SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

Jeff Sieh: [00:00:00] Hello, folks. Welcome to Social Media News Live. I’m Jeff Sieh.

Conor Brown: And I’m Connor Brown, and this is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the world of social media and more.

Jeff Sieh: Yes, and I’m very excited to be here today with my friend Peg Fitzpatrick. Peg and I have done this for a while, but I want to know if you guys, have you guys checked out Instagram’s new Threads app yet? Are you maybe intrigued by how this new app could reshape the social media landscape? Or perhaps you’re wondering how…

Businesses and Influencers can leverage threads to their advantage. If these questions are striking a chord with you, then you’re in for a real treat today. We’re absolutely just delighted to have a guest who is an authority in the realm of social media. It’s none other than Peg Fitzpatrick, a social media strategist who has mastered the art.

of navigating new platforms and trends. Peg’s gonna be unpacking Instagram’s threads, sharing her insights and offering her expert perspectives on [00:01:00] its implications, so make yourself comfortable and prepare for episode brimming with valuable insights and thought provoking discussions with you, our faithful audience.

So let’s dive on in. Peg, how are you doing today?

Peg Fitzpatrick: I am so good. I stopped using threads to come on here. It seems

Jeff Sieh: like everybody’s doing that. So if you guys don’t know who Peg is, she is an author, a social media strategist, and head of social and marketing for Cressler Inc. Peg has been spearheaded, she’s spearheaded successful social media campaigns for…

I’ve been spearheaded? You’ve been spearheaded. That’s horrible. You are, you’ll be spearheaded on today’s show, but she’s spearheaded successful social media campaigns for Motorola. Audi, Google, and Virgin, as well as being a brand ambassador for Kempton Hotels, TJ Maxx, Nestle, and Adobe. And she was actually the first head of social media for Canva, Canva, Canva!

I need to get on threads where I just can talk. You need to go! I know. You need to I was so stressed that Connor wasn’t here, I was… It’s all, it’s [00:02:00] all going downhill. He’s here though, calm down. But she has also authored the, she co authored the Art of Social Media Power Tips for Power Users with Guy Kawasaki.

And Guy teamed up with Peg because he believes she is the best social media person he has ever met. I would say the same thing. So she has been handpicked by Pinterest for their expert program. And she has worked directly with the teams at Facebook, Adobe, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google to help them with launches, platform feedback, and special projects.

And get ready for this, guys. It’s Spring 2024. Peg is going to have a new book. That she has written, so hold on to your seats. This is going to be a game changing book for small businesses. All about social media for them in Spring 2024. So, we do have, I want to pull this up right here, you can go to pegfitzpatrick.

com forward slash book buzz, pegfitzpatrick. com forward slash book. buzz. You can sign up to get those updates, because I’ve read a little bit of it, and it’s pretty awesome. So you guys can

Peg Fitzpatrick: check it out. Jeff actually has it. Jeff is one of the only

Jeff Sieh: people that has it. I did, so, [00:03:00] yeah, it’s… It’s pretty cool.

So with that all out of the way I wanna do a big shout out to our sponsors. Ecamm, you can find out more about the e camm. Sorry. Hit the wrong button. . It’s one of those days, folks. Social media news live.com/ecamm. They’re actually having a summer sale right now. So if you haven’t tried out ECA Ecamm for a while, you need to go there, go to their website, go to social medias live.com/ecamm.

It’s gonna give you a code at the top and you can actually get a special offer where they’re discounting it. Pretty significantly for just this month. So, for if you’re a new user, haven’t tried it yet before, go there, use that code, and you can get a significant discount. So, very, very cool from our friends over at Ecamm.

All right. Let’s see if I can talk. So, are you thready for this, Peg? Oh, see, here it goes. It’s perfect. Dad joke stuff for threads.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Everybody’s, everybody’s doing the play on words over there with trying to just figure out [00:04:00] how to make it punny.

Jeff Sieh: And I, and I saw that you had posted like what they’re supposed to call it, but it’s so boring.

It’s got to be something fun.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Here’s the thing, Jeff, and you know this is true. They come up with a platform, and they have ideas for it, but then what happens is the community makes it something. The community decides what it’s going to be, so they, they give some tools and then people decide what it’s going to be, and right now, it’s like everybody just going on trying to figure it out, and even to the point where people started with the same post, like, is this thing on?

Which was, like, so old. I’m going to sneeze.

Jeff Sieh: So, tweets.

Conor Brown: Is a noun and a verb. Right. But thread, I just don’t see it like that. Like you can

Peg Fitzpatrick: say thread it, but that it sounds like Reddit. Hey,

Jeff Sieh: I

Conor Brown: tweeted about this. I threaded about this. I don’t [00:05:00] know.

Peg Fitzpatrick: But you know, tweet wasn’t a verb or even a word except for birds before we used it for a decade and more. So I think it’s what we make it.

So they called it that, but we’ll probably come up with different.

Jeff Sieh: So, so Jim has something, this is really interesting, and he’s kind of being funny, but he’s like, I’m on threads while watching you on YouTube, it’s that meta. But, that’s one of the things I want to talk about when we get into this, so this first kind of section we’re going to be, we’re going to be talking about understanding threads, what it is, because like, Jim Alt here, and he’s like, this is a new thing kind of for him, a lot of people, it’s, I mean, it’s brand new, like it’s, you know, it still smells like a new car over there right now.

But, you know, what is Threads? And, and Jim’s point, like, is it going to be a second screen? You know, like with Twitter, people, like, when Lost, remember when Lost was out? You know, they would even have the hashtag on the screen there and kind of in the lower third where people were, you know, it was used as a second screen while you’re watching a show.

Will this happen with Threads? That’s what I want to talk about. But, Peg, only if they add hashtags. Right, right. [00:06:00] So, can you explain what Instagram Threads is and how it works for what we know so far?

Peg Fitzpatrick: Okay. So it’s an extension of Instagram. They haven’t made it like an extension of Facebook, but it’s basically a meta property.

It’s getting so washy on the names over there, but it’s basically a tech. They want it to be like a text only communication app. It’s only a mobile app right now. It’s not on desktop, although you can see people’s profile, but you can’t comment or do anything, but you can see people’s profile on.

Eccamm, socialmedianewslive. com. So you can just go say something text based. You can also add a photo. You can also add a video up to five minutes and you can add carousels up to, I think I tried like seven, so it might be up to 10 images. I’m not a hundred percent on that. They really [00:07:00] were emphasizing the text part of it.

But the thing with that is people are more attracted to images. We know that from all the studies that are out there. So I still am like cooked on GIFs and, and emojis and stuff because it breaks things up a little bit from just being text, but it’s basically just communication. It’s like, you know, getting to know people.

And the really interesting thing is that the adoption of it was insane. They had like 10 million users. Yeah, like first day and I guess it passed. We’ll say it again. So sorry, whoever has to drink, that’s Chris. It passed Google plus was the fastest adoption before now. And these things are kind of apples and oranges.

Cause it’s like, it’s faster adoption than this. But people are so used to going to a new platform now. So it’s not the same thing as 10 years ago where people would be like, well, I’m already on Instagram. I don’t think I’m going to try it. But now people know I better get there, better grab my name. One nice thing was that your name was attached to your [00:08:00] Instagram account.

So people couldn’t like take your name. I guess they could do a version of it, but I haven’t seen that yet. I haven’t seen fake accounts, but they’re probably coming.

Jeff Sieh: Right. Yeah, so I want to go back to this 10 million users. That’s, I mean, 24 hours, 10 million. It’s probably bigger than that. Yeah, from what I understand to be the same amount of users as Twitter, he only has to get like, what, 12% of the Instagram users to start using threads and he will already be bigger.

Peg Fitzpatrick: I think it’s going to. All these, all the celebrities have adopted it. The YouTubers have adopted it. The TikTokers adopted it. Day one. Right. Day one when it was like, it was live at 7:00 PM mm-hmm. , right on Wednesday and I, I was on at seven 10 . And already like the early people that got in a little extra sneak preview.

Mm-hmm. , there was Colleen Hoover, who is the huge author that just went viral on TikTok. She’s huge on [00:09:00] TikTok. She obviously must have Instagram too, and she was right on. She went in there at the early adoption. I mean, people know now. There’s a huge advantage to being early on something, to gaining followers and to building your community.

So I think because the celebrity adoption was so fast, I think it’s going to pass Twitter’s numbers pretty quickly. I think there’s a percentage of people that are still happy with Twitter, but that’s all political and. I, I really hope that stuff doesn’t come over onto threads. Like it gives me anxiety even thinking like politics on there.

It’s just like, oh, please no,

Jeff Sieh: please don’t. It’ll, it’ll come. I have a feeling it’ll, it’ll come. So, so it’s, so the number one app the fastest downloaded app was OpenAI. That was the fastest one that has grown. This one is, It’s supposed to overtake it, if it actually, if it continues to go like it.

This weekend will be really interesting to see what happens, so, anyway. Connor, you had a question?

Conor Brown: Yeah, especially with the Twitter thing, but I think one thing that’s super [00:10:00] interesting is, yes, all the celebrities are going, but because it’s such an easy adoption, you click in your profile on Instagram, it automatically creates it and downloads it for you.

I think that’s going to be really big, because I always do the mom test, right? Can mom figure this out? My mom’s already out there. She’s never been a foot on Twitter, probably has never seen a tweet before. She’s tech savvy, to her credit, but she’s already on there. And I think that that’s going to be the real.

This is how it becomes super, super, super big. The easiness of it to set it up. But Peg, you did mention Twitter. If you know, you kind of compare just a, a thread to a tweet. They look kind of similar. They look very similar. And this of course is being touted as Facebook’s reply to Twitter or whatever it is, competitor to Twitter.

So how does it differentiate itself right now? What are the key features that set it apart? And I know it’s super early, but how do [00:11:00] you see it differentiate itself in the long term, especially when we’ve had other Twitter competitors before like Mastodon, other things like

Peg Fitzpatrick: that? It definitely looks like Mastodon to me.

It feels like it’s quieter. I think right now the advantage is. That’s the newsfeed. They’re limiting, I think it was 600, that you’ll see 600 posts a day. And they are going into chronological feed. They have the advantage of being after everything else. When you’re the first one out there with something, you have to come up with all the things.

Like, you know, Snapchat came out and they were like, it disappears. And, and everybody was like, wait, it disappears. That’s not good. And everybody was like, no, it’s cool. And then they were like, oh wait, it’s cool. So I will say. They wait, that awaited a long time. This is definitely a copy of a couple other things that we’ve seen.

I mean, that’s, those are facts. Even the name is like a Twitter thread. I’m, I’m really not sure why they went so close on [00:12:00] that. But. How’s it going to differentiate itself? That’s a good question. I think right now Twitter is, has such bad press and people are, people that were like hard core Twitter users, like authors, like journalists that built up their platforms, the people who hang on their every word because they are journalists and like really interesting people, I think they’re going to enjoy the quieter network.

It’s harder to connect right now because there’s no hashtags and it’s harder. People right now are. Just randomly posting, they’re replying. They’re not at mentioning people. So you may or may not see the notification. I missed some yesterday came on this morning. I was like, Oh, Hey, you have to check. I mean, there’s not that much to check.

There’s very few buttons. And so it’s very, I think the simplicity is the beauty of it right now. The quietness and the simplicity, like it’s easy. Like you said, there’s some people who never went to Twitter. They were on Facebook. So far, they’ve only pushed it through Instagram that I’ve seen because they’re partnering it with Instagram.[00:13:00]

They also have their Facebook user base. There might be people there that don’t have even Instagram, you know, if you’re going to go with older agents. So, we’ll see. I mean, They have a huge base of people to go from, so they have it’s, it’s a lot different than starting with no followers. Like, Mastodon was kind of like, hi, we’re a new thing, and people were, were just looking for something to replace Twitter, so they got a lot of adoption.

See, I’m not

Jeff Sieh: even on Mastodon. I haven’t gone

Peg Fitzpatrick: over there. When Google started Google you had to have an invitation, and they were tied to your Gmail account, which they got fast adoption because everybody had Gmail accounts. So.

Jeff Sieh: It’s smart. It’s interesting, and I want to bring up this question, and it’s from it’s from your daughter.

Shayla says, Threads is used as a term outside of Twitter. Although think Slack thread, Reddit thread, email thread, etc. So, yeah, I can see that. But, and it was funny, because I saw her on Threads yesterday, throw down the gauntlet saying, Will this be the [00:14:00] platform that I’m going to have more followers than my mother?

Peg Fitzpatrick: So everybody follow Shayla. She’s funny. Yeah, so she’s a tech girl. So she’s, she’s if you like gaming or,

Jeff Sieh: yeah, but she has a great question. What do you think of another purely algorithm, algorithmic based? I want to know what your thoughts about like the launch, Peg, and this is part of it.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Well, I’m sick of algorithms.

My, a lot of you know, my life is run by algorithms online. So you blah on that. So we’ll see how it goes. I mean, I’m not sure how it’s going to be for businesses as far as like links and content and things like that. People are starting to share things like that. So how do I feel about algorithms? I hate them and I think that they’re changed constantly.

So no matter what you do, you can never catch up on them. So on one hand, they’re there. On the other hand, I try to ignore them and just.[00:15:00]

Social media is a great way to why people share things online. They want it to be entertaining. They think it’s funny. They want to share it so their friends see it and think they’re funny by association. So it’s still the basic tenets of social media. Do I wish that things weren’t algorithmically based?

Yes, but that’s how they find out what’s popular and they share it to more people. I mean, even our TV viewing is algorithmically based. You know, you go on Netflix and it’s going to show you things and you pause on a movie for a second and then that movie shows up in every category that you look at. I mean, we don’t have free choice anymore.

Our free choice is gone. So, so Shayla, question for you. How did we get that back? Since you’re,

Jeff Sieh: since she’s writing the algorithms. Yeah. Yeah.

Conor Brown: Go ahead. That is, it is really interesting. I also think the launch was interesting just because there wasn’t a huge beta. There was a beta, you know, and yeah, we saw like Shakira was on there.

Other, you know, [00:16:00] big names were on there for the beta, but it almost seems like they wanted to launch it and see how people are going to use it, right. To kind of understand what’s going to go on. And I know the head of Instagram has announced, listen, these are the things we. May or may not have in the pipeline, like a, a food just for the people you follow.

DM, hashtags better search functions, those sorts of things. And those might come, time will tell. Of course we know that they’ve always been kind of wishy washy with announcing things. And if they come, they come. But I think what’s interesting about this is every new social platform that’s come before has almost been kind of like, we have to get.

People off of another platform to us, vice versa. People have worried. Other platforms have worried when a new thing enters the landscape. Oh boy. How are we going to prevent people from leaving us to go to this? But this is different because it’s built on Instagram. So we haven’t really seen this a whole lot, [00:17:00] saying, encouraging people almost to jump to another platform.

So how do you think threads is going to impact how we use Instagram and how people use Instagram going forward?

Peg Fitzpatrick: Right, that’s a great question. Back to the launch though, I think it was an excellent launch. Obviously, how can you deny it was an excellent launch? Right, 10 million people, yeah. They, they crushed it.

So it was low key. I think that they launched it earlier. I know there was a later date that it was supposed to come out, but I saw in the press that it was being talked about and they had information. So I think that some big press contact broke the embargo. And then I think they launched it. That’s only my theory.

I haven’t seen that written anywhere, but I know that the date was supposed to be later and it came out earlier. So, and, and I had seen articles talking about it. And now I just forgot your great question. Refresh me, Connor. How do I think it’s going to? How do people

Jeff Sieh: use Instagram? How do [00:18:00]

Peg Fitzpatrick: you, yeah, I think, so I think it’s, obviously it’s a lot different than Instagram because Instagram, you’re like.

I need a photo. I need a video. I need something. I need to make a reel. We’ve all been like told reels, reels, reels. You got to do reels. I think this gives us a break from having to be camera ready or, you know, you get trained to create certain content for certain things like TikTok. You have to have a video Instagram.

You had to have a photo forever or now it’s a photo and a video, but there’s no text only. Post unless you make a graphic, which is still an image. So this is the people who were crushing it on Twitter. The funny people that are just writing the short snappy things that people respond to are instantly crushing it on threads.

There’s a really big difference between somebody who’s really great at Twitter and somebody who’s really great at Instagram. So it’s kind of trying to meld those two things together. And which persona do we pick? That’s the interesting thing. Wendy’s and McDonald’s, two [00:19:00] brands that crush it on Twitter and are also on Instagram are already over there crushing it.

Ulta Beauty, which is, you know, they post videos, they post that kind of thing. I’d every, I don’t even know if I follow them on Twitter because Beauty Brands like that. You go to them for TikTok that we have so many compartments now, but Ulta is already like posting great questions on Ulta on their threads.

So you have to do a little bit of a switch to what you’re going to share. It’s text based and people are going to read it. You can have graphics and things with it, but I think that the it’s kind of like, people are trying to figure out how do I meld those two things together. And those are the people that are going to succeed.

And. Asking questions and building your community and sharing things, you know, I love the ones that are staying a hundred percent true to who they are. You can follow, again, the big brands for like guidance on stuff. Check out some of the big brands and see what they’re sharing and is it working? McDonald’s got raked over the coals with that grimace.

Did you guys see the grimace [00:20:00] trending? Oh my gosh. They already posted that on, on threads. They were like, say goodbye. Grimace is gone today. It was like. If you haven’t seen it, it was a viral Twitter thing, or TikTok, excuse me. Grimace came out, and then people were posting that they drank, shake, and died.

So it was really, it really backfired on them, and McDonald’s was like, Help! But, you know, they’re staying in the conversation, which is good.

Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So, there’s, there’s a couple things I wanted to, to go back and talk about, you know. First of all, about the interface, because I want to know what you think about the interface so far.

We don’t know what it’s going to turn into. Instagram was pretty simple when it first started and then it, in my opinion, it’s really bloated. You know, is that going to happen to threads, you know, as they add new features and stuff like that? I, I hope not, but you got to look at the track record, record, but Dealcaster says, I still don’t understand the auto follow thing.

versus those that I have to accept them to follow, maybe I, Chris was too busy hitting all the buttons and getting started. So how does, so you can import everybody [00:21:00] from instagram and you’re following them, but then you also see people that you have to accept them to follow. So how, what

Peg Fitzpatrick: is he talking about?

I was like, do you want to auto follow all the people you have follow on Instagram? And I was like. I’ve been pretty careful about who I follow on Instagram. I’ve deleted a lot of accounts and I follow only things I really like. So it’s like, sure, I’ll do it. And now I see the auto follow ones and there’s no way to go back once you did or didn’t do it.

They might update those things. They made it like Chris, like, Connor already mentioned. They made it very simple, right? The log is very simple. You can either do it or not do it. And then there’s not even that many buttons when, when you’re looking at your profiles or anything like that, there’s very few buttons.

I don’t think they’re going to overbloat it because they already have Meta. I guess we have to call it meta. They already have Facebook. They already have Instagram. It has a million features. They’ve tried to add some of the Instagram features like Reels over on Facebook. They’re not really taking off. I mean, people like their separate things.

I think one of the biggest problems is [00:22:00] people are concerned about having another place that they have to post. That’s the thing. Like, do I have to post another place? But it’s connected.

Jeff Sieh: Yeah, let’s, I want to talk about that because, and I want to do that in this next section where we talk about, like, how it’s going to impact social, because you and I have both seen where you can tell people are just taking what they already had scheduled on Twitter and they’re posting it to threads and then other people are like, Hey, this is a new space.

I’m going to start fresh. I’m going to be my real self. And so, that’s the kind of way I’m, I haven’t done any like marketing. I didn’t even share this show was coming up. I mentioned it when in some comments, but I never like pushed it out. Like I have it auto scheduled on Twitter. Don’t worry about it, my man.

I got you covered. You did it. You did it. All right, thanks. So I want it to be like fun. Kind of see where it is. ’cause I don’t know what it’s gonna ha what it’s gonna do business wise or whatever. And Gary has this, this this kind of comment. He goes, he’s still waiting for his invite to Blue Sky.

Meanwhile, Zuck is hovering up the market share. So this is interesting to me is Hoovering, he’s hoovering it ho [00:23:00] Yeah, hoovering it up. He’s, he’s from the uk so that makes . So the question I wanna talk about is, Yeah, he’s getting all this market share. People are, are trying to figure out, you know, what to do.

One of the cool things I think about the interface is just like a lot of Instagram users would post, like it, they would take a screenshot of their Twitter. And they would post it as their, you can already share that to a story now from Threads. Yeah, I love that.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Which I think is that you can post and then share it to Threads.

So it’s, the integration for that is really great and you can also make a post in Threads and share it as a post. So you have a post. You can share, I don’t think you could share it as a reel, I haven’t tried that, but you can share it to a post and you can share it as a story, and it makes a great story.

I hope that you can change the backgrounds and stuff on them, eventually I haven’t played with it too much, but once you share it to Instagram, you have the ability to do all the things that you can do in stories like add hashtags or give, you know, GIFs or location or any of those kind of little button things in there.

[00:24:00] So you still have your stripped down version to share from threads, but it’s a very seamless integration. I like

Jeff Sieh: that. One

Conor Brown: thing I did want to mention about the auto follow. I found out how you can do it after the fact as well. Go into followers on, on your threads profile who you’re following. There’s a little thing right up at the top that says like import or whatever, Instagram followers, click that.

And then the list will come up and you can click follow all at the, at the very bottom. What’s really cool is this morning, I found out I just followed someone new on Instagram. There was cool video or whatever. So I gave him a follow. And then I went over to threads. I opened up my following section and he, they were like, Hey, this new person is now on threads.

It was that account I just followed on Instagram on threads and it went like that. So it’s all automatically like populating who you just followed on Instagram if you also want to follow them on [00:25:00] threads.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I can’t see that. I just pulled it up while you were saying it because I auto followed at the beginning.

So that feature isn’t there for me, but it is cool that you mean so far I’ve been trying to keep up on followers like who’s following me. Just to catch people. Yeah, if I’m not following them. So

Jeff Sieh: let’s talk because I want to know like how I know it’s only been like 24 hours or 36 whatever, but How do you think this is going to affect the social media?

landscape, right? Like, how, is it just, right now the big news cycle is, hey, it’s stealing, it’s Twitter’s, all their followers are coming over here, Twitter’s dead, you know, this is the big Twitter killer that, you know, and it’s gonna be Zuck and Elon in a cage fight, kind of a thing. But I want to talk about, like, the whole landscape, how this may change things, like, even, like, TikTok all this stuff, and the thing that, and I think I wrote this on, like, Lou’s post when he was talking about Threads was, I kind of, there’s no video really, like, the thing about TikTok, you will be [00:26:00] sucked in and like, you wake up and there’s, oh, two hours has passed, you know, and instead of being sucked into a video where you’re not engaging, like your TikTok, you’re liking, maybe you’ll comment.

Threads is, it’s sucking you in to be part of the conversation. The whole thing is engagement. It’s all about talking. So, is this going to change the landscape? Is it just a totally different animal? Is it, So much like Twitter. It’s just another Twitter. I mean, what are your thoughts, Peg? So

Peg Fitzpatrick: far, it seems like another Twitter, but TikTok does keep you on the app by, you know, you watch a video and they autoplay something else for you.

Like, they keep you going, going, going. And Reels does the same thing with, you know, when you’re on Instagram, you see Reels, and then they just keep showing you more Reels that are related. Pinterest shows you all the related, remember Pinterest? Pinterest shares all the related things that you like. So Twitter Twitter.

Threads is different because it is just that singular conversation, which is why it reminds me more of Mastodon, but also Twitter back in the beginning [00:27:00] before people got really used to using hashtags to connect with other people. That, to me, is the hardest part right now, is that you’re connected to one thread, one little thread conversation.

You could post a thread with, with multiple posts on that one thread. But… It’s not easy to see all the people that are talking about X. There’s no trending topics about X right now. I think that’s a good thing because. The algorithm, you know, we know how that goes when the newsfeed is decided by LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.

It has not gone well for politics and for other things. So I’m kind of glad that there’s not those trending topics yet. I don’t know if they’ll do that. I think people need a thing to connect with. Right now, it’s the most popular thing because people are there live talking. Right. And that’s what people are looking for on the internet.

We want someone to talk to. We want to, some people are going to post the funny thing and the other people are going to respond to the funny thing or to the celebrity. That when I [00:28:00] was a meet, when I was on early on I saw that Colleen Hoover was on there and I said hi to her and she responded and I was pretty darn happy because she’s amazing and she would never see a comment that I made on, on TikTok.

Like no way. Or maybe she would see it, but not respond because she gets too many. So there’s that early thing of connecting with people and they might see it now. So if you see people there that you really want to connect with, it’s a great time to do it. And then those things are all going to even out.

I have to say, it’s also great to just keep having more and more followers coming in. I’m like, Hey, more followers today. Yay. When I, you know, that doesn’t, that slows down too, eventually. Right. It is. And then the referral feed, it’s all celebrities. If that’s what I see when I when I look, it’s always, you know.

Acura has been at the top of my feed a lot, and obviously Iconers too.

Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So I really liked how. What Connor was saying, like, you follow somebody new, [00:29:00] it shows up on threads, and the same vice versa, so I think that’s going to be really cool to help, you know, build your audience. And I want to bring up some some comments real quick.

Chris says, Connor, with the follow hack, he appreciates it. He also says the early vibes are great. It feels like everybody at this point is just getting along. But you know… We just can’t have nice things, Chris. And marketers are already coming in telling you how to use Threads, which just drives me bonkers because it’s 24 hours old.

Nobody knows how this thing is going to work. So…

Peg Fitzpatrick: And you know the bros are, the tech bros are already like changing their LinkedIn bio to say ChatGBTPrompt, Engineer, and Threads Expert, and LinkedIn Influencer. Like, just simmer down with your expert. Status people that it, it, that is a frustrating thing.

And honestly, the other thing that comes after that, first comes this part where everybody’s happy. Next comes the people telling other people, these are the rules, [00:30:00] right? . Yeah. You have to follow our rules and do it this way. You didn’t post it this way and then come the trolls. Yeah. Telling you that you’re a, you’re a horrible threader and you don’t know what you’re doing.

Gary has

Jeff Sieh: a great point. He goes, fabric chop are gonna be huge on threads. That’s right. Gary. We have the same wavelength thinking. So, all right, Connor, you had a question. Sorry. You know,

Conor Brown: this is a great question. Cause Jeff just brought up the fact that he already hates that marketers are doing these things.

We’re going to ask a question about how marketers can take advantage of threads, but seriously, cause that’s the business we’re in, right? We want to use these things as tools. We don’t want them to use us as the tool. So as marketers, as businesses and influencers What do you think the potential benefits for using Instagram threads are for those, those people

Jeff Sieh: and association?

It’s gonna be a new chapter in your book,

Peg Fitzpatrick: babe, so you’re gonna have to deal with it. It might be. We’ll see how threads do. My book is already at the publisher. It’s not 100% edited, [00:31:00] so it’s entirely possible that it will be added. We’ll see. But potential for businesses, the businesses that, like I mentioned before, that have already, this is the first time I’ve seen brands.

These are just a few With the exception of Snapchat, brands were awesome on Snapchat right away. But I think that it’s a great place right now for building your community. I think it’s all about conversation and community. So I think, like I mentioned before, being helpful, do the things for your industry that you’re going to connect with people, follow people.

It’s, we’re in the building growing stage. So you want to take what you’ve already, you’re not going to like, change what you’ve been doing everywhere else. You should have what your brand voice is and what your, you know. What you talk about and all those things are not going to change. It’s just going to be a little bit of a translation.

I would say that it’s not really a curation place. [00:32:00] That’s my snap 26 hour thing is don’t copy your Twitter strategy if it’s mostly curation. Don’t just curate things and dump it over there. I think people want to see the original thoughts and that stands for brands. And you know, I actually saw somebody posting, you know, what do you want to see from me here?

And it was somebody who’s. Who is a big YouTuber. And YouTubers are also great to follow because they’re really great with connect, connecting with their communities, like better, they’re one of the best, I think, at really connecting with their audiences, YouTubers, no matter what platform they’re on, Instagram or Twitter, you know, wherever.

I’ve seen a lot of the big people like you know, Marques Brownlee’s already. You know, obviously rocking it. So look at some of those people if you’re looking for ideas, but it’s really staying true to your brand and just translating it to that text version. So it might be like what you’re doing on Twitter, but even a brand, like [00:33:00] even my personal brand.

I’m on all the platforms and there’s things that people like for me in different communities, like on my Facebook page, people really like my daily mantras and on Twitter, they do okay. LinkedIn, not interested at all. I’m not going to do them on threads. Cause I just don’t think that’ll be popular there.

But my Facebook page, if I stopped doing them, they were like. And I get a lot of personal mess. I get a lot of direct messages saying, thank you so much for posting these every day. They helped me. So I feel good about that, but I’m not going to start it on a new place. I’m just kind of getting the feel for things and using it much like I did with early Twitter.

Just talking to people like, hi, you know, like what’s up. I haven’t shared any of my blog posts or anything yet.

Jeff Sieh: Yeah, see, that’s what I’m, I’m, and this is, as Chris says, I felt amazing when Peg Pettifactory replied to one of my TikToks, so. Oh, stop. Just go, just

Peg Fitzpatrick: go comment on mine. I’m, like, not the best TikToker, so, whatever.

Jeff Sieh: So, [00:34:00] the question, like, this is a question, like, I was, because you can do what, what was it, up to five minutes of video. You can post on threads. And I haven’t seen much yet, and I’m wondering, is, are we gonna see people start to post reels that they’ve already posted on, on, you know, Instagram reels over as, you know, because short form content really works?

Like, so, what I do is like, I make a, like a, 30 second clip or a minute clip of this show where we have, I’m asking you a question, you answer it. And I have been repurposing them over on YouTube Shorts and also on Instagram Reels. Is this another spot where I should think about doing that or is it too soon to tell?

What do you think, babe? I would,

Peg Fitzpatrick: especially because there’s not that many people doing video yet. So, I, I would, the only thing I would say not to do is people that repurpose TikToks or just make sure there’s no logos on it that are not meta. I don’t know about Reels, but and I don’t know if you can share, I don’t think you can share from Instagram two threads yet.

I don’t

Jeff Sieh: think you can, that’s why I was wondering, I mean, I’ve already got the video, it would be like, [00:35:00] it would be reposting it, you know, uploading it and doing that. Eric’s got it, this is his strategy, my friend Eric Fisher says, holding off with posting content and focusing on chatting with others, it’s about relationships.

I think a lot of people are taking that same strategy. My, the people I follow are, I mean I’m sure there’s not because it’s like people you haven’t connected, like we saw Jed Record, we both commented on his post, and I hadn’t talked to Jed since Google Plus days or something, you know, back in the, forever, and so, it was great to, it’s like you’re kind of old, it’s like a family reunion where you haven’t seen these people in a while.

It’s also,

Conor Brown: because it’s, it’s, you’re doing this with all your Instagram followers. And the things that they share on Instagram are completely different considering this is a text based app. So it’s almost like when you’re in elementary school and you would see your teacher at the grocery store and you’re like, What?

Jeff Sieh: She’s a

Conor Brown: real person. What’s going on? But someone that both of you guys know, Guy Kawasaki, he already [00:36:00] said the what did he say? He said, Instagram is for bragging, threads is for thinking. Which I think it’s a little too early. Obviously to kind of establish what this is and what this isn’t. Yeah, certainly social media platform and it’s adolescence, so it hasn’t really right what it wants be, but I do like what Eric’s saying.

It’s like just start talking right now. Post some stuff. Yeah, just don’t, don’t,

Peg Fitzpatrick: don’t be. The interesting thing though is it’s not. It’s not my Instagram followers that I’m surprised to see on threads. It’s people that I met on Twitter years and years ago, people from Google Plus, the people who really enjoy the conversation of.

Social media, no matter where you are, those are the people who are connecting with me again, which I love. There was a group on Twitter a long time ago, hashtag us guys, if you’re an us guy, you know, there’s girls and us guys, that’s the question. Oh, it’s good to ask, but anyway, it was a community based on a hashtag and people would go in that thread and talk all the time.

[00:37:00] So it’s interesting, those people have been connecting. So I think it’s the live aspect of it. Like people just want, this is the only place. In the metaverse, that you can’t schedule anything right now. So people are posting live and responding live. So everything is live, live. Yeah. Eric

Jeff Sieh: says the same thing.

He goes, yes I’m reconnecting with people that I follow on IG that don’t post much. And I think that’s the other thing. It’s like people who, it’s hard, you know, it’s hard to come up with content and Connor as well. You know, it’s hard to get that perfect photo or, or make that real, which is even more of a commitment.

And this is

Peg Fitzpatrick: like… A perfect photo doesn’t even mean anything anymore on Instagram. The problem is that the algorithm on Instagram and Facebook is 100% gone. Back in the… early days of Facebook pages. You could reach everybody who followed you. Everything that you posted when you reach them. It was amazing and Instagram was the same thing you would post and people would see it.

Now people don’t see your content even if you [00:38:00] post. So I don’t know how many people are, if people are following, I’m following like 2, 300 people. I’m only going to see 600 posts a day. So even if all the people I follow, post it, I won’t see them unless I go to their profile.

Conor Brown: Question for both of you, which is kind of like a, a social media landscape question, almost.

We see meta investing billions into metaverse and creating your avatar. And live in your life online and no one seems to want to actually do it, right? Like no one wants to jump in. Some do, but maybe you’re just not ready, whatever. Then we see them launch this and it skyrockets. Is this something where they’re finally listening to the audience of what they want or is it just

Peg Fitzpatrick: MetaSane?

No, they just came out with more Metaverse stuff. I have the headset. Jeff has a headset. I actually worked with I met on a [00:39:00] project and they actually sent me one. And I do have a couple of apps that I use on it. I don’t use it that much. The headset is so like clunky and stuff. I just don’t think it has the adoption that they wanted, obviously, but I do know there’s somebody, I don’t know if you know him, Connor, but Mitch Jackson, who’s an attorney in California, he’s, was a trial attorney.

He recently just stopped doing that. And now he is doing, he does all stuff in the metaverse. He makes. A million, yeah, he’s doing arbitrary mediation for for, for people. So it’s possible for people to do it. I mean, the cool thing is you can create a room and go in there and people don’t have to have a headset and they can still do it, but I just think people weren’t ready for that, or it’s not the right demographic.

I mean, Gen Z, I think is the generation that’s more, and millennials are like more video game kind of deal. It just doesn’t see, it seems more like a video game than. That’s why I

Jeff Sieh: like it, Peg. That’s why you like it? Yeah, so I, so I, I want to, I’m going to bring up some comments. And how

Peg Fitzpatrick: [00:40:00] often did we use it, Jeff?

Jeff Sieh: We had one meeting. Well, we tried to do it for a meeting, that didn’t work. I use it all the time for gaming and working out, as you can tell how fit I am. So, but I would, I would bring up this question from, this is back from Shayla, because I want to talk about this specifically. And we were talking about algorithms.

She goes, lack of algorithms? Sorry, it’s not going to go away. I’m actually suspicious to see if MetaMite need to use threads to try out AI algorithms. Be interested to dig into that. Well, I read an article, like, yesterday, that somebody was saying that the reason that they launched it so fast and why they did it is because this gives them all this text and information to train an AI.

Because because that’s what Zuck has said they’ve been wanting to do. They want to take on Google, they want to take on OpenAI, ChatGPT, and this gives them all this information. And so I want to move from what Shayla said, too, in this vein and talk about… Let’s talk about the privacy stuff, [00:41:00] because there’s been some stuff on that, because this fits into that.

Peg Fitzpatrick: That’s not good. The privacy stuff is not good. It says right in the terms of service that they own everything that you post, and if you post it, you’re saying that you have the rights to post it. So if you’re posting memes or photos or anything from any other platforms, they’re telling you right in the terms of service that you can’t do that, but people are already doing that and they are saying that they own it.

That they can, that they can use it any way that they want. So, that would include AI, even though it doesn’t say, we’re going to turn this into an AI bot that’s your personality.

Jeff Sieh: But go ahead, go into your, your, you know, you can go into iPhone in the app store and see what they’re going to be tracking.

They’re tracking your health data. They’re tracking everything. Now, so Musk has been saying, look how much they’re doing. Twitter still tracks a lot of stuff too, maybe not as much, but it’s pretty scary how much stuff they’re tracking. And Shayla has another great question about how long do you think it’s going to be until we see ads in the feed?

And I go, you know, [00:42:00] their

Peg Fitzpatrick: track record… They said at least until the end of the

Jeff Sieh: year. So, but their track record is that there’s ads lurking behind there. You can just feel it, Brady, trying to peek out. But, if they’re using it for AI, and it, you know, there’s a reason we get this stuff for free. They’re taking our data.

I just read another great article about you know, Tesla was, you know, they got all this great you know, praise for opening up their charging networks for, like, I think it’s General Motors or Ford, one of those two. Well, what people don’t understand is when you plug in a Tesla there’s a data port as well.

It’s telling me where you drove, how long you were doing it, what radio station you listened to, all this stuff. Now they can do that with their competitors. So, all this stuff that we get for free is data. Yeah,

Peg Fitzpatrick: we don’t get it. Either you’re paying for it or you’re the product. Right. Yeah. That’s how it goes with all of these.

So, it’s free and everybody’s like, Yay, let’s go on and let’s post this. And [00:43:00] yeah, it’s out there.

Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So, anyway, I think there is a concern about privacy. I, and one of the things, I mean, we didn’t talk about this when we talked about it at the beginning. But one of the things that they have said is like, when you want to leave, you can take this with you.

Like it’s built on, what was it? The, the platform

Peg Fitzpatrick: that Master… The Fediverse. It’s about, it’s, it’s part of the, they’re making it part of the Fediverse and it may. At some point be connected to Mastodon and other things that are in the open. It’s so techie, but it’s, it’s part of the Fediverse. So they’re saying, hypothetically speaking, this could be connected to other things.

So it’s not part of, you could build your followers here and then you won’t lose them. And I would say I would have loved that for Google plus because you know, I built up the Hugoes. Platform I had and then it disappeared. And I think that’s part of, you know, a lot of people have done that, built platforms here, there, and then it goes away.

And I mean, Twitter, people are complaining about it, but also have [00:44:00] decade or more on there. Mm-hmm. posting all the time. And it’s hard to leave that when you’ve built that, even though it’s not the same that it was, it’s hard to give it

Jeff Sieh: up. Yeah. Yeah. Jim just said he just saw a post on threads now at 70 million million users as of 8:00 AM.

Just think of, I mean, to be honest, they don’t, they won’t have to run ads. I mean, they will because it’s even more money, but they’re already getting what they need to build

Peg Fitzpatrick: their Skynet. If what they want is our Facebook,

every social platform has been tracking everything, creating these buyer personas for us to send us the ads. I mean, that’s everywhere. And that’s even our iPhones. So, you know, you could be having a conversation with someone and it’s listening in some app and then you get ads for it later. We all get

Conor Brown: that.

I think the only one thing is just, yes, they are getting so much data, they’re just going to [00:45:00] have to show, especially to investors, especially being public, you know, if they know that they can make a whole heck of a lot of money with ads, they have to justify that by not showing ads, we’re also making money with that.

That’s why I just, I’m just always wary of that. It’s just always. It’s great, but who knows? We’ll get the business people involved.

Peg Fitzpatrick: I think right now they’re just showing that they have numbers. Numbers are first in the tech world. We have this many users. Where did they not launch? Did you pay attention to that?

Uh uh.

Jeff Sieh: Europe. Oh, the UK. Yeah, they couldn’t do it in the

Peg Fitzpatrick: Europe, yeah. They didn’t do it in Europe because they have strict privacy laws. Right. And they’ve already gotten hit from different things.

Jeff Sieh: And Sheila does say she’s I say a quick check all the data they request access for with threads They already have access to with Instagram the health fitness finances all that stuff So but Fred has a my friend Fred said over on YouTube says I just wish we could control our data better So we have a portion of what they earn off of us and we don’t like it.

We could [00:46:00] throttle it I get it as a creator. It’s you have a platform to put stuff on but That platform is benefiting off your content. So yeah, it’s a

Conor Brown: what a bummer We were riding that thread side coming in and then we really took a I

Jeff Sieh: know but but it’s the price of the privacy thing Is important, you know Um, and I, if you turn off, if you, cause I know in some Apple things you can say don’t track, ask this app not to track.

Can you do that with threads? Or does it break it where you can’t get in?

Peg Fitzpatrick: Here’s the thing with all the meta stuff though. I mean, if you really look at how many apps you have on your phone that are meta, you have a lot. So you need to check a lot of things. And that’s, that’s one thing that used to bother me too.

It’s like, I don’t want like the messenger app. I have fought hard not to put on my phone because I don’t want like there, you have five Facebook apps. They’re all different things, but you know, you have Instagram. Now you have threads, you have, you know, I have business manager. I have blah, I have blah, I have blah.

Like in some way, I would just like one app for that [00:47:00] one thing. So they’re tracking all of this, you know, even if you’re careful on one, it’s, it’s. You really just need to not be on social media if you don’t want your data to be out there. That’s the thing. It’s not just a threads thing. It’s an everything thing.

That’s, that’s honest. I mean, if you want to talk bad policies, TikTok is the one that no one should be on because they’re tracking all of your stuff. And it’s, you know, they’re, they’re doing a lot worse in my opinion. And so.

Jeff Sieh: Yeah, and Eric says the value of threads may not, for them, may not be monitored, it may be in the data.

Peg Fitzpatrick: And the numbers, the people, the people, we have this many users.

Jeff Sieh: And Fred, who is a programmer, he goes if these social platforms acquire their own large language models, like ChatGPT, they can easily make these experiences more personalized, and that may add some value that we don’t have right now. So, I think that’s, it will be interesting.

When they start, right now we’re seeing all the people we know. Like it’s people who follow us on [00:48:00] Instagram, working, Hey, it’s good to see you here. It’ll be interesting when it goes to that next step, when it starts recommending not just the big influencers but also the, you know, normal people like,

Peg Fitzpatrick: Hey YouTube!

If you’re new here, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter Thanks for watching! You care about the content of

Conor Brown: your live stream and you want to make

Jeff Sieh: sure that you can share it with younger viewers. For that, that’s a separate subscription. Instagram is a subscription, but right now it transferred over to Threads.

I have a feeling with 10 million and growing [00:49:00] or whatever Jim said, I have a feeling they’ll start charging for just Threads verification too.

Peg Fitzpatrick: They might, but in the, the only thing that I’ve seen that where it’s a, you know, it’s a bonus right now is that I’ve only seen verified people in that recommended

Jeff Sieh: section.

Yeah, but I haven’t seen me being recommended there yet, so,

Peg Fitzpatrick: I haven’t seen me either. They probably don’t show you and I don’t anybody. Wait, can you tell you guys that are that are watching right now? Have you seen us on your like little recommended thing? Maybe you don’t even see people that you’re already following.

Could

Jeff Sieh: be my the question that the thing that I think of and we did it as an experiment because I’m not a big. Pay for the blue check kind of guy. I’m just like, whatever. We did it because we wanted to see that. Yeah, and it’s, to me, it’s, it’s like 15 a month, and it’s not worth it for me to have a little blue check by my name.

So, now if it would like, if it does like boost my posts or whatever, [00:50:00] maybe you can make that argument. But it was an interesting experience, experiment, and it even told me when I signed up, it said this may take up to like 72 hours. To do it, because you have to take a picture of your license and like, you know, make sure you’re not on the watch list.

Thank you. You’re not sharing your data, Jeff. What have you just done? I know. Yeah, in Texas, you know, we don’t have any problem with that. But, so there it goes. Jeff will always be verified in my mind. Yeah, I’m verified something. Anyway, but that was an interesting thing to try. So if you want the blue check and maybe if you think they’re going to charge later, maybe it’s time to do it now before it.

You know, they add another subscription level because I can just see that. So Shayla goes, I’ve seen people on threads I’m not following, but they show more commonly if someone you follow interacts with the post. Interesting.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Shayla’s really cranking out the threads usage here.

Jeff Sieh: She’s going after mom is

Peg Fitzpatrick: what she is.

How many followers do you have now, Shayla?

Jeff Sieh: [00:51:00] So, it’s really interesting. So, So, do you think, what do you see Peg as a person? Challenge or drawback with the adoption of Instagram threads. Not just that we have to go do something else on another platform. But, do you see any downside, as a business person, and like if you had a client said, come up to you and said, Peg, should I get on threads?

Would you say, wait? Or would you say, go for it, get your name, you know, just kind of hold it, wait till it kind of smooths out, or would you say, jump on in?

Peg Fitzpatrick: I would say jump in. I don’t think people can take your name, like I said, but, That’s not confirmed because it’s connected with your Instagram account, but it used to be, I mean, you have to have a Facebook account to have a Facebook page.

So we’ll see how they’re connected. Like you have to have the personal profile to have the page. So it’s sort of similar, you know, like you have an Instagram account and you can just transfer your data. I would say if you’re a business and you’re on Instagram that you should do it. I [00:52:00] haven’t figured out how to be logged into a different account.

There’s no account switching thing. So that’s a little bit clunky right now.

Conor Brown: That’s on the list. The head of Instagram said that that was a feature on the list, kind of like on Instagram, you just click at the bottom.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Yep. Yeah, but it’s not there now, so that’s kind of one challenge.

Conor Brown: I think for a lot of people, maybe, might be transitioning over from Twitter.

You know, we talked about it before. They’re, they’re kind of done with Twitter and with everything that’s happening. So how do you see threads potentially affecting not only the user base, but, but the platform? Of, of Twitter in the long

Peg Fitzpatrick: run. But the what of Twitter I missed the last part. The

Conor Brown: popularity of, of Twitter and their use.

Peg Fitzpatrick: I think if people stay on threads and they like it and it’s a good experience, people are gonna stay there. I think the people that are still happy with the current ownership of Twitter and love everything about that [00:53:00] particular. Conversations and those things, they’re gonna stay there. Mm-hmm. , I think you’re splitting the population and I think it’s already been done in my opinion.

There’s people who would’ve been, you know, the second that he start, he fired. Everybody at Twitter were like, oh my God, we need to go somewhere else. But most of those people are still there. You know, there’s a lot of people who didn’t, who didn’t wanna be there, but still stay there. Stephen King loves Twitter and he tweets, obviously.

He’s a great writer. I haven’t checked to see, my guess is that he hopped right over to threads and carried that on. So I think that there’s a percentage of people who will still stay on Twitter, but I think there’s a lot of people who are looking for something that wasn’t so controlled. And, you know, I don’t follow Elon Musk on Twitter, and every time I go on, I see his stuff.

He puts himself in your feed all the time. There’s no avoiding it. So, I hope it’ll be better. I hope it’ll just be a better experience and stay that way, but it’s brand [00:54:00] spankin new,

Jeff Sieh: so. So what will your strategy be, Peg, personally? Will you, will you stop posting on Twitter or you continue to go? To both places for a while and eventually just migrate to threads, or will you always have some sort of presence on Twitter since you have so many followers?

Peg Fitzpatrick: I don’t post as much as I used to on Twitter. I used to spend a lot of time curating a lot of content and sharing a lot of things, and I just don’t do that really anymore. I share a little bit. So, I still have my Twitter, I can’t, I don’t know, I mean eventually maybe I would just get rid of it, but I do have a book coming out, so I was hoping that would be a great place to market my book to my 60, 000 followers, but how many people will see it on there?

I don’t know. So we’ll see if my book, well, you know, how would a book launch go on threads? I don’t know, we’ll see.

Jeff Sieh: By the way, if you want to sign up for Pig’s Book, pigsoffetric. com forward slash book buzz. Go sign up. And

Peg Fitzpatrick: it’s an, it’s an email list and email list you actually own and you can keep that and send people things.

So don’t forget [00:55:00] about your blog and your email list people when you’re thinking about your social, because I think threads is amazing and it’s fun and everybody loves it. But if you really want to contact people. Email’s a good, good way to do

Jeff Sieh: it. Well, pal, Eric says, he goes, I posted on Twitter this week about threads.

So, yeah. And he’s a, he’s big on Twitter, and he has for a long time. But he, this last, listen, I wanted to talk about this last part just before we move on to talking about your book a little bit, Peg, is I asked on threads, you know, what’s going to look like this weekend? And I’m really curious what you guys think.

Is there going to be an activity drop this week on Twitter? And will it, you know, do you think Threads is going to continue to go up this weekend? What are your predictions for that?

Peg Fitzpatrick: It’s still going to, people are, people are excited to see people on there and they’re, they’re hopping on right away. And people are on there all day too, I’ve noticed.

Like people are on there later, people are posting in the morning like, Oh my God, I’m so tired. So I would say that it’s going to keep going for a while [00:56:00] until, you know, we’ll see if it even, it’ll probably even out at a certain point. But right now I think people are still excited about it. So I think they’re going to be there.

Jeff Sieh: By the way, if you aren’t following us on Threads, make sure you go follow Connor Brown, WDW Opinion over there, Jeff Sieh, I’m over there, Peg is there give us a follow, say you watch this show, let us know that you watch it, any questions and comments

Peg Fitzpatrick: that You

can respond to people, but if you at mention people, you have a much better rate of getting a response.

Jeff Sieh: So I want to take some time to talk about how I think you’re kind of crazy for launching a book on social media because we’ve already had a big change that you’re going to have to fix. But she’s got a new book launch coming up.

We teased it, and I think I even put in the post what the proposed title is going to be. Of course, that can change. But Peg, tell us about this book, you know, and why you decided to write it. I mean, why this book? [00:57:00]

Peg Fitzpatrick: Why this book? Well, I wrote The Artist Social Media with with Guy. That was… You know, almost it was eight years ago that that was published.

And obviously a lot of things have changed. But the biggest difference between this book and my first book is that this is for small business owners. So this is The first book was the art of social media. It was power tips for power users. And those were bite sized small tips where you could take a tip and learn a thing and do a thing.

And my new book for small businesses, which is tentatively the art of small business social media, but we’ll see, or a social, the publisher’s playing with that. I don’t really know what the, where that’s going to land up, but the book is for how to market for small businesses. From A to Z. So it starts at the beginning and explains all of it.

Like how to build your brand, what a brand is on social media, how to translate your offline stuff online, and then literally all the steps. And it’s not the things that you can just like Google this to do this. I don’t go step by step. This is how you set up [00:58:00] a Facebook page. This is how you do this. I talk about the overall strategies and how to just do everything from getting started to creating content, to creating, you know, Editorial calendars and just really doing everything.

So yes, it is always, you know, a thing when you start, when you write a social media book. Things change that happens. Our first book didn’t have anything about TikTok in it. That was like big in between there. So, I mean, obviously those things change, but the point of this book is not about tips and tactics for specific.

platforms, but how to be, I like to say platform agnostic and create your brand. So it works everywhere, which we’ve kind of talked about in here. Like, are you gonna, you know, cut and paste the same strategies that you have here to do here? You can’t really, that’s why we’re still on the wait and see, communicate, talk to people and have fun stage.

Even if you’re a brand, you know, ask questions post funny things. But, I wouldn’t [00:59:00] dive into your big strategy yet. Like I think today, if people saw, you know, a whole bunch of brand pushing sales, they would. Probably on all of the brand, but that being said, people love that on Instagram. People love brands.

They love sales coupons and all of that on Instagram. So brands specifically should do a little wait and see for this. But so that’s what the book is about. It’s, it’s how to do marketing for small business owners. It’s going to be like the little hand guide that you wished that you already had, but you know, really needed And why now?

Because after the pandemic, we saw so many businesses locally closed that just didn’t translate online. They didn’t have, they didn’t have any way to connect with their customers. They didn’t have an email list. They didn’t, they couldn’t, they didn’t have anywhere where they could post. We’re going to be closed today because all of our staff is sick or, and then you would go to the business and it was closed and then you were frustrated and then you.

you know, how many times are you going to go back to a [01:00:00] store that’s closed in the middle of the day before you say, forget it. And then later that’s just gone forever. And I just, I grew up in a small town and I love small businesses and I love them in my community. I do shop it online and shop at big stores too, but I love my local florist.

I love all my local things, local bookstores. And you know, I really wanted to help all of them succeed. Yeah,

Conor Brown: Mr. Fred with a great message there. Tactics win battles, but strategies win wars. Gonna grab your book. So, can you, Mr. Fred, can you tease or give a little sneak peek into maybe some of the strategies you talk about in the book, Peg?

Or a favorite one.

Peg Fitzpatrick: Really, you know, the, the biggest thing is the platform agnostic piece. I think that’s something that people don’t talk about enough. I think people are like, how are we going to be good on this? How are we going to be, you still have to think about those things. Like how does your brand. Translate to [01:01:00] Instagram or threads or Tic Tac, or like, what are we going to post?

Those kinds of things, but it’s really more about figuring out who you are and what your audience needs and how you’re going to translate that and how you’re going to connect with them where they are. Because you can say, well, I’m going to go here and I’m going to talk about X. And it can be totally wrong.

Kind of like I talked about with my personal brand. These things are popular here, but they’re not popular there. I manage a brand social media and I post on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and Pinterest, Pinterest brings us blog traffic, but Facebook is our, still our biggest channel and that’s where our audience is.

That the Facebook page was the first thing that we had, and that’s the most popular. And I don’t run ads or anything on there anymore, but that’s just where our audience connects the most. LinkedIn is growing a lot and it’s an industry where there’s not like an exponential amount of people. It’s not [01:02:00] like Facebook where we’re like, 10 million people can use us, right?

This is a smaller industry. So it’s really kind of figuring out all of those things. And I, it’s really just like, things that I haven’t seen altogether in one book and I’ve read. A lot of marketing books because it’s my job. So, you know, and I like that. And the other thing that’s different is that I’ve actually worked in social media since day one that I’ve ever posting.

I’ve managed a brand and done all these other things. So I use it every single day. I’m not a person who is just deciding I’m a marketer and I’m a social media. So, again, if you’re doing, you’re doing a business or you’re in the business, f zipper is was a container where, if somebody wants to You can find that, that online, that online.

Net.. it… So, just that in the field experience sets my advice apart, I feel. I agree.

Jeff Sieh: That’s why we have you on the show. Make [01:03:00] sure you guys go to pegfitzpatrick. com forward slash book dash buzz. For you guys on the podcast, listeners, 

Thank you guys so much for being here. I appreciate our sponsors, Ecamm, they’re another, they’re another way to, they’re great, they’re on threads, I saw them the other day having conversation they do such a great job with building community, but they also have a great sale going on right now, if you haven’t checked them out, and you want to take your presentations, your live video, all that stuff that has to do with creating your kind of video online, Thank you This Ecamm can help you do that.

They have a sale right now, so if you haven’t done that, check them out before I go there to socialmedianewslive. com Ecamm, check them out with this special sale. You can see it right at the top of the screen. They have a special code you can enter. Do that and check them out. And with that, we thank all of you guys for being here.

I appreciate Eric for stopping by. Jim, the deal casters, Chris Gary, Fred, everybody who stopped by, I appreciate you. 

[01:04:00] It’s Shayla. And Shayla, yes, Shayla’s not by. Shayla popped out the questions. She did. She had some great ones. I appreciate you as well. And with that, we’ll see you guys next time. Thanks for stopping by.

See you over on Threads. See ya. Follow us on Threads. Bye.