Latest / Content, Briefly / Treat Social Like an Actual Content Channel (Because It Is), with Deedi Brown

Transcript

Treat Social Like an Actual Content Channel (Because It Is), with Deedi Brown · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. Let me tell you about Userp. That's U-S-E-R-P.I-O.
• 0:13
  If you're a growth stage or public company and SEO isn't driving enough pipeline for you yet, or maybe you've hit a growth bottleneck, you need to talk to this crew.
• 0:22
  Userp has spent 10 years helping some of the biggest SaaS, fintech, and healthcare brands in the world turn organic search into a legitimate customer acquisition engine, and now they're doing the same for AI search.
• 0:32
  We're talking companies like monday.com, Robinhood, CrowdStrike, Wiz, Binance, and dozens more that you've heard of, from Series A all the way to publicly traded. And the results speak for themselves.
• 0:43
  They helped monday.com go from 600,000 to 1.2 million organic visits leading into their IPO.
• 0:49
  They built hundreds of high-authority links and content assets for EarlyBird, a fintech app, driving over 20,000 acquired users before EarlyBird was acquired by Acorns.
• 0:58
  And they've helped Onboard rank for 13,000 more keywords in their space, tripling their organic pipeline value in a single year. What makes Userp different is they don't just publish content and hope for the best.
• 1:08
  They engineer content assets that rank and convert, backed by links on sites like HubSpot, Gartner, and G2. Here's the deal for Superpath.
• 1:16
  Mention Superpath when you book your strategy call at userp.io, and they'll add five bonus high-authority link placements to your first month on top of your package. That's userp.io.
• 1:27
  [upbeat music] Dee Dee Brown, head of content at Bubble, thinks we need to update our ideas of what social media is for and how we organize our content teams as a result.
• 1:36
  She's here to talk with us about her piece for the Collective Content blog, The Art of Content, titled Your Social Media Person Belongs on the Content Team. Dee Dee, I am so excited to have you on the podcast today.
• 1:47
  We've obviously been friends for a while, and we've worked together across your roles at multiple companies, which is super fun. But I loved this piece you did for us.
• 1:57
  I feel like in content, social media is still an afterthought most of the time. So yeah, I'm just super excited to have you on to chat more about this, and I feel like you are a content person who really gets social.
• 2:11
  So I'm excited to have your perspective on this. But we want to start with some rapid fire questions just to get to know you a little bit more. So are you in-house, agency, freelance? Yeah. So I am in-house.
• 2:24
  Also just want to say, I am also just absolutely delighted to be here. I love the Superpath podcast. I love Rachel. I love the Art of Content blog. I love social, and I'm really jazzed to talk about it.
• 2:33
  But yeah, so I am in-house. I have actually been in-house for my entire career. That's awesome. Yeah.
• 2:40
  I like the practice of really getting to know the company inside and out, and being able to come at it from that direction.
• 2:47
  But yeah, I started my career at a high net worth insurance company that I don't really talk about that too much. [laughs] I don't need to relive those years.
• 2:54
  And then I worked at Elevate, which was a lot of fun, and went from an SEO writer pumping out a blog post a day to leading the content team there.
• 3:04
  And now I am at Bubble, where I have not only editorial and long form on my team, but also social media, video, marketing, product enablement, which is like education, and then a little bit of project management across our creative team, which is another one of my sub-passions for ops and whatnot.
• 3:24
  That's awesome. I love how you kind of have your hands in a little bit of everything at Bubble. I do. What's your favorite part of your job? Managing that team.
• 3:33
  I will say I also really do love talking to customers and hearing customer stories, because I think Bubble is just mission-driven enough that you get that, like, really great feeling and feedback when people are building really cool things, like apps that coordinate organ donation or- Yeah...
• 3:49
  like, you know what I mean? But really, truly, I love managing a team. I am just, like, so proud and honored to be able to mentor the incredibly smart people on my team. I cannot emphasize enough how great they are.
• 4:02
  And it's just so much more rewarding to build something together- Mm... and to have that be a team accomplishment when things go well, for me personally- Totally...
• 4:11
  rather than just kind of, you know, just having it yourself. Right, being a lone ranger. Yeah. What would you be doing if you weren't in content? I would own a bookstore. Yeah.
• 4:21
  And I would make a lot less money, but I- [laughs]... would still be happy. [laughs] People always ask, when I ask that question, they're like, "Well, do I still have to make money, or, like, is money no object?"
• 4:32
  And I feel like money's no object. So I'm with you. I would definitely own- Yeah... a bookstore too. But it would be, like, bookstore/coffee shop/floral shop. Yes. I have been to one of those, and it was a magical place.
• 4:45
  Wow. Yeah, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Of course. Ugh, I want to own one so bad. Okay, so let's talk about your article, which is Your Social Media Person Belongs on the Content Team.
• 4:55
  Just for anybody who maybe hasn't read it, and I will put the link to it down in the show notes, but describe the thesis of your article for us in, like, a sentence or two. Yeah.
• 5:04
  So basically, in 2026, if you are doing social media correctly, it's content, not distribution. Mm. Because the platforms reward native content, and the audience prefers native content.
• 5:20
  And so you should put the person who's making that content on the content team because it's content. Yeah.
• 5:26
  I'm so excited to jump into this, because I feel like we all kind of know this instinctively as people who use social media. Like, I don't want to click off of Instagram once I'm on it. Like- Right...
• 5:38
  I don't want to click off of YouTube once I'm on it. I went on that app 'cause I wanted to scroll on that app.
• 5:43
  But then within our content functions, I feel like we so often still just use it as a distribution channel, or just think of it as a distribution channel, which still impacts the way that we make content for it. Right.
• 5:58
  So there's a point in your article where you said, you had a sentence like, "Social media is a content channel now, not just a place to share it," which is kind of like this old way, new way that we're talking about.So can you explain a little bit what you mean about like native content and how you see the differences between making content for these, these two different ways of viewing social?
• 6:22
  Yeah, definitely. So I think the listeners of this podcast who are content marketers are going to be familiar, right, with like this like sort of old model and it's familiar, right? We did it for literally years.
• 6:34
  [laughs] Yes. Right? We wrote a blog post, we maybe chopped it up into little pieces or we wrote a caption to go along with it, or if we were lucky, we had a social media person who wrote a caption. Yep.
• 6:45
  And we shared the link out on the different social channels, and we hoped people clicked. Right.
• 6:51
  And when we looked at our blog traffic or our website traffic, social was a channel, and we evaluated how much traffic was coming to our blog from social, and so on and so forth.
• 7:03
  And so it may not have been the entire social strategy, but it was definitely a part of our distribution strategy as content marketers.
• 7:14
  But that's just not how social media works anymore, and I really think about this as like you don't wanna fight the tide, right? Yeah.
• 7:23
  So not only is it true what you said about how people don't want to leave the platform, right? They also... Like the platforms don't want people leaving the platform. Mm-hmm.
• 7:36
  Every single platform is deprioritizing posts that have links out. [laughs] And so you're fighting against what people want, and you're fighting against what the platforms are rewarding.
• 7:48
  That's just never [laughs] gonna work. Right. Right. And it's not f- easy to switch your total strategy like that and the way that you measure things, which we'll talk about later.
• 7:57
  So I understand the resistance and like especially because s- social's not usually on the content team, so it's not like, quote-unquote, "Our job to figure out social strategy." Yeah.
• 8:07
  But we are losing [laughs] traffic, and if you want eyeballs on the words that you're writing, they have to live on the platform, quote-unquote, "Natively," and by that I mean in a way that doesn't take people outside of the platform to get the value from your content.
• 8:22
  Mm. And I think it's interesting because we've seen the exact same thing happen with newsletters, if you think about it, right? Yeah, that's a good point. Right?
• 8:30
  So the old way of newsletters was like these clip shows, right? We'd wrote all these blog posts, here's all the blog posts we wrote this month. Mm-hmm. Here, you can click on all of them if you wanna read them.
• 8:38
  And like people don't wanna read newsletters anymore, they just want the whole blog post in the newsletter, which is what Substack is. Mm. They don't wanna even go outside their inbox.
• 8:46
  Like I would almost argue like they want the long form in the inbox, and they want like, you know, short form on social.
• 8:51
  So I think that the entire pattern of the way that people consume content has shifted over the past however many years. I can't even tell you how many years it's been because it happened so slowly. Mm-hmm.
• 9:00
  Almost like boiling a frog, which is like very different from like the shifts we've seen in how like people use AI a- and whatnot, which I think people are paying a lot more attention to as like a fundamental like culture shift.
• 9:12
  Yeah. I love how you frame that. I wanted to circle back to something that you said earlier, where you were talking about, you know, it's really difficult to kind of switch your whole social strategy.
• 9:24
  And not only just to change the way you're thinking about it, like in your mind, but to actually change how you act on how you view social. So I'm curious what that looked like for you at Bubble.
• 9:37
  Like what was the tipping point where you kind of realized like, "Oh, if social is working differently now, then we need to do it differently. We need to structure our org differently." Like how did that process happen?
• 9:51
  Yeah. So at Bubble, our previous social media manager, and I say that sort of with quote-unquotes because that was not her entire job. Okay. Right? She was a community manager, and social was part of her job.
• 10:03
  And it also wasn't necessarily the part of her job that she loved the most. So she was stretched very thin and was doing a lot of things, and so social was really being treated as a comms channel- Okay...
• 10:16
  rather than a brand channel, if you will. And so like if we had something to say, we tweeted about it, basically. Sure. But there was nothing in addition to that.
• 10:23
  And so if I wanted something posted on social, I either had to write it for her and like make the graphics or like really like it was on us.
• 10:31
  And so for that reason, a lot of that ideation started moving onto the content team. Mm-hmm. But like as I mentioned, I'm also a creator in the book reviews part of the internet. I'm on Instagram.
• 10:40
  So I also at the same time was s- like I knew that like, "Oh, click in my link in bio to read the whole review or the whole blog post."
• 10:50
  Like, and my clip show, MailChimp newsletter, right, we're moving away from the entire review in the caption of the post, or in a carousel, or like Substack. Mm-hmm.
• 10:59
  So I knew what was kind of like not working anymore, and I knew that at Bubble we weren't resourcing to make that happen. Mm-hmm.
• 11:07
  Uh, and so when that person ultimately left, I raised my hand and I said, "I want social on my team. I have ideas. I think that this is valuable."
• 11:16
  And I obviously like pulled together like a little bit more of a business case. It didn't take a lot of convincing.
• 11:20
  I think we knew for a long time at Bubble that if we were gonna do social, we had to like do it better, and that was just sort of like the catalyst moment.
• 11:27
  And so then I got to hire a dedicated social media person onto my team. That's awesome. And we have not looked back.
• 11:33
  What I feel like, first of all, I feel like for a lot of brands, it's so rare to be able to make that argument to have an entire person just dedicated to social.
• 11:44
  I do wonder if you have any like advice for if someone's pitching this kind of a role or trying to advocate for this kind of a role on the content team. Yeah. I mean... About how to... How to advocate for a new hire?
• 12:01
  I mean, that's always hard. [laughs] Yeah. Right. I have many strong opinions. And there's so many like contextual and organizational things that go into that. Yes.
• 12:10
  But I think, I mean, like a lot of the stuff that I've talked about so far as-... cultural shifts and pairing that with the data in probably what's a decline from, of traffic from social- Yeah...
• 12:24
  to, like, what you think you want people to be reading. I say that intentionally, right? Because maybe you actually just want them to read it on like LinkedIn or whatever, right?
• 12:33
  Like, the point is we are putting time into writing things that nobody is reading, and that also [laughs] feels awful. Right. Right?
• 12:42
  And so I think that's obviously not the way that you approach the conversation, but that's like sort of the impetus for the conversation.
• 12:48
  And, you know, if we're going to put time into brand messaging and things that we want people to know, we need to meet them where they are and look at the way that this has evolved and look at these other brands that are doing this right, and they're not just linking out to their websites all the time.
• 13:04
  And I am not that skilled person, right, if this is you. I am a long-form writer- Yeah...
• 13:10
  and I have plenty of work to do over here, and so we need this additional person who has these, like, platform native skills and understands the trends and understands the format if we are gonna be successful, and we can't do it halfway.
• 13:22
  Yeah.
• 13:22
  I think the not doing it halfway is, like, such a big piece of content in general, and a mistake that I see a lot of folks make when they're getting started with different content channels is feeling like, well, let's just put something out there because something's better than nothing, right?
• 13:37
  Like, at least if we link to our blog every day on Twitter, that's better than nothing, right?
• 13:42
  And I kind of feel like, [laughs] yeah, I kind of feel like you would argue, like, actually, it's better to just not have a Twitter. Right. [laughs] Right.
• 13:50
  Well, because it's also gonna harm your brand reputation if you have a bunch of tweets with no likes on them. Yeah. Then you just look, like, desperate, right? Like, nobody wants their brand to look desperate. Yeah.
• 14:00
  I also love how you talk about it as, like, you know, this idea of not swimming against the tide or just, like, paying attention to what is happening on social or what people are wanting from social.
• 14:15
  And I think one of the things that is so interesting to me about the article you wrote was you said, you talked about the shift as one that is fundamentally respectful to our audiences. And I just, I don't know.
• 14:27
  I love that idea. I don't know that we talk about this enough in content, in thinking about, like, how we make content that really respects our audience's time, energy, attention.
• 14:41
  I think we often just make content and feel like, well, I made it to be helpful, so thus, it ought to be, or you ought to pay attention to it. Mm-hmm.
• 14:51
  Or it ought to be consumed, and we don't often think about what our audience is bringing to content. So yeah, I don't know.
• 15:00
  I'm just curious kind of how you came to this perspective, or maybe it's through y- your book review account or... Yeah, I mean, I obviously had an interest in social and a passion for it.
• 15:15
  But I mean, I would like to believe genuinely that many, many more content marketers would, like, come to that same conclusion that putting content out there in a format that is preferred by your reader and not by you is more empathetic and is just the right thing to do and, ultimately, the winning strategy.
• 15:33
  Because, like, we have always known as content marketers how important it is to think not about what we want, like what we want to say, but what our audience wants, right? Right. What our audience wants to know.
• 15:45
  If you write a blog post about everything you want to tell them instead of everything that they wanna know, it's not gonna be helpful. Right. And so we do put ourselves in people's shoes. Right.
• 15:55
  And I think sometimes that gets lost as lip service to SEO, but I do also believe that the best content marketers, it's not, right? Right. I agree. And so, right, we don't wanna be salesy.
• 16:08
  We don't want things to feel icky. Good content, like, puts the reader first and then finds genuinely useful moments to mention the brand.
• 16:17
  And that's what you do when you focus on social native content that doesn't link them out from the platform. Sometimes you will link... I'm not saying you never link people out from- Sure...
• 16:28
  the platform, but you have to, that has to be a bonus, and they have to get the primary value out of the content itself. And so I really see it as just, like, the same philosophy. It's just the platform- Yeah...
• 16:42
  and, and not the words. Right. It's like thinking about this idea of, like, what does our audience need and want from every perspective.
• 16:49
  Like, what format the content's in, what the content's saying, how long the content takes to consume. Yeah. Like, all of these little pieces that go into it. Yeah.
• 16:59
  I think a lot about, so my local newspaper, I have a lot of qualms with my local [laughs] newspaper, but they really do the thing where they are clearly trying to get you to just click. Okay. Right?
• 17:09
  They are withholding information that they know that you want because they know that that will make you click.
• 17:14
  And it's kind of clickbait, but it's like, oh, there was, like, a major 12-car pileup in central New York town. And you're like, "Just tell me where it was." Which town? Is this gonna affect me? Right.
• 17:23
  Like, can we just say the town- Yeah... in the headline? And it's so frustrating and manipulative, and I just don't ever wanna make people feel like that. Yeah.
• 17:30
  And obviously, that's not, that's, like, to a much greater degree than like, oh, link in bio for the whole story or, like, you know, a piece in a LinkedIn post with the link in the comments.
• 17:39
  But it's the same, but just to a lesser degree. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's the same frustration that people have. And you know what? People are just not gonna click on it. They're just not going to. Yeah.
• 17:48
  And I think that's, like, an interesting piece of it for me. There is an element of frustration, but there's also an element of just, like, apathy, you know? Like, nobody cares about your brand as much as you do. Yeah.
• 18:00
  And so if you post something that's just not that interesting or is difficult to consume, like you have to click a bunch of things or you have to leave the platform, mostly people just won't.Because- Right...
• 18:13
  there's no reason for them to. Right.
• 18:16
  Well, do you remember when it was, like, really trendy on Instagram for people to be, like, to put, like, a hook in the permatext on a reel and then be like, "Check the caption for the answer"? Yes.
• 18:25
  I would literally be like, "I will not," and scroll away. Like, I was like rage scrolling. Like, I was like, "Don't... I will not check your caption." [laughs] That's so funny. "I will not be doing that.
• 18:33
  Just put it in the video," right? And that's the same thing. Yeah.
• 18:37
  I also think, too, of, like, the tabloids that, like, post those articles, like, the way that your hometown newspaper does, and then there's always someone in the comments that's like, "This happened in this town," and then- [laughs]...
• 18:49
  like 2,000 likes on that comment, which really gets at, like, please just give us what we want- Correct... without trying to... And I think, like, you get at this in your piece, too.
• 18:59
  It, all of these things, like, we know that we're being used. Like, we know that this content isn't really for us.
• 19:09
  It's for the brand, or it's for the clicks, or it's for the advertisements or whatever, and nobody likes to feel that way. Right. So that's just, like, a gross feeling to have associated with your brand. Right.
• 19:22
  I don't wanna make people feel that way. No. None of us do. But yeah, I feel like all of that kind of gets down to this idea of, like, who are you actually making content for?
• 19:32
  Like, is it actually for your audience, or is it because your brand needs something? Mm.
• 19:36
  Uh, which is also something I'm curious your perspective on, because sometimes, you know, whether it's that we really need to communicate something about our brand or just our boss wants us to, like, sometimes there are times when content is more for your brand than- Yeah...
• 19:53
  it is for your audience. I'm curious how you balance those, especially thinking about socially native content, like when- Yeah... you need to do something that is brand or company first.
• 20:04
  Is there a way to do that and still make it good for your audience or good for social? Yeah, I mean, I think yes.
• 20:11
  I also, like, right, that is tricky, and I also believe that the 80/20 principle here can take you a long way.
• 20:18
  If you have built the trust with your audience that they know that, like, your content is usually for them, right, they're going to be okay with it when- Sure... you have some stuff that's about you, right?
• 20:29
  But also, I think, like, sometimes you do just have to post the announcement, but at Bubble, we're always looking for the best way to then post that announcement based on the individual channel.
• 20:40
  So just because you have to post an announcement, like we post a lot of product updates, right? Bubble is an AI app development platform. I haven't mentioned that yet.
• 20:48
  [laughs] But, like, we are in a really noisy market, [laughs] right? Yeah.
• 20:52
  There's not a lot of oxygen there, and you have to just constantly talk about what you have shipped, like, in order to, like, even not be thought of as dead, right? Right.
• 21:02
  And so we do talk about ourselves a lot, but we have done a lot of experimenting to find the best way for that to land. So, like, right now, currently, carousels are killing it on LinkedIn.
• 21:13
  We started this year thinking that video was gonna be the way to go, and halfway through, we were like, "Carousels are really popping off on LinkedIn."
• 21:20
  And so we totally switched, and our engagements were, like, up way, way more than our impressions- Okay... in the quarter.
• 21:26
  But on Instagram, what's interesting is that we have found that's the place where we really lean into, like, trends and memes. And that doesn't mean getting super silly. I mean, occasionally we get silly.
• 21:37
  I'm a firm believer that all brands should occasionally get silly, no matter who you are. I think I agree. But like, yeah, you can al- It's like, it's trust, right? Like, I'm- Yeah... I'm a person.
• 21:45
  But right, like, so if you think about, let's see, some of the Instagram trends that work for us, right, so there was one where there was, like, a black square in the middle of the screen, and it was like, "Zoom in to see a person who's awesome."
• 21:56
  And then you, like, zoom in and it, you realize that- Okay. [laughs]... it, like, reveals your own face, right? Yeah.
• 22:00
  Like, and so it's not necessarily, like, a cheesy meme or trend, but just, like, a format that's kind of, like, trending on the platform is f- it feels really native to the experience of Instagram.
• 22:12
  And we have found that does really well for us when we can find a way to put a product update in that format. Okay.
• 22:20
  And so I think it's about having leadership that trusts you to package things in the best possible way and then letting you do that and trust that you are going to get the message that they want you to convey out there in the way that is going to, like, succeed best.
• 22:36
  Right. If you have that trust, then I think you can really, I think you can nail it.
• 22:40
  And I imagine that having a dedicated social media person makes it easier to, like, hearing you talk about experimenting and, like, "We thought this was gonna work, and then we've totally pivoted and did this other thing," I don't imagine that you would necessarily have done those experiments or found those things if you didn't have somebody thinking about social in a dedicated way.
• 23:01
  Right. But I will say that we have a team effort, like, to watch out for trends. Like, there's a- Yeah... like, a social inspo channel, and, like- Nice... we'll send things as we see them. So it's not all on her.
• 23:11
  I also just wanna shout out this woman whose name is Rachel Carton. She does a Substack called Link in Bio. Yeah, and there's a Discord for paid subscribers to her- Oh, cool...
• 23:20
  Substack, and it's filled with, like, [laughs] really cool people at really cool brands running their social. That's awesome.
• 23:26
  And that is also a great source of, like, there's a currently trending, like, channel in that server and, like, good posts and yikes and, right? Yeah.
• 23:35
  And so, like, I also see some really good inspo come through there, and I basically, like, required my social person to also subscribe. I was like, [laughs] "This is-" This is required reading for you. Yeah.
• 23:45
  [laughs] I was like, "I wanna make sure that you're seeing what I'm seeing because there's, like, so much good stuff in there." So shout out to Link in Bio. It's an amazing newsletter. I've read it for years.
• 23:54
  I would also love to hear, before we wrap up, like, how this all looks practically for you. So you have this team of five of your content team.
• 24:02
  You also have a dedicated social person, social manager, who works on your team.
• 24:07
  Like, how, when you're creating, like, a content campaign, how are you managing all of these different formats and channels, and just what does that look like?For you guys. Yeah.
• 24:19
  It's something that I feel really passionate about, giving my team space to ideate in their formats. Mm-hmm.
• 24:26
  Um, because I think I have always thought of content as part strategy organization and part service organization, right? We have our own strategy on our own initiatives, but we are also supporting so many other teams.
• 24:39
  Totally. And so, like product marketing has, you know, their like launch campaigns or whatever, and we have to support those with creative assets.
• 24:49
  And it can be really easy to just take like in requests for a product launch of like the same formats that we've always done, and that can fill up all of our time. That's a very sure way for my team to burn out.
• 25:01
  They need to have... They have great ideas. They need to have the space- Mm... to bring those ideas to the table. And so I am very adamant that we make sure that we are leaving that space.
• 25:10
  So when we start a campaign, whether it be big or small, I always encourage my team to like just sit down, do some ideation, come up with some things you wanna pitch.
• 25:19
  We are, this quarter, really focused on our native mobile offering at Bubble. And so at the end of Q1, we had a big brainstorm as a content team, and I said, you know, to my video person, like, "Bring your video ideas."
• 25:31
  And I said to my social person, like, "Bring your social campaign ideas." And I said to my editorial person, right, "Bring your like blog long form customer case story like newsletter ideas." Mm-hmm.
• 25:40
  And we sat down and we looked at them all together. And so I'm not like handing my social media person like, "Oh, we're gonna write these blog posts. How can you get them out?" Right?
• 25:49
  What can we do from an, like a series perspective, right? Because serialization is huge- Yeah, it's huge right now... on social media.
• 25:56
  And like how can we come up with a new series, or like what meme formats can we tie into? And then she writes the creative briefs for the campaign, and then she leads the execution on that. That's awesome.
• 26:08
  And the vast majority of what she's producing is not trying to link anybody anywhere. Yeah. Right. And that's a lot of fun. It's so much more fun to make content that isn't trying to link anybody anywhere.
• 26:20
  [laughs] It's so much more fun. It's so much more fun to make content that is good content. Like, I wish I had- Yes... a better way to say that, but I think people listening to this podcast will know what I mean.
• 26:32
  Like, when you make content that is truly for your audience in the places they are hanging out about things they care about and also like supporting your goals too, it just feels good.
• 26:46
  And I think when we have the opportunities to do that, and especially like you were saying earlier, when we have the opportunity to do that with other people on our team or who we know who care about content, it just, it makes life so good for everybody involved.
• 27:00
  Yeah. I'm also curious, last question before we wrap, how you are thinking about measurement, metrics, ROI.
• 27:08
  I know you kind of mentioned at the beginning like it was easier when everything was linking back to a blog or a webpage, and then you can kind of just measure traffic or measure what channels are driving traffic, and I assume that's not the case anymore.
• 27:24
  Right. So I'm curious how you all are managing that side of things. Yeah. So when I started at Bubble little more than three years ago, right, the first thing I did was set up a blog traffic report, right? Yeah.
• 27:38
  And I knew how much... Like, I was monitoring it month over month. Mm-hmm. Were we increasing? I, I might... This is going to be surprising. I literally could not tell you how much traffic our blog got last month.
• 27:48
  [laughs] Really? I actually... Like, I'm not measuring that at all anymore. You, like, haven't even signed into Google Analytics in a month. No, I have. [laughs] Okay, okay, okay. [laughs] Well, actually, we...
• 27:55
  Yeah, we're not really using Google Analytics. But I'm much more focused on, like, rankings and- Okay... like, you know, citation rate from AI. Like, I'm looking at those rather than, like, actual traffic these days.
• 28:05
  Mm-hmm. Um, so what we're reporting out are those AI search metrics, and then total organic traffic to the site obviously is, like, something that we're- Sure... still measuring.
• 28:15
  But from a social perspective, we are focused on the combination of both impressions and engagements. So that's actually really tricky to do both- Yeah... of them. I was gonna say. Because they, they can...
• 28:28
  If you focus on one, if you focus on just impressions or just engagements, you're actually going to create perverse incentives for yourself to damage the other one, right? Yeah.
• 28:37
  So, like, if you are going for impressions because you wanna, like, reach a bunch of people, I'm telling you right now the best way to do that is just, like, a bunch of empty memes, right? Yeah.
• 28:44
  It's all candy and no vitamins. Yeah. And you will reach a bunch of people, but they are not gonna do anything for you. Right. Right?
• 28:51
  And if you focus on engagements, you are going to be incentivized to only post the content that resonates with your existing audience, because you know that it's gonna land.
• 29:01
  And that talks to them, and it doesn't talk to anybody new. Mm-hmm. And so you're not gonna grow that audience.
• 29:08
  And so the only way to do both is to actually try to increase both at the same time, and that means that you need a mix of- Yeah... different types of content. You need some memes.
• 29:17
  You need some stuff for your existing audience. And then when you have campaigns, obviously you have to... We use Sprout, right?
• 29:23
  So we would like tag posts that are related to a campaign, so then we can sort of add up the cumulative impressions and engagements related to that campaign.
• 29:31
  But, like, you know, to put it in context for someone who might be operating in a little bit more of like a quote unquote traditional content marketing, like, function right now, like if it used to be like how much traffic did this blog post get, now if you've taken that blog post, and I dare you, I dare you- [laughs]...
• 29:47
  to put the entire blog post in a LinkedIn carousel, right? Like- Okay. Something like that, right? Mm-hmm. Where you are truly not linking people out. You can then add together the traffic you got on the blog- Mm...
• 29:57
  and the impressions that you got on that LinkedIn post. So it's a lot more legwork, but it's not impossible. It's just coming from a lot more sources. Yeah.
• 30:05
  With, like, the same message.But let's be real, like this has never been easy. Yes.
• 30:10
  We are so used to things being hard to measure, and I just genuinely believe that it is never the right decision to do something because it's easier to measure. Yeah. I totally agree.
• 30:22
  I also feel like as we've been talking, I've been thinking about like we used to kind of have this idea for both content creation and content measurement that there was a hub, like where your content lived, like the blog, for example, or your website, and then all of these little spokes that brought you into the hub.
• 30:41
  And so you just made content for that, and then you measured that traffic. And now things are so much more distributed.
• 30:50
  Like we've got this whole constellation of places where people can discover your content and engage with your content. And so it actually just doesn't make sense to only- Right...
• 31:00
  measure one star in that constellation, right? Like you need to look at the whole sky in front of you and measure all of that.
• 31:06
  I mean, it would be like looking at organic search traffic to your blog and never looking at citations from ChatGPT. Right. Or like never looking at mentions on ChatGPT. That's like important. [laughs] Yeah. Right.
• 31:19
  That's like a whole subset of people, right? And then you and I have chatted about this before, but then guess what?
• 31:24
  Those people are then going to search for your brand name, and you're gonna see that show up in branded search, and you might have been ignoring branded search your entire time. Totally. Right?
• 31:31
  Like because we've ignored branded search for years. Who cared about branded search? That was easy, right? That was a, a cop-out. [laughs] And so it's all changing- Yeah...
• 31:39
  and we, we have to look more broadly because otherwise we're not gonna achieve the outcomes that we want. Yeah. I think it's such a great picture, and it is like...
• 31:52
  You know, I think a lot of people the past few years have been like, "Oh, like s- someone's gotta create the new playbook," like, "We've gotta figure out what's going on in marketing." And there has just been...
• 32:03
  or what I've heard from a lot of marketers, especially in content, is just like a lot of instability. And I think a lot of us have been looking for like this one next thing to land on.
• 32:16
  Like if it's not a blog anymore, then what is it? And I feel like I'm walking away from this conversation feeling like it's everything. It's everything. [laughs] It's like... [laughs] And like in an exciting way.
• 32:28
  Like it's- Yeah...
• 32:28
  a opportunity to not have to have a perfect blog or have a perfect Instagram or have a perfect website or have one perfect thing that you're kind of relying on for all of your traffic and all of your inbound, but instead it's like this web of interconnected things where your audience,
• 32:48
  you are making content for all of these places that your audience hangs out, that respects their time and respects their attention, and is really almost like a collaborative effort between what they need and want and what you need and want.
• 33:03
  Yeah. And then there's all of these places where they can come and find you.
• 33:09
  And yeah, I think, I think this conversation is just an amazing reminder that we need to break out of this model of like here's how people move through the funnel- Yeah... and embrace [laughs] like a new world.
• 33:24
  The chaos. Yeah. [laughs] The entropy. Embrace the chaos. And, and yeah, just roll with it. Yeah. I love your perspective on this. I have a couple of rapid fire questions before we end.
• 33:37
  What is more important right now for content, social or longform? Social. Social?
• 33:45
  [sighs] Okay, it hurts me because obviously I also love longform, and I obviously believe that longform is important, but if you put a gun to my head, I would say social. That's where people spend their time. Okay.
• 33:57
  If you don't meet them there, you might never meet them. That's fair. That's fair. Okay. What's one thing brands should do more on social? Memes and trends and humor. Fair enough.
• 34:07
  You don't have to be unhinged to tap into a trend. I think that's a great point. You don't have to be unhinged to be funny. You don't have to be unhinged. What are your favorite brands doing social well right now? Figma.
• 34:20
  Mm. Especially in our space, they are just so good. It... Like, talk about trends. Yeah.
• 34:26
  They are so good at finding, like, organic ways to participate in trends that, like, bring their product into it, and it never feels forced. Mm. And it...
• 34:34
  Like, their stuff will come across our feed, and me and my social manager are, like, almost mad that we didn't think, like- Didn't think of it first... obviously that's the way into the trend, right? They're so good.
• 34:44
  It's jealousy. It's not hatred, obviously. Yeah, of course, of course. But, but they're so good. And so looking to them for a lot of inspiration. Libraries everywhere. Libraries are so good on Instagram. Yeah.
• 34:55
  You know what? I've seen a lot of library content, too. They are just...
• 34:59
  Like, these librarians are out here taking risks and tripping over signs and being funny, but also being, like, genuinely, like, useful people as libraries are.
• 35:09
  Libraries, you will never be sorry that you followed a library. And then the last one, this is gonna sound cheesy for one second- Okay...
• 35:16
  because I'm gonna say Duolingo, and everybody says Duolingo, but it is not because of their, like, unhinged humor, like what everybody talks about with Duolingo.
• 35:25
  I s- am most impressed, and I think what's most relevant about what they do for content marketers is their employer branding efforts on LinkedIn.
• 35:35
  Because what Duolingo does really well is make it seem or tell the truth, I'm sure they're telling the truth, that every single person on their team was handpicked because they are incredible at their jobs. Mm.
• 35:50
  And that this is a team of experts who are so, so good at their jobs. And not only does that make you want to join the team because you- Yeah, yeah, yeah...
• 35:59
  will also feel like you are really good at your job, which I'm sure you are. Not you, everyone.
• 36:02
  But, like, also there is an element of brand trust that then gets created when I associate Duolingo as being a company made up of incredibly talented people. Yeah. That's so interesting.
• 36:15
  I don't want to derail us, but I do just wanna say it's interesting that that's their strategy on LinkedIn.Versus like what they post on Instagram- Yeah... or Twitter or something.
• 36:25
  They've got some other stuff on LinkedIn too, but like that vertical on LinkedIn is so well done and something that I look to a lot when we're talking about employer branding and hiring posts and those kinds- Yeah...
• 36:35
  of things. Yeah, so interesting. Last question. What's one skill all content marketers should be building right now? I'm gonna tell on myself a little bit from a snafu that I had myself this week. What was it?
• 36:45
  But like interrogating data conclusions in the age of AI. Like figuring out what the data's actually saying? Well, more like I had Claude pull all these data, all this data from all these sources using their MCPs. Okay.
• 36:59
  How do I make sure that it understood my assumptions correctly? Uh-huh. And is actually giving me what I think it's giving me.
• 37:05
  So like an example that I ran into this week was I was evaluating like SEO and AI search performance, and I wanted to know organic search traffic.
• 37:16
  And so I had hooked it up with Ahrefs and also our internal data- Mm-hmm... in Amplitude, and I told it to pull traffic from Amplitude, but it kinda went a little bit rogue.
• 37:26
  And what I ended up finding [laughs] out was that what it did was it estimated traffic based on Ahrefs like keyword volume and rankings. Okay. Because there's like an estimated traffic value there.
• 37:37
  And so I didn't realize for too long that went off the rails, and that was just completely not even the right number. So it wasn't like it was hallucinated. It was just that- It was like traffic volume. Got it, Ahrefs.
• 37:50
  Right. It's not a person, right? Yeah. It doesn't have a brain. Right. It didn't understand what I needed or why I needed it.
• 37:55
  And so since then I have kinda raised my hand internally, and we have a new data analytics manager, and I said, "Can you help me put together some guidelines for the team on how to like receive a result from a Claude MCP, and then check it, and make sure-" Yeah...
• 38:07
  "that you like feel good about it?" And I think that is going to be really important for content marketers, especially if they're taking my advice and measuring a lot of different things in a lot of different places.
• 38:18
  [laughs] The MCP is gonna be far and away the easiest way to do that, but it's not as smart as it thinks it is or that you hope it is yet, so. Yeah. Well, this was so awesome.
• 38:30
  Thank you again so much for coming on and chatting with us.
• 38:33
  I feel like I am definitely thinking about social differently right now, and I also feel like so excited about the possibilities of social media, which is just like a good feeling.
• 38:46
  I feel like a lot of content marketers can kind of dread it sometimes, or it feels like an impossible nut to crack.
• 38:52
  So it's just awesome to hear from somebody who is doing it well and enjoying it with their team and getting results from it. So thank you so much for coming, and I'm super excited for everyone to listen to this episode.
• 39:04
  Yeah. You're welcome. Have fun, everybody. Go out there and make fun stuff and have fun. [outro music]