best needs. And in doing so, they're going to suppress the ones that don't so that wait for it, you have to pay to appear there. So the strategy that you laid out, I think is the modern day social strategy, which is it's an ad channel. We advertise here. That is what we do. If you want to post stuff occasionally, fine. But just know it's probably not going to break through the noise. But I see for most brands, their social feed is almost like an about us page. You throw some best stuff. It's also where people binge.

17:55So we just did an event last week. And I would say that 20 % of the people that were attending the event came up and said, and also like kind of going around and meeting them said, I saw an ad on YouTube and then I went and I binged all your videos. I feel like I've watched all your videos now and now I'm here in a$40 ,000 event because of that. So I definitely think you've got to do both, right? That's the point though, just to put, because I agree with you. And that's what I'm saying. I feel like the social feeds and about us page because the best about us page wasn't just simply here's about our company.

18:38Now the best about us page featured your best stuff. Like that was you first date, putting your best foot forward. So you're going to link off to your best posts. And the ideal about us page would facilitate content binging, you know, them learning and getting to go on, you know, 50 dates with you. For me, it just a little bit difference in the, in the terminology. For me, like if I'm trying to find out about a SaaS, like I'm really into, I want to know how do I do video business intelligence with AI, then I'm going to find the list of, say, 30 sites that do that. I'm going to go to all of them.

19:22And about us, I've never seen the way that you're talking about, which I do agree would be awesome. but they have a resources page and the resources page has white papers, videos, you know, PDFs, all that kind of stuff. That's to me what really social is now is it's the resources page. Yeah, agree. But so that, so, so you, you post on social, but I don't think brands need to worry so much about, you know, there was this whole thing about, Oh, we have to post a certain number of times per day because that's what the algorithm likes. It don't, it doesn't matter. You're not, you're not going to see anyway.

19:58So post it when you got it, Make sure that it's there for people who want to binge. Having a regular posting strategy, I'm not saying is a bad thing. I just think that if you're a brand, you don't need to have the pressure of being an influencer anymore because you're probably not going to win anyway. So yes, post content for people who can binge. But get good at the ad game. And when you're doing ads, one of your primary calls to action, like what you said, should be let's chat in the DMs. Let's talk in DMs. Keep them on channel. Have the conversation there because as this report pointed out, that's where it's happening anyway.

20:37And so accept that you're an advertiser, that you're not talent. Yes, post content for the sake of binging, which means when it was posted is largely irrelevant. Keep it time, you know, evergreen. And then from a call to action, some of them definitely, if you're buying the ad, can take them off site. But have someone be, you know, comment below or drop me a DM and then continue the conversation. Do true legitimate social selling on social platforms where the social is taking place now, which is in the DMs. That's where it's taking place. Yeah. I've got an interesting prediction for you, by the way.

21:13You want to hear it? I do. Heard it here first. first. Because to your point, basically every social channel, you don't see your followers. If you follow brands, you don't really see them. You got to kind of create your own feed. There are two social channels that function similarly to what you described. I wish I could see what I actually subscribe to. And they would just show me some suggested stuff. But in general, I'm going to mostly see what I subscribe to. And it's not perfect. But if you actually do curate who you subscribe to, the two that I found are the best are YouTube by far and Facebook.

21:57And I predict... Facebook, I cannot take the cacophony of the experience that is Facebook. Facebook is what Yahoo used to be. It was like Google ate Yahoo's lunch because Yahoo became this like, just all this noise everywhere. You go to Facebook and instantly to me, it's just like, it's offensively content rich. It's just so much stuff screaming at you for attention compared to Instagram or YouTube. YouTube, I agree with you a hundred percent. YouTube is very good at that. All right. Let me, let me give you the bull case for Facebook and why I think it's, um, why I think it's happening. Cause what you said is true.

22:35Um, but it's not actually as true for normal people. Like you and I are weird. And in the early days of Facebook, we followed everybody and we follow all these accounts in part to see what they were doing. Right. That's not what my mom does. Right. My mom only follows a handful of people that she actually knows. Right. And brands that she actually likes. Right. So you, her Facebook feed is actually remarkably curated. And now that they seem to have purged out a lot of the nut job, you know, politics stuff, unless by the way, that's what you want, they'll serve it up to you. It's actually a kind of delightful experience.

23:18And so I took the time to go through and purge my Facebook. And now Facebook, I go to more than almost anything else because when I open it up, it's actually my friends. It's the people that I want to see and follow. There's no real business stuff there anymore. I've got a separate page for all that. I've got a personal feed and it now for me has been the one that I find that I enjoy the most. And so it's funny because, uh, you can do that with any of them. Right. So I, I did that with Instagram. I have, I think 91 ,000 followers or something like that on Instagram. And I follow 78 people, you know, and I know all of those 78 people and they They are across interests that I like.

23:59And even people who I like, who have followed me, I have unfollowed because I just like, I don't need to see their stuff. Like I'm not, you know, it's like, I like them. And when I see them, we are business acquaintances and, you know, or business friends, but I don't like, I care about your family. And, you know, and I don't mean I don't care about them, but it's like when I see posts of them doing stuff with their family and their personal stuff, To me, that's their personal stuff. And, you know, it's just not my thing. So I agree with you. And if I did it on Facebook, you were very patient because that had to have been thousands of unfollows.

24:40But I have that on YouTube and on Instagram. And that's why I like them so much. I've just found that algorithmically speaking, Instagram still shows me more stuff that is more marketing. And Facebook still seems more personal. And I think also the type of stuff that people post on Facebook is a little bit more personal and less I'm trying to glam out on this kind of thing. So maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe my old age, I'm yelling at clouds and I'm getting excited about Facebook again. But I'm predicting. Well, technology is cyclical, right? Yeah. If followers are generally, if we're kind of living in the death of the follower world, like it doesn't matter that people are following you.

25:22and we're essentially in a post follower algorithm first world. I don't believe that people, that consumers are going to like that as much. I think they're going to like it some, but I think they're still going to seek out alternatives. And people have said like, oh, there needs to be a social platform that goes back. It's probably not going to happen. There's just too many big players entrenched. But I think that Facebook, and if you're listening, Facebook, I think a good strategy for you, because you already got Instagram, but you bought it. Let that be the TikTok killer. Let that be the thing that's all algorithm heavy.

25:52create a platform that still is social by nature, you know, like social by default, not so algorithm heavy. And I bet you get the best of both worlds. And I bet as marketers and business people, as advertisers, we find that Facebook maybe starts to perform a little better than some of these other channels. Just a prediction thrown out there. Could be wrong. if I'm wrong, we'll never talk about this again. If I'm right, I'm going to be clipping the hell out of this for the next decade. I like it. I like it. I mean, you're a lot older than I am. You have the experience for now, if it's going to be the thing or not.

26:31Now, yeah, it's interesting. I will say just since we're having a conversation here with Meta, to me, the most annoying development on Instagram is that if you're in a feed and you're watching, like I'll go to somebody's feed and I'll, you know, I'll go through a lot of their stuff. And every time a fricking video comes up, which auto plays, uh, I get taken to reels. So if I go down to the next thing, I'm stuck in reels. I have to go click on the back button to get out of that, to get back in their thing, to get out of reels, which is all kinds of stuff that I don't want to see. Um, And it's really like, we're going to force you to take our version of TikTok.