A Close Examination of Each of the Major Social Media Channels in 2024

Doug Downs (00:06):

Maurice Ravel's. Bolero was composed in 1928 and it was a smashing success right away that surprised the composer more than anyone. Rave was quite convinced orchestras would refuse to play it 15 minutes long. The same melody all throughout the same rhythm. No additional movements. That's weird. As the story goes, when he first started composing it, he sat at a piano with a friend and playing with one finger, played the outline of the melody and said, what do you think of this? I'm going to try and repeat it a number of times without any development as an abstract concept, Bolero and social media have a lot in common. Bolero has this gradual buildup, starting with just a snare drum and eventually incorporating the full orchestra. Social media began with simple platforms that allowed basic interactions, but they've evolved into complex ecosystems. Bolero has a cumulative effect layering instrument upon instrument to create a rich tapestry of sound, social media layers, interactions, connections, and content. Each user has their own small contribution, but in aggregate, they create a vast network of information and social interaction. Bolero builds to a crescendo and a climactic point, much like how social media campaigns or movements can start small, but gain momentum through user participation leading to real world change. Bolero is polarizing. People tend to love it or hate it. Social media, obviously. Both Bolero and social media are fluid, not static. They evolve and change over time and both appeal to newer generations all the time. Bolero saw massive sales with the movie 10 with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek, when it was released in 1979, Torville and Dean used a shortened version of it for their gold medal ice dancing at the 1984 Olympics. The song was used at the torch lighting ceremony for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, and Nintendo was going to use it as the main theme for the first Legend of Zelda video game, but opted not to at the time. Due to copyright concerns today on stories and strategies, a fresh look at the big social media channels we all use right now. Beautiful harmony or out of tune. My name is Doug. Do a quick note before we start. I want to say hello and thank you to Ashlie EM. Ashley on Apple Podcasts in the United States. Left us a five star rating and an awesome review. She says, "I love listening to this podcast. I've gained valuable strategic insights from multiple different episodes. Keep these coming. Excellent work here." Ashley, you rock, and you don't know how much I appreciate this. It means a lot to me personally. My guest this week is Stephanie Huston, joining today from Philadelphia, PA Hey Stephanie.

Stephanie Huston (03:57):

Hello. Hello, Doug. How are you doing?

Doug Downs (03:59):

Good. How are things in Philly? Big Eagles fan, Phillies fan flyers? Where do your allegiances lie?

Stephanie Huston (04:08):

My allegiances actually lie in New York at East Coast Triple threat. So I was born in New Jersey, raised in Philly and adult in New York City, so I'm sure my dad's going to be listening. So it's Yankees Giants for the teams, but I will be going to a Phillies game on Saturday, so I'll make up for it

Doug Downs (04:29):

As a Canadian, when I hear that Yankees term or see the brand, it's like the Death Star to me. That's just go Blue Jays, Stephanie, you're the founder and owner of Stephanie Houston, LLC, and it all began in 2008 when you started building your personal brand and that led you to become a top earner in the New York City digital advertising industry. You've published articles in the Huffington Post Business Insider Refinery 29 and others, and there's a banner at the top of your website and it says, don't click here. Right? It's bait people, it's bait, and you know that going in. Don't click here, blink, blink, blink. So you know what I did? I clicked, that's how you and I met, and still at this moment, I checked it before we started recording. If you go to that page on Stephanie's website, there's an offer for a free social media audit mini sprint, which I took you up on, and I get this analysis a short time later of all my channels and I'm reading it. I was like, whoa, whoa, this is, and so you and I spent almost an hour together. I think it was a Zoom call, one of those, and that's, anyway, we went through point through the channels and we thought we should do a podcast episode together. Just analyzing the channels in general. Not my channels, but the channels that are out there. So ready to go.

Stephanie Huston (05:56):

Ready to go.

Doug Downs (05:57):

Okay. Let's start with the one that's become real controversial, has been for a long time, but never lets us down X, which was controversial before Elon Musk to be fair, but how is X doing?

Stephanie Huston (06:11):

Yes, that is true. It has had his fair share of news since the start. Okay, so I'm coming from the perspective of the solopreneur, the small business owner, the entrepreneur with a tiny team that's building their company brand and probably their personal brand too. I think X has had its controversies, but as Gary V would say, I'm platform agnostic. I don't care what billionaire is making a mess of things. I'm still a big fan of X as a platform and really consider it critical for big or small brand building. And we talked about, I think X is still hands down the best platform to connect directly with and get noticed by journalists, authors, influencers, big brands, sports teams, et cetera,

Doug Downs (07:03):

Customer service. If they won't answer their email,

Stephanie Huston (07:08):

That makes it necessary for all big brands, whether it's good things or bad things. I send shout outs to Asana and Grammarly when I like their updates and get tweets back from their product team. So it's a great way to connect with super fans as well, not just the complaining fans.

Doug Downs (07:26):

And I think politically in Canada, we had the federal budget come out and all the political parties right away, they need to get on social media to give their narrative there, this is good and this will be helpful for young people. And then the opposite voice, no, this is terrible and this is going to kill jobs. Political parties want to control the narrative, and let's face it, they're doing it on X because it has that news real kind of quality, doesn't it?

Stephanie Huston (07:54):

Yes. Yep. Twitter is where I go for the real time updates and all the opinions. If a news story is breaking, Twitter is just hands down where I'm going to go first. And I'm probably finding it out from Twitter first before any news platform is reporting it so you don't have to love it. But I think still take advantage of it. Tweets are going viral all the time and people are repurposing their tweets content on other platforms too, so it's just another way to do

Doug Downs (08:30):

It. And real quick, how many years until we actually call it X and not Twitter? Five years, 20 years?

Stephanie Huston (08:38):

Twitter forever. I'm hoping someone's going to change it back. I'm just like Why? Do anything else you want to it, but

Doug Downs (08:45):

Let's switch over to the meta banner now. Facebook still the king or queen of total reach for social media?

Stephanie Huston (08:53):

Yes. Yeah, I was actually looking up just the general overall monthly active user statistics for each one of these. And I dunno, I feel like people feel that Facebook is dead, is dying out, but I think it's obviously far from it. Maybe it's just the Gen Z folks that I'm talking to, but I think it has 3 billion monthly active users, and especially with IG, Instagram and Threads floating it now, it's not going anywhere. So I think a lot of people in my circle are avoiding it like the plague, but it is still worth posting your content too, especially because Facebook does force you to create a company page to have your Instagram page, so you have to have it might as well be posting content to there as well. I've seen a lot of stuff just go unexpectedly viral and get a lot of traction, so you might as well be involved in that as well.

Doug Downs (09:54):

And I'm on both of those, but both X and Facebook, for me, from a business standpoint, I don't pay a lot of, as you know, I don't pay a lot of attention to those two. One I do like is Instagram, but has Instagram peaked, has it kind of topped out or is there room still for it to grow?

Stephanie Huston (10:15):

Ooh, I think there's still room for Instagram to grow. I think they've been struggling to find their own within the TikTok growth realm, and they have, they're number three on the list with 2 billion monthly active users. And I know millennials are still holding strong for that demographic, myself included. I watch a lot of my tiktoks on reels, so I know it's what a lot of brands are doing. But I think brand Instagram is still now just generally considered as a must have. Maybe one of the most annoying things to figure out with feeds and now reels. But really any small business owner brand or influencer needs to have that kind of chunk of real estate on Instagram. And I recommend, I know we talked about this with you, is that entrepreneurs should really be building up their personal brands along with their company brands. So the accounts can support each other, but you can share different types of personal behind the scenes content. And I've noticed just that my personal professional brands tend to get a lot more traction than just a, Hey, I'm a business and I'm selling something type of accounts,

Doug Downs (11:38):

And what kind of posts? I've noticed carousels a lot of people posting carousels and they video and photo carousels. That seems to be the trend.

Stephanie Huston (11:47):

Yes. And carousels are really popular on TikTok too. And so obviously now at this point, Instagram openly competing with TikTok in that video real and really prioritizing pushing reels and videos. So if you are posting carousels, which do well because people are swiping through, so you're getting just that more engagement time as you're going and using popular trending sounds on reels too, to get traction has worked really well. And I've been getting up to 20,000 monthly impressions on Instagram using that sound strategy with just choosing anything that's trending.

Doug Downs (12:31):

Oh, that's so interesting. And again, to do it as a brand, just give people a value nugget. Don't tease them. Don't say, click on my website kind of thing. Just give them something of value, right?

Stephanie Huston (12:43):

Yes. Yeah, exactly. You want to, I know one of my big things that I am really excited about is just this is where the fun fluff, real casual content comes in. People are so quick to feel like everything has to be a sales pitch, a call to action, a click here, but just focus ont providing.

Doug Downs (13:07):

We're supposed to always do CTAs, aren't we?

Stephanie Huston (13:09):

Exactly. But I don't think so. I think especially with Gen Z coming in hot in the market and with their spending power, they want to see the more casual, fun, organic behind the scenes stuff. Their radar goes off when they see that perfectly designed thing to try to sell you something

Doug Downs (13:36):

Perfect. And still with meta threads I've gone through this is useless and stupid period to, I'm coming around with this threads thing. Am I part of the mainstream here?

Stephanie Huston (13:50):

Yes. Yeah, I think so. I think right now it has like 130 million active users, so it is at the bottom of the list, but it was less than a year ago when meta kind of hard launched threads. I think it's July 20, 23 x was going through some type of phase, and everyone just kind of not jumped ship, but Instagram met, it made it really quick and easy to register. And it was interesting to see how they played the launch and leveraged Instagram and Facebook users to become the fastest growing app ever. I think it was Instagram for example, took 15 months to get to that 30 million user mark, whereas it took threads one day.

Doug Downs (14:38):

Okay. Some momentum built by Instagram, by Facebook, right? They harness some of that.

Stephanie Huston (14:43):

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And I've been approaching threads the same way I do with every new platform and will, for every platform that comes, I've created a profile I'm observing, I'm keeping an eye on things like at first they didn't have hashtags and now they've integrated hashtags into posts.

Doug Downs (15:03):

You can put one hashtag per post, or not per thread, but per post within the

Stephanie Huston (15:09):

Thread, and then it's just a link to it or however. And then just liking repost and commenting on relevant content while I figure things out. But I have noticed an uptick of the brands and the influencers and the entrepreneurs that I follow, creating content on threads as well.

Doug Downs (15:29):

One thing with threads is some of my clients use Hootsuite. They've got some that use Buffer I actually use later, which is cool. But there are all kinds of scheduling. I've left thousands of them out here. There are all kinds of scheduling apps. Threads isn't on many of the big ones yet, but they're working on it.

Stephanie Huston (15:48):

Yes. Yeah, same here. The one that I use too as well, social media doesn't have threads yet, so that's also my kind of tipping point from like, well, I'll start scheduling content on that when I can actually have content scheduled and just observing for now.

Doug Downs (16:02):

And it's still cool to schedule content. I don't gotten so live feely and casual that I almost get nervous should I really be scheduling this stuff? But it is still cool to use a scheduler for social media.

Stephanie Huston (16:17):

I think so. I mean, I think that it's cool to be efficient, cost effective and efficient with your time in managing social media. And I think that you can still be that cool, casual, organic and still have it planned out, but just for me, being a neurodivergent entrepreneur with a DHD, I can get 30 posts done in 90 minutes versus 30 posts done in an hour every day. So definitely recommend being able to be strategic in planning it out and proactively batch creating content.

Doug Downs (16:56):

TikTok still controversial, especially in the us, that has really sparked some controversy. I admit I like TikTok a lot and one of my best engagement channels next to LinkedIn, but how is TikTok and can you crystal ball whether we're going to be able to use it in a year from now?

Stephanie Huston (17:15):

Yes. I don't think it's going anywhere. I think TikTok is so controversial because it is so powerful. It's empowered billions of people to create, produce, edit their own series streams of unique video content and share knowledge, interests, ideas, passions, and information in a way that was never possible before in that video format. Of course, you have YouTube who is still a big player, but the video editing to it, they didn't give it to the people. So it's been cool to see it evolve and really see now empowering every generation to share their own story their way. So I think people are going to make the fight to keep it around.

Doug Downs (18:07):

And its main audience is Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Those are the two main targets for TikTok?

Stephanie Huston (18:13):

Yes. Yeah. Okay. And then a lot of folks are posting their tiktoks onto Instagram reels as well and repurposing it. And so there's that joke that millennials see,

Doug Downs (18:26):

I do

Stephanie Huston (18:27):

That. I'm like, I watch a lot of I tiktoks on reels, and then that's a same for a lot of millennials.

Doug Downs (18:34):

I kind of see YouTube as a social media channel, a big one. It's a massive search engine. Am I in the right vein? It's at least sort of a social media channel.

Stephanie Huston (18:45):

Yeah, I think so. I'm right there with you. I think YouTube is an integral part of any brand or company's social media because I feel like there's its own world within the comments for so many creators and really being able to build a community within your subscribers there. And so I think it's very social in that sense, but it's the number two with 2.5 billion monthly active users. So there's definitely a whole ecosystem within YouTube in itself. And my advice is even if you're not actively creating content for YouTube, have a profile created because eventually there's going to be some form of horizontal long form content, whether it's a podcast, a keynote speaker, something you created, and you'll just want to have something ready to be able to post that or get tagged and collaborated in that. I've been posting videos randomly for 11 years, and I've had one video, get half a million views on

Doug Downs (19:58):

YouTube. YouTube, yours are good. Yours are excellent,

Stephanie Huston (20:00):

By the way, just random travel ones and stuff and not really concentrating on that yet, but then it's there and it's just building in parallel while you're working on everything else.

Doug Downs (20:10):

It sort of feels like YouTube 15, 20 years ago, we all kind of went, whoa, we need a website. You get one of those website things. It sort of feels like YouTube is right there. We need a YouTube channel. Yeah, we need a YouTube channel.

Stephanie Huston (20:25):

Yes. I feel like everyone, that's one of the ones that so many companies have started and stopped so many times because they don't realize how much time and energy it takes to actually produce it and get the thumbnail with the catchy title and the catchy image and the description with the keywords. So it's a whole beast within itself that you need to decide if you want to commit to that,

Doug Downs (20:50):

But worth it. Okay. LinkedIn might be my favorite hands down social media channel. Yes,

Stephanie Huston (20:56):

Yes. I'm right there with you. LinkedIn is hands down, one of my favorites. It's a social network for businesses and entrepreneurs and people building their careers, and it's one of my favorite places to be where people who get your industry and your niche, things that you can connect with them. I've been connected with professors and bosses that I've met 20 years ago and still able to keep in touch with them in a way that was never possible before. And so I think that it's such an important platform to capitalize on whether you are in a career or building a business,

Doug Downs (21:40):

And it just feels like people are so polite there. I remember I had one little sort of semi nastys comment to something I'd put, and I said, Hey, this isn't Twitter. People just seem to be more collected about themselves when they're on LinkedIn.

Stephanie Huston (21:55):

Yes. Yeah, it's way more professional and inspirational. Yeah,

Doug Downs (21:59):

Pinterest, I've dabbled in Pinterest, but at least I don't think I'm on it. I certainly don't go on it, but this is one I probably should be looking at. Pinterest.

Stephanie Huston (22:10):

Yes, Pinterest is growing. They have almost like 500 million monthly active users, so they're getting up there. I think they're above Twitter in that sense. So I feel like I've been saying every platform is my favorite, but Pinterest really is my favorite platform. Even for, I guess for the mental health creative aspect of things of you're not commenting, there's no crazy feeds. You can kind of get lost in designing whatever image or whatever board that you want to go after. And it does have a 76% skews, 76% female. So especially for any brands that want to target that female demographic, that's the place to be.

Doug Downs (22:56):

That's our podcast demographic. So we should definitely get on Pinterest with this podcast. And real fast, medium, I have no experience with Medium.

Stephanie Huston (23:08):

I love Medium. So Medium is basically like a public blog platform, is how I would describe it. So basically, if you have a blog on your website, for the most part, your blog is never going to have as much impressions reach potential than Medium, because medium's getting 100 million monthly active users and it has been flooded now with more celebrities, journalists and getting features from that. But blog posts can and will go viral on Medium. People can share it, they can comment on it and get picked up by national and local publishing outlets. And that's how I've gotten most of my articles published by the bigger outlets by getting traction on Medium first.

Doug Downs (24:00):

Ah, great idea. I'm glad we did this episode hashtag Thank you for your time. Thank

Stephanie Huston (24:06):

You. Thank you. Oh, hashtag grateful.

Doug Downs (24:09):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Stephanie Houston, we've got her contact info in the show notes and that free mini sprint offer on her website. Don't click there, it's right at the top. Do not click Stories and Strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies, podcasts, whatever app you're listening on. One thing you could do for us is follow us on Podchaser and maybe even add us to a list. Podchaser is kind of becoming the IDMB of podcast. Really cool. There's a link to this podcast in Pod Chaser in the show notes to this episode. That would be awesome. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.