Press — Social Global Grind

The Political Poppy: Cambridge Analytica Changed How Democracy Works.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:00:06 GMT

Here Is Why 2026 Is the Year to Pay Attention.

The Political Poppy: Cambridge Analytica Changed How Democracy Works. Here Is Why 2026 Is the Year to Pay Attention.

By Francesca Alexander, Founder, The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind

Part of The Silicon Poppy Series

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

In 2016, an election was influenced not by the loudest candidate or the biggest advertising budget but by a company most people had never heard of, using data most people did not know had been collected, to deliver messages most people believed they had chosen to seek out themselves.

Cambridge Analytica did not hack democracy with a technical exploit. It hacked the human mind with a psychological one. And the reason it worked so devastatingly well is the same reason the conditions that enabled it deserve our full attention in 2026. Most people still do not have the tools to see it coming.

This article is about why that matters. Why AI is the antidote. And why the women who are most resistant to learning these tools are the ones most at risk from the systems being built right now to manipulate exactly them.

What Cambridge Analytica Actually Did

Let us start with what actually happened because the story got buried under the scandal and most people came away with a vague sense of wrongdoing without understanding the specific mechanism.

Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of approximately 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent. Not their public posts. Their psychological profiles. Their fears, their values, their political pressure points, their susceptibility to specific emotional triggers.

They built a model called OCEAN, measuring openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, that could predict with remarkable accuracy how a person would respond to a specific message framed in a specific way. Then they used that model to deliver micro-targeted political advertising so precisely calibrated to individual psychological profiles that the message did not feel like propaganda. It felt personal. It felt true. It felt like something the recipient had arrived at themselves.

The outrage was not manufactured. It was engineered. The fear was not invented. It was located, amplified, and directed.

And the people it worked on most effectively were the ones who had no framework for questioning the information they were receiving because it felt so specifically, uncomfortably true about things they already half believed.

That is not a story about gullibility. That is a story about vulnerability in the absence of tools.

Why the Conditions That Enabled It Have Only Become More Sophisticated

Many of the underlying conditions that enabled Cambridge Analytica, massive data collection, behavioural profiling, and algorithmic targeting, have become even more sophisticated since 2016.

The psychological modelling is more precise. The delivery mechanisms are faster and more personalised. Information is now increasingly mediated through AI assistants, recommendation systems, personalised search results, and algorithmic feeds that make it genuinely difficult to distinguish between what you chose to seek and what a system decided you should see.

The misinformation ecosystem has also learned something important from 2016. It no longer needs to invent outright falsehoods. It needs only to select, frame, and amplify information that is technically true but strategically incomplete. A real statistic, stripped of context. A genuine quote, removed from its surrounding argument. A documented event, presented without the history that would change its meaning entirely.

That kind of manipulation is significantly harder to detect than an outright lie. And it is significantly easier to produce at scale than it was a decade ago.

Both New Zealand and the United States have significant electoral cycles ahead. Both countries have populations that are increasingly dependent on digital platforms for news and information. Both have citizenries that are, in many cases, consuming information without the tools to interrogate where it came from, who decided they should see it, and what it was designed to make them feel.

That is not a technology problem. It is a discernment problem. And discernment is learnable.

The Silicon Poppy Connection

Here is where this connects directly to everything I have been writing in this series.

The women who are most resistant to learning AI are not resistant because they are incapable. They are resistant because of a century of structural conditioning that positioned technology as belonging to someone else. The Silicon Poppy. The digital version of Tall Poppy Syndrome that keeps women out of the rooms where the tools of the future are being built and used.

And those same women, the ones who have opted out of AI fluency, are the ones most vulnerable to AI-powered manipulation.

Because here is what the tools actually give you when you learn to use them properly. Not just productivity. Not just efficiency. Discernment. The ability to interrogate a piece of information, trace its origins, identify its framing, pressure-test its claims, and arrive at a conclusion based on evidence rather than emotional engineering.

Modern AI research tools, including Claude, Perplexity, and others, can help you research the source of a claim, find the citations behind a news story, and present the strongest argument on multiple sides of a political question so you can see the whole picture rather than the slice someone decided you should see.

That is not a political act. That is a civic one. And it is available to every person with a phone and a willingness to ask the question.

The Cambridge Analytica operation worked because its targets did not know they were targets. The antidote to that is knowing how the system works well enough to recognise when it is working on you.

What Discernment Actually Looks Like in Practice

Let me make this concrete.

You see a headline that makes you angry. Before you share it, you open an AI research tool, and you ask: what is the full context of this story? Who published it and what is their track record? What are the strongest counterarguments to the claim being made? What does the primary source actually say versus how it is being reported?

Those four questions take approximately four minutes. They will not always change your conclusion. But they will change the quality of your conclusion. They will tell you whether the anger you are feeling is a response to a genuine injustice or a response to a carefully engineered trigger designed to move you in a specific direction.

Voting from fear is not the same as voting from values.

The systems being built today increasingly reward emotional reaction over careful reflection. Discernment is what allows us to tell the difference. That distinction matters enormously in an election year. It matters in New Zealand where the policy decisions being made right now about AI, about governance, about who benefits from the technological transition, will shape the country for the next decade. It matters in the United States where the information environment has become so contested that the truth is genuinely difficult to locate without tools designed to help you find it.

The Citizenry Argument

I wrote recently about the New Zealand government cutting 9,000 public service jobs with voluntary AI guidelines and no binding governance framework. I called it a citizenry failure as much as a government one. The decision was made in a room the citizenry was not paying enough attention to fill.

The same argument applies here.

Democratic systems depend on an informed citizenry making considered decisions based on accurate information. When the information environment is manipulated and the citizenry does not have the tools to detect the manipulation, the outcome is not democracy. It is the performance of democracy with the results shaped by whoever had access to the better data and the more sophisticated targeting.

Cambridge Analytica understood this. The operations that are being built right now understand it too.

The question is whether the citizenry will develop the discernment to understand it before the next significant electoral moment arrives. In New Zealand. In the United States. And in every country where the same infrastructure is quietly operating.

What You Can Do Before the Next Election

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a call to a specific, practical, immediately actionable kind of civic engagement.

Learn to use AI research tools not just as productivity tools but as discernment tools. Understand that they can show you multiple perspectives on a contested question in the time it would take you to find a single article. That capacity for rapid, comprehensive research is one of the most powerful civic tools available to ordinary people right now.

Develop the habit of asking who benefits from you believing this before you share a piece of information. Not as paranoia. As hygiene.

Talk about this in your communities. At your business breakfasts. Around your kitchen tables. With the women in your network who have been putting off learning these tools because they felt too complicated or too foreign or not quite for them.

Because the sophistication of the manipulation being deployed right now is not matched by the sophistication of the public's defences against it. And that gap is where Cambridge Analytica lived. And it is where whatever comes next will live too, unless we close it.

Discernment is not a political position. It is a pre-political capacity. The foundation underneath every informed decision, every considered vote, every piece of information shared with confidence rather than fear.

Build it now. Teach it to the people around you. And refuse to let the Silicon Poppy keep you out of the most important civic conversation of our generation.

Your Five-Minute Discernment Checklist

Before you believe it or share it, ask these five questions.

Who published this and what is their track record?

What is the original primary source, not the article reporting on it, but the actual source?

What important context is missing from how this is being framed?

Who benefits if you believe this?

What is the strongest opposing argument and does it change anything?

Five questions. Four minutes. The difference between informed and engineered.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at socialglobalgrind.com and join the community at hustleandglow.com and linkin.bio/francescahustles

Claude Just Got Smarter. Here Is What Claude Opus 5 Means for Your Business.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:21:36 GMT

Claude Just Got Smarter. Here Is What Claude Opus 5 Means for Your Business.

Claude Just Got Smarter. Here Is What Claude Opus 5 Means for Your Business.

By Francesca Alexander, Founder, The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind

On July 24, 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5. And as a Claude Partner I want to translate what that actually means in plain language for every business owner and founder who is still figuring out how to make AI work for them.

Because the announcement is full of benchmark scores and technical language that can make your eyes glaze over. So let me cut through it and tell you what actually changed and why it matters to you.

The Short Version

Claude Opus 5 is a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.

In plain language, that means you are getting significantly more intelligence for the same cost you were already paying. It provides greatly improved performance for the same cost as its predecessor, Opus 4.8.

For a small business or solo founder, that is not a small thing. That is the difference between premium AI capability being reserved for large enterprise budgets and being genuinely accessible to anyone building something real.

What It Actually Does Better

There are three areas where the improvement is most relevant for business owners who are not developers or data scientists.

It completes complex tasks more reliably.

Claude Opus 5 is much stronger at verifying its own work and iterating carefully until it succeeds. In practice, that means when you give it a multi-step assignment, it does not just produce an answer and stop. It checks itself, catches its own errors, and keeps refining until the result is actually finished.

Think about what that means for the kind of work you do every day. A proposal that needs multiple rounds of review. A research task that requires cross-referencing several sources. A content piece that needs to meet a specific brief. Opus 5 stays in the task longer and comes back with something closer to done rather than something that still needs significant human rework.

It handles knowledge work with greater precision.

On ARC-AGI 3, an evaluation where the model has to solve novel problems, Opus 5's score is three times as high as the next-best model.

On Zapier AutomationBench, which measures whether models can complete business tasks from start to finish, Opus 5's pass rate is around 1.5 times the next-best model for the same cost per task.

For founders that second benchmark is the one worth paying attention to. Business tasks from start to finish. Not just answering a question but completing an actual piece of work. That is the gap Claude Opus 5 is closing.

It is the most aligned and trustworthy model Anthropic has built.

This one matters and it does not get talked about enough in the AI conversation. During pre-deployment testing, Anthropic's automated behavioral audit found Opus 5 to be their most aligned model to date. It exhibits the lowest rates of deceptive behavior and is the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse.

For anyone using AI in a client-facing or professional context, that is not a technical footnote. That is the assurance that the tool is working with your interests in mind rather than optimising for outputs that sound good but mislead.

What Has Not Changed

The price. Claude Opus 5 is available today on all platforms, priced at five dollars per million input tokens and twenty-five dollars per million output tokens, the same as Opus 4.8.

You get meaningfully more capability for the same investment. That is a straightforward win for every business that has already been using Claude in their workflow.

What This Means for the Silicon Poppy Series

I want to say something specific to the women who have been following this series and who are still sitting on the edge of deciding whether to start learning AI properly.

The tools are getting better, faster, and more accessible with every release. The gap between the women who are building AI fluency now and the ones who are still waiting is widening with every announcement like this one.

Claude Opus 5 is not a product for developers. It is designed to be used every day. It is the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro. That means the version of Claude that millions of everyday users open on a Tuesday morning just got significantly more capable.

The on-ramp has never been shorter. The tools have never been more accessible. And the argument that AI is too complicated, too technical, or not quite for you has never been weaker.

Developers can get started with Claude Opus 5 on the Claude API today. Everyone else can access it through Claude.ai right now.

Come to one of our workshops if you want to learn how to use it properly. The Eventbrite link is live at linkin.bio/francescahustles. The room is small by design. The learning is real.

The model is ready. Now you are too.

Orgasm Is a Business Strategy. Now Hear Me Out.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:45:43 GMT

What Mama Gena's work taught me about desire, decision-making, and why women keep building the wrong thing

Orgasm Is a Business Strategy. Now Hear Me Out.

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

What Mama Gena's work taught me about desire, decision-making, and why women keep building the wrong thing

By Francesca Alexander | Hustle and Glow

I am going to lose some of you in the first line. That is fine. The ones who stay are the ones who need this.

Here is the claim. The reason so many women build businesses that exhaust them, underpay them, and quietly drain the life out of them is that they were never taught to make decisions from desire. They were taught to make decisions from obligation. From fear. From what a good woman is supposed to want. And there is a direct line between that conditioning and the work of a teacher named Regena Thomashauer, who most people know as Mama Gena.

Stay with me. This is a business conversation. It just does not look like the ones you are used to.

The Thing Nobody Taught You About Wanting

Mama Gena built a multi-million dollar company, the School of Womanly Arts, on a single uncomfortable observation. Women have learned how to sidestep their deepest truth, their source, their knowledge, and follow the guidelines of the patriarchal world culture instead. NZ Motorsports

Read that as a business problem, because it is one.

When you build from the patriarchal guidelines, you build what you think you are supposed to build. The offer that looks credible. The pricing that feels modest enough to be palatable. The business model that other people approve of. The yes you gave because saying no felt dangerous. You optimise for being acceptable instead of being alive, and then you wonder why the thing you built feels like a cage with good branding.

Men, broadly, were never trained to override their own wanting. They were trained to pursue it. To name what they want in a room and expect the room to move. Women were trained to do almost the exact opposite, to read the room, manage the room, and quietly shelve their own desire to keep the room comfortable.

That is not a personality difference. That is a competitive disadvantage that was installed on purpose.

Why Pleasure Is Actually the Data

Here is where the orgasm comes in, and here is where I need you to think like a strategist rather than a prude.

Pleasure is information. It is one of the most accurate, least corruptible signals a human being has about what is actually right for them. Your body knows what lights you up before your overthinking, over-conditioned, people-pleasing mind has finished building the case for why you cannot have it.

Mama Gena's entire framework rests on the idea that the absence of the feminine is the absence of pleasure, which is the absence of listening to our desires, our dreams, our feelings. Strip the spiritual language off it and you are left with something every good founder already knows in another context. The data you ignore is the data that sinks you.

Motorsports

Women have been trained to ignore the single clearest data stream they have. The one that says this excites me and that depletes me. This client is worth it and that one is going to cost me my weekends and my joy. This direction is alive and that one is just safe.

She puts it plainly. The more demanding our lives are, the more rigorously we must attend to our pleasure. Not as a reward for the work. As the instrument that tells you whether the work is the right work. NZ Motorsports

What This Looks Like at Your Desk on a Tuesday

Let me make this concrete, because a philosophy that does not change your Tuesday is just a nice feeling.

You are pricing a new offer. The patriarchal-guidelines version asks what is reasonable, what will not upset anyone, what you can justify. The desire version asks what would actually thrill you to be paid, and then treats the flinch you feel at that number as information about your conditioning, not information about your worth.

You are deciding whether to take a client. The trained-woman version weighs whether saying no makes you difficult. The desire version notices that your whole body contracted when you read their email and treats that as a legitimate input, not an inconvenient feeling to override.

You are choosing what to build next. The conditioned version chooses what looks impressive on a website. The desire version chooses what you cannot stop thinking about in the shower, because sustained desire is the only fuel that survives the unglamorous middle of building anything real.

This is not woo. This is risk management. You are simply refusing to discard your most reliable instrument because someone once taught you that wanting things was unbecoming.

The Part Men Have Always Known

There is a reason the boardroom rewards appetite.

Ambition is just desire that society decided to respect when a man holds it. Drive is desire in a suit. Vision is desire that learned to use a slide deck. We celebrate all of it in men without blinking, and then we call the same energy in a woman too much, intense, difficult, a lot.

So women learn to fold it down. To want quietly. To ask for less than they need and apologise for the asking. And then they build businesses that reflect the size of the permission they gave themselves, not the size of the desire they actually carry.

Mama Gena's work, underneath the provocation and the deliberately shocking title, is a permission slip dressed as a reclamation. Her core claim is that women are the greatest untapped resource on the planet, and that reconnecting a woman to her own pleasure and power is the thing no amount of success or education has managed to solve on its own. Lin

kedIn

You can build a perfectly competent business from obligation. Plenty of women have. But the business that actually fits your life, pays you what you are worth, and does not hollow you out to sustain it, that one gets built from desire or it does not get built at all.

The Invitation

I am not asking you to read every page of Mama Gena and agree with all of it. Her work is bold and it is polarising and that is rather the point. I am asking you to take the one principle that is genuinely useful and put it to work.

Desire is a compass. Pleasure is data. The thing that lights you up is not a distraction from the strategy. It is the strategy.

We talk about exactly this kind of inner work inside the Hustle and Glow Network, because the women building the most aligned businesses are not the ones with the best funnels. They are the ones who stopped overriding themselves long enough to hear what they actually wanted, and then had the nerve to build it.

That is the work. It is not soft. It is the hardest, most rigorous thing most of us will ever do.

So here is your homework, and I mean it. The next decision you make in your business this week, ask the question you were trained never to ask. Not is this reasonable. Not will this be approved. Just this. Do I actually want this?

Then build from the answer.

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

On The Hustle and Glow Podcast: The Coded Poppy. We Were Never Encouraged. That Was the Point.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:04:19 GMT

On The Hustle and Glow Podcast:

The Coded Poppy. We Were Never Encouraged. That Was the Point.

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

The Coded Poppy: We Were Never Encouraged. That Was the Point.

By Francesca Alexander, Founder, The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind

Part of The Silicon Poppy Series

I want to start with a sentence that took me a long time to be able to say out loud.

You were not bad at science. You were redirected away from it. And those are two completely different stories.

Most women I know are carrying the first one. The story that says the subject was not for them, that they were not a science person, that technology was always going to belong to someone else. They carry it quietly, as a settled fact about themselves, something decided long before they were old enough to question it.

The truth is almost always the second story. Not a story about ability. A story about a system. And once you see the system clearly, the appropriate response is not shame.

It is anger. The clear-eyed, useful kind.

Here is the history nobody told you. Here is the data from two countries I call home. And here is what we do with what we learn.

Once We Were Welcome. Then We Were Expelled.

Here is the part of the history that almost nobody tells you, and it reframes everything.

Between 1500 and 1800, women lucky enough to gain an education often found a home in science or mathematics. Science was considered a more appropriate discipline for women than the classics. That surprises people when they hear it. It surprised me too.

Then, between the 1850s and 1870s, everything changed.

As science professionalised, it did not simply refuse women admittance. It expelled them by definition from the newly defined field. The logic was circular and devastating. If women could not be professionals, and science was now a profession, then women could not do science. The exclusion was not an accident of the era. It was a direct response to the field becoming powerful. The walls went up precisely because what was behind them had become valuable.

By the 1870s, women could be educated in science but were barred from scientific careers. The justifications given were biology, motherhood, and the absence of precedent. All dressed up as nature. All structural.

The pattern is worth naming clearly because it repeats. Every time a field becomes the seat of power, it grows walls. The walls get a justification that sounds like common sense. Women get redirected toward lower pay and less influence and then told it was their choice.

That pattern did not stop in the 1870s. It is happening right now. In the field of artificial intelligence. In the language that says tech is complicated, that it requires a certain kind of mind, that it is probably not really for you.

We have been here before. We just called it something different.

The Data From Two Countries

This is not abstract history happening somewhere else. Let me show you the architecture of the two places I call home.

New Zealand

From 1877, when New Zealand established its national education system, that system developed according to accepted notions of the different roles men and women would play in adult life. Secondary education was offered to boys more readily than girls. The redirection was not added later. It was in the foundation.

By 1985 the situation was concerning enough that the New Zealand Association for Women in the Sciences had to be founded specifically to give girls and women confidence that science was for them. Let that land. An entire organisation had to exist simply to counteract the system's own design.

By 2023, women were 61.7 percent of New Zealand tertiary graduates but only 39.9 percent of STEM graduates. Only 27 percent of digital technology positions in New Zealand are held by women.

In the final year of high school, physics remains male-dominated while nearly 70 percent of biology students are female. Computer and engineering subjects are continually male-dominated and the imbalance is growing, not shrinking. The only technology domains where girls are the majority are food technology and textiles.

Girls pointed at the kitchen and the sewing machine. Boys pointed at the machines that build the future.

At current rates, the gender imbalance in technology and engineering at the University of Auckland is projected to persist until 2070. That is not a gap closing slowly. That is a gap being deliberately maintained.

Los Angeles and California

Women make up 42 percent of California's workforce but only a quarter of those working in STEM. And here is the number that should stop you. Fewer women were working in mathematics careers in 2023 than five or ten years before that. Not stalled. Going backwards.

For more than a decade, state and federal officials poured millions of dollars into programmes designed to boost women in STEM. The results were disappointing. The rates barely moved.

Then came the finding that should make every woman reading this furious.

Just before the pandemic, girls in California had actually done it. They had overtaken boys in mathematics and closed the long-standing gender gap. Girls had higher math scores than boys in 62 percent of California districts in 2018 and 2019.

By 2023 and 2024, that figure had collapsed to just 4 percent. In the Los Angeles Unified School District specifically, girls' scores dropped while boys' scores rose.

Girls closed the gap. Actually closed it. And then society was disrupted, the active effort to fight the pattern paused, and within a few years the pattern came roaring back. As one researcher put it, when society is disrupted, you fall back into bad patterns.

The bad pattern is the redirection. It is so deeply coded that the moment we stopped fighting it, it reasserted itself. That is not a commentary on girls' ability. It is a commentary on the depth of the system.

What We Do With the Anger

I am not telling you this to make you despair. I am telling you because anger, the clear and useful kind, is the beginning of refusal.

Here is the subtle modern version of the same pattern. Nearly equal percentages of young men and women report that their schools encouraged them toward STEM subjects. The encouragement sounds equal. But 54 percent of young men report actually learning computer programming in school, compared with only 39 percent of young women.

The encouragement was not always the variable. The exposure was.

The boys were in the room where the coding happened. The girls were elsewhere, being encouraged, in general terms, toward a future they were never actually shown.

That is the Coded Poppy. Not a woman who lacks ability. A woman who was systematically positioned away from power and then handed the story that the positioning was her preference. That the subject was not really for her. That technology had always belonged to someone else.

And now, at the exact moment when artificial intelligence is becoming the most powerful professional tool of our generation, the same coding is doing the same work. AI feels complicated. It feels technical. It feels like it belongs to a certain kind of person, and that person has never quite had our face.

The refusal is simple. You learn it anyway.

Not because anyone finally gives permission. The history makes clear they never will. You learn it because the coding only works while you believe it was your choice. The moment you see it clearly, the spell breaks. You stop opting out of something that was never actually optional and start building the fluency that the next decade of your professional life will require.

AI does not require the physics class you were redirected out of. It does not require the computer science course the boys were quietly funnelled toward while you were in textiles. It requires curiosity and the refusal to accept a story written into you by a system that benefited from your absence.

And it is learned better in a community. That is not a soft observation. It is historical evidence. Women have always reclaimed what was taken from them by refusing to do it alone and refusing to wait for an invitation that history makes clear will never come.

The Invitation

The Silicon Poppy workshop series is being built for exactly this. A room where the first question is not embarrassing. Where not knowing yet is the starting point, not a disqualification. Where women learn the tools that were never designed for them and make them their own anyway.

The Eventbrite link will be live at linkin.bio/francescahustles when I a m back in New Zealand. Watch that space.

The full written article with every statistic sourced is at socialglobalgrind.com . Read it . Share it. Send it to someone who has been carrying the wrong story about themselves for too long.

They expelled us from the room once. They have been keeping us out by design ever since.

We are walking back in.

Bring your anger. It is the most useful thing you own.

.....................................................................................................................................................

Revenue Size Does Not Immunise You From an LLM Visibility Problem

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 07:23:35 GMT

By Francesca Alexander, Founder, The Intelligent Marketing Studio

at Social Global Grind

I want to tell you about a conversation I recently had with a founder of a well-established Auckland business. Seventeen years in operation. Strong Google presence. A reputation that precedes her in every room she walks into. A client list that reads like a who's who of the New Zealand market.

She asked me why her business was not coming up when she searched for it on ChatGPT.

The answer is one of the most important things happening in marketing right now, and almost nobody is talking about it clearly enough.

Your Google ranking and your AI visibility are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing. And the gap between them is widening every single day.

The Search Landscape Just Split in Two

For the better part of three decades, search meant Google. You optimised for it, you ranked on it, and you trusted that the clients looking for you would find you there.

That model is not dead. But it is no longer the whole picture.

Today your potential clients are discovering businesses, services, and recommendations through a completely different set of engines. ChatGPT. Claude. Perplexity. Google AI Overviews. These are not search engines in the traditional sense. They are answer engines. They do not return a list of links for a user to scroll through. They synthesise information from sources they have already decided to trust and deliver a direct answer.

And here is the part that matters for your business.

The criteria they use to decide whose content to trust and cite have almost nothing to do with your domain authority, your backlink profile, or the meta descriptions your web developer wrote in 2019.

A company that has spent twenty years building a Google-optimised digital presence can be completely invisible to an AI engine. Not because the business is not credible. Because the content it has produced was never structured for the way AI engines read, evaluate, and cite information.

That is the LLM visibility problem. And revenue size does not protect you from it.

What Large Language Models Actually Look For

Large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, are not crawling your website and counting keywords. They are evaluating something altogether more nuanced.

They are looking for authority signals. Clear, specific, well-structured content that answers real questions with genuine depth. Content that demonstrates expertise through specificity rather than claiming it through repetition. Content that exists across multiple credible surfaces, your website, your LinkedIn, your Substack, your podcast, your press mentions, your industry citations.

They are looking for entity recognition. Does the model know who you are as a named entity in your field? Is your name, your business name, and your specific expertise consistently and clearly represented across the sources the model was trained on? Or does your business exist primarily as a transactional presence, a website with services listed and a contact form, without a substantial body of thought leadership that establishes what you actually believe and why?

They are looking for trustworthiness signals. Are other credible sources referencing your work? Are your claims backed by evidence? Does your content demonstrate the kind of reasoning and depth that signals genuine expertise rather than marketing copy designed to rank?

These are not the same signals that Google rewards. And a business that has invested heavily in traditional SEO may have built almost none of them.

The Uncomfortable Reality for Established Businesses

Here is where this gets genuinely uncomfortable for some of the most successful businesses in the market.

A company with a twenty-year reputation has often built that reputation through relationships, referrals, and a physical or social presence that exists largely offline. The credibility is real. The expertise is real. The results are real.

But if that credibility has never been translated into a substantial body of public content, if the expertise has lived in meetings and phone calls rather than articles and podcasts and documented thinking, then as far as an LLM is concerned, that expertise barely exists.

A newer business with a smaller client list but a clear point of view, consistently published across multiple platforms, structured to answer the questions its ideal clients are typing into AI engines, will be cited. The established business with a superior track record but a thin content footprint will not.

This is the visibility inversion that is happening right now. And the businesses that do not see it coming are already losing ground to competitors they would have considered significantly smaller a year ago.

What AEO Actually Means in Practice

Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, is the practice of structuring your content so that AI engines pull from your work when they generate answers for users.

It is not a technical discipline in the traditional sense. It does not require a developer. It requires a different way of thinking about what your content is for.

Traditional SEO content is designed to rank for queries. It is written to satisfy an algorithm that rewards certain structural signals, keyword density, heading hierarchy, internal linking, page speed.

AEO content is designed to answer questions. It is written to satisfy an intelligent system that is trying to give a user the most accurate, specific, useful answer to something they genuinely want to know. It rewards depth over density. Specificity over breadth. Genuine expertise over optimised approximation.

The practical difference looks like this. A traditional SEO article about marketing strategy in Auckland might be structured around keyword clusters, designed to capture search volume across a range of related terms.

An AEO-optimised piece on the same subject is structured around the actual questions a business owner in Auckland types into Claude or Perplexity when trying to solve a specific marketing problem. It answers those questions directly, specifically, and with evidence, and presents a clear point of view that signals genuine expertise rather than generic competence.

The second type of content gets cited. The first type gets ranked on a page that fewer and fewer people are clicking through to.

Why Point of View Is Now a Business Asset

I know, girl, there's more! One of the clearest signals an LLM uses to evaluate content authority is the presence of a genuine, consistent, specific point of view.

Generic content, the kind that tries to appeal to everyone by saying nothing controversial, creates no entity signal. It does not distinguish its author from thousands of other sources saying approximately the same thing in approximately the same words.

Content built around a specific, argued, evidence-based perspective creates something the model can recognise as distinctive. It builds entity recognition over time. It signals that the author is not just reproducing consensus but contributing original thinking to a field.

This is why the Silicon Poppy series is not just a content strategy. It is an AEO strategy. A clearly named framework, a specific cultural observation, a body of evidence-backed argument published consistently across multiple platforms, creates exactly the kind of footprint that LLMs are built to recognise and cite.

Every article in that series is doing two jobs simultaneously. It is building community and driving the mission. And it is signalling to every AI engine that indexes it that Francesca Alexander has a specific, original, well-developed point of view on AI adoption, women in technology, and the structural barriers that keep capable people out of the rooms where the future is being built.

That signal compounds. Every piece adds to it. Every citation another credible source makes of that framework strengthens it. Over time, the entity recognition builds to the point where when someone asks Claude about women and AI adoption in New Zealand, the answer has a meaningful probability of including this work.

That is what LLM visibility actually looks like when it is working.

What to Do About It Right Now

The good news is that building LLM visibility is not a technical project. It is a content project, meaning it is accessible to any business willing to commit.

Start with your point of view. What does your business actually believe that others in your field do not, or will not say as clearly? That belief, articulated consistently and specifically, is the foundation of everything else.

Build a body of work that answers real questions. Not keyword-optimised approximations of real questions. The actual questions your ideal clients are typing into AI engines right now. Use Claude or Perplexity to find out what those questions are. Then answer them properly.

Distribute across multiple credible surfaces. Your website is one signal. LinkedIn is another. Substack is another. Podcast citations are another. Press mentions are another. The more surfaces carry your specific expertise, the stronger the entity recognition becomes.

Be consistent over time. LLM visibility is not built into a campaign. It is built in the compounding of consistent, quality output over months and years. The businesses that start now will have a meaningful advantage over those that start when the urgency is impossible to ignore.

And if you want someone who has already built this infrastructure, who understands both the content and the technical dimensions of AEO and GEO strategy, and who can apply it specifically to your business and your market, that is exactly what The Intelligent Marketing Studio was built to do.

The discovery call is at socialglobalgrind.com. The waitlist is short. The window to act before your competitors do is still open.

For now.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long-form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at socialglobalgrind.com and join the community at hustleandglow.com and linkin.bio/francescahustles

The Room Is Almost Full. Here Is What Happens Inside It

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:53:03 GMT

The Room Is Almost Full. Here Is What Happens Inside It

By Francesca Alexander, Founder, The Intelligent Marketing Studio

at Social Global Grind

Something interesting happens when you put a group of founders in a room with AI tools and someone who actually knows how to use them.

The overwhelm lifts. The mystery dissolves. And what felt like a technology problem turns out to have been a confidence problem all along.

I have watched it happen enough times now to know it is not a coincidence. It is what in-person learning does that no online course, no YouTube tutorial, and no amount of solo experimentation can replicate. The room changes something. The questions other people ask are the questions you did not know you needed answered. The moment someone else has the breakthrough, you have it too.

This is why the Hustle and Glow Network runs live events. Not because online is not good enough. Because in person is something else entirely.

What Is Happening at 12 Madden Street

Social Global Grind lives at 12 Madden Street in Wynyard Quarter, Auckland CBD. It is where The Intelligent Marketing Studio operates and where the Hustle and Glow Network hosts its live sessions.

Two events are on the calendar right now. One is almost full.

The AI Marketing Lab. Wednesday 29 July. From $37.50.

This is the flagship live session. A hands-on AI marketing workshop designed for founders and marketing professionals who want to understand how AI actually functions inside a real marketing strategy, not in theory, not in a textbook, but in the specific context of your business and your goals.

Hustle and Glow Network is where strategy meets confidence. We host in-person workshops designed for professionals who want to refine their personal brand, build content systems that work, and use AI in ways that amplify their message.

The AI Marketing Lab is that in practice. You will leave with a working understanding of how to integrate AI into your marketing stack, how to use it as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut, and how to build content systems that actually compound over time rather than eating you alive.

It starts at 9:45am. It runs at SGG HQ, 12 Madden Street, Wynyard Quarter.

And it is almost full.

If you have been sitting on this one, now is the time to move. Use code EARLYBIRD at checkout for the early bird rate. HUSTLEANDGLOW also applies if you are part of the network already.

Hustle HQ: AI Fluency. Ask Me Anything. Wednesday 5 August. From $15.

This one is different in format and deliberately so.

AI Fluency is exactly what it sounds like. A low-barrier, high-value session designed for people who are at the beginning of their AI journey and want a safe, practical, no-judgment space to ask every question they have been too embarrassed to ask anywhere else.

From $15. Wednesday 5 August. 9:45am. Same location.

This is the entry point. The room where you get to be a beginner without apology and leave with enough clarity to actually start.

Use code HUSTLEANDGLOW at checkout.

Why These Events Exist

New Zealand has a specific relationship with technology adoption that I have been writing about for months now under the name the Silicon Poppy. The same cultural conditioning that taught women to shrink from visibility is operating in the AI space, making the tools feel inaccessible, technical, and not quite for them.

They are wrong about that. And the fastest way to prove it is to put them in a room and show them.

These events are not about handing people information. They are about changing the relationship someone has with a tool that is already reshaping every industry they work in. That shift happens in a room with other people learning alongside you, not alone with a laptop at midnight, wondering if you are doing it right.

The AI Marketing Lab is almost full because the people who moved first already knew that. The Hustle HQ session is wide open because the people it was designed for have not heard about it yet.

Consider this your notification.

Where to Register

Both events are listed on Eventbrite at the link below. Seats are limited because the rooms are intentionally small. That is the whole point.

Find both events here: eventbrite.co.nz/o/hustle-and-glow-network-120728162580

Promo codes: EARLYBIRD for the AI Marketing Lab. HUSTLEANDGLOW for both events. COACHLAB if you are a coach looking to build AI into your client offer.

Come. Bring someone who has been putting this off. The room is almost full and the ones who show up always wish they had done it sooner.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long-form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at socialglobalgrind.com and join the community at hustleandglow.com and linkin.bio/francescahustles

Nobody Actually Agrees On What Digital Marketing Is. And That's The Problem.

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:15:00 GMT

"So what actually is digital marketing? Like, what does it cover?"

I was in a room recently with a group of business owners, all at different stages, all smart, all doing their best, and someone asked a question that stopped the conversation cold. They asked: "So what actually is digital marketing? Like, what does it cover?"

The answers that followed were revealing. One person said social media. Another said SEO. Someone else mentioned email. A business coach in the corner said, "It's everything online." Nobody was wrong, exactly. But nobody was saying the same thing either. And that gap, that small but significant disconnect in a single room, is playing out at scale in businesses everywhere.

Here is what I have come to understand after years of working with founders across Auckland and Los Angeles: the confusion about what digital marketing is, is actually costing people money. Not because they are doing the wrong things, but because they do not have a shared language for what they are building toward.

Let's clear this up properly.

Digital marketing is the full ecosystem of how your business shows up, communicates, and converts online. That includes the content you create, the platforms you choose, the emails you send, the ads you run, the search terms you show up for, and the experience someone has when they arrive at your website or booking page. It is not one thing. It is the relationship between all of those things, working together with intention.

The reason it feels so vast and so confusing is that it keeps expanding. In 2020, most business owners were still figuring out Instagram. In 2023, everyone was suddenly talking about AI content tools. Now, in 2026, we are navigating something even more fundamental: the way people search for, discover, and choose businesses has changed at the infrastructure level. Not at the surface.

What has actually shifted in 2026?

Almost 800 million people a week now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode to ask questions, compare options, and make decisions. Many of them never reach a business website at all. They ask their AI assistant, get an answer, and move on. Which means the traditional idea of "getting to the first page of Google" is not dead exactly, but it is not enough on its own anymore either.

Organic traffic to websites has dropped significantly in categories where AI summaries now appear in search results. Your content is becoming a source rather than a destination. That is a meaningful distinction, and most small business owners have not been told to think about it yet.

At the same time, AI-generated content has flooded every channel. And here is the uncomfortable truth the data is surfacing: three in four marketers are now worried that AI-generated creative is making brands look and sound identical. The tools are everywhere. The outputs are blurring. Which means the businesses that will stand out in the next few years are not the ones using the most AI, but the ones using it with the clearest sense of who they actually are.

So, where does AI actually fit into your digital marketing right now?

This is the question I get most often from the founders I work with, and it deserves a real answer rather than a trend report.

AI belongs in the parts of your marketing that are slow, repetitive, or data-heavy. Content ideation and first drafts. Email personalisation and segmentation. Social caption variations. Ad copy testing. Analysing what is working and what is not. Scheduling and workflow. These are real productivity gains, and they are available to small businesses just as much as large ones. That is genuinely good news.

What AI cannot do is replace what makes your marketing actually work. Your point of view. Your lived experience. The specific reason someone chooses you over another capable person doing similar work. A tool like ChatGPT can help you draft faster, but it cannot tell you what to say, or why your story matters, or what room you are trying to build.

That is still yours. That has always been the differentiator.

The tools worth knowing in 2026.

If you are a founder building your own marketing, here is what I actually recommend paying attention to right now, without the hype.

For content creation and writing: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini as thinking partners and first-draft tools. Not as ghostwriters. As starting points that you shape into your voice.

For video: short-form, talking-head content filmed on your phone still outperforms polished production at the small-business level. If you need editing support, or CapCut handle the basics cleanly. AI video generation tools exist, but they are not yet replacing the human face that builds trust in your niche.

For visibility and search: prioritise structured, clear, experience-based content on your website and in your profiles. AI tools use your publicly available information to recommend you, or not. Make it easy for them to understand what you do and who you serve.

For email: platforms like Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign now have AI-powered segmentation built in. Worth using. But the copy still has to sound like you. Automation without voice is just noise with a schedule.

For ads: Meta's Advantage+ campaigns have improved significantly. They use AI to identify and deliver your ads to the audiences most likely to convert. Even on a low budget, the philosophy remains to test one audience, one offer, one creative angle at a time. Let the data lead before you scale.

The part most people skip.

Digital marketing in 2026 is not harder than it was five years ago. In some ways, the tools have made it genuinely more accessible. What is harder is the clarity required before any of it works. Knowing who you are for. Knowing what you are actually selling and what problem it solves. Knowing which platform your people are actually on, as opposed to the platform you feel most comfortable with.

The founders I see building real momentum right now are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones who have done the quieter work of getting clear and then stayed consistent long enough for the clarity to compound.

That is what I teach. That is what I build for my clients. And that is the part that no AI tool, however good it gets, is going to do for you.

If you are still trying to figure out where to start, or you have been doing all the things and wondering why it is not converting, that is a good conversation to have. My discovery calls are open. For all the links visit here: https://linkin.bio/francescahustles/

Listen on Spotify for more topics just like this

This Week's Discovery: Meta Just Gave Claude Access to Your Ad Account

Mon, 18 May 2026 17:53:30 GMT

You do not need to be a media buyer to understand your ad performance anymore.

This Week's Discovery is a weekly series from The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind. Every week Francesca Alexander tests something new in AI and marketing technology and reports back with the honest version.

For years, understanding your ad performance meant either hiring a media buyer at agency rates, paying for access to someone who would translate the numbers for you, or simply not knowing. The data existed. You just were not supposed to be able to read it without paying someone to stand between you and it. That model always served the agency more than the client. What happened on April 29, 2026, changed that conversation permanently.

I did not expect this one.

I have been testing AI integrations for a while now, looking for the ones that actually change how a small business operates versus the ones that sound impressive in a press release and deliver very little in practice. This week I found one worth reporting back on.

On April 29, 2026, Meta officially launched the Meta Ads AI Connectors in open beta. For the first time in its history, Meta has opened its advertising infrastructure to third party AI systems at this level of integration. Claude is one of them. And what that means in practice is something I had to see to believe.

What This Actually Is

This is not a workaround. It is not a developer build or a third-party hack. Meta launched an official AI Connector that allows Claude to connect directly to your Facebook and Instagram ad accounts through claude.ai/settings/integrations using standard Business OAuth authorisation. No API tokens. No developer app. No technical background required.

You go to claude.ai/settings/integrations, search for Meta Ads, authorise through your Facebook Business account, select your ad accounts, and you are connected.

That is the entire setup.

What Claude Can Actually Do With Your Ad Account

Once connected, Claude can pull real campaign data from your actual account in seconds. Not estimates. Not benchmarks from someone else's industry. Your data.

I asked it to show me yesterday's ad spend broken out across all campaigns. It returned real numbers in the time it would have taken me to log into Ads Manager and find the right report.

Beyond basic reporting, the connector can flag anomalies inside your account. CPM spikes. Frequency creep. Campaigns that are burning budget without delivering results. The kind of patterns that a media buyer catches immediately and a business owner running their own ads often misses entirely until the damage is already done.

It can also create campaigns. With one important detail that matters a great deal at this budget level. Every new asset is paused by default. Nothing goes live. Nothing spends. Not a single dollar moves without your explicit manual approval. That is not a limitation. That is the right way to build a tool that touches someone's ad budget.

How Small Businesses Can Use This Right Now

If you have a Meta Business account and you get beta access, here are the two questions worth asking Claude immediately.

Show me my last 30 days of spend broken out by campaign.

What looks off in my account this week?

Both return real data. Both take seconds. Both give you the kind of visibility into your own ad performance that used to require either a media buyer on retainer or a significant amount of time spent inside Ads Manager learning which reports to pull and what to look for in them.

The gatekeeping is gone. The data is yours. You just needed the right tool to read it.

One Honest Caveat

Beta access is rolling out gradually and it is not universal yet. You may complete the entire setup correctly and have a working connector that returns no data. If that happens it means your account has not been granted beta access yet. It does not mean the setup is broken. Keep checking. This is worth waiting for.

What I Am Testing Next

The anomaly detection. I want to know what Claude catches inside a real ad account that a business owner would have missed running the account manually. I will report back next week with what I find.

This is what an intelligent marketing studio does differently. We test first. We verify before we publish. And we report back with the honest version, including the caveats, so you can make a real decision about whether something is worth your time.

This one is worth your time.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis — A 2026 Brand Story

Sun, 17 May 2026 15:00:03 GMT

What would Jackie do?

She Never Posted Once.

And She Was the Most Powerful Brand Architect of the Twentieth Century.

What Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would do in 2026, and what her years as a book editor teach us about influence that compounds.

Picture this. It is 1978. The most photographed woman in the world walks into a small, windowless office on the seventh floor of a midtown Manhattan building. She gets her own coffee. She waits in line to use the copy machine. She sits on the floor with manuscripts spread around her, reading. Her name is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and she has chosen, at 46 years old, with $20 million in the bank and the entire world's attention available to her at any moment, to become a working book editor.

She could have lunched with presidents. She could have started a foundation with her name on the building. She could have written a memoir that would have outsold everything on the market for a decade. She chose none of those things. She chose the work. And in doing so, she built one of the most durable personal brands in modern history without a single social media post, a single press release in her own name, or a single moment of performed vulnerability.

I think about her constantly when I am working with founders on their visibility strategy. Because what she understood instinctively, without a marketing team or a content calendar, is exactly what the most effective founders are only just beginning to learn in 2026.

She understood that influence lives in curation, not proclamation. When she arrived at Doubleday in 1978, Jackie did not announce herself. She did not give interviews about her creative vision. She did not build a personal brand around being a former first lady who had found her true calling. She simply started acquiring books.

She brought in Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, which had been sitting in Arabic since the 1950s and which almost nobody in the American publishing world had bothered to touch. When Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, every publishing house in New York wanted him. Her boss asked Jackie to make the call because, as her colleague Nan Talese recalled, she would elicit a response. She did. He said yes.

She commissioned The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, a book about mythology that had no obvious mass-market appeal and that went on to become a cultural touchstone. She nurtured Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance writer and her neighbour on Martha's Vineyard, who was in her eighties, and encouraged her to finish The Wedding, a novel that Oprah Winfrey later adapted into a television series. She shepherded more than a hundred books across sixteen years. Not one of them had her name on the cover.

The most powerful brand she ever built was other people's stories. That is the kind of influence that does not age.

In 2026, she would be a quiet influencer with a very specific architecture. I want to be precise about what I mean by quiet influencer, because it is not the same as invisible. Jackie was never invisible. She was hypervisible in every room she entered. What she controlled, with extraordinary discipline, was what she amplified. What she chose to put her name next to. What she allowed to exist in her orbit and what she walked away from.

In 2026, that strategy has a name. We call it brand curation. We call it editorial positioning. We call it content gatekeeping. She was doing all of it by instinct, in a windowless office in Manhattan, forty-eight years ago. Think about what her digital footprint would look like today. A Substack, almost certainly. Not a newsletter with a weekly content schedule and a sales funnel attached. An occasional, deeply considered essay about culture, literature, and what it means to give a story the life it deserves.

No comments enabled, probably. The kind of Substack that people forward to each other privately because it feels too good to keep to themselves. A curated Instagram with no captions. Just images. Covers of books she was passionate about.

A photograph taken from a window. A view of the ocean at Martha's Vineyard. Nothing that explained itself, because she understood that mystery is not a strategy gap. It is a strategy. She would not be on TikTok. But her books would be. The authors she championed would talk about her in their videos, and the algorithm would carry her influence forward without her having to appear once.

She would approach her brand exactly the way she approached editing.

One of the most revealing things about Jackie's editorial career is how she treated the authors she worked with. She was described by colleagues as a woman who fought like a lioness for her projects internally while maintaining an almost preternatural calm externally. She advocated ferociously behind closed doors and appeared serene in every room she walked into.

That is a brand strategy. That is the understanding that your public face and your private work are both part of the same ecosystem, and that the public face gains its authority precisely because the private work is real and substantial.

She also understood something that most personal brands get catastrophically wrong. She never confused her celebrity with her credibility. Her fame was the door that got Naguib Mahfouz on the phone. Her taste, her curiosity, and her editorial judgment were what kept him there. She did not try to make the books about being discovered by Jackie Kennedy. She made them about the books.

The comparison that matters.

People reach for Michelle Obama and Meghan Markle when they talk about Jackie's modern equivalents, and there is truth in both comparisons. Michelle Obama's Becoming is one of the best-selling memoirs in history, and the way she has moved since leaving the White House, deliberate, community-forward, deeply strategic about what she engages with and what she ignores, has Jackie's fingerprints all over it. Meghan Markle's pivot from royal life to creative entrepreneurship, the American Riviera Orchard launch, the Netflix deals, the newsletter, and the deliberate rebuilding of a personal brand on her own terms also operate in the same tradition.

But neither of them is quite doing what Jackie did at Doubleday, and I think that is the more interesting lesson for founders. What Jackie did was make other people the story. She was the invisible architecture. The hand behind the work. And because she never competed with her own authors for attention, her influence became structural rather than personal. It lasted longer than any memoir could have.

She never wrote her memoirs. And she never had to. The books she chose spoke on her behalf, and they are still speaking.

What founders can take from this in 2026.

The single most undervalued brand strategy available to founders right now is this: choose what you amplify more carefully than you choose what you say. Your curation is your positioning. The clients you take, the content you share, the people you endorse, the conversations you enter and the ones you decline, all of that is brand architecture, whether you are treating it that way or not.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis was never unaware of her own power. What made her extraordinary was that she chose to direct it outward rather than inward. She used her attention as a resource and she invested it in things she believed deserved to be seen. That is the playbook.

In a market saturated with founders performing their own expertise, the most powerful position available is the one she occupied for sixteen years. The person who knows what is worth paying attention to. The person whose presence on something changes what it means.

She sat on the floor reading manuscripts in a windowless office in midtown Manhattan. She waited in line for the copy machine. She had no byline on anything she created. And she was the most influential woman in American publishing for the last third of her life.

That is the brand strategy.

...

Francesca Alexander is the founder of Social Global Grind, a boutique marketing studio across. Click here for more details.

Auckland and Los Angeles, and the Hustle and Glow Network. If this piece resonated, the Hustle and Glow Bootcamp is where we do this work together.

#PersonalBrand #BrandStrategy #WomenInBusiness #JackieKennedy #FounderMarketing #SocialGlobalGrind #HustleAndGlow #ContentStrategy #QuietInfluencer

Girl, They Don't Know You If They Can't See You Why

Sun, 17 May 2026 05:16:36 GMT

Why Visibility Is the Most Powerful Thing Women in MarTech Can Give Each Other

I want to tell you about Maria Abercrombie.

She moved to New Zealand from Brazil in her twenties. No established network. No roadmap. Just a vision, a work ethic that most people would find exhausting to witness, and that particular kind of quiet determination that does not announce itself until one day you look up and realise she has built an entire life worth aspiring to.

Today Maria runs My Vibes Co, a digital education and coaching business helping small business owners grow with smart systems and digital tools. She hosts the me.vibes podcast, one of the most genuinely useful business podcasts coming out of New Zealand right now, where she breaks down automation, scaling, and the practical intelligence behind building a business that actually works without burning you out in the process. She is a community leader, a mother, a founder, and one of the most naturally gifted business minds I have had the privilege of knowing personally.

And I am writing this article because more people need to know her name.

That is the whole point, actually. Not just of this article. Of everything I believe about women in marketing technology right now.

The Tall Poppy Problem Has a New Address

New Zealand has a cultural phenomenon called Tall Poppy Syndrome. The idea that when someone grows too tall, too visible, too successful, the instinct of the people around them is to cut them down rather than celebrate them. It is a structural feature of the culture, not a personal failing, and it disproportionately and consistently affects women in business.

But here is what nobody is talking about yet. Tall Poppy Syndrome has found a new home inside the conversation about artificial intelligence and marketing technology, and it is doing damage in a way that is both subtle and completely predictable.

When a woman in MarTech steps up and says I am using AI to work smarter, to serve my clients better, to build systems that scale without burning me out, the response from some corners of the industry is not celebration. It is a suspicion. Is she really doing the thinking? Is the AI doing it for her? Is any of it actually her work?

Nobody asks a man that question.

The gatekeeping that used to happen at the boardroom door has simply moved online. And some of it, uncomfortably, is coming from other women.

I refuse to participate in that. And I think you should refuse too.

Visibility Is Not Vanity. It Is Infrastructure.

There is a quote I come back to constantly in my work with founders and business owners across Auckland and Los Angeles.

"Girl, they don't know you if they can't see you."

I said it first to a client who was brilliant, experienced, and completely invisible online. She had spent years perfecting her craft and almost no time building the visibility that would allow the right people to find her. Her digital presence undersold her in every direction. And the clients she deserved were finding someone less qualified instead, simply because that person showed up and she did not.

Visibility is not about ego. It is not about performing to be successful or manufacturing a personal brand that has nothing to do with who you actually are. It is about making sure that the work you have put in, the expertise you have built, the value you genuinely offer, is findable by the people who need it.

Maria Abercrombie understands this. The me.vibes podcast is not just content. It is infrastructure. Every episode she publishes is a searchable, shareable, discoverable piece of her expertise living permanently on the internet, working for her audience and for her business simultaneously. That is smart. That is strategic. That is exactly what AI-integrated marketing should be helping more women build.

What Celebrating Each Other Actually Looks Like in Practice

Supporting women in MarTech is not a hashtag. It is a behaviour. It looks like this.

It looks like writing an article that names a woman you admire and links to her work so that Google knows her name is worth knowing. It looks like sharing her podcast episode to your audience, even when she is technically in an adjacent space to yours, because abundance is a strategy and scarcity is a trap. It looks like leaving a review, sending a voice note, showing up to her event, booking her course, and telling three people about her this week.

It looks like using AI to amplify her reach, not to replicate her voice. It looks like building systems that give you more time and capacity to show up for the community around you, not just for your own metrics.

And it looks like refusing to let Tall Poppy Syndrome masquerade as discernment. There is a difference between critical thinking and cutting someone down because they are visible and make you uncomfortable. One of those is useful. The other is just fear with better vocabulary.

The me.vibes Podcast Is Worth Your Time. Here Is Where to Find It.

If you are a small business owner trying to figure out how to use digital tools and smart systems to grow without the overwhelm, Maria Abercrombie is one of the clearest, most practical voices on the subject available to you right now.

She brings warmth, real intelligence, and the kind of teaching that meets you where you are rather than performing above your head to look impressive. Every episode of the me.vibes podcast is built to give you something you can actually use.

Go listen. Go follow. Go tell someone else about it.

Listen to the me.vibes podcast on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/65zlFF9iruorXiAQ1eEX5L

Follow My Vibes Co on Instagram: instagram.com/me.vibes.co

Follow Maria Abercrombie and everything she is building. She has earned every bit of the visibility that is coming her way.

The MarTech Vision

I built The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind on one core belief. That visibility is not optional for a serious business. The gap between the quality of your work and the quality of your digital presence is quietly costing you the clients, the opportunities, and the recognition you have already earned.

That belief applies to my own business. It applies to every client I work with across Auckland and Los Angeles. And it applies to every woman in MarTech who is doing exceptional work and not yet getting the reach she deserves.

They do not know you if they cannot see you. So let us make sure they can see you.

Starting with Maria.

………………………………………………..

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long-form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real.

What Summer House Taught Me About Brand Sentiment, Silence, and the Narratives You Are Not Writing

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:41 GMT

When You Stop Showing Up, Someone Else Writes the Story. Here Is What That Costs.

The Cost of Being Quiet

What Summer House taught us about brand sentiment and silence

Right now, one of the most interesting brand sentiment experiments happening in real time is not taking place inside a marketing department.

It is unfolding on Instagram Stories and it involves Amanda Batula and the cast of Summer House.

This matters more than it looks like it should. Because what we are watching is not gossip. It is a case study in what happens when a narrative forms in public and the people at the center of it choose silence instead of authorship.

Founders do this all the time without realising they are doing it.

And it costs them more than they think.

Listen now on Apple Podcast

The rumour moment

In March 2026, the celebrity gossip account Deux Moi shared a tip claiming Amanda Batula and West Wilson were casually hooking up.

On its own, that might have stayed ordinary reality-television speculation.

But the relationships surrounding the rumour changed everything.

Amanda had recently separated from Kyle Cooke after four years of marriage. Kyle and West are close friends. West’s most recent serious relationship had been with Ciara Miller, who is also Amanda’s closest friend on the show.

So if the rumo u r were true, it touched multiple friendships at once.

That turns a relationship story into a sentiment story.

And sentiment is where reputation lives.

What happened next

Here is the moment that made this situation strategically interesting.

No one confirmed anything.

No one denied anything.

Instead, the cast vagueposted.

Reaction memes appeared. Shrug emojis followed. Photos carried captions that implied more than they explained. Kyle responded to a fan comment with a shrug emoji and a crying face. Ciara and Amanda quietly stopped liking each other’s posts. A scheduled joint Amazon Live appearance between Amanda and Ciara was suddenly split into two separate recordings.

None of this explained the situation.

But all of it communicated something.

And the audience noticed everything.

Listen now on Spotify

What silence does to a narrative

When people do not receive clarity, they create interpretation.

Fan theories multiplied quickly. Online discussion filled the gaps. The ambiguity itself became the story. Instead of reacting to confirmed information, the audience reacted to signals.

This is the exact moment most brands misread what is happening around them.

Silence feels neutral from the inside.

From the outside, it reads as meaning.

When founders step back from communication during uncertainty, audiences do not pause politely and wait for clarity. They continue forming conclusions. And those conclusions often become the version of the story that travels the furthest.

The version the audience writes is rarely smaller than the truth.

It is usually louder.

Why this matters for business owners

This pattern shows up constantly in business.

A founder disappears from social media during a difficult season. A company faces criticism and says nothing while it evaluates its response. A team change happens quietly without explanation. A product direction shifts but the messaging stays silent.

In each case, the audience fills the gap.

Silence does not protect reputation.

Silence transfers authorship.

And once the story is no longer yours, it becomes expensive to recover control of it.

The real cost of being quiet

None of this is about being loud.

It is about being present and consistent enough that when someone is in discovery mode, looking for what you offer, you are already part of the conversation they are having with themselves.

Because when you are quiet, you are not just invisible to new clients.

You are handing the narrative to whoever is willing to show up.

And in most markets right now, someone is showing up.

If someone who had never heard of you visited your social platforms today, what would they find?

Would they find a business with a clear point of view, an active community, and a visible presence?

Or would they find the last few posts from months ago and signals that suggest something stalled?

The cost of quiet is rarely dramatic.

It is the client who never found you. The sentiment that shifted without you shaping it. The competitor who showed up the day your audience was looking.

And sometimes it is something more subtle and more serious.

It is what happens when a narrative about loyalty, trust, collaboration, or credibility begins forming in public while you are not there to guide it.

If you were Amanda and walking into a room for a brand deal, your reputation and internet sentiment is that this scandal portrays you as a liar, not a good friend, a betrayer in your marriage, and only out for yourself.

Because those narratives follow you.

Into partnerships. Into brand deals. Into introductions. Into rooms you have not even walked into yet.

That is the real cost of being quiet.

Most businesses never see it because it appears as an absence instead of a loss.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of Social Global Grind, a boutique marketing studio across Auckland and Los Angeles, and the Hustle and Glow Network. If this piece resonated, the Hustle and Glow Bootcamp is where we do this work together.

Click here for more details.

#BrandVisibility #SocialMediaStrategy #FounderMarketing #ReputationManagement #DigitalMarketingNZ #WomenInBusiness #ContentStrategy #BrandSentiment #LeadershipVisibility #HustleAndGlow #SocialGlobalGrind

Ciara Miller Is This Generation's Carrie Bradshaw

Sat, 16 May 2026 23:42:49 GMT

What Her Real-Time Posting Regime Teaches Us About Visibility, Resilience, and When to Spill the Tea

The mistake most people building a public profile make when they look at someone like Ciara Miller is thinking her social media is spontaneous. It is not. It is disciplined spontaneity, which is a completely different thing. She has a regimen. She has hygiene. And the reason her content lands is that the foundation beneath it is solid enough to capture the real-time moments as they happen.

Here is what that regime looks like, broken down into something you can actually use.

The Foundation — Set This Up Once

Profile is complete, consistent, and says exactly who you are and what you do in the first line. No mystery, no vague aspiration. Clarity converts
Stories highlights are curated and current. They are the first thing a new follower goes to. Treat them like a mini website
Bio link goes somewhere that works. Check it monthly. A broken link is a broken first impression
Posting format is consistent. Ciara uses carousels to tell a story in sequence. Pick your format and own it so people know what to expect from you
Profile photo and cover image are current. Not two years ago current. Now current

The Weekly Regime — Do This Consistently

Three to four posts per week minimum. Presence is the baseline. You cannot go viral from silence
At least one post that is purely personal with zero business agenda. The breakfast photo. The cat. The moment that has nothing to do with work. This is what builds the human connection that makes the business content land
At least one post that demonstrates expertise. A take, a lesson, a reframe. Something that gives the audience a reason to follow you beyond your personality
Stories daily or near daily. Stories are your real-time layer. This is where the behind-the-scenes, the polls, the candid moments live. They do not need to be polished. They need to be present
Engage with comments within the first hour of posting. The algorithm rewards early engagement and so do the people who took time to respond

The Real-Time Protocol — When Something Happens

This is where Ciara excels and where most brands freeze. Something happens, a news story, a professional win, a cultural moment, a misrepresentation, and there is a window of about two to four hours before the moment has passed. Here is how to move inside that window.

Notice the moment. Not everything deserves a post. Ask yourself: does this connect to who I am and what I stand for? If yes, move immediately
Post the raw version first. A Story, a photo, a short thought. Get something up while the moment is live. You can go deeper later with a caption or a carousel
Write the caption in your own voice without editing it into oblivion. Ciara's TMZ correction worked because it sounded like a real person who was actually irritated. Polish kills authenticity in real time
Tag sparingly and intentionally. Only tag people or brands where the tag adds something. Tagging for reach alone is transparent and reads as desperate
Do not delete it unless it is genuinely wrong. Editing your story in public is part of the brand. Ciara does not delete. She clarifies and moves forward
Screenshot the moment if it involves a third party. You may need the record

The Hygiene Rules — Do These Monthly

Audit your content from the last 30 days. What got engagement? What landed flat. What surprised you. Adjust one thing based on what you see
Check your follower growth and your unfollows. Sudden drops after a specific post tell you something. Pay attention
Update your highlights if anything has changed in your offer, your positioning, or your life
Review your bio. Does it still say exactly who you are right now
Clear your drafts folder. If you have been sitting on something for more than two weeks, either post it today or delete it. Held content becomes stale content

When To Be Messy and Give the Tea

This is the part nobody talks about clearly, so here it is clearly.

There is a difference between being strategic and being sterile. Ciara Miller understands this instinctively. She is not a brand machine. She is a person who happens to have a brand, and the moments where that humanity leaks through are not accidents. They are the whole point.

Here is when being messy is actually the move.

Give the tea when something happened that your audience already knows about.

Ciara did not create the narrative around the Amanda and West situation. It was already everywhere. What she did was show up in the middle of it with dignity and let her presence tell the story. When something is already public and already being discussed, your silence does not protect you. It just removes you from the conversation and lets other people write your chapter.

Give the tea when you have been misrepresented. The TMZ correction was tea, delivered cleanly, with receipts implied. When someone has said something wrong about you publicly, you have the right and frankly the professional obligation to correct it in your own words. Do not wait for a PR statement. Speak directly.

Give the tea when the behind-the-scenes is more interesting than the polished version.

The carousel that included her breakfast and her cat Jasper on Met Gala morning was more compelling than any professional red carpet post because it was real. The mundane detail next to the extraordinary moment is always the more interesting content. Post both.

Give the tea when you have genuinely changed your mind about something.

The most underrated content format is the honest update. I used to think this. I was wrong. Here is what I know now. This is not weakness. This is intellectual honesty and people find it deeply refreshing in a world full of brands that never admit anything.

Do not give the tea when you are still in the emotion.

Ciara waited. She processed. She showed up to the Met Gala first. There is a version of this where you post from the middle of the pain and it reads as unhinged rather than honest. The tell is usually the length. If the caption is more than four paragraphs and ends with a rhetorical question aimed at a specific person, wait twenty-four hours.

Do not give the tea to a client, a colleague, or anyone who did not consent to be part of your content.

Vague posting about professional frustrations is the fastest way to lose professional credibility. If you want to talk about the archetype, talk about the archetype. Do not talk about the person.

Do not give the tea if the only reason you are doing it is to get sympathy.

Audiences can feel the difference between someone processing something real and someone performing victimhood. One builds loyalty. The other builds an audience that will turn on you the moment the sympathy well runs dry.

The rule Ciara seems to operate by, even if she has never articulated it this way, is this. Show up as the fullest version of yourself and let the quality of your presence make the argument for you. Not every moment needs a caption. Not every feeling needs a post. But the ones that are genuinely yours, the ones that connect to something true, those deserve to be shared without apology and without over-editing.

That is the regime.

That is the hygiene.

And that is when you spill it.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of Social Global Grind, The Intelligent Marketing Studio, and the Hustle and Glow Network. Her work sits at the intersection of marketing strategy, AI integration, and business development for executives, founders, and coaches who want measurable results. The Hustle and Glow Podcast covers what actually moves the needle. Find the articles, resources, and podcast at socialglobalgrind.com.

For everything else go to linkin.bio/francescahustles

The Gap Paid for Its Silence with 8.2 Million People.

Sat, 16 May 2026 01:13:27 GMT

Here's What That Means for Your Business.

I used to fold the denim wall at the Gap at the Santa Anita mall on Sunday mornings before the store opened. I was about 19, completely obsessed with the brand, and convinced that working there was the coolest thing a person could do with a weekend. This was the 90s. The Gap was everywhere. The commercials were iconic. Khaki swing, leather, denim, celebrities mid-dance in a white studio. It was one of those brands that felt genuinely alive in the culture, not just present in a mall.

So watching it go quiet over the years has been something I have thought about a lot. Not because I have some deep nostalgic attachment to a retail chain, but because the way the Gap lost ground is the same way most businesses lose ground. Quietly. Gradually.

Without a single dramatic moment you could point to and say, that was the problem.

They did not have a scandal. They did not make a catastrophic strategic error. They just withdrew. And the culture moved on without them.

The cost of being quiet is not zero.

This is the thing I keep trying to get into boardrooms in New Zealand, and honestly, across every market I work in. Silence is not neutral. It is not a safe holding position. It is a decision with a price tag, and sometimes we do not find out what that price tag was until the receipts are already printed.

Research from Tracksuit in 2025 put a number on what happened to the Gap during one of its quiet periods. Between August 2024 and February 2025, brand awareness among consumers fell seven points. Consideration dropped twelve points. When they translated that into actual human beings, it came out to approximately 8.2 million fewer people actively thinking about the brand in that window alone.

8.2 million people who moved on. Not because they chose a competitor with a better product. Not because Gap did something wrong. Just because the brand was not in the room when decisions were being made.

That is the cost of being quiet.

Why this matters even if you are not a global retail brand.

LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST

I know what you are thinking. Francesca, I am not the Gap. I do not have 8.2 million customers to lose.

Fair. But the principle scales down perfectly.

When you go quiet on social media, when you stop showing up consistently in the spaces where your potential clients are spending time, you are not maintaining your position. You are slowly surrendering it. The algorithm does not hold your spot. Attention does not wait. People discover someone else who is showing up, who is being useful, who is in the conversation, and they start to build trust with that person instead.

I know this from personal experience, not just from watching it happen to other brands. In the last three years, I have not been as present on social media as I normally have been. And sitting with that, noticing the cost of it on my own visibility and pipeline, is actually what pushed me to build this whole April series around the topic.

Because the question I had to ask myself was the same one I am asking you now. What has the silence cost me? And is that a bill I want to keep running up?

What the comeback required.

The Gap is back. Genuinely back, not just technically operational. Their collaboration with Charli xcx on the Better in Denim campaign generated 8 billion media impressions in a single month. It made Gap the number one searched brand on TikTok. It drove 7% comparable sales growth in the following quarter, and they are now on their eighth consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales growth.

That is a real comeback. But here is the thing about comebacks. They cost more than consistency would have.

To recover the ground that silence quietly surrendered over years, they had to come back at that scale. Most businesses cannot afford to do that. Which means the smarter play is not to go quiet in the first place, and if you have already gone quiet, to start showing up again before the gap between where you are and where you need to be gets any wider.

What the Gap got right when it came back.

They went back to what had worked before. The dancing, the music, the energy. They understood that the common denominator across generations, whatever the decade, is that people respond to movement and sound and things that feel genuinely alive. And they found a collaborator who embodied that for a new audience without abandoning the brand's own history.

There is a lesson in that for anyone thinking about how to re-enter a space they have been absent from. You do not have to reinvent yourself. You just have to show up in a way that is recognisably you, updated for where the audience actually is right now.

The practical piece.

50% of consumers now discover new businesses via social media, outperforming traditional search and television in brand discovery. 83% of marketers name social media as their primary client acquisition channel. Brands investing more than 20% of their marketing budget in social report 33% higher ROI.

These are not aspirational numbers. They are describing what is already happening.

If you are still treating social media as optional, as something you will get to when things slow down or when you have better content or when you feel more ready, I want you to sit with the Gap's 8.2 million for a moment. Not to scare you. Just to make the cost feel real, because it is real, it is just usually invisible until it is not.

You do not need a perfect strategy to start. You need a first post and a reason to keep going. The 12 months after that first one are where you learn what actually works for your audience, your voice, and your offer.

Start there.

My name is Francesca Alexander.

I am the founder of Social Global Grind, a boutique marketing studio based in Auckland and Los Angeles, and the Hustle and Glow Network, a women's business community built around strategy, visibility, and growth that does not cost you your wellbeing. This piece is part of my April series on the cost of being quiet. If it landed for you, the podcast episode goes deeper.

What The Devil Wears Prada Actually Taught Me About Running an AI Marketing Studio

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:45:28 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

Nobody warns you that running a marketing studio is basically working at Runway Magazine. By Francesca Alexander

Fr Alexander

Nobody warns you that running a marketing studio is basically working at Runway Magazine. Different clients, same energy. Someone always needs the book. The details are always wrong. And somewhere in the building, a woman in Chanel is deciding whether you're worth her time.

I say this with love. And with seventeen years of receipts.

Here is what I have learned from working with brilliant, demanding, occasionally terrifying clients who changed their minds constantly and expected me to keep up without being asked: they were not the problem. The model I was using to serve them was.

Providing a service and being of service are not the same thing. One is a transaction. The other is a relationship built on intelligence, anticipation, and the kind of follow-through that makes a client feel genuinely held. Most studios offer the first and call it the second. I did it too, until I stopped.

The Miranda Client

She is not difficult. She is decided, until she isn't, and then she is decided again in a completely different direction, and your job is to be good enough to keep up without losing your footing. She changes her mind because she is still thinking, still editing toward better, still holding a standard that most people in the room cannot quite see yet.

What Miranda needs from her marketing studio is not agreement. It is conviction. Walk in with a point of view. Present like the strategy is already working and you are simply walking her through the evidence. When she redirects, absorb it, come back sharper, and never apologise for your creative direction unless you were actually wrong.

The AI layer fundamentally changes this relationship. When every meeting is recorded through Otter and synthesised through Claude, nothing gets lost in translation between what Miranda said on Tuesday and what the campaign brief reflects on Friday. She gets a precise record of her own thinking back to her, and she gets recommendations that move before she has to ask for them. Miranda does not want to manage you. She wants you to be unmanageable in the best possible way.

The Emily Client

She has already researched you. Your follower count, your case studies, whether your aesthetic has aged well, and whether the results you are referencing are real or approximate. She is not cold. She is careful. She has been burned before by someone who delivered a vibe instead of an outcome, and she has zero interest in repeating the experience.

What Emily needs is specificity. Numbers. Before and after. A KPI framework built with her, not for her, tracked visibly, reported in plain language, and reviewed proactively when the data suggests a change of direction. The moment you get vague with Emily, she is already composing a polite exit email in her head.

An AI-powered studio gives Emily what she has always deserved: a system that shows the work, not just does it. Real-time campaign intelligence. Recommendations grounded in evidence. A marketing partner who flags the shift before she has to notice it herself.

The Andy Client

She is open. She is curious. She shops vintage because she knows that proven style outlasts the trend cycle, and she is applying that same logic to her marketing. She did not arrive with a fixed idea of what good looks like. She developed her instincts by paying attention, and those instincts are sharp.

What Andy needs is integrity. Marketing that reflects something true about her business, not something borrowed from whoever is winning the algorithm this quarter. She will follow the data but only when it connects to something that actually fits who she is. Give her the fact and the feeling together. Lead with strategy, dress it with intention, and never strip the meaning out of the numbers to make them look more impressive.

The AI-intelligent approach to Andy is knowing her well enough to mirror her back to herself accurately. That is not manipulation. That is the highest form of service.

Why Mirroring Is a Professional Skill, Not a Personality Trick

Every one of these clients is, in their own way, a demanding client. They shift. They evolve. They wake up at three in the morning and realise they have been chasing the wrong metric. That is not a flaw. That is what it looks like to be genuinely invested in building something.

The mistake most studios make is treating all three of them the same way. Same onboarding form. Same reporting cadence. Same follow-up email template. Same energy in the room, regardless of whose room it is.

At Social Global Grind, the repositioning to The Intelligent Marketing Studio was built around one core recognition: different clients require different calibration, and artificial intelligence makes that calibration faster, more precise, and more sustainable across an entire client portfolio.

When you combine Claude AI for intelligent account management with Otter for meeting-recording synthesis, you build a system that not only tracks what was agreed upon. It tracks what was meant, what shifted, and what the campaign needs to do differently as a result. The delivery confirmation is built in. The KPI review is proactive. The recommendation comes before the client has to ask the question.

That is the difference between providing a service and being of service. And it is, genuinely, the most intelligent thing I have ever done for this business.

Miranda would probably say nothing. But she would keep the meeting.

That is enough.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders who are building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long-form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at https://linkin.bio/francescahustles/ That's All.

What If Miranda Priestly Was Your Client?

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:27:14 GMT

The Deeper Dive Into Client Management Nobody Is Having

Here’s the premise. Miranda Priestly exists in real client relationships. She is in real boardrooms, in real inboxes, sending emails at midnight with no subject line, fully expecting you already know what she needs.

But Miranda is not the only archetype sitting across the table from you. The Devil Wears Prada gives us a full cast of client personalities, and if you have been in professional services for more than five minutes, you have worked with every single one of them. Today, we are going through the full roster. What each archetype actually needs from you, how you show up for each one, the tools that keep you protected and professional, and the checklist that makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, regardless of who you are dealing with.

Because how you show up is not separate from the work. It is part of the work. The Miranda Priestly clients of the world do not just evaluate your deliverables. They evaluate your presence, your preparation, your response time, and whether you hold the standard they hold or quietly lower it when they are not looking.

This is Part 2. The deeper dive. Let’s get into it.

The Miranda Priestly Client

High standards. Low tolerance for excuses. She communicates through implications rather than instructions and expects you to interpret them correctly the first time. She does not explain what she wants because in her mind, it should already be clear. She has been in rooms with people who could not keep up, and she has very little patience for becoming someone’s learning curve.

What she actually needs from you is someone who does not flinch. Miranda respects competence above everything else, and she can smell hesitation from three floors up. Your job is to be prepared before she asks, to anticipate the brief before it arrives, and to deliver work that demonstrates you understood the assignment even when the assignment was never fully articulated.

How you show up: Calm, prepared, and completely unbothered. You match the standard without performing anxiety about it. She does not need your nerves. She needs your best thinking, already done, waiting on her desk.

Your Miranda Priestly Client Checklist

Use Otter.ai to record every meeting without exception. Miranda will never repeat herself, and she should not have to. You have the transcript, the timestamps, and her exact words. No room for misinterpretation and no excuse for missing anything
Drop the Otter summary into Asana as the first task note immediately after the meeting, so the record starts from day one and lives somewhere permanent
Brief documented in writing before any work begins. If it was not confirmed in Asana, it does not exist
Every deliverable has a deadline confirmed by both parties inside Asana before you touch the work
All feedback is captured inside the Asana task, not only verbally. If she says it in the room, you log it before you leave the building
Weekly status update sent proactively before she has to ask. Use Claude to format it cleanly so it takes her thirty seconds to read, and nothing gets missed
Scope changes require a new Asana task and a confirmed revised timeline. No exceptions, no informal agreements, no verbal handshakes

The Nigel Client

Nigel is the one who actually knows what is going on. He is strategic, perceptive, and genuinely invested in the outcome. He gives you context Miranda never would. He is the insider who makes the whole relationship navigable, and he is worth protecting fiercely because losing his trust costs you the account.

What he needs from you is a peer. Someone who thinks alongside him, not just executes for him. He does not need to be managed. He needs to be collaborated with. Bring your perspective into every room you share with him, because he hired you for your thinking. The moment you stop thinking and start just delivering, he starts wondering why he needs you.

How you show up: As an equal. With a point of view. With something worth saying before he asks for it.

Your Nigel Client Checklist

Use Claude Design to build concepts on the fly during your sessions. Nigel thinks strategically and responds to seeing ideas visualised in real time, not described in bullet points two weeks later when the moment has passed
Use Claude to generate visual performance reports with clean, sexy pie charts that he actually wants to look at. Nigel appreciates the aesthetic layer as much as the data layer, and a well-designed report communicates that you take the relationship seriously
Schedule a monthly strategic conversation in the calendar, not a status update, a real thinking session with an agenda you both contribute to beforehand
Keep a shared Asana project where both of you can add observations and ideas between meetings, so the thinking stays live between sessions
Share relevant industry observations and data he may not have seen. Being the person who brings him something new is how you stay indispensable
Acknowledge his institutional knowledge explicitly. He has context you do not have yet, and he needs to know you know that

The Emily Client

Emily is efficient, protective of her principal, and operates entirely by process. She is the gatekeeper, and she takes that role seriously. Cross her, and you lose access. Respect her and she becomes your most reliable internal advocate, the person who makes sure your work gets seen by the right people and your invoices get paid on time.

What she needs from you is professionalism and precision. She does not have time for loose ends, unclear asks, or chasing you for things that should already be done. She is managing a thousand things, and your job is not to be one of them.

How you show up: Organised, responsive, and never the reason something is late. Being easy to work with is an underrated competitive advantage. Most vendors are not. Be the one who is.

Your Emily Client Checklist

Use Otter.ai for every call and send her the summary within the hour. Emily should never have to chase you for notes or action items. Ever
All communications are responded to within the agreed timeframe, documented in Asana, so you both know what the standard is, and there is no ambiguity about expectations
Deliverables submitted in the exact format she has specified. No improvising, no creative reinterpretation of the brief, no surprises
Never go around her to reach the decision maker directly without her knowledge. That is the fastest way to lose the relationship and the hardest mistake to recover from
Use Claude to build clean, formatted reports that Emily can scan in thirty seconds and forward immediately without editing. Make her look good internally, and she will protect your access to the people who matter
Send a brief end-of-week Asana summary of everything completed and everything pending. She is managing a thousand things. Do not be one of them

The Andy Client

Andy is the emerging one. She is figuring it out in real time, she is capable of more than she currently believes, and she is genuinely trying. She will grow into something significant if someone treats her like she already is. She responds to encouragement, clarity, and the feeling that you are genuinely invested in her success rather than just her budget.

What she needs from you is a guide who does not make her feel small for not yet knowing everything. Your job is to make the complex feel navigable, to show her the vision before she has to commit to it, and to celebrate the wins because she is not always sure she deserves them. Founders who invest in their Andy clients early build relationships that last for decades.

How you show up: Warm, clear, and consistent. She needs to trust you before she can fully use you. Build that first, and everything else follows.

Your Andy Client Checklist

Use Claude Code to mock up a new landing page concept or interactive prototype so Andy can see the vision before she has to commit to it. She responds to seeing the possibility, not just hearing about it described in abstract terms
Use Claude Design to create simple, beautiful graphics she can use immediately. Early visible wins build the trust that makes the whole relationship work, and give her something to show her stakeholders
An onboarding document that explains your process, your tools, and what to expect from the relationship. Drop it into Asana as the first task so it lives somewhere she can always find it, rather than buried in an email thread from six months ago
Educational context included with every deliverable. Not just the work but the why. Use Claude to add a plain-English summary to every report so she is never left guessing what the numbers mean or what to do next
Regular check-ins that invite her questions without making her feel behind. Log these in Asana with a standing agenda template so the conversation always has structure and she walks into every session knowing what to expect
Celebrate every milestone in writing inside Asana, so she has a visible record of her progress. Andy does not always know she is winning. Show her the evidence

The Tool Stack That Holds All of It Together

None of this works without a system that lives outside your head and outside your email inbox.

Otter.ai captures every conversation in real time, so nothing gets lost between the meeting and the follow-up. For Miranda and Emily clients, especially, having the verbatim record is not optional. It is professional insurance.

Asana keeps the entire relationship accountable. Every deliverable, every deadline, every feedback loop, every scope change lives in there. When a Miranda client verbally changes the brief at 11 pm, you log it in Asana by 9 am the next morning, with a note confirming your understanding and the revised timeline. When an Emily client needs a status update, you send the Asana link. When an Andy client is unsure what will happen next, the task list tells her. Nothing lives in a thread that disappears. Everything lives in a system that both parties can see and are accountable to.

Claude handles the visual and creative layer. Social media performance reports do not have to look like spreadsheets from 2009. Claude Design builds clean, visually compelling reports with pie charts that actually communicate what is happening in the numbers, graphics that represent data in a way the client wants to look at, and live concept visuals that let Nigel respond to ideas in the room rather than two weeks later. Claude Code builds landing page mockups and interactive prototypes that help Andy see the vision before she has to commit to a budget.

The combination of Otter for capture, Asana for accountability, and Claude for visual communication and prototyping covers the three biggest reasons client relationships break down. Things get forgotten. Things get lost in email. And things get presented in ways that do not respect the client’s time or intelligence. Fix all three, and you have already separated yourself from most of the competition.

The Closing Thought

Miranda Priestly is not the villain of that story. She is the standard. She is what happens when someone refuses to accept mediocrity as an option and builds an entire professional environment around that refusal. Working with her requires you to be the best version of what you do. That is not comfortable. It is also nothing.

Every archetype in that film is teaching you something about how to be the professional people want to call first. The one who documents everything. The one who shows up prepared. The one who makes the complex feel manageable. The one who earns the trust before they ask for the brief.

The tools exist. The systems exist. The only question is whether you build them before you need them or scramble to find them after something goes wrong.

Build them now.

Full episode is at linkin.bio/francescahustles

For everything else, go to linkin.bio/francescahustles

Think You're Falling Behind? Discover How to Outshine Competitors in the New Year Without Comparison Anxiety!

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:10:52 GMT

How to Outshine Competitors in the New Year Without Comparison Anxiety!

That whole comparison is the death of joy vibe...

As we usher in a new year filled with both excitement and uncertainty, it's important to address a common yet often overlooked obstacle in the realm of business and career growth: the peril of comparison. Particularly in the fast-evolving sector of social media-based careers, where brand creators and business owners span all ages, comparison can indeed be the thief of joy.

The allure of social media often compels us to juxtapose our journey with others, especially when images of success and achievement are constantly highlighted. For entrepreneurs and creators, this can lead to undue stress and a skewed perception of success. It’s crucial to remember that each path is unique and not directly comparable to another's highlight reel.

Here are some tips to avoid the trap of comparison, particularly in the context of business and career goals in the new year:

Set Personal Milestones: Instead of measuring your progress against others, define your own success through personal milestones based on your goals and capacities. This could mean aiming to increase your engagement rates by a certain percentage or planning to launch a new product line by the end of the quarter.
Celebrate Small Wins: In the ever-competitive social media landscape, it's vital to celebrate every small win. Whether it's gaining a new client, improving your content quality, or even just refining your brand voice, acknowledging these victories can boost your morale and keep you motivated.
Focus on Learning, Not Just Earning: Concentrate on acquiring new skills and knowledge pertinent to your field. For social media strategists and content creators, staying updated with the latest platform algorithms and marketing techniques is crucial. This focus diverts attention from comparison to personal and professional growth. The money is a natural result.
Utilize Constructive Feedback: Instead of dwelling on how others might perceive your business, seek constructive feedback from trusted mentors or peers. This can provide actionable insights and foster improvement, steering you clear of unproductive comparisons.
Mindfulness and Reflection: Regularly engage in mindfulness practices and reflect on your journey. This helps maintain a clear perspective and alleviates the anxiety that often accompanies comparison.

Remember, in the world of digital entrepreneurship, where brand creators range from enthusiastic teenagers to seasoned business owners, the key to sustained joy and success lies in focusing on your own journey, not someone else’s destination. By embracing this mindset, you can navigate the uncertainties of the new year with confidence and creativity, ensuring that comparison does not steal your joy but fuels your journey forward.

Not sure how to do this and need advice. Book in a discovery call and lets catch up.

What Would Andy Sachs Do? Career Lessons for 2025

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 06:18:48 GMT

The Devil Wears Prada was 19 years ago in 2025.

That would make Andy Sachs 42.

What Would Andy Sachs Do? 10 Career Tips Inspired by The Devil Wears Prada

As we head into 2025, Gen Z is leading the way in transforming workplace culture. Their approach emphasizes a human-centered experience built on respect. And let’s be clear: respect = robust productivity and loyalty . While Gen X and other generations may need to catch up, there’s plenty to learn from the lessons portrayed in The Devil Wears Prada. Inspired by Andy Sachs’ journey, here are 10 career tips that blend cinematic wisdom with actionable advice, helping us all thrive in the modern workplace.

1. First Impressions Matter

Andy’s transformation began the moment she recognized the value of presenting herself with care. While her initial indifference to fashion was relatable, it also sent a signal that she wasn’t fully invested in her role. Dressing the part isn’t superficial; it’s about showing respect for yourself and your work. A polished appearance exudes confidence and signals competency to peers and leadership alike.

2. Mindshift: Appearance and Confidence Are Linked

Andy’s initial lack of attention to her appearance reflected a deeper insecurity and disconnect with her role. When she embraced the power of style, she didn’t just look the part—she became the part. This mindshift is crucial. How you present yourself affects not only how others perceive you but also how you perceive yourself. When you look put-together, you’re more likely to feel capable, confident, and ready to tackle challenges.

3. Attitude Is Everything

From her early days of disdain to her eventual resilience, Andy’s journey highlights the importance of maintaining a positive and professional attitude. Approach every task with curiosity and a willingness to learn, even if it’s outside your comfort zone. A strong work ethic and respect for your role build credibility and open doors.

4. Set Boundaries and Stand Up for Yourself

Andy’s decision to walk away from Runway was a defining moment. It was about reclaiming her boundaries and staying true to her values. In the workplace, boundaries protect your time, energy, and well-being. Know when to say no and advocate for what matters to you.

5. Strategic Thinking Wins

Success often requires going beyond what’s expected. Andy’s ability to anticipate needs—like finding the unpublished manuscript for the twins—showed her resourcefulness and initiative. In today’s workplace, being proactive means preparing data-driven insights, having strategic solutions ready, and thinking ahead in meetings.

6. Timeliness Reflects Reliability

Being on time—whether for meetings, deadlines, or projects—builds trust. Andy learned this the hard way during her early days at Runway. Timeliness isn’t just about punctuality; it’s about showing respect for others’ time and ensuring you’re someone people can count on.

7. Cultivate a Growth Mindset

Andy’s evolution wouldn’t have been possible without her willingness to grow and adapt. A growth mindset enables you to view challenges as opportunities to learn. Seek feedback, embrace change, and continually strive for improvement.

8. Grooming Is a Form of Self-Respect

Andy’s makeover wasn’t about vanity; it was about aligning her appearance with her ambitions. Investing in self-care, from grooming to fitness, signals that you value yourself. This isn’t about conforming to societal standards but about presenting yourself as someone who takes their role seriously.

9. Balance Creativity with Data

In Andy’s world, fashion was art, but it was also a business. Similarly, in today’s workplaces, creativity must be balanced with strategy. Use data to support your ideas and ensure your creative solutions are actionable and results-driven.

10. Stay True to Your Values

Andy’s moral compass ultimately guided her decision to leave Runway. No matter how demanding your workplace becomes, never lose sight of your values. Loyalty to yourself and your principles will serve you better in the long run than any paycheck or title.

Andy Sachs’ journey in The Devil Wears Prada is more than a cinematic story; it’s a roadmap for anyone navigating the complexities of the modern workplace. By embracing these lessons, we can all approach 2025 with confidence, clarity, and a renewed sense of purpose. After all, as Andy proved, the right mindset can change everything.

Can content like this help your business get in touch and lets chat about it.

Social Media Girlies

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 22:49:46 GMT

Insights from the Creative Vanguard of Gen Z and Millennials

Social Media Girlies: Insights from the Creative Vanguard of Gen Z and Millennials

In today's digital age, a significant portion of Gen Z and Millennials view the world through a social media lens, crafting lifestyles and careers around digital platforms. This blog delves into the mindset of these 'social media girlies'—a term affectionately used to describe young individuals who are not only consuming content but are also creating it, shaping trends, and influencing a vast online community. Here’s what we can learn from their approach to social media.

Living Through a Social Media Lens

For many in Gen Z and the Millennial generation, social media isn't just a tool; it's a primary mode of interaction, self-expression, and information. This demographic has grown up with the internet and social media at their fingertips, making them inherently adept at navigating these platforms. They think in terms of shareability and virality—every moment holds the potential to be captured, posted, and appreciated on a global scale.

Creativity on the Front Lines

The creativity seen on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat from young social media aficionados is not just spontaneous but often meticulously planned and executed. This generation has mastered the art of blending authenticity with aspiration, creating content that resonates with both their immediate peer group and a broader audience. They are the trendsetters and the pacesetters for what is cool, what is ethical, and what is marketable.

Key Takeaways:

Visual First: Imagery and aesthetics are paramount. A well-curated visual can transcend language barriers and connect emotionally with viewers, making visual literacy as critical as textual literacy.
Authenticity Matters: Despite the polish, authenticity drives engagement. Young content creators are adept at being relatable; they share their real lives, warts and all, crafting narratives that feel both personal and universal.
Engagement Over Production: While high production values were once the hallmark of quality content, today’s audiences gravitate towards engagement and interaction. Quick, reactive content often trumps more polished pieces in terms of viewer engagement.
Social Responsibility: With great power comes great responsibility. Young creators are increasingly aware of their platform's impact, leading to more conscientious content that often tackles social, environmental, and political issues.

Learning from the Fro ntline

Businesses and older generations can learn a lot from these digital natives. Flexibility, responsiveness to trends, and the ability to engage sincerely with an audience are traits that can enhance any digital strategy. Additionally, understanding the importance of a platform's specific language and culture can help in crafting messages that resonate and drive engagement.

Contributors

The 'social media girlies' of Gen Z and Millennials are redefining fame, creativity, and entrepreneurship. By observing their methods and understanding their perspectives, we can adapt to and excel in this ever-evolving digital landscape. Whether you're a budding influencer, a seasoned marketer, or a business owner, there’s much to learn from the creativity and dynamism of these young creators.

For those looking to dive deeper into effective social media strategies and learn from the best practices of today’s youth, connect with us at Social Global Grind. We have that generational experience that can help you with your campaign.

Friendships in the Workplace: Are They Worth It?

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:29:25 GMT

Workplace friendships often promise camaraderie and support, but are they always beneficial?

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Style at Any Age

Mon, 26 May 2025 22:26:44 GMT

A Personal Take on Fashion Over 50

Style at Any Age: A Personal Take on Fashion Over 50

Hello, I'm Francesca Alexander, and as someone who's navigated the colorful world of fashion well into my 50s, I believe style is an evolution, not just a static choice. Let me share with you how embracing modern fashion influences from TikTok has inspired my own style journey and how it can invigorate yours too, regardless of age.

Finding Inspiration in Unexpected Places

TikTok, often seen as a playground for the young, is bursting with style icons who challenge the norms and redefine what fashion looks like at any age. Here are a few TikTok influencers who inspire me daily, not necessarily because they are over 50, but because they embody the spirit of timeless style:

@newsfash: Brings a creative twist to everyday fashion that appeals to anyone who values both classic and contemporary elements.
@welcometoheidi: Heidi shows that personal style is about confidence and breaking free from conventional age barriers.
@neelamahooja: Exudes elegance and sophistication, proving that style is an art form that transcends age.
@karenbritchick: Demonstrates how to turn everyday moments into fashion statements with her bold and expressive choices.

Integrating Modern Trends into Your Personal Style

Fashion is not just about following trends; it's about making them your own. Here’s how I weave these modern influences into my wardrobe:

Experiment Boldly: I take cues from influencers who mix colors and patterns bravely and try to incorporate similar boldness into my outfits.
Focus on Fit and Comfort: No matter the trend, fit is paramount. I choose garments that flatter my shape and give me comfort, showing that style does not have to compromise comfort.
Invest in Versatile Pieces: I look for pieces that can be styled in multiple ways, extending their life and versatility in my wardrobe.
Accessorize Thoughtfully: Accessories like a striking necklace or a chic scarf can elevate an outfit instantly, similar to the inspirations I find on TikTok.

Embracing Your Unique Style Journey

Every person's style journey is unique, and mine has been about blending inspiration from various sources with my personal taste and lifestyle needs. Whether you're revamping your wardrobe or just looking for ways to spice up your daily outfits, remember that fashion should be fun, expressive, and uniquely yours.

Let's Talk Fashion

If you're intrigued by the idea of infusing new life into your personal style with some TikTok flair, or if you're curious about how to maintain relevance in your fashion choices as you mature, I’d love to help. At Social Global Grind, we’re all about making style accessible and exciting for everyone. Connect with us, and let’s make your style journey one to remember!

Is Social Media Really Worth the Hype? One Business Owner's Journey to Finding Focus

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 03:34:20 GMT

5 Physical and Mental Signs You’re On the Verge of Burnout from Social Media

Is Social Media Really Worth the Hype? One Business Owner's Journey to Finding Focus

“It was all too much. Facebook ads, TikTok dancing, and feeling unclear about what to do on LinkedIn was catching up with me. I began to wonder, ‘Is social media worth the hype?’”

As a small business owner, I had dipped my toes into social media more times than I could count. But the constant pressure to be everywhere—posting, engaging, trending—felt like an endless race. That’s when I made the decision to hire someone who could manage it all for me.

Enter the young, enthusiastic social media manager. She was bursting with energy and ideas. But as time went on, I noticed something was off. My social media looked active, but the content wasn’t connecting. It felt more like a collection of her favorite trends—TikTok dances, motivational quotes—than a focused campaign that spoke to my brand and, more importantly, my audience.

What was missing? Strategy. Focus. Intentional content creation.

It became clear that what I really needed wasn’t just someone to post, but someone to help me shape a clear, long-term social media strategy—someone who could balance creativity with real business goals. That’s when I found Social Collab.

Francesca Alexander, agency owner and creator of Social Collab, understands the challenges business owners face. She designed Social Collab with a hands-on approach, making sure business owners don’t get overwhelmed or burnt out trying to manage their social media alone. With Francesca’s guidance, you get personalized strategy, intentional campaigns, and a strong community built around your brand.

5 Physical and Mental Signs You’re On the Verge of Burnout from Social Media:

Constant Fatigue: The endless cycle of posting, commenting, and engaging can leave you drained. If you’re always feeling exhausted after spending time on social media, it’s a sign that your campaign may be too much to handle alone.
Increased Anxiety: The pressure to perform—whether it’s keeping up with trends or meeting engagement goals—can create overwhelming stress and anxiety.
Lack of Focus: Without a clear strategy, you may find yourself jumping from one idea to the next, feeling lost in the noise of social media platforms. This mental clutter is a huge contributor to burnout.
Physical Discomfort: Spending too much time in front of a screen can lead to headaches, eye strain, or even back and neck pain. Your body may be telling you it’s time to step back and reassess your approach.
Emotional Detachment: When your social media feels like a chore, it’s easy to become emotionally disconnected from your business. If you no longer feel excited or passionate about your content, you might be heading toward burnout.

If you’re experiencing any of these signs, it might be time to co-create with Social Collab.

With Social Collab, everything changed for me. Unlike before, I was no longer just a passive spectator watching random posts go up. I became part of the process. Together with Francesca and her team, I co-created meaningful content—videos, editorial posts, and more—that aligned with my brand’s mission.

No more guessing games. No more aimless campaigns. With Social Collab, I learned how to build a consistent social media presence and develop a plan that targeted the right audience. It was the perfect blend of expert support and hands-on involvement.

Now, instead of wondering if social media marketing is worth it, I’m seeing the impact firsthand. The right strategy makes all the difference.

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed and wondering whether social media is for you, maybe it’s time for something different. Maybe it’s time for Social Collab.

Note from the Author:

We started our social media collaborations with small businesses in 2009. Over the years, we’ve refined our methods through working closely with our clients, helping them navigate the ever-changing landscape of social media. In this article, you’ll find actual quotes and experiences from clients we've worked with along the way.

I wanted to write this article as a compilation of the many success stories we’ve been a part of, showcasing how Social Collab methods have helped business owners course-correct and ultimately thrive with focused, effective social media campaigns. Our mission has always been to prevent burnout and overwhelm, and to build something meaningful alongside our clients.

Call to Action:

You don’t have to navigate social media alone. Social Collab is here to help you create meaningful campaigns that resonate with your audience and build your brand. Find out more about how we can work together and book a discovery call today. Let’s create a strategy that works for you!

Care to catch up in Auckland? Click here and book in.

We will take care of you and your parking.

Let's chat from anywhere in the world. Click here to book a discovery call.

Wherever you are Australia, London or Los Angeles let's see if SOCIAL COLLAB is right for you.

Streamlining Your Marketing with Social Global Grind

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 22:33:19 GMT

What it feels like to get shit done

Streamlining Your Marketing with Social Global Grind

Hey there, fellow business owners! We understand that the marketing world can feel overwhelming, especially when you're balancing so many aspects of your business. You've got products to launch, teams to manage, and an endless list of tasks. Who has the time to become an Instagram guru or a master of SEO overnight? That's where we step in—Social Global Grind is here to lighten your marketing load.

Tackling Your Marketing Challenges

You're wearing multiple hats every day, and often, marketing doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's not just about squeezing marketing activities into your day; it's about making sure those efforts effectively engage your audience and lead to tangible results. Let us take the marketing reins so you can focus on what you do best—running your business.

Our Comprehensive Solutions

Tailored Social Media Strategies: We simplify the complexities of each platform, crafting tailored strategies that elevate your brand without overwhelming you. Whether it's engaging posts for Instagram, community building on Facebook, or networking on LinkedIn, we handle it all.

Expert Content Creation: Forget the content creation stress. Our team develops customized content that truly reflects your brand’s personality and talks directly to your customers, enhancing engagement and freeing up your time.

SEO & Digital Integration: Lost in the world of SEO? No worries. We ensure your online presence is finely tuned to improve visibility and attract more business, making your website a magnet for new customers.

Effortless Campaign Management: From emails that captivate to ads that convert, we manage your campaigns from start to finish. You’ll see better performance, with less effort on your part.

Professional Multimedia Production: Ready to explore podcasts or video marketing? We produce high-quality multimedia content that captures the essence of your brand and connects with people on a deeper level.

Why Choose Us?

At Social Global Grind, we’re not just a service provider; we’re your partner in navigating the digital marketing landscape. We understand the pressures you face and specialize in creating strategies that align with your overall business objectives. By partnering with us, you'll gain a dedicated team that’s committed to making your marketing successful and straightforward.

Ready to ease your marketing headaches and propel your business forward?

Let's connect!

We’re excited to help you streamline your marketing efforts and achieve the results you deserve.

How Often Should you Post on Instagram

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 01:27:15 GMT

Let's dive in

How Often Should You Post on Instagram?

Navigating the world of Instagram effectively requires a strategic approach to content posting. The frequency with which you post can significantly impact your account's growth and engagement levels. But how often should you really be posting to optimize these metrics? Recent analysis of over 19 million Instagram feed posts reveals some interesting trends related to posting frequency and account size.

Understanding Posting Frequency by Account Size

The data suggests that optimal posting frequencies vary depending on the size of the Instagram account:

Nano Accounts (0-10K followers): These accounts benefit from posting twice per week. At this level, maintaining a regular but not overwhelming presence helps to build a dedicated audience without saturating their feeds.
Micro Accounts (10K-100K followers): Slightly larger accounts should aim for three posts per week. This increased frequency helps maintain visibility and engagement as the audience grows.
Mid Accounts (100K-500K followers): For these more substantial accounts, posting five times per week is ideal. Frequent posts keep the account active in followers' feeds and encourage regular interactions, which is crucial for sustaining engagement at higher follower counts.

Why Consistency Matters

Consistency in posting not only helps in building a routine that followers can expect but also signals to Instagram's algorithms that your account is actively engaging with its audience. This can lead to greater visibility in your followers' feeds and potentially increase the reach of your posts to new audiences.

Tips for Planning Your Instagram Content

Understand Your Audience: Knowing when your audience is most active on Instagram can help you choose the best times to post. Utilize Instagram Insights to determine when your posts receive the most engagement.
Quality Over Quantity: While frequency is important, the quality of your content is crucial. High-quality, engaging content that resonates with your audience is more likely to be shared and commented on, regardless of how often you post.
Use a Content Calendar: Planning your posts in advance with a content calendar can help ensure you maintain the frequency needed for your account size. It also helps in managing the creative process more efficiently, ensuring you have quality content ready to go.
Engage with Your Audience: Posting is just one part of the Instagram strategy. Engaging with your audience through comments, stories, and direct messages can help boost your post's performance and foster a stronger community.
Experiment and Adapt: Don't be afraid to test different posting frequencies to see what works best for your specific audience. Social media is dynamic, and staying flexible allows you to adapt to changes in audience preferences and platform algorithms.

What You Need To Know

Finding the right balance in your posting frequency on Instagram is key to maximizing growth and engagement. By aligning your posting schedule with the needs and preferences of your audience, and by keeping the quality of your content high, you can build a more engaged and loyal following. Remember, what works best can vary widely, so continuous testing and adjustment are essential to find the most effective strategy for your Instagram account.

Still have questions about how often you should posts and on what platforms? Schedule a call with us. Let's connect soon.

Spring Refresh: The Cool Girl’s Guide to Revamping Your Wardrobe in Aotearoa

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:58:59 GMT

Lets refresh

Spring Refresh: The Cool Girl’s Guide to Revamping Your Wardrobe in Aotearoa

As the crisp air of Aotearoa gives way to the milder, inviting days of spring, it’s the perfect time to refresh your wardrobe with stylish, functional pieces that transition beautifully from the cooler months into the warmer season. Here’s your cool girl's guide to updating your style with flair and practicality this spring.

Embracing Warmer Yet Lightweight Layers

Spring in Aotearoa often means saying goodbye to heavy coats and welcoming lighter alternatives that offer warmth without the bulk.

Chic Blazers: Swap out your winter coat for a warm blazer. Perfect for those slightly chilly mornings, a blazer keeps you warm and adds a touch of sophistication to any outfit, whether you're dressing up for a meeting or keeping it casual for a coffee run.
Versatile Jackets: Consider adding different styles of jackets to your wardrobe. A leather jacket can edge up a floral spring dress, while a tailored denim jacket pairs well with both workwear and weekend outfits. These pieces are substantial enough to shield you from a cool breeze but light enough to carry around or tie around your waist if the day warms up.

Innovating with Sweaters

Replace your bulky scarves with stylish sweaters that you can drape over your shoulders or wrap around your neck like a scarf. When it gets warmer, you can effortlessly layer them over a spring dress or a chic blouse, ensuring both style and warmth.

The Utility of a Capacious Bag

A big, stylish bag isn’t just a fashion statement—it's also incredibly practical for spring. Opt for one that’s large enough to stash an extra sweater or that jacket you might peel off in the afternoon sun. This way, you’re prepared for any temperature swings throughout the day.

Leveraging Social Media for Style and Insights

Spring also brings the opportunity to share your style and thoughts with the world. Why not film your outfit of the day (OOTD) and share your current insights on life and career? Platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok are not just for networking and entertainment; they’re also fantastic avenues to express your personal style and professional growth.

On LinkedIn, share how your spring wardrobe refresh is a part of your broader personal branding strategy. Connect it with professional growth, networking, or personal development.
On TikTok, get creative with short, engaging videos showing how you style your spring outfits or how you transition from a professional day look to a relaxed evening style.

Making It Demure

Keep the tone subtle and sophisticated. Spring fashion, especially in the beautiful backdrop of Aotearoa, can be understated yet incredibly chic. Emphasise soft pastels, floral patterns (I know groundbreaking...), and lightweight fabrics that make a statement in their simplicity.

OOTD Opportunity

Refreshing your wardrobe for spring in Aotearoa doesn’t just mean keeping up with the trends; it's about making smart, stylish choices that work for your lifestyle and preferences. So, as the seasons change, take this chance to reinvent your wardrobe and maybe even your social media presence to reflect your unique style and insights.

Navigating Gossip: Strategies for Managing Workplace and Friendship Dynamics

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:47:11 GMT

How Do you Stay Ahead of it

Navigating Gossip: Strategies for Managing Workplace and Friendship Dynamics

Gossip can be a disruptive force not only in the workplace but also in personal relationships among friends. Drawing from both personal experiences and the strategic approach of Justin Baldoni during his well-documented workplace disputes , this blog offers insights on how to handle gossip delicately and effectively in any setting.

Understanding the Impact of Gossip

Gossip can quickly spiral into damaging rumours or misunderstandings that strain relationships, whether at work or among friends. It’s essential to approach these situations with thoughtful strategies that protect your reputation and preserve your relationships.

Strategies to Stay Ahead of Gossip

Maintain Professionalism and Decorum: Inspired by Justin Baldoni's approach , maintaining a calm and professional demeanour is crucial. Address misunderstandings directly with the individuals involved and avoid airing grievances in public or on social media. This approach helps preserve respect and dignity in all interactions.
Redirect Conversations: When gossip emerges, consciously steer conversations towards more positive or constructive topics. Focusing on future plans, mutual interests, or positive attributes can shift the tone of interactions and reduce the impact of negative gossip.
Establish Clear Boundaries: Setting personal boundaries is essential. Decide what information you are comfortable sharing and what you believe should remain private. Communicating these boundaries clearly can prevent misunderstandings and discourage gossip.
Promote Understanding and Kindness: Opt for a compassionate approach when dealing with gossip. Trying to understand the perspectives of others and addressing concerns with empathy can mitigate conflicts and foster a more supportive environment.
Communicate Positively and Regularly: Use your interactions, whether in person or on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok, to share positive insights and experiences that reinforce your values and the quality of your relationships. Regular, positive communication can counteract the effects of any negative gossip.

Mental Health: Emotional Well-being in Mind

Here are some mental health care tips to consider when dealing with gossip and the importance of seeking support through these challenging times.

Prioritizing Mental Health While Dealing with Gossip

Recognise the Impact: Understand that gossip can be emotionally draining and can impact your mental health. Recognizing this impact is the first step in taking proactive measures to protect your well-being.
Seek Support: During such times, it's beneficial to have a support system. This could be a mentor who has experience navigating similar situations or a mental health professional who can provide strategies to manage stress and anxiety resulting from negative social interactions. These experts can offer guidance and perspective, helping you to handle the situation with less emotional strain.
Set Emotional Boundaries: Just as you set boundaries for what personal information you share, it’s important to establish emotional boundaries. Decide how much of other people’s opinions you are willing to let affect you and stick to these limits.
Engage in Self-Care: Invest time in activities that bolster your emotional and mental health. Whether it’s pursuing hobbies, practising meditation, or simply spending time in nature, make sure to take care of your mental well-being.
Stay Connected with Positive Influences: Surround yourself with people who uplift you and reinforce positive self-image and confidence. Positive social interactions can act as a buffer against the negative effects of gossip.
Reflect and Grow: Use challenging experiences with gossip as opportunities for personal growth. Reflect on what these situations teach you about communication, relationships, and your own resilience.

Impact

Dealing with gossip is challenging, but managing it effectively is crucial to maintaining your social relations and mental health. By understanding the emotional impact of gossip, seeking professional guidance, and practising self-care, you can navigate these situations more effectively and come out stronger. Remember, you’re not alone in this—reaching out to mentors or mental health professionals can provide the support and tools you need to handle gossip healthily and constructively.

For more insights and resources, check out here . https://mentalhealth.org.nz/

https://mentalhealth.org.nz/

The ‘feral 25-year-olds’ making Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:38:02 GMT

Making Kamala Harris Go Viral on TikTok

The ‘feral 25-year-olds’ making Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok

In the bustling world of social media where every second counts, Kamala Harris's TikTok team, composed entirely of zealous Gen-Z wizards, has been revolutionizing presidential politics. Fresh out of the debate halls, while traditional strategies still lingered in the spin rooms, Harris’s squad was already orchestrating viral magic online, propelling her campaign with an unmatched digital flair.

What sets them apart? A bold, agile approach that marries the spontaneity of internet culture with the sharp strategy of political campaigning. This team, brimming with youthful exuberance, has mastered the art of rapid response, creating and deploying content in the blink of an eye. From light-hearted memes that pack a political punch to strategic posts that turn adversaries' tactics on their heads, their content strategy isn’t just reactive—it's a step ahead, shaping the narrative in real-time.

Their secret sauce? An all-hands-on-deck ethos that leverages each platform's unique vibe, from TikTok’s viral beats to Instagram’s glossy aesthetics, making Harris relatable and omnipresent. It’s not just about being seen—it’s about creating a moment, a meme, a movement. They don’t just share news—they make it, ensuring Harris’s voice is not just heard but resonates through the endless scroll of feeds.

Rapid Response Creation: The TikTok team could produce and post content swiftly, often within about half an hour, contrasting sharply with previous campaigns where a single post might take much longer.
Youth-Led Team: The team, comprising members all under 25, was given the freedom to experiment and chase viral trends, indicating a trust in young professionals' understanding of internet culture.
Content Variety and Engagement: The team utilized a mix of humorous, snarky, and upbeat content to engage viewers, significantly differentiating their approach from more traditional or negative campaigning styles.
Real-Time Monitoring and Reaction: The digital team actively monitored political events and responded in real time, enhancing their ability to influence public perception quickly.
Platform-Specific Strategies: Each team member specialized in different platforms, tailoring content to fit the unique culture and slang of each, showing a sophisticated understanding of diverse social media environments.
High Engagement Metrics: Despite having fewer followers than competitors, Harris's campaign videos received significantly more views, showcasing their effective engagement strategies.
Innovative Use of Memes and Cultural References: From leveraging memes to integrating pop culture references, the team’s approach was aimed at making political content more relatable and shareable among younger audiences.

By embracing the quirks and features of each social medium, Harris’s team has tapped into a new vein of political engagement, demonstrating that when it comes to winning hearts and votes online, authenticity trumps all. Their strategy exemplifies how powerful combining traditional campaign tactics with the unorthodox can be, crafting a campaign presence that’s as dynamic as the digital landscape itself.

Fashion Week to Thrift Shop: Styling Runway Looks on a Budget

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:07:01 GMT

The Art of Thrifting Runway Trends

As fashion week dazzles us with the latest trends, it brings with it a wave of inspiration that fashion enthusiasts around the globe yearn to recreate. However, not everyone has access to high-end designer pieces. This is where the magic of thrift shopping comes into play, allowing style lovers to mimic these luxurious looks without breaking the bank. Let's explore how you can bring runway fashion into your wardrobe through thrift shopping, with a nod to some of the most creative TikTok influencers who make fashion accessible and fun.

The Art of Thrifting Runway Trends

Fashion Week showcases a myriad of styles that often set the tone for the upcoming season's trends. From bold prints and voluminous silhouettes to retro revivals, these trends can often be spotted later in the racks of local thrift stores. Here’s how you can thrift Fashion Week trends effectively:

Research and Prepare: Before hitting the thrift stores, familiarize yourself with the key trends from Fashion Week. Take notes or save images of the looks you loved the most.
Visit Multiple Stores: Thrift shopping is a treasure hunt. Visit various thrift stores to increase your chances of finding high-fashion replicas. Each store has its unique inventory, offering a plethora of vintage and contemporary styles.
Look for Quality Fabrics: High-quality fabrics can make even the simplest designs look upscale. Search for silks, linens, and good-quality cottons to mimic the luxurious feel of runway outfits.
Alter and Customize: Sometimes, a little tweak is all it takes to transform a thrift store find into a runway-worthy piece. Whether it’s hemming a skirt to match the length of a runway model or taking in a jacket for a perfect fit, simple alterations can make a significant impact.

TikTok Creators for Fashion Inspiration

To get started or to find new ways to style your thrift store finds, follow these TikTok fashion influencers who excel at turning everyday items into fashion statements:

@newsfash: Known for their keen eye on emerging trends and how to style them for everyday wear.
@alexisbittar: Delivers high fashion meets streetwear with a focus on bold jewelry and accessories.
@jasmina: Inspires with minimalist styles and how to maximize a wardrobe with key versatile pieces.
@jordanrothofficial: Offers a theatrical take on fashion that pushes boundaries and redefines norms.
@tuihana.ohia: Celebrates cultural heritage with contemporary fashion, blending traditional motifs with modern designs.
@jennalyonsnyc: Known for her chic and sophisticated aesthetic that mixes high-end with accessible fashion.

Bringing It All Together

Thrift shopping after Fashion Week isn’t just about being economical; it’s about being environmentally friendly, creative, and making fashion accessible. By taking inspiration from both the runway and TikTok creators, you can create unique, stylish outfits that won’t strain your budget.

Fashion Week inspires us to dream big with our style, while thrift shopping keeps us grounded in reality, offering a practical approach to achieving these dreams. This blend of aspiration and accessibility ensures that anyone, regardless of budget, can participate in and enjoy the thrill of fashion week trends.

Boundaries

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 21:39:03 GMT

Dealing with Bosses Who Expect Constant Availability

While setting boundaries for work communications is crucial, some bosses or managers may have a different perspective on availability, expecting employees to be on-call at all times. It’s important to address this issue carefully, as the pressure to be constantly available can negatively affect both your work-life balance and mental health.

Why Discussing Boundaries Matters in Social Media Marketing

The conversation around setting clear professional boundaries is critical, especially within the social media marketing sector—a field under constant scrutiny and where outcomes are often viewed through a qualitative lens. For women in the workplace, particularly those in digital roles like social media, this scrutiny can intensify when a company faces challenges. My experience has shown that scepticism often comes from leadership least familiar with the dynamics of social media marketing. For instance, a former VP of Sales at a corporate setting dismissed the efficacy of social media as "hocus pocus" only to later start his own social media company after being let go.

This underscores not only the misunderstood nature of social media marketing but also highlights why companies like ours, Social Global Grind, dedicate articles to the importance of maintaining professional boundaries. Proper boundaries not only safeguard employees from undue stress and scrutiny but also foster an environment where the true value of meticulous, analytics-driven social media strategies can be appreciated and quantified. For those navigating the intricate balance of visibility and responsibility in digital marketing, understanding how to assert and maintain boundaries is not just beneficial—it's essential for long-term success and recognition in the industry.

How to Handle Bosses Who Expect You to Be Fully Available

Communicate Clearly and Professionally: When faced with a boss who expects you to be available around the clock, the first step is to have an open conversation. Express your commitment to the job while highlighting the importance of maintaining personal time to recharge. You might say, “I’m dedicated to delivering my best work, and for that to happen, I need to set clear boundaries for after-hours communication. I’m happy to be flexible during urgent situations, but I’ll generally respond to messages first thing in the morning.”
Offer Alternatives: If your role requires occasional off-hours availability, suggest a structured approach. For example, propose designated on-call times during particularly busy periods rather than leaving your availability open-ended. Let them know you are willing to meet the needs of the business while balancing your personal time.
Focus on Productivity, Not Presence: Shift the conversation from availability to results. Highlight how having well-defined boundaries will enable you to be more productive during working hours. You can explain that taking regular breaks and disconnecting outside of work hours improves focus, energy, and creativity when you’re on the clock.
Refer to Company Policies or Industry Norms: If your company has specific policies around work hours, use them to support your stance. Additionally, many industries are moving toward more flexible, balanced work cultures, so citing examples of how these policies benefit both employees and employers can help make your case.
Seek Support from HR or Mentors: If direct conversations don’t lead to a resolution, consider seeking advice from HR or a trusted mentor. They can offer guidance on how to approach the situation in a way that maintains your professional integrity while protecting your personal time.
Know When to Compromise: In some cases, compromise may be necessary. For example, during critical project deadlines, you may need to be available outside regular hours temporarily. However, be sure to reset those boundaries once the project is completed to avoid setting a precedent of constant availability.

Safeguarding Your Boundaries with Documentation

While striving to establish and maintain work-life boundaries is critical, it may sometimes be necessary to document instances where these boundaries are not respected, especially if the issue persists despite clear communication. This is not only about protecting your personal time but also about maintaining a professional and respectful work environment.

Steps for Documenting Boundary Violations

Keep Records: Whenever a boundary is crossed, such as receiving work-related messages outside of agreed-upon hours, keep a record. This includes saving screenshots of text messages, emails, or any other communications that occur outside the boundaries you've set.
Note the Frequency and Content: Along with keeping screenshots, make a note of how often these intrusions occur and the nature of the requests or messages. This will help illustrate whether these are one-off incidents or part of a larger pattern.
Use a Journal for Ongoing Issues: For ongoing issues, maintain a detailed journal with dates, times, and descriptions of all interactions that involve boundary violations. This documentation can be invaluable in discussions with HR or your supervisor as it provides a clear, objective record of what has been happening.
Communicate Concerns with Evidence: If you need to escalate the issue, present your records in a factual and dispassionate manner. Explain how these intrusions affect your productivity and well-being and reiterate your need for clearly defined boundaries.
Consult with HR or Legal Advice: If boundary violations continue despite your efforts to address them, consider consulting with HR or seeking legal advice, especially if the behavior impacts your ability to perform your job or affects your mental health.

Protecting Your Rights and Well-being

Documenting boundary violations is a step you can take to ensure your rights to personal time and a respectful workplace are upheld. It’s about creating a fair environment where everyone understands and respects each other's time and contributions. Remember, setting boundaries is not only beneficial for your own health and productivity but also sets a precedent that fosters a healthier workplace culture for everyone.

By taking these steps, you can more effectively manage your work-life balance and advocate for a workplace that respects personal boundaries and promotes mutual respect.

Needing further advice on how to handle tricky situations like this? We are here to help. Click on our Calendly link and let's catch up.

Harnessing AI for High-End, Affordable Content Creation

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 22:26:39 GMT

Affordable Content Creation

Harnessing AI for High-End, Affordable Content Creation

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses and content creators are constantly seeking innovative ways to produce high-quality, visually appealing content without breaking the bank. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing this arena by enabling the creation of up-market, sophisticated imagery and multimedia content at a fraction of traditional costs.

AI-Powered Content Production

AI technologies have evolved to a point where they can generate stunning graphics, sophisticated animations, and even realistic video content that aligns with a brand’s aesthetic, all while maintaining a high-end feel. Here’s how AI is making this possible:

Automated Graphic Design: Tools like Canva’s AI-assisted design suggestions allow users to create polished designs quickly. AI algorithms can suggest color palettes, layouts, and fonts, making it easier for users without a graphic design background to achieve professional-looking results.
AI Photo Editing: AI-powered photo editing tools can enhance images to a high degree of quality automatically. These tools adjust lighting, color balance, and even composition, providing users with magazine-quality visuals in seconds.
Custom Illustrations with AI: Platforms like DALL-E 2 and similar services offer the ability to generate unique images and artwork from textual descriptions. This not only speeds up the creative process but also reduces costs associated with hiring illustrators for custom work.
Video Production and Editing: AI-driven video editing software can automate many aspects of video production, from color correction to cutting scenes together based on the best takes. AI can analyze hours of footage and recommend the best clips to include, significantly reducing the time and expense of video editing.
Content Personalization at Scale: AI excels in personalizing content for different segments of a target audience. By analyzing data on viewer preferences and behaviors, AI can customize visuals and messages to resonate more deeply with various demographic groups, enhancing engagement without additional cost for customization.

The Benefits of AI in Content Production

Cost Efficiency: AI reduces the need for expensive software or professional services, democratizing access to high-quality content creation.
Speed: AI can produce or edit content much faster than human counterparts, crucial for brands that need to respond quickly to market trends.
Consistency: AI maintains a consistent quality and style, ensuring brand standards are met across all visual assets.
Scalability: With AI, businesses can scale their content production up or down without significant resource adjustments, allowing them to meet demand fluctuations more efficiently.

Looking Ahead

As AI continues to advance, we can expect even more sophisticated tools to emerge, further transforming content creation into a more accessible yet high-quality process. Businesses and creators who leverage these AI capabilities can not only save on costs but also stay competitive in a market that values both aesthetic appeal and rapid content turnaround.

At Social Global Grind , we specialize in integrating these AI-driven content solutions into your marketing strategy, ensuring your brand not only keeps up with trends but sets them. Interested in transforming your content creation approach with AI? Contact us to explore how we can elevate your brand with cutting-edge technology.

Sleep Hygiene: The Foundation of Effective Leadership and Wellness

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 22:19:16 GMT

The Foundation of Effective Leadership and Wellness

Sleep Hygiene: The Foundation of Effective Leadership and Wellness

In the world of high-stakes decision-making and leadership, the importance of sleep is often underestimated. Drawing inspiration from Arianna Huffington's Thrive concept, this blog explores the critical link between sleep hygiene and leadership effectiveness, particularly emphasizing the consequences of sleep deprivation, such as poor decision-making exemplified by impulsive late-night communications.

The Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Decision-Making

Leadership roles demand clarity, strategic thinking, and the ability to manage stress—qualities that are directly compromised by lack of sleep. Huffington’s Thrive underscores how major leadership mishaps can often be traced back to poor sleep, including errors in judgment and impaired emotional regulation. For instance, late-night decisions or communications (like tweeting at 2 AM) can result in reputational risks and strategic errors.

The Power of Rest: Benefits for Women Leaders

For women in leadership, adequate rest is not just a necessity but a leverage point for enhanced performance. Well-rested women are better equipped to handle the complexities of leadership roles, from making informed decisions to managing teams with empathy and precision. The benefits extend beyond the boardroom, contributing to overall wellness, improved mood regulation, and long-term health resilience.

The Science of Napping

Naps can be a secret weapon in improving cognitive function, emotional resilience, and overall productivity. However, the key is moderation. Research suggests that short naps of about 20-30 minutes are ideal for boosting brain function without entering deep sleep cycles, which can lead to grogginess if interrupted.

Implementing Effective Sleep Hygiene Practices

Here are some actionable tips for improving sleep hygiene:

Consistency is Key: Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day to regulate your body’s internal clock.
Create a Restful Environment: Ensure your bedroom is conducive to sleep—cool, quiet, and dark.
Wind Down Routinely: Develop a pre-sleep routine that may include reading, light stretching, or meditation to signal to your body that it's time to wind down.
Limit Stimulants: Avoid caffeine and screen time at least an hour before bedtime to enhance the quality of your sleep.

Embracing Sleep as a Leadership Strategy

Embracing good sleep hygiene isn’t just about avoiding negatives; it’s about actively enhancing your leadership capacity and overall well-being. As we continue to learn from thought leaders like Arianna Huffington, it becomes clear that sleep is not a luxury—it's an essential ingredient for anyone looking to lead effectively and live well.

For those looking to delve deeper into how sleep can enhance both personal and professional life, or how to implement effective sleep strategies within your team, connect with us. Let’s explore how prioritizing sleep hygiene can transform your productivity and leadership effectiveness.

Navigating the Pitfalls of Comparison: Healthy Perspectives for Careers and Businesses

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 22:06:24 GMT

Healthy Perspectives for Careers and Businesses

Navigating the Pitfalls of Comparison: Healthy Perspectives for Careers and Businesses

In a world driven by constant updates on successes and milestones through social media and professional networks, it's incredibly easy to fall into the comparison trap. Whether it's juxtaposing our career paths with peers or measuring our business against competitors, comparison can be a double-edged sword. Here’s how to engage in comparison in a healthy way and avoid the potential negative impacts on our personal and professional well-being.

Understanding the Value of Comparison

Comparison, when used constructively, can serve as a motivational tool and a benchmark for setting goals and expectations. It can provide valuable insights into industry standards, helping us identify areas for improvement and innovation in our businesses or careers. However, it's crucial to approach comparison with a mindset that fosters growth rather than resentment.

The Danger of Negative Comparisons

The danger lies in excessive or unhealthy comparison that can lead to feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, and even depression. When we constantly compare our journey to others', we risk overlooking the unique aspects of our own paths and the intrinsic value of our individual achievements.

Healthy Ways to Compare

Set Personal Benchmarks: Instead of measuring success against others, set personal goals based on your previous performances. This shifts the focus from competing with others to competing with yourself, which is more about self-improvement and less about outdoing someone else.
Contextualize the Comparison: Remember that each business or career journey has its own set of unique challenges and opportunities. What works for one might not work for another. Contextualizing helps in understanding the why behind someone else's success and can reduce feelings of envy.
Celebrate Small Wins: Focus on your progress, no matter how small. Celebrating small wins helps build confidence and maintains positive momentum, making it easier to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of professional life.
Seek Inspiration, Not Imitation: Let the success of others inspire you to achieve your own goals. Use their achievements as a learning opportunity rather than a benchmark. This can help in identifying strategies that might work for you without the pressure to mirror someone else's path.
Maintain a Support Network: Engage with a community that supports and uplifts each other. A healthy support network can provide encouragement and a more realistic perspective on achievements and timelines.

Conclusion: Embracing Your Unique Path

Every career and business has its own trajectory. While it's beneficial to look outward for inspiration and motivation, the most important comparison is with your past self. Are you growing? Are you learning? If the answer is yes, you're on the right path.

At Social Global Grind , we understand the importance of tailored strategies that reflect your unique business values and goals. We're here to help you develop a digital presence that stands out for its authenticity and effectiveness, not just because it matches up to the competition. Let’s connect and explore how we can foster your distinct brand identity in a way that celebrates your individual journey.

Navigating Your Career Path: Knowing When to Stay and When to Go

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 21:52:07 GMT

How Long Should you Stay at your Job

Navigating Your Career Path: Knowing When to Stay and When to Go

As seasons change around the world, bringing transformations from spring blossoms in one hemisphere to autumn leaves in another, it’s a natural time for growth and reassessment—not just in nature, but in our careers as well. For many young professionals, especially Gen Z and millennials, determining the right length of stay at a job can be pivotal to long-term success. Whether you're embracing new beginnings or reflecting during quieter times, here’s how to evaluate whether it's time to stay put or seek new horizons.

Navigating Your Career Path: Knowing When to Stay and When to Go

As spring arrives, it's a natural time for growth and reassessment—not just for nature, but for our careers too. For many young professionals, especially Gen Z and millennials, determining the length of stay at a job can be pivotal to long-term success. Here's how to evaluate whether it's time to stay put or seek new horizons.

Understanding the Timeline

Traditionally, staying in a job for at least three to five years was seen as a testament to loyalty and perseverance. However, the modern workplace dynamic suggests three years might be the optimal time to master your role and consider upward movement, especially if internal growth opportunities have plateaued.

Evaluating Your Position and Environment

Before deciding to leave, assess key factors within your current role:

Opportunity for Advancement: Have you been overlooked for promotions despite promises? It might be time to look elsewhere if growth opportunities are consistently delayed.
Workplace Culture and Respect: Do you trust your management? Does the company culture align with your values? If you dread going to work, this could be a red flag signaling it's time to move on.
Proactive Engagement: Maintain regular one-on-ones with your manager to discuss your performance and career aspirations. This not only ensures you're on the same page but also enhances your visibility within the company.

Leveraging Social Media for Career Growth

In today's digital age, your online presence can significantly impact your professional trajectory. Here's how to effectively use social media to your advantage:

LinkedIn: Regularly post thought leadership articles and engage with content relevant to your field to establish your expertise and professional brand.
TikTok: Surprisingly, TikTok can be a powerful tool to reach a global audience. Share content that highlights your skills and professional insights, making your profile attractive to potential employers worldwide.

Making the Decision

Whether you decide to stay and climb the ladder within your current company or seek new opportunities, remember that the path to success is seldom linear.

Evaluate your current situation with honesty, and don't be afraid to make the move if it aligns with your long-term career goals.

Remember, nobody will hand you the perfect role or the corner office; it's something you need to work toward actively. Be strategic, be proactive, and most importantly, be ready to seize opportunities as they come.

Spring Clean Your Digital Presence: Refresh and Reinvigorate Your Brand with Social Global Grind

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 04:27:10 GMT

Refresh and Reinvigorate Your Brand with Social Global Grind

As spring unfolds across New Zealand, bringing clearer skies and the promise of new beginnings, it's the perfect opportunity for business owners to rejuvenate not just their mindset but their digital footprints as well.

From websites to social media, refreshing your online presence can reenergize your brand and engage your audience more effectively. Here’s how to embark on a comprehensive digital spring cleaning:

Website Refresh

Start with your website—the cornerstone of your digital identity. Review its design and functionality. Is it intuitive and user-friendly? Does it reflect the latest in design trends? An updated, sleek website can boost user engagement and improve your SEO standings.

Newsletter Revamp

Revitalise your email newsletters. Refreshing the design and content can help recapture the interest of your subscribers and enhance engagement. Introduce new, interactive content formats to make your emails stand out and keep your audience looking forward to more.

Social Media Overhaul

Consistency across platforms ensures your brand is instantly recognizable. This spring, align your social media profiles with your updated website and newsletter style. Experiment with new content types like videos or interactive posts to maintain a dynamic and engaging social media presence.

Executive Engagement

Enhance the authenticity of your digital presence by involving your company’s leaders. Encourage executives to engage with content personally—sharing posts and adding insights can lend credibility and a personal touch to your brand's online narrative.

Stakeholder Alignment

Align your digital strategy with your business objectives by involving all stakeholders. A unified approach to digital marketing ensures cohesive branding and messaging, crucial for effective communication and goal achievement.

Expanding Your Digital Horizons with Social Global Grind

At Social Global Grind , we understand that refreshing your digital presence means more than just a facelift. It’s about reimagining the ways you connect with your audience. Perhaps your brand could benefit from incorporating a podcast strategy, offering a fresh platform to engage and expand your audience.

Let’s talk about innovative ways to revitalize your content and ensure your brand remains vibrant and relevant. Social Global Grind is here to help you navigate the evolving digital landscape. Whether it's through strategic planning, creative content, or a new podcast series, we’re ready to assist you in giving your digital presence a thorough spring clean.

Ready to reinvigorate your digital strategy this spring? Contact us at Social Global Grind , and let’s explore how we can help refresh your brand and prepare you for success in the digital age.

The Gig Economy

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 06:12:26 GMT

Navigating the Gig Economy: Essential Tips for Going Solo in Social Media Management

The Gig Economy: Is It Time to Go Out on Your Own?

Stepping into the world of freelance can be thrilling yet daunting, especially in social media management. Like a freshly graduated doctor with little business acumen, venturing solo requires more than just expertise in your field—it demands savvy client management skills. Here are five essential tips to help you maintain control and set yourself up for success:

Set Clear Priorities and Office Hours: Clearly communicate your working hours to manage expectations. Let clients know these are your primary hours for meetings and calls, but outside these, your focus is dedicated to content creation and strategy.
Establish Boundaries: Inform clients about your availability for calls and texts, possibly ending business communications at 4 PM each day. Setting these boundaries upfront helps manage expectations and prevents burnout.
Use a Client Contract: Clarify the terms of engagement through a contract. Opt for project-based pricing to avoid billing surprises, detailing the number of hours, posts, and the total cost upfront.
Automate Out-of-Office Notifications: If weekends are your downtime, use out-of-office notifications to inform clients when you’ll be unavailable and when you’ll return.
Streamline Content Approvals: To keep things moving with type A clients, consider having them pre-approve batches of content. This allows you to work efficiently while respecting your work-life balance.

Excited about mastering client management? Stay tuned for our upcoming program, Social Collab, tailored for new entrepreneurs like you in the social media space. This series will dive deep into effective client management strategies to help you thrive independently.

Transforming Politics with TikTok Kamala Harris's Campaign Strategy

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 05:48:28 GMT

This strategy showcases the power of social media to reach and actively engage diverse audiences, proving its effectiveness in today's digital-first world.

Kamala Harris's presidential campaign has been a notable example of how effectively TikTok can be used to engage not just younger audiences but also bridge generational divides in political campaigning. Her team's strategic use of the platform has highlighted several key elements that make social media an invaluable tool for reaching a broad audience:

User-Generated Content: The Harris campaign has excelled in utilizing user-generated content to foster a sense of community and active participation among followers. By encouraging supporters to create and share their own videos and memes, the campaign has managed to extend its reach and engage with the electorate on a more personal and relatable level.

Meme Strategy: Tapping into meme culture, the campaign has used viral trends and humor to maintain a high level of engagement with followers. This approach not only keeps the content light and relatable but also helps in simplifying complex political messages, making them more accessible to younger voters.

Cultural Relevance: The campaign has been adept at incorporating culturally relevant references and trending sounds from popular music to resonate with Gen Z voters. This strategy ensures that the campaign's messages are not only heard but are also shared widely across the platform.

Engagement with Trends: By staying up-to-date with the latest social media trends, the Harris campaign has kept its content fresh and engaging. This ongoing adaptation to the digital landscape shows a keen understanding of the dynamic nature of social media engagement.

Authenticity and Timeliness: The authenticity and timely nature of the campaign's social media posts have played a crucial role in building trust and credibility among voters, particularly those who rely on digital platforms for news and information.

These elements together showcase how TikTok and similar platforms can be powerful tools for not just campaigning but also for creating a lasting impact through digital storytelling and community building.

For businesses and brands looking to replicate this success, Social Global Grind can provide comprehensive social media strategy and executive training to harness the potential of social media effectively. Whether it's crafting engaging content or training your team to manage and utilize social media platforms, our services are designed to meet your specific needs and help you achieve your social media goals.

Bridging the Gap: How Social Media Can Transform Business Development

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 05:35:11 GMT

In today’s digital age, the challenge often lies in convincing senior-level executives of social media’s potency as a business development tool. It's not just about trending; it's about transforming how we connect and communicate across all levels of business and community.

In an era where digital landscapes are continually evolving, many businesses find themselves at a crossroads, especially when it comes to convincing seasoned executives of the value of social media. As generational divides deepen, the need for comprehensive and adaptable digital strategies becomes undeniable.

Here’s how social media isn’t just changing the game—it’s creating entirely new playing fields, exemplified by savvy campaigns like Kamala Harris’s use of TikTok in her presidential run. This campaign masterfully demonstrates social media’s power to engage broad and diverse demographics, including those typically resistant to digital shifts.

Five Steps to Launch a Successful Social Media Campaign

Understand Your Audience: Before launching a campaign, it's crucial to deeply understand who your audience is. What are their needs, preferences, and online behaviours? Tailoring your content to meet the specific interests and requirements of your target demographic can significantly increase engagement.
Set Clear Objectives: Define what you want to achieve with your social media campaign. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or perhaps enhance customer service? Setting clear and measurable goals will help guide your strategy and tactics.
Choose the Right Platforms: Not all social media platforms are suitable for every campaign. Choose platforms that align best with your audience's preferences and your campaign goals. For example, LinkedIn is great for B2B interactions, while Instagram might be better suited for visual storytelling aimed at younger consumers.
Create Engaging Content: At the heart of social media success is compelling content. Whether it’s informative posts, engaging videos, or interactive polls, make sure your content resonates with your audience and encourages interaction.
Monitor and Adapt: Social media is dynamic, so it’s essential to keep track of your campaign’s performance and make adjustments as needed. Use analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t, and be ready to pivot your strategy to optimize results.

Social Global Grind: Your Partner in Social Media Strategy

At Social Global Grind, we understand the challenges businesses face in integrating social media effectively. Our comprehensive services are designed not only to launch successful campaigns but also to educate and empower your team. From strategic planning and content creation to executive training and ongoing management, we provide tailored solutions that align with your business goals and bridge the gap between traditional business practices and modern marketing innovations.

Ready to transform your business with effective social media strategies? Contact Social Global Grind today, and let us help you make your mark in the digital world, ensuring your brand not only participates in the conversation but leads it.

Navigating the Mid-Year Slump: Winter Wellness Tips from a Social Media Creative

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 05:09:12 GMT

As a social media creative in the southern hemisphere, winter can really test our spirits.

As a social media creative in the southern hemisphere, winter can really test our spirits. The shorter days and sporadic sunshine can sometimes feel like creativity’s kryptonite. Here’s how I stay inspired and energized through the chill:

Chase the Sun: I make it a mission to step outside the moment the sun decides to grace us. It’s not just a breath of fresh air; it’s a vital burst of Vitamin D that keeps the winter blues at bay.
Infrared Glow: To keep my inner light shining bright, I turn to infrared treatments. It’s like basking in the glow of an endless summer, right here in the heart of winter.
Pilates for the Mind: Pilates is more than just physical exercise; it is my mental alignment tool. It keeps me grounded and mindful, ensuring my creativity flows as smoothly as my movements. This keeps me mindful and, dare say, demure.

And let’s not forget—good sleep is the ultimate creative fuel. So, while winter might try to dull our sparkle, remember, every creative mind thrives under a bit of pressure. Let’s use this time to recalibrate and keep warm.

Stay inspired,

xo Francesca

Client Firing 101: Your Guide to Ending Toxic Business Relationships!

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 04:56:31 GMT

This is an article that I re-write at least every couple of years because I learn more. I feel like we have a great handle on screening clients that will be a great fit for our team. We set boundaries and have specific office hours for our clients and we pre-screen in an interview. For the most part, this works, but on occasion, we still get a client that challenges our process.

That last sentence might be triggering for some. "What do you mean 'your process'. You are a service provider, and the customer is always right."

The number of years I have had in the service industry and dealing with clients is that this is absolutely not true. An abusive client automatically does not get the privilege of a high-end service. I will say we believe in perception and we work with a client to fully demonstrate from an educational perspective of why we do the things we do. If they do not mesh and quite frankly always cause drama, that is an issue from a business standpoint to see if it is cost-effective to forward with a client.

In the intricate world of business relationships, not every client engagement sails smoothly. There inevitably comes a time when you must rigorously evaluate whether holding onto a client is genuinely advantageous for the overall growth and well-being of your enterprise. If you find yourself entangled in a situation where a client is voraciously consuming an excessive amount of your valuable time, incessantly complaining despite clear and comprehensive communication, impervious to guidance, and triggering frequent budget overruns, it may be high time to deliberate the possibility of terminating the association. However, before taking the momentous step of firing a client, here are several pivotal steps to meticulously navigate. Why because your brand reputation matters. We have broken down the process over the years:

1️⃣ Reflect and Evaluate

Commence your deliberations by adopting a thoughtful stance and conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the client relationship. Conduct a meticulous assessment of the overarching impact this relationship exerts on your business. Scrutinize whether the client's substantial demands on your time are obstructing your capacity to allocate resources to pivotal business development tasks. Contemplate whether the emotional toll this association exacts in your team outweighs its financial benefits. Engage in an impartial weighing of the pros and cons to make a well-informed decision.

2️⃣ Review the Contract and Terms

Proceed by revisiting the contractual agreement and the terms initially stipulated when you embarked on this client journey. Scrutinize whether the contract encompasses specific clauses or conditions that pertain to the termination of the engagement or any potential modifications to the agreed-upon scope of work. A profound comprehension of your contractual rights and obligations serves as an invaluable compass for your subsequent actions.

3️⃣ Document Issues and Attempts to Resolve

In parallel with your introspective evaluation, diligently maintain a comprehensive record of the myriad issues and challenges that have surfaced during your collaboration with the client. Methodically chronicle the dates, detailed communications, and any conscientious efforts undertaken to address their multifarious concerns and requests. The meticulous documentation of these occurrences will stand as invaluable evidential support should the necessity for a contract termination materialize.

4️⃣ Communicate Your Concerns

Empower yourself by instigating a candid and transparent dialogue with the client. Convey, with utmost clarity and candour, your multifaceted concerns regarding their burgeoning demands, recurrent budgetary transgressions, and any other pressing issues that have arisen during your professional collaboration. Employ this opportunity not only to elucidate your apprehensions but also to explore potential mutually beneficial resolutions and to ascertain whether there exists any possibility for amelioration in the contours of your working partnership.

5️⃣ Offer a Graceful Exit

Should your rigorous contemplation reaffirm your thoughts that you should terminate the client's services/ engagement, which remains the most delicate course of action, proceed with this decision gracefully. Extend an olive branch by articulating your rationale cogently and diplomatically. Ensure that your reasoning is communicated with utmost empathy. Subsequently, diligently adhere to the terms delineated within the contract, particularly those pertaining to the handling of any outstanding obligations or deliverables. Yes, contract. Girl, do you have one in place with your clients? (Sounds like another good blog/ video for the near future.)

Here are some signs or symptoms you are on the right track before you proceed in cutting ties with a client:

You hesitate taking a call because you know it's going to be a lot of energy and you need to complete an important task first before you can dive in.
You have to re-work content/ artwork even after the work has been approved.
After extensive meetings/ agreements, the client wants to take it all down and start all over again.
Abusive language when referring to your colleagues.
You feel exhausted around this client (energy vampire)

Throughout this intricate process, it is imperative to conduct yourself with unwavering professionalism and unswerving integrity. While the decision to part ways with a client may appear to be an arduous one, it is at times, indispensable for the broader health and prosperity of your business. Retain your focus on the overarching goals and always act in the best interests of your enterprise.

As a final note, while the urge for creative expression is innate, it is imperative to underscore that TikTok reenactments or any other forms of indiscretion related to client terminations are not recommended. The principles of confidentiality and professionalism should invariably remain paramount. In other words, GIRL DON'T DO IT!

For a more comprehensive exploration of the nuances and practicalities of managing complex client relationships, we cordially invite you to delve into our in-depth mini-blog.

Celebrating Jools LeBron: A Beacon of Resilience and Change

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 04:49:19 GMT

Meet Jools LeBron isn't she demure...

Celebrating Jools LeBron: A Beacon of Resilience and Change

Meet Jools LeBron, a vibrant TikTok sensation who not only captivates with her humor but also educates and inspires. Known for her playful twist on the word "demure," Jools faces social media's harsh reality where unwarranted critiques are all too common. Yet, she stands resilient, turning negativity into a powerful narrative of acceptance and resilience.

Her journey reminds us of the strength found in visibility and the importance of creating space for oneself in the digital world. Jools's story is a testament to the transformative power of social media when used to uplift and support, particularly for trans women and diverse voices everywhere.

Let's embrace this wave of change. Support, like, share, and learn. Engage positively and be a part of a community that celebrates every individual's unique voice. Together, we can shape a future rich in understanding and hope, where diversity is not just seen but valued.

Be present, be loud, be you—because every voice matters in the vast symphony of social change.

Do you have a plan for your personal branding on social media? Let's chat.

Navigating the Personalities of Social Media Platforms: Finding Your Fit

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 02:29:03 GMT

65 % of the general population are visual learners, meaning they need to see information in order to retain it. A consistent social media presence is golden.

In the world of social media, each platform carries a unique vibe and caters to distinct user behaviours. It's crucial to identify the platform that not only resonates with your brand’s personality but also amplifies your message effectively. Let’s explore the current landscape of these platforms to see where you might thrive.

Understanding the Platforms:

LinkedIn: Once a stiff professional network, LinkedIn has evolved into a vibrant community where personal storytelling shines. Here, you can delve into your personal 'why' and consistently contribute to the thought leadership landscape.

Facebook: This platform has shifted significantly from a community space to a commercial one, adopting a 'pay to play' model. Essentially, visibility hinges on ad spend, diminishing the organic reach of business pages.

Instagram: Despite its challenges under the Metaverse umbrella, Instagram remains crucial for visibility. It functions increasingly as a search engine, making it essential for businesses aiming for discoverability, especially through video reels.

Pinterest: The originator of social backlinks, Pinterest is a go-to for users seeking ideas and inspiration, from recipes to lifestyle tips. Its search-driven format makes it a valuable platform for visibility.

Twitter: More of a news aggregator than a traditional social network, Twitter excels in public relations and media connections, making it ideal for announcements and industry updates.

TikTok: A powerhouse for organic reach, TikTok rewards engaging content with broad visibility, influencing trends and purchases, particularly among younger demographics.

The Art of Content Curation:

Content curation involves selecting and sharing top-notch, pertinent content that resonates with your audience, establishing your brand as a knowledgeable leader in your field. It’s an efficient strategy to maintain engagement without the overhead of creating new content.

Benefits of Content Curation:

Cost Efficiency: Curating content is less resource-intensive than creating it from scratch.
Industry Credibility: Sharing insightful content can bolster your reputation as an expert.
Engagement: Regular content sharing keeps your dialogue with customers active.
Networking: Sharing content from other creators can forge new industry connections.
Generosity: Demonstrating that your interest extends beyond your own promotions reflects well on your brand ethos.

Common Social Media Myths:

Facebook’s Decline: Investing heavily in Facebook without a clear ROI in ads may not be the best strategy anymore.
Organic Reach on TikTok: You don’t need viral dances to succeed; organic content still performs well.
Instagram Aesthetics: A perfect feed is less important than content that delivers value.
Social Media Assistance: Consider hiring help to manage or enhance your social media strategies effectively.

Top 3 Social Media Tips:

Embrace Video Content: Platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels are ideal for showcasing your process in action, from chiropractic adjustments to behind-the-scenes peeks.
Highlight Features and Benefits: Clearly articulate what you offer and how it benefits your clients, enhancing transparency and trust.
Master Hashtags: Invest time in understanding which hashtags perform best for your content type across different platforms.

Eager to dive deeper or have specific questions? Let’s connect directly. Click here to schedule a chat and explore how you can maximise your social media impact.

Fill out our contact form and we will connect shortly.

Navigating Toxic Work Environments: Lessons from Justin Baldoni's Experience

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 01:20:02 GMT

How would you react in a toxic work environment?

In the creative industry, where passion meets production, tensions can run high, and disputes among coworkers can evolve into full-blown feuds. The recent public discord between Justin Baldoni and a prominent co-star over creative differences during the filming of It Ends With Us offers valuable insights into handling toxic work environments. Here are the top three strategies Baldoni used that can help anyone navigate a challenging workplace relationship and manage their reputation effectively.

1. Professionalism Over Pettiness: Justin Baldoni’s approach to the alleged feud was marked by a professional demeanour. Instead of engaging in public mudslinging or gossip, he chose to address the issue subtly and with grace. For instance, his comment about looking forward to working with "better people" in future projects hints at dissatisfaction but steers clear of direct insult. This method of veiled critique highlights the importance of maintaining a professional front, even when personal feelings are involved.

2. Redirecting Focus to Future Projects: Amidst the controversy, Baldoni smartly shifted the conversation to future endeavours, specifically his plans to work on the movie's sequel, It Starts With Us. By focusing on upcoming projects rather than dwelling on current disputes, he not only redirected public attention but also framed himself as forward-thinking and committed to his craft. This strategy can be particularly effective in a work setting as it demonstrates resilience and a focus on growth rather than conflict.

3. Advocating for Personal Space and Boundaries: Baldoni’s decision to "take a vacation" after the project is a testament to the importance of setting personal boundaries and taking time to recharge, especially after a taxing experience. Recognizing when to step back and take a break can prevent burnout and ensure that you return to your work with a clearer mind and renewed energy.

Navigating Through Toxicity with Kindness: The key takeaway from Baldoni’s handling of the situation is the power of kindness. In toxic work environments, the instinct might be to fight fire with fire, but coming from a place of kindness and professionalism can serve you better in the long run. By addressing issues calmly and focusing on solutions rather than problems, you can maintain your dignity and ensure that your reputation remains intact.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to survive a toxic work environment but to thrive in spite of it. By learning from these high-profile conflicts and applying the principles of professionalism, forward-thinking, and kindness, you can navigate even the most challenging situations and emerge with your reputation and relationships stronger than ever.

Wondering if Social Global Grind can help you polish your professional image or manage workplace controversies? Absolutely! We specialise in both social media worldwide and traditional PR methods tailored specifically for the New Zealand market. Get in touch and DM us for more information.

Financial Growth Hacks Revealed: How CMOs and CFOs Are Winning Big with Social Media

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 21:07:22 GMT

Leveraging Social Media for Business Growth: A Strategic Guide for CMOs and CFOs

Every year, we see an upward trend in social media's impact on small and big businesses. The relationship between your brand and your social media audience is impactful. Companies are now using social media to predict trends, brand awareness and the likely engagement to potential customers.

Social media has emerged as an indispensable tool for business development in today's digital landscape. As CMOs and CFOs, understanding its value is crucial for aligning marketing strategies with financial outcomes. Social media enhances brand awareness and serves as a barometer for forecasting market trends, making it a vital component in marketing and financial planning.

Powerful Business Development Tool: Social media platforms offer unparalleled opportunities to engage directly with customers, creating a feedback loop that was previously unattainable through traditional marketing channels. This direct engagement boosts brand visibility and fosters customer loyalty, driving both short-term gains and long-term growth.

Key Takeaways for Setting KPIs: To harness the full potential of social media, it's essential to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with business objectives. These KPIs should include metrics such as engagement rates, follower growth, and conversion rates. For CFOs, linking these metrics to financial outcomes like ROI and customer acquisition cost is vital.

Brand Awareness: Social media's role in amplifying brand awareness is undeniable. Through targeted campaigns and consistent messaging, brands can establish a strong online presence, reaching a broader audience than ever before. CMOs should leverage analytics tools to track brand mentions and sentiment, providing insights into brand health and perception.

Forecasting Trends: Social media is a treasure trove of data, offering real-time insights into consumer behaviour and market trends. Businesses can anticipate market shifts and adapt their strategies by analysing social media trends. This proactive approach enables CFOs to allocate resources more effectively, maximizing the impact of marketing expenditures.

What we know for sure: Social media is not just a marketing tool; it's a strategic asset that intersects with every aspect of business development. For CMOs and CFOs, leveraging social media effectively means aligning it with broader business goals, ensuring every post, tweet, or update contributes to the company's financial health and market position.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the role of social media in shaping business strategies will only grow. CMOs and CFOs who embrace this tool will find themselves at the forefront of innovation, driving their companies to new heights of success.

To structure KPIs or want more information contact us for a consultation. Located in Auckland, New Zealand and worldwide on Google Hangout.

New Year Now What: The top 5 things you need to know to get activated!

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 22:54:39 GMT

Reemerging from the end of the year holiday can be tricky. This is our first week back from Social Global Grind, and I decided (very quickly, I might add) that we needed to do our first week of reentry from our home office. Summer is here in New Zealand and our weather is starting to shine through finally. When you think about it, this is when everyone should be taking a break.

With that said, I was just back home last week in Los Angeles and wondering if I still lived there, what I would do differently in incorporating Kate Northrup's philosophy of body first, business second with the corporate expectation. I was going to label this 'Corporate America', but sadly, this is now a global problem.

In 2024 achieving "balance is out" and being "realistic" with mental health, mobility (moving your body), and meditation (Body First) is essential to prioritise so that you can structure your life and career by choice.

It's not about being calm; the nervous system regulation is about being at choice.

In the realm of business, the approach of 'doing less to achieve more', as championed by Kate Northrup in her book "Do Less", is revolutionary. This philosophy underlines the importance of quality rest and life balance as key drivers for enhanced productivity and creativity.

The Power of Rest: Embracing periods of rest is not laziness; it's a strategic move. Quality rest rejuvenates the mind, fostering sharper cognitive abilities and innovative thinking. As Northrup suggests, resting isn't about stopping entirely but about integrating intervals of repose, allowing ideas to gestate and flourish.

Shared Household Duties: Equitably dividing household responsibilities with your partner creates a supportive domestic atmosphere, which is crucial for a clear, focused mind. This practice echoes Northrup's emphasis on collaboration and support within personal relationships to bolster professional success.

The Benefits of Daily Walks and Leisure Reading: Incorporating daily walks and reading for pleasure are more than mere leisure activities. They are essential for mental well-being and creativity. Walking offers a mental reset, aiding in problem-solving and strategic planning. Reading, beyond being a source of enjoyment, expands your worldview and inspires innovative ideas.

In line with Northrup's insights, these strategies may seem unconventional in traditional business contexts. Yet, they are vital for a sustainable, creative, and balanced entrepreneurial journey. Adopting a 'do less' approach allows for organic growth in creativity and strategic thinking, proving that sometimes, less really is more.

The Essence of Creativity: Northrup's philosophy highlights that creativity and strategic business insights often stem from moments of stillness and reflection. Instead of constant action, allowing oneself the space to breathe and reflect can lead to more profound, impactful business decisions.

Embracing Flexibility: The modern entrepreneur should embrace flexibility in their schedule. This isn't about shirking responsibilities but about recognizing that rigid schedules can stifle innovation. Adopting a more fluid approach to work can enhance productivity, making space for unexpected bursts of creativity and insight.

Final Thoughts: Kate Northrup's "Do Less" philosophy is a reminder that in the fast-paced world of business, taking time to slow down, share responsibilities, and engage in mindful activities is not just beneficial but necessary for success. In doing less, we find more space for growth, innovation, and a balanced life – key ingredients for long-term success in any entrepreneurial endeavour. Girl, you need to take this seriously, or you will quickly find yourself on the road to burnout.

Holiday self-care tips + How to Transform Your TikTok Scrolling into Social Activism!

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 21:36:58 GMT

In these turbulent times, as 2023 draws to a close amidst a backdrop of economic uncertainties, �� political upheavals, environmental crises, and social challenges, the role of social media, particularly TikTok, in driving social change is more crucial than ever. However, alongside advocating for change, it’s equally important to focus on self-care to ensure we remain resilient and effective.

Using TikTok for Social Change

1. Educational Content:

Addressing complex issues like climate change actions from COP28 or the recent escalation in mass shootings in the US, TikTok can serve as a platform for distilling and spreading vital information. Create concise, informative videos to educate your audience on these matters.

2. Awareness Campaigns:

Initiating or participating in hashtag campaigns can significantly enhance the visibility of pressing issues. This could range from environmental concerns highlighted by ScienceDaily's report on CO2 emissions to advocating for mental health awareness.

3. Personal Narratives:

Sharing personal experiences or stories can humanize and add depth to global and local issues, making them more relatable to a wider audience.

4. Collaboration and Networking:

Team up with experts, activists, or influencers. Their expertise and network can be instrumental in amplifying your social change messages.

5. Actionable Steps:

Encourage tangible actions, be it community engagement, supporting policy changes, or contributing to global relief efforts.

6. Creative Advocacy:

Leverage the power of creativity - through music, art, or storytelling - to make a compelling case for the changes you advocate.

7. Interactive Engagement:

Foster a community by actively engaging with your audience. This could involve discussions, feedback, or collaborative content creation.

8. Resource Sharing:

Provide resources or information for further learning or action, guiding your audience towards meaningful participation.

Incorporating Self-Care

Amidst these efforts, self-care is paramount. As advocates and active citizens, maintaining our physical and mental well-being ensures we can continue making a difference without burning out. Here are some self-care strategies:

- Regular Exercise:

Engage in physical activities like walking, yoga, or any form of exercise that you enjoy. These activities not only improve physical health but also reduce stress.

- Mindfulness and Meditation:

Incorporate mindfulness practices or meditation into your daily routine to help centre your thoughts and manage stress.

- Digital Detox:

Regularly take breaks from social media to avoid information overload and maintain a balanced perspective.

- Hobbies and Interests:

Pursue hobbies or interests that relax you and bring joy. Whether it’s reading, painting, or gardening, these activities can provide a much-needed respite.

- Quality Time with Loved Ones:

Spend time with family and friends. These interactions can offer support, laughter, and a sense of belonging.

- Adequate Rest:

Ensure you get enough sleep. Good sleep is crucial for rejuvenation and maintaining overall health.

- Seek Professional Help if Needed:

If you find yourself overwhelmed, do not hesitate to seek support from mental health professionals.

Evolving is painful and equality is not easy. In these challenging times, using platforms like TikTok for social advocacy can be a powerful tool for change. Simultaneously, prioritizing self-care ensures that we remain healthy and motivated in our endeavours to create a positive impact in the world. Wishing you inner peace this holiday and a thriving 2024.

With love and adoration,

xoxo Francesca

Elevate Your LinkedIn Profile Quietly During the Holidays for New Year Opportunities

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:40:49 GMT

The holiday season is a time for rest, relaxation, and quality time with loved ones. It's also a perfect opportunity to quietly enhance your LinkedIn profile, setting the stage for exciting new opportunities in the coming year. While others may be taking a break, you can subtly boost your online presence to increase your chances of being discovered by potential employers, clients, or collaborators in the new year. Here's how:

**1. Optimize Your Profile Summary**

Start by refining your LinkedIn profile summary. Use this section to briefly highlight your professional journey, achievements, and aspirations. Incorporate relevant keywords related to your field, skills, and industry. By doing so, you'll enhance your profile's visibility in search results, making it easier for others to find you.

**2. Showcase Your Achievements**

Review your LinkedIn profile for any recent accomplishments or milestones. Have you completed a project, earned a certification, or received an award? Update your profile to reflect these achievements. Highlighting your successes not only demonstrates your expertise but also adds fresh content to your profile, signaling to LinkedIn's algorithms that your profile is active and engaged.

**3. Refresh Your Headshot and Background Photo**

Consider updating your profile picture with a professional, high-quality image that reflects your current appearance. A clear and welcoming headshot can leave a lasting impression on viewers. Additionally, customize your background photo to align with your personal brand or current professional focus. A refreshed visual presence can make your profile more appealing and memorable.

**4. Share Thoughtful Content**

During the holiday season, sharing meaningful and relevant content can help maintain your presence without overwhelming your schedule. Share articles, insights, or reflections related to your industry or area of expertise. Engage with your network by commenting on or liking posts from others. Consistent but measured activity can keep your profile active and engaged.

**5. Connect with New Contacts**

While you're relaxing during the holidays, consider sending connection requests to new contacts you've met or interacted with throughout the year. Personalize your invitations to remind them of your connection and express your interest in staying in touch. Expanding your network can lead to valuable opportunities in the future.

**6. Request Recommendations**

Reach out to former colleagues, supervisors, or clients for LinkedIn recommendations. These endorsements serve as powerful social proof of your skills and professionalism. A collection of genuine recommendations can make your profile more appealing to potential employers or collaborators.

**7. Set Goals for the New Year**

Use the holiday season as a time for reflection and goal-setting. What are your professional aspirations for the upcoming year? Are there specific industries, roles, or projects you want to pursue? By setting clear goals, you'll be better prepared to align your LinkedIn profile with your objectives in the new year.

Quietly elevating your LinkedIn profile during the holidays is a strategic investment in your professional future. By optimizing your profile, sharing thoughtful content, and expanding your network, you'll increase your chances of being discovered by exciting new opportunities in the upcoming year. So, take advantage of this downtime to prepare for a bright professional future.

Staying Grounded During the Holiday Season: A Guide for the Busy Woman

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 22:34:54 GMT

As the holiday season rolls in, with its sparkle and cheer, it also brings a unique set of challenges, especially for women who juggle roles as social media managers, SME business leaders, and entrepreneurs. The festive period, while joyous, often comes with a heightened level of stress and demands. However, it's essential to remember that amidst the hustle and bustle, staying grounded and taking care of oneself is paramount. I'm already exhausted! Did I mention what you need to complete before you have a quick holiday break?

While my US colleagues are lucky to possibly have 2-3 days off for those that have weekends off to my New Zealand colleagues, take a Christmas/ Summer break.

While New Zealand's break sounds ideal, it's really not. Instead of the rest of the world taking a break mid-year, we may wait until the end of the year for ours. I call December the land of the zombies as colleagues are exhausted and overworked, and if you are in Auckland, we are still experiencing gloomy grey skies and rain.

With all the things happening, you can miss the holidays while struggling in the grind.

Capture the Magic, Be in the Moment

In the age of digital connectivity, your video phone is more than just a tool for communication; it's a gateway to capturing the essence of the holiday spirit. As social media professionals and business leaders, you understand the power of a well-captured moment. This holiday, use your phone not just for work but to record the beautiful, fleeting moments of the season. Whether it's the laughter of family, the quiet snowfall outside, or the warmth of a shared meal, these captured moments serve as reminders to be present and savour the now.

How do you do that when you are doing all the tasks that require you? Do what I do and schedule it in on your calendar. In my book, if it's not in the calendar, it will not get done. Mark it as a "creative exploration research" as it will benefit your business as you use your experience to adjust your vision from a business/ creative perspective. More on this in next week's blog.

The Art of Self-Preservation

The holidays can often lead to burnout, but remember, self-preservation is key. A well-rested person is not just a luxury but a necessity for a productive life. Sleep and relaxation are not just physical requirements; they are the fuel that powers your creativity, decision-making, and strategic thinking.

Take time for yourself amidst the holiday chaos. Whether it's a quiet evening with a book, a peaceful walk, or a relaxing bath, these moments of solitude and rest are crucial. They allow you to recharge and return to your responsibilities with renewed energy and a clearer mind.

Time to get that sleep mask you always wanted.

Productivity and Strategy: A Balanced Approach

For the driven woman, productivity is often a top priority. However, true productivity stems from a strategic approach to work and life. This strategic mindset begins with acknowledging that your health and well-being are the foundation of your success. In other words, when was the last time you did something in your pleasure? Give yourself that early holiday gift or holiday experience.

As a business leader, you plan and strategize for your business's growth—similarly, plan for your well-being. Set boundaries for work and personal time, delegate tasks when necessary, and most importantly, listen to your body. Understand that saying 'no' to overcommitment is saying 'yes' to your health and productivity.

Your Body Comes First

In a culture that often glorifies busyness, prioritising your health is a revolutionary act. Girl, you do you! This holiday season, let's shift the narrative. Your body, health, and well-being come before deadlines and social media updates. When you take care of yourself, you are in a better position to care for others and your business.

This holiday season, let's embrace a holistic approach to our lives. By staying grounded, capturing moments, resting well, and prioritizing our health, we can enjoy the season to its fullest and enter the new year rejuvenated and ready to take on new challenges. Remember, a well-rested, healthy, and grounded individual is the most productive and strategic one.

Wishing you everything you want and need this holiday season.

The Power of TikTok

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 22:25:12 GMT

The Rubix Cube Guy Sparks a TikTok Revolution with Jack Harlow's "Lovin On Me

Have you seen the Rubix Cube Guy video? Search TikTok if you have yet to see it. I showed Lola from Social Global Grind this video, and we captured her reaction in this week's podcast.

In the ever-evolving world of social media, TikTok remains a powerhouse for setting trends, and recently, a new sensation has taken over - all thanks to "The Rubix Cube Guy" and Jack Harlow's catchy tune "Lovin On Me." This 300-word blog dives into the heart of this viral phenomenon, unravelling how a simple video can ripple across the digital landscape, influencing millions.

The Birth of a Trend

It all started with a creative spark from "The Rubix Cube Guy," a TikTok user known for his quirky and engaging content. In his latest viral hit, he blends his Rubik's Cube-solving prowess with the rhythmic beats of Jack Harlow's "Lovin On Me." The result? A sensational video that not only showcases his talent but also perfectly encapsulates the song's lively spirit. This unique combination of music and skill caught the TikTok community's attention, inspiring a wave of creativity across the platform.

TikTok: A Catalyst for Viral Hits

TikTok's magic lies in its ability to transform ordinary content into viral sensations. The platform's algorithm, favouring engaging and original content, propelled "The Rubix Cube Guy's" video to stardom, illustrating the symbiotic relationship between music and social media trends. This phenomenon highlights the power of TikTok in amplifying a song's reach, showcasing how a single video can significantly impact a track's popularity.

There is no sure-fire way to create a viral video that is why trial and error is so important. Who knew this would take off?

Community Engagement and Creativity

The trend sparked by "The Rubix Cube Guy" encouraged TikTok users to unleash their creativity. From hilarious parodies to awe-inspiring displays of talent, the community's response to the trend was a testament to the platform's diverse and inventive nature. These user-generated videos not only added layers to the trend but also created a communal space for sharing, connecting, and entertaining.

The Bigger Picture

This trend exemplifies the profound impact of social media on modern culture and marketing. Artists and brands are increasingly recognizing the power of TikTok trends in shaping public perception and driving engagement. As we continue to witness the rise of such trends, they serve as a reminder of the dynamic and influential role social media plays in our lives.

"The Rubix Cube Guy" and his viral take on "Lovin' On Me" demonstrate the extraordinary potential of TikTok to set trends, unite communities, and influence the music industry. It's a digital era where a single video can start a revolution.

Revolutionize Your Brand with TikTok: Secrets Revealed for 2024!

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 21:20:14 GMT

Is Your Business Ready for 2024? Here are some game-changing tactics for you to review in time for next year.

TikTok in 2024: The New Frontier for SMEs and Social Media Managers

As we look towards 2024, TikTok emerges not just as a social media giant, but as a revolutionary platform for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and social media managers. This 300-400 word blog explores how TikTok is transforming the landscape of digital marketing and problem-solving, particularly for a younger, dynamic audience.

Enhanced Search Capabilities: Solving Real-Time Problems

The evolution of TikTok’s search function is a game-changer. For SMEs and business leaders, this means an opportunity to position their brands as solutions to common consumer and business problems. By creating content that addresses specific queries, brands can engage with their audience more effectively, providing value and building trust.

Educational Content: A New Learning Hub

A surprising and exciting trend on TikTok is its role as an educational platform. Younger audiences are turning to TikTok for learning everything from life hacks to complex skills like Excel. This opens a new avenue for SMEs to create informative and instructional content, thereby connecting with this demographic on a level that goes beyond traditional advertising.

Micro-Marketing and Hyper-Personalization

For social media managers, TikTok’s potential lies in its ability to enable micro-marketing. In 2024, expect to see a rise in content that is hyper-personalized, targeting specific interests and needs of niche audience segments. This level of personalization not only enhances user engagement but also fosters brand loyalty.

TikTok for B2B Engagement

Moving beyond B2C, TikTok is also carving out space in the B2B sector. Businesses can leverage TikTok to share industry insights and success stories. This platform provides an informal yet impactful space for businesses to establish thought leadership and build professional networks.

User-Generated Content and Community Building

User-generated content remains a cornerstone of TikTok’s appeal. For SMEs, encouraging and featuring such content can be a powerful strategy to build a community around their brand, enhancing engagement and trust.

Creative Advertising and Influencer Collaborations

TikTok’s unique format allows for innovative advertising that feels less intrusive. Collaborations with influencers and creators offer a way to reach broader audiences while maintaining authenticity.

Staying Agile with Trend Analysis

Finally, the fast-paced nature of TikTok demands agility in content creation. Staying abreast of trends and quickly developing relevant content will be key for brands to stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape.

In 2024, TikTok stands as a versatile and indispensable tool for SMEs and social media managers. Its ability to adapt to diverse user needs and preferences positions it as a key player in the future of digital marketing and problem-solving. For businesses looking to connect with younger demographics and stay ahead of the curve, TikTok is the platform to watch.

Unlocking the Secret to Social Media Success: Introverts, You Won't Believe Tip #6!

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 23:23:43 GMT

Did you know that around one-third of the population identifies as introverts? Identifying them isn't always easy – they might be the ones lingering on the sidelines at a party, enjoying a quiet conversation while others hit the dance floor. In the workplace, they often find solace in the tranquillity of their cubicles, avoiding water cooler chit-chat.

In a corporate environment, introverts bring unique strengths to the table. They tend to be exceptionally observant and sometimes even more innovative than their extroverted counterparts. However, they may encounter difficulties in bustling pitch meetings and might shy away from self-promotion. While introverts excel at listening, those dreaded "icebreakers" can pose a considerable challenge.

Regrettably, an introvert's inclination to retreat from a crowded conference room can inadvertently hinder their career progression. Dr. Mike Bechtle, a communication expert and author of "The Introvert's Guide to Success in the Workplace," highlights this issue.

"Introverts often fade into the background, despite making significant creative and strategic contributions," notes Bechtle, who identifies as an introvert himself. "People may acknowledge our work, but we're not 'top of mind.'"

Today, we're sharing an excerpt from Bechtle's upcoming book that will resonate with at least one out of every three of you. And don't worry extroverts; we haven't forgotten about you. In this edition, Lisa Sun, the author of "Gravitas," dissects the common mistakes made by those who thrive on social interaction in the office and offers valuable insights into how they can put their best foot forward.

Now, let's dive into the world of social media and discover how to harness its power to find and express your authentic voice.

Social Media Tip #1: Embrace Your Introverted Strengths

Social media platforms are fantastic avenues for introverts to shine. Take advantage of your innate listening skills and attention to detail to craft thoughtful posts and engage in meaningful conversations. Remember, it's not about being the loudest voice in the room; it's about being the most authentic.

Social Media Tip #2: Plan Your Content

Introverts tend to thrive when they have time to prepare and reflect. Apply this strength to your social media strategy by planning your content ahead of time. Create a content calendar, research topics, and draft posts that genuinely reflect your personality and expertise.

Social Media Tip #3: Use Visual Storytelling

Introverts often excel at conveying their thoughts through writing. Leverage this talent by incorporating visual storytelling into your social media presence. Create infographics, share images, and craft compelling captions to make your content stand out.

Social Media Tip #4: Engage Thoughtfully

Quality over quantity should be your motto when it comes to social media engagement. Take the time to respond thoughtfully to comments and messages. Building authentic connections with your audience will go a long way in establishing your online presence.

Social Media Tip #5: Seek Collaborations

Collaborating with others can help introverts expand their social media reach. Partner with like-minded individuals or organizations to co-create content and reach a wider audience. These collaborations can also provide valuable networking opportunities.

Social Media Tip #6: Practice Self-Promotion

While self-promotion might not come naturally to introverts, it's essential for building an online presence. Find a balance between humility and highlighting your achievements. Share your successes, but do so in a way that feels genuine and authentic.

Social Media Tip #7: Consistency Is Key

Consistency is crucial in the world of social media. Set a posting schedule that you can realistically maintain and stick to it. Regular and reliable content updates will help you build a dedicated following over time.

Finding your voice on social media is a journey that introverts can embark on with confidence. By embracing your unique strengths, planning your content, engaging authentically, and collaborating with others, you can make a meaningful impact and ensure that you're "top of mind" in the digital realm. So, don't be afraid to let your authentic self shine through the virtual noise.

From Zero to Hero: How Content Pillars Can Transform Your Social Media Game

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 21:07:26 GMT

In the ever-changing world of social media, having a well-defined content strategy is crucial for success. Content pillars are vital in this strategy, serving as the building blocks for your social media presence. They enable you to create captivating content and maintain a consistent brand image. In this article, we'll explore the importance of content pillars for social media in 2023 and provide expert tips on leveraging them effectively.

Why Content Pillars Matter in 2023:

Content pillars are an essential element of a strong social media strategy. They go beyond being just buzzwords and offer tangible benefits. By establishing content pillars, you provide structure and direction to your content creation process, ensuring that your posts remain relevant, focused, and resonate with your target audience. In an era where authenticity is highly valued, content pillars help you establish yourself as a trusted expert or a source of inspiration and entertainment.

Creating Effective Content Pillars:

To create compelling content pillars, several factors come into play. Firstly, align your pillars with your business goals and the needs of your audience. Understand the type of content that will provide value and resonate with your target audience. Whether your aim is to educate, inspire, entertain, or combine these, content pillars will guide you in delivering consistent and valuable content.

Conducting comprehensive keyword research is another crucial step in defining your content pillars. Stay informed about industry trends, identify content gaps, and leverage keywords to enhance your visibility and optimize your search engine performance. Tools like Instagram and TikTok search, Google Trends, and Pinterest search can offer valuable insights into popular topics and relevant keywords.

Analyzing the performance of your existing content can also provide valuable insights. Look for patterns and themes in highly successful posts, paying close attention to captions, visuals, and hashtags. This analysis will help you identify potential content pillars that resonate with your audience.

Listening to your audience is equally important. Pay attention to frequently asked questions, feedback, and comments from your followers. Engage with them, foster a sense of community, and tailor your content to address their needs. Social media platforms provide abundant opportunities for dialogue, so make the most of them to understand your audience's preferences and create genuinely engaging content.

Leveraging tools like Social Global Grind's AI-powered Ideas tool can be immensely helpful. The tool generates content pillar ideas tailored to your description by inputting relevant keywords and phrases. It provides you with content ideas for each pillar, enabling you to create captivating content quickly and efficiently.

Driving Engagement and Planning Your Content Calendar:

Content pillars facilitate the creation of meaningful content and help you maintain a consistent posting schedule. By diversifying your content formats and encouraging user-generated content, you can keep your audience engaged and foster a sense of community. Consistency in posting is vital, as it establishes reliable brand identity and keeps your audience coming back for more.

Leverage tools like Social Global Grind's social media management platform to plan and schedule your content effectively. Utilizing features like the media library, content scheduling, and analytics to streamline your workflow. By planning your content in advance, you can maintain a balanced approach, align your posts with your content pillars, and save time in the content creation process.

As we navigate the social media landscape in 2023, content pillars remain indispensable for building a strong social media strategy. By incorporating content pillars into your approach, you can create valuable and captivating content, establish yourself as a trusted authority, and foster meaningful connections with your audience. Embrace the power of content pillars, leverage the available tools, and witness your social media presence flourish. With Francesca Alexander, the Founder, Managing Director, and Strategist of Social Global Grind leading the way, you can confidently navigate the ever-changing social media landscape and unlock the full potential of your social media strategy.

By defining your content pillars, creating engaging content, and fostering audience engagement, you can elevate your brand's online presence and position yourself as a trusted authority. Francesca Alexander, the Founder, Managing Director, and Strategist of Social Global Grind, offers invaluable guidance and expertise in navigating the dynamic world of social media.

Embrace the power of content pillars as you adapt to the ever-evolving landscape. Utilize the available tools and resources to unlock the full potential of your social media strategy. With a casual yet informative approach, you can effectively reach and resonate with your audience, whether they are new to social media or well-versed in its intricacies.

Remember, in the fast-paced digital realm, authenticity and consistency are key. By establishing content pillars and staying true to your brand, you can connect with your audience on a deeper level and drive meaningful interactions. Leverage the tools, insights, and expertise shared in this article to make your social media strategy a resounding success.

Take charge of your social media journey, master content pillars, and let your brand shine in the ever-evolving landscape of 2023. With Francesca Alexander and Social Global Grind by your side, your social media presence is set to soar.

Small Business: What is the most common mistake you see other social media managers make?

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 21:39:49 GMT

As a business owner investing substantial money—$1000 or more per month—for social media creation, it can be disheartening when your campaigns fail to deliver the expected results. Are you left wondering if your social media efforts are going unnoticed, lacking explanation, and simply hoping they make a difference?

At Social Global Grind, we understand the frustrations faced by business owners like you who have invested in social media marketing without reaping the desired rewards. That's why we're here to shed light on the hidden potential within your social media campaigns and provide actionable solutions to amplify your impact.

1. Strategy Evaluation: One of the primary reasons for underwhelming results is a lack of strategic alignment. Without a clear roadmap that connects your social media efforts to your business objectives, your campaigns may lack direction and fail to engage your target audience effectively. Our experts at Social Global Grind will evaluate your existing strategy, identify gaps, and develop a tailored approach that ensures every post serves a purpose and contributes to your bottom line.

2. Compelling Content Creation: Crafting engaging and relevant content is crucial to capturing your audience's attention. However, it's not just about posting for the sake of posting. Quality content is key. Our team specializes in creating compelling content that resonates with your target audience, tells your unique brand story, and drives meaningful engagement. From captivating visuals to captivating copy, we go beyond surface-level content creation to deliver impactful material that sets your business apart.

3. Data-Driven Insights: To truly understand the impact of your social media campaigns, you need comprehensive data analysis. We dive deep into the analytics, providing valuable insights into your audience's behaviour, preferences, and engagement patterns. With this data in hand, we refine our strategies, optimize your campaigns, and focus on tactics that yield measurable results. Our data-driven approach ensures that every decision is backed by valuable insights, enabling you to make informed adjustments and maximize your social media investment.

4. Targeted Audience Engagement: One of the common pitfalls in social media campaigns is failing to engage with the target audience effectively. Your social media presence should go beyond posting content—it should spark meaningful conversations and create a sense of community. At Social Global Grind, we specialize in crafting engagement strategies that foster connections with your audience, encouraging interactions, comments, and shares. Creating a genuine and interactive online presence can build strong relationships that translate into brand loyalty and increased conversions.

5. Continuous Monitoring and Optimization: Social media is a dynamic landscape that requires constant monitoring and optimization. It's not a "set it and forget it" strategy. Our team at Social Global Grind employs cutting-edge tools and analytics to monitor your social media campaigns' performance closely. We track key metrics, identify trends, and make data-driven adjustments to ensure optimal results. Whether it's refining targeting parameters, experimenting with different content formats, or exploring new platforms, we stay at the forefront of social media trends to keep your brand relevant and thriving.

At Social Global Grind, we believe your social media creation investment should yield tangible results. Our experienced team of social media strategists, content creators, and data analysts are committed to helping you unlock the full potential of your social media campaigns. By aligning your strategy with your business goals, creating compelling content, engaging with your target audience, and continuously optimizing your approach, we can elevate your social media impact and drive the outcomes you desire.

Don't let your social media campaign go without explanation or simply hope for a difference. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and discover how Social Global Grind can revolutionize your social media presence. Let's take your business to new heights and make your social media investment truly impactful.

Is this all you need to make your campaign successful? Think again. We want to emphasize the importance of aligning the communication between social media managers and business owners. At Social Global Grind, we understand that effective communication is key to achieving social media success. Even if you and your social media manager are not currently on the same page, we can bridge that gap by carefully reviewing your strategy and communication style.

Contact us now to schedule a consultation and get a relatable social media audit or email us. Let us unveil the hidden potential within your social media campaigns and amplify your impact. Don't wait; take the next step towards social media success today!

Remember to use the hashtags #socialglobalgrind and #hustleandglow to stay connected with our community and receive updates on the latest social media strategies. Let's create a powerful online presence together!

EP. 73 I absolutely had it with social media clients!

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 05:34:29 GMT

As a social media marketer, it's not uncommon to come across difficult clients who fail to understand the importance of effective social media marketing. It's frustrating for both parties involved, especially when the client doesn't recognize the effort and hard work that goes into building and executing a successful social media strategy. In this blog, we'll address some of the most common problems with social media clients, explore the underlying reasons behind these issues, and provide practical solutions for managing difficult clients.

Problem #1: Clients Who Want Instant Results Many clients expect immediate results from social media marketing. They assume that their brand will gain popularity overnight, and when they don't see the desired outcome, they become frustrated and impatient. This is especially common with small business owners who have limited budgets and resources.

Reason: The issue here lies in the misunderstanding of the time and effort required to build a strong social media presence. It takes consistent effort and time to build an online community, engage with followers, and establish brand authority.

Solution: Educate your clients about the time and effort required to achieve their desired results. Set realistic goals and timelines, and make sure they understand the importance of patience and consistency.

Problem #2: Clients Who Don't Understand Social Media Some clients may have little to no knowledge about social media and how it works. They may not understand the value of creating engaging content or engaging with their followers.

Reason: The lack of knowledge or understanding about social media can create unrealistic expectations and make it challenging for social media marketers to execute effective strategies.

Solution: Take the time to educate your clients about social media and the benefits of effective social media marketing. Explain the basics of social media, including how algorithms work and how the content creation and engagement drive success. Provide resources and tools to help them learn and understand the process better.

Problem #3: Clients Who Don't Trust the Process Clients who don't trust the process or the social media marketer can make the job difficult. They may question every decision and strategy and resist making changes, even when the data suggests it's necessary.

Reason: This issue stems from a lack of trust and understanding of the social media marketing process. Clients may feel like they're not in control or have a say in the strategy, leading to a lack of trust.

Solution: Build trust with your clients by involving them in the process. Share data and insights that support your decisions, and explain the rationale behind your strategies. Encourage open communication and collaboration so they feel like they're a part of the process.

Dealing with difficult clients is a challenge that many social media marketers face. However, understanding the underlying reasons behind these issues and providing practical solutions can help alleviate the frustration and improve communication and collaboration between the social media marketer and the client. By educating clients, building trust, and setting realistic expectations, social media marketers can create successful campaigns that help their clients achieve their goals.

Don't Know What to Post on Social Media for Your Small Business? Use These Tips to Get the Creative Juices Flowing!

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 21:52:10 GMT

Don't Know What to Post on Social Media for Your Small Business? Use These Tips to Get the Creative Juices Flowing! Having trouble coming up with creative content for your small business's social media accounts? You're not alone! Coming up with content that resonates with your target audience can be difficult, especially if you don't have a lot of experience with social media marketing. Fortunately, with the right tips and tricks, you can get the creative juices flowing and create content that your followers will love. In this blog post, we'll explore some strategies to help you get the creative spark going so you can start generating engaging content for your small business.

Why Bother With Social Media For Your Small Business?

Social media has become an essential marketing tool for businesses of all sizes, but especially small businesses. Not only does it give you the opportunity to reach a larger audience, but it also allows you to build relationships with your customers. With social media, you can engage with customers on a more personal level, drive traffic to your website, and boost your brand’s visibility.

Social media also allows you to create content that is tailored to your specific audience and promote your products or services in a more effective manner. Whether you’re posting photos, videos, or stories, creating interesting content that resonates with your followers is key to engaging them and getting them to share your content with their friends and family.

Overall, using social media for your small business is an effective way to market your business, increase brand awareness, and build relationships with customers. It’s an inexpensive way to reach a large number of people and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. So, don’t hesitate - start using social media for your small business today!

What Type of Content Should You Post on Social Media?

Creating content for social media can be an intimidating task, but it doesn't have to be! Knowing what kind of content you should post on social media for your small business is the first step to creating a successful online presence.

When it comes to the type of content you should post on social media, the possibilities are endless! You can choose to focus on promotional posts that drive sales, engaging posts that create conversations with your followers, or informative posts that provide value and educate your audience.

Promotional posts are great for small businesses as they drive sales and help to get the word out about your products or services. However, be sure not to inundate your followers with too many promotional posts – aim for one promotional post for every three engaging or informative posts.

Engaging posts are a great way to start conversations with your followers and help to build relationships with them. You can ask your followers questions, share fun stories, or post polls and surveys to get their opinions on things related to your industry.

Informative posts are a great way to add value and demonstrate your expertise. Try sharing industry news or tips, or simply explaining how something works in your industry. This type of content shows potential customers that you know what you're talking about and helps to establish trust.

No matter what type of content you choose to post on social media, remember to always focus on providing value to your followers. This will help to keep them engaged and create a strong relationship between them and your business.

How to come up with ideas for social media posts

Creating engaging content for your small business’s social media accounts can be a challenge. You want to post something interesting, useful, or entertaining that will draw your target audience’s attention and encourage them to interact with your posts. But how do you come up with ideas for posts? Here are a few tips:

• Ask questions – Ask your followers what they would like to see from you on social media. Not only does this give you an idea of what kind of content they’re interested in, but it also encourages interaction and engagement.

• Look at what your competitors are doing – What type of content are your competitors creating? What kind of topics or issues are they discussing? Are there any areas in which you could outshine them? Take note of any new trends or topics that have potential for your own social media campaigns.

• Research current events and topics related to your industry – Keep an eye out for topics related to your industry that may spark the interest of your followers. Whether it’s a recent news article or a trend in the industry, keep your finger on the pulse and use this information to create timely and relevant posts.

• Brainstorm ideas with your team – Get the whole team involved! Have a brainstorming session and come up with ideas that could potentially be interesting and engaging to your followers.

• Think outside the box – Sometimes, being creative is the best way to come up with ideas for social media posts. Think about topics or ways you can present them that will stand out from the competition.

• Repurpose existing content – If you already have great content, why not use it? Create graphics or videos from existing blog posts or other articles and post them on your social media channels.

Creating content for social media can seem daunting at first, but with a bit of creativity and research, you can come up with interesting posts that will engage your followers and help promote your small business.

Brainstorming tips for small businesses

When it comes to creating content for social media, the creative process can be tricky. Luckily, there are plenty of tips and tricks that small businesses can use to get their creative juices flowing. Here are a few brainstorming tips that may help spark some inspiration:

1. Research Your Audience: Take some time to research your target audience and learn what kind of content they respond best to. Are they more likely to engage with humorous posts or educational ones? Use this information to shape your content ideas.

2. Take Advantage of Trending Topics: Staying up-to-date on the latest news and trends can help you come up with content ideas that are timely and relevant. You don’t have to necessarily weigh in on political topics or major news stories, but if something related to your business is trending, take advantage of it!

3. Connect With Influencers: By following influencers who are relevant to your industry, you can gain insight into new ideas and trends. They can also help to spread your content, which can potentially lead to more engagement.

4. Ask Your Followers For Ideas: Social media is all about two-way communication, so don’t be afraid to reach out to your followers and ask them what kinds of content they would like to see from your business.

5. Write Down Ideas When They Come To You: Whenever you come up with a good idea, make sure you write it down! This way, you won’t forget any great ideas you have in the moment.

By following these tips, small businesses can make sure their social media content remains fresh and engaging. With the right approach, any business can stay one step ahead of the competition and ensure their content stands out from the rest.

The Benefits of Content Curation

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 21:31:30 GMT

Content curation is the act of finding and sharing excellent, relevant content to your online followers.

With content curation, companies deliver a wide variety of content to their customers, keeping them engaged with well-organized and meaningful material.

In today’s fast-paced and competitive marketplace, content curation is becoming increasingly popular to keep up with growing customer demands for information and entertainment.

The Benefits of Content Curation:

Efficient and cost-effective brand building. Curating content costs less than creating it.
Thought leadership potential: The right content demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of your industry, increasing your credibility as an industry leader.
Maintain conversations with your audience: The more content you share, the easier it is to keep your customers engaged.
Unlock networking opportunities: Sharing other people’s content helps you to build relationships with those people. Curation is a great way to connect with influencers and future partners.
Show your selflessness: Curation demonstrates to your audience that you’re not just interested in talking about yourself.

Brainstorming tips for small businesses

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 21:02:00 GMT

Brainstorming tips for small businesses.

5. Write Down Ideas When They Come To You: Whenever you come up with a good idea, make sure you write it down! This way, you won’t forget any great ideas you have in the moment.

Can I hire someone to do my social media?

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 19:01:09 GMT

Are you thinking about hiring a social media manager? With 2.1 billion people active on social media, it's no surprise that businesses are increasingly turning to social media managers to help them navigate this vast and complex landscape. But what exactly does a social media manager do, and how can they benefit your business?

A social media manager is responsible for sourcing, creating, writing, and scheduling social media posts on behalf of your business. They curate content, schedule posts at optimal times, manage the content calendar, engage with followers and partners, monitor social media trends, news, and best practices, and review analytics to put forward a strategy for improvement.

By taking on a social media manager, you can ensure that your business's social media accounts are always up-to-date with fresh, engaging content. This can help to build your brand's online presence, attract new customers, and keep existing ones engaged.

If you're looking to hire a social media manager, you might be wondering where to find the best talent, how much it will cost, and how to write a job description. At MixBloom, our social media managers and writers know exactly what works (and what doesn't) on social media. We can help you fill your content calendar with the perfect mix of original, curated, and promotional content - without you lifting a finger!

So, if you want to take your business's social media accounts to the next level, consider hiring a social media manager. With their expertise and experience, they can help you to unlock the full potential of social media for your business. Contact Francesca at Social Global Grind or hit the link in the bio to learn more about our social media management services.

Is SEO important for social media?

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 23:26:44 GMT

Is SEO important for social media?

As a business owner or social media marketer, you want to ensure that your content is reaching as many people as possible. One way to do this is by using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques when posting on social media.

SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your website and online content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). When you optimize your content for SEO, you're essentially making it easier for search engines like Google to understand what your content is about, which can help it rank higher in search results.

So why is SEO important when posting on social media? Here are a few reasons:

Improved visibility: By using relevant keywords and tags in your social media posts, you can improve the visibility of your content in search engine results. This can help more people discover your content, potentially leading to more engagement and followers.

Increased traffic: If your content ranks highly in search results, it's more likely that people will click through to your website or social media profile. This can lead to increased traffic and potentially even more sales or leads.

Better user experience: Using SEO techniques can help ensure that your content is relevant and valuable to your audience. This can lead to a better user experience, as people are more likely to engage with and share content that they find useful or interesting.

To optimize your social media posts for SEO, consider using relevant keywords in your captions and hashtags, as well as adding alt text to your images. You can also use tools like Google's Keyword Planner to research and find popular keywords in your industry.

In summary, using SEO techniques when posting on social media can help improve the visibility and reach of your content, leading to increased traffic and potentially even more sales or leads. Don't underestimate the power of SEO – it can make a big difference in the success of your social media marketing efforts.

The Power of Confidence: Why Small Business Owners Need It

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 20:00:46 GMT

Confidence is a crucial quality for small business owners to possess. It allows them to take risks, make decisions, and lead their team effectively. Without confidence, it can be difficult for small business owners to succeed in an increasingly competitive market.

One of the main benefits of confidence is that it helps small business owners to take calculated risks. Starting a small business requires a certain level of risk-taking, as there are no guarantees of success. However, confidence allows business owners to weigh the potential risks and rewards of a decision and make a decision that is in the best interests of their business.

Confidence also plays a crucial role in decision-making. As a small business owner, you are faced with a variety of decisions on a daily basis. From hiring employees to deciding on a marketing strategy, your confidence in your own judgment can greatly impact the success of your business. Without confidence, it can be difficult to make decisive decisions, which can lead to a lack of progress and missed opportunities.

In addition to helping with risk-taking and decision-making, confidence is also essential for effectively leading a team. As a small business owner, you are responsible for setting the tone for your business and inspiring your employees to do their best work. Confidence allows you to communicate your vision and goals to your team in a way that is clear and decisive, which can lead to greater buy-in and better performance from your team.

There are a few key ways that you can work to build and maintain your confidence:

Set clear goals: Having a clear vision and specific goals can help you stay focused and motivated, which can in turn boost your confidence.
Learn from your mistakes: Mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. By acknowledging and learning from your mistakes, you can gain valuable experience and build your confidence over time.
Surround yourself with supportive people: Surrounding yourself with people who believe in you and your business can be a great way to boost your confidence. This can include employees, mentors, or even friends and family.

I think you'll all agree that confidence is a crucial quality for small business owners to possess. It allows you to take risks, make decisions, and lead their team effectively. By setting clear goals, learning from mistakes, and surrounding themselves with supportive people, you can work to build and maintain their confidence, which can ultimately lead to greater success for your business.

New Year, New You? 5 Ways to Refresh Your Small Business's Social Media

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 04:25:26 GMT

With the start of the new year, many of us look for ways to refresh and reinvigorate our lives. For small businesses, this could mean taking a step back and looking at how their social media is performing. Social media can be a powerful tool for driving customers and increasing brand awareness, but if you're stuck in a rut or don't know where to begin, the new year can be the perfect opportunity to get your business's social media on track. In this blog post, we'll explore five ways that small businesses can use the start of the year to refresh their social media.

1) Evaluate what's working and what isn't

As you’re getting ready to take advantage of the new year, it’s important to step back and evaluate what’s been working for your small business’s social media platforms. What posts have generated the most engagement? What type of content resonates best with your audience? What topics or campaigns did you focus on this past year that were successful or not so successful?

These are all key questions to ask yourself in order to set your small business up for success in the upcoming year. Take a look at your analytics, look at which posts your followers like and comment on the most, and assess how your presence on each platform has evolved over the past year. This will help you develop strategies for the upcoming year and make sure you are putting out content that resonates with your audience. Additionally, this will also help you decide which content to focus on in the upcoming year.

By taking the time to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t, you can create an action plan for the new year that is tailored to your small business and what works best for your customers. Knowing which content works and which doesn’t will make sure you don’t waste time on content that won’t generate results and can help focus your energy on content that does bring in a return.

2) Create goals for the new year

As a small business, it’s important to set goals for the upcoming year in order to measure success and keep yourself on track. When it comes to your social media presence, think about the results you want to see and create measurable goals that will help you get there. For example, consider the growth of your followers, engagement rate, website traffic, or sales that you can trace back to social media.

Develop SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals that can help guide you throughout the year. For example, if you want to increase website traffic from your social media accounts, set a goal to generate a 10% increase over the next three months. Or if you’d like to increase engagement on your posts, determine the average number of likes and comments you have now, and strive to exceed it over time.

Be sure to check in with yourself throughout the year to track progress and make adjustments as needed. Re-evaluate your goals every three months and make sure they are still realistic and achievable. By creating SMART goals and revisiting them regularly, you can ensure that your efforts are making an impact.

3) Take advantage of changes in algorithms

The new year is a great time to take advantage of any changes in algorithms that may have occurred over the course of the last year. Algorithm changes can have a big impact on how your content is viewed by customers. For instance, if you’re using Instagram, you’ll want to make sure you’re taking advantage of their recent addition of the “Explore” page, which allows users to discover content they wouldn’t have seen before. Additionally, Facebook recently made an algorithm change which prioritises live video content. So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and reach a broader audience with your social media posts, consider creating some live video content.

Other platforms like Twitter and YouTube also regularly update their algorithms in order to keep up with the ever-changing world of social media. Make sure you’re aware of any algorithm changes that may have occurred on these platforms, so you can adjust your social media strategy accordingly. Keeping up with algorithm changes and understanding how they affect your content can help your small business stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media in 2023.

4) Get creative with content

Creating fresh, engaging content on social media can be a challenge for small businesses, especially if they are already stretched for time and resources. This is where getting creative can help!

One way to get creative with content is to experiment with different types of posts. Share an inspirational quote, post a funny meme, start a hashtag challenge, create an interactive poll – the possibilities are endless! It’s important to mix up the content you share on your social media channels to keep followers interested and engaged.

You should also take advantage of holidays and seasonal trends to come up with fun content ideas. For example, if it’s summer time, you could post beach-related content or encourage people to tag their friends in holiday-themed posts.

Another great way to get creative with content is to partner with influencers or micro-influencers who can help promote your brand. Reach out to influencers whose values align with those of your company and offer them some form of compensation in exchange for a shout-out or collaboration. This will not only help you create more interesting content, but it will also help you reach a larger audience.

Finally, don’t be afraid to have fun with your content! Experiment with different tones and visuals, such as videos, GIFs, and photos. People respond better when the content is entertaining, so get creative and think outside of the box.

By using these tips, you can make sure that your small business stands out from the crowd and refreshes its social media in the new year. Good luck!

How do I calculate the conversion rate?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 04:41:58 GMT

How do I calculate the conversion rate?

To calculate the conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by your desired metric (clicks, ad impressions, sessions on-site, etc.).

Your KPIs will indicate how well or close you are to meeting your goal. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of purchases for an eCommerce site, one target KPI is the number of customers who land on a “Thank you page” after buying an item.

You can also track KPIs for consumers who are close to meeting a conversion goal and then take steps to ensure the completion of your goal. For example, suppose a customer adds an item to a shopping cart but abandons the cart. In that case, you can use a retargeting campaign via Google AdWords to display ads for abandoned items and increase the chance of a conversion.

How Do You Find Social Media ROI?

With social commerce, you can bypass many traditional purchasing routes by using built-in e-commerce features, such as Instagram Shopping or Pinterest Shopping Pins, and marketing your products to an existing and engaged audience.

Essentially, social commerce allows businesses to engage users where they already are and turn their social media engagement directly into sales.

Who are Your Brand Advocates?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 02:12:11 GMT

Brand Advocacy

A brand advocate is someone who elevates your brand through word-of-mouth marketing. The conversation starter is your social media campaign, and your engagement rate will prove it.

Brand advocates leave positive reviews about your product. They also refer new customers and create content on your behalf. Brand advocates even contribute valuable insights to your user personas.

Now that 92% of customers seek social recommendations before buying, advocates are a powerful part of your marketing strategy.

Who are Your Brand Advocates?

A brand advocate is anyone who supports your company’s growth.

This includes:

Customers: Customers are not affiliated with your company. This makes their support more genuine and influential to future clients.
Employees: Employee advocates know everything about your business. Their inside knowledge and relatable nature make them powerful tools in advocacy.
Business partners: Charities, organizations and other companies affiliated with your brand also influence purchasing decisions.

If you would like to find out more about Brand Advocacy, click the link below to book a discovery call with Francecsa.

Why Should Conversion Goals Be Tracked?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 01:53:45 GMT

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is when a brand monitors consumers' actions toward completing a business goal. These actions can include signing up for a newsletter, downloading a content offer or adding an item to a cart. Conversion tracking is a way to determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, design change and other marketing components as consumers move toward conversion.

What Should Conversion Goals Be Tracked?

Conversion tracking tools like Google Analytics require account managers to define measurable goals for conversion. Goals are typically connected to specific pages, events, products, and services.

Examples of conversion goals:

Direct people to a physical store location
Increase site visitors
Contact a business via call or message
Add item to cart
Make a purchase
Sign-up for a newsletter
Download content offer
Play a video

Reach out to arrange a call via the link below or send me an email on francesca@socialglobalgrind.com.

Why Service-Based Businesses Need A Podcast

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 18:52:58 GMT

I can't tell you how often I have been in a meeting with a service-based business and they don't know how to effectively market online.

"Have you ever thought about a podcast?" I would say. Then the look of "What is she talking about?" look? By the way, I love this look. It means they never thought about it, and I get to take this on a journey.

Hear me out. This is a way you can covertly create content. If you are sharing client wins and explain what you do. Features and benefits of your service can be explained in each episode, and it will start to attract the clients you potentially want to gain. This is not only great for your marketing strategy but also your SEO strategy,

Here's the thing. As all social media sites are the new search engines, so are the podcasts platforms. Check it out yourself. Look and search for your industry topics on all the platforms. Now do it on any podcast platform.

Our favourite SEO tool is https://answerthepublic.com/

You can type in any phrase about your business, populating key phrases that are likely used to find that topic.

With this type of information, you can easily set yourself apart from the competition.

Book a social media audit with us today, click the button below.

The Best Time to Post on TikTok

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 20:27:03 GMT

If you are new to TikTok and have no idea when to post, we get it! It can absolutely feel like you’re putting content out on all the channels and not getting much traction. To help, we’ve had a look at four steps to help you discover the best time for your business to post on TikTok.

How to Discover Your Best Time to Post on TikTok

Just like instagram, there’s no universal time for posting on TikTok but you can find out your best time to post on TikTok in these 4 simple steps:

Create a Business or Creator Account
Identify Your Top Territories
Know When Your Audience is Most Active
Track and Measure Your Content

Step #1: Create a Business or Creator Account

Switching to a Business or Creator TikTok account will unlock all of your profile’s metrics, and these hold the key to finding out when the best time to post is.

If you haven’t already gotten a business or creator account, you’ll need to switch:

Go to the “Settings and Privacy” section by tapping the three lines in the top right corner of your profile page
Tap “Manage Account”
Under “Account Control”, tap “Switch to Business account”

To find the analytics tools on your business account follow these steps:

Head to the “Settings and Privacy” section again
Tap “Business Suite”
Go to “Analytics”

If you have a Creator account, follow these steps to find your analytics:

Head to the “Settings and Privacy” section
Tap “Creator tools”
Go to “Analytics”

There are 4 tabs for your TikTok analytics which cover: Overview, content, followers and LIVE - these are also flexible within your chosen date range which is currently up to 60 days. TikTok analytics covers your audience, when they are most active and where they are which will come in handy when scheduling your posts.

Step #2: Identify Your Top Regions

Identifying where most of your audience is based can help you work out when they’ll be likely to be online - its different to Instagram and Facebook where most of your audience will be New Zealand based, whereas because of the virality of TikTok, it will more likely be picked up by audiences that are further afield.

TikTok doesn’t break locations down into cities so if you do have an audience in another part of the world, you could have to consider multiple timezones - even with audiences in Australia. To get around this, choose to not post too early or late in the day to avoid excluding a lot of your audience. It will take some trial and error but stick to it and you’ll soon reach that sweet spot.

Step #3: Know When Your Audience is Most Active

This is an amazing feature that isn’t too well known at the moment: “Follower Activity” section.

To find it just go to the Follower tab of your TikTok Analytics and scroll down; in this super feature you’ll find detailed info on your audience’s most active hours and days. One thing to notes is that you’ll have to use a timezone calculator to work out the times as they’re currently recorded in UTC.

Step #4: Track and Measure Your Content Performance

Perhaps the key step is tracking and measuring your content’s performance. Looking at the content tab in TikTok analytics, you’ll be able to get a tonne of data on your content’s performance - average watch time, number of comments, and where in the world your views are coming from. Its key to keep track of this and measure content performance over time, noting down any major or minor tweaks that you made.

As your profile grows, your audience’s location and behaviours will also grown and change. Its important to check in on your TikTok analytics regularly so you move in the right direction.

If you want to learn more about how and what to post on TikTok, reach out to Francesca on the button below for a quick call.

Which Key Performance Indicators Do I Track?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 08:09:20 GMT

Which Key Performance Indicators Do I Track?

There are a variety of key performance indicators related to conversions themselves and other metrics that suggest the effectiveness of conversion efforts.

Examples of KPIs for conversion:

Number of conversions
Conversion rate
Cost per conversion/acquisition
Bounce rate
Pages per visit
Hits on the destination page
Events (played videos, download content)
Session duration

KPIs like conversion rate evaluate conversions themselves, while metrics like events take into account actions that will eventually lead to conversions. For example, a social media viewer may lead to a sale down the line. It is not definitively measurable; however, a link to consistent social media brand awareness will lead to sales.

How to use LinkedIn for Business Goals

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 19:40:51 GMT

How to use LinkedIn for Business Goals

Decide on goals

In order to build an effective LinkedIn strategy and brand presence, you’ll need to create specific goals for the platform. Depending on how large your team is, make sure to meet with different team members to identify your top priorities, if you are just a few team members or a one man/woman business, try putting on each ‘hat’ individually and creating goals from that perspective. For example, a sales lead might be interested in how you can increase web traffic and drive sales, whereas a business development lead would be more interested in raising brand awareness and reaching investors.

When putting on each of these hats, or speaking with team members, here are some questions to help guide the process:

Which audience are you trying to reach?
What are they interested in?
What is the action you want them to take after seeing your content?

Build your toolkit

In order to simplify your LinkedIn content creation process, a good step is to first do a content audit. Running an audit of the content you already have at your disposal will highlight what content can be repurposed and what needs to be created from scratch. If you have a team with different priorities, it is a good time to reconnect once you’ve done the audit to share your findings and see if anything that you’ve tagged for repurposing needs updating ie. You are a recruitment business and you had a pre-2020 blog posts on interview prep, this could now be updated to reflect virtual interview practices.

Make it conversational

As with any successful brand on social media, you need to engage with your followers to be successful on LinkedIn. If you take the time to respond to questions and comments, it will increase your visibility in other’s feeds and increase your reach. The LinkedIn algorithm favours posts with higher engagement and luckily, this includes how you engage with your followers. Once you have the basics down, using LinkedIn’s interactive features like polls or stories to increase engagement on your account.

To arrange a call about how you can prioritise your business goals and optimise your LinkedIn social strategy, reach out to Francesca on the link below:

Business Influencer Mary Portas

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 03:02:04 GMT

I was introduced to Mary Portas in 2014 when I moved to New Zealand. A television series called the Queen of Shops where Mary Portas went into small retail establishments and rebuilt their business. The work and retail understanding that was unprecedented.

Mary Portas made her name at Harvey Nichols. In the early Nineties, she took the fading monolithic Knightsbridge department store and transformed it into the throbbing epicentre of the glamorous London shopping experience.

Mary is known for ripping it all down and building it back up. We can learn so much from her and in fact before covid, she had campaigned for the new economy and the triple bottom line with People, Planet and Profit in that order.

"No matter how you slice or dice it, which bit of the company is making what, where etc, no business should be raking in a £6.9 billion profit in just three months right now – and not giving something back to those most in need."

This is her core essence. Do right by the people and the planet and profit will be sure to follow. That's the formula, and that is the new economy.

Mary is not alone in her vision. Millions in the workforce are leaving their positions to find a better way of working. In New Zealand, we worry about a dwindling workforce leaving for overseas opportunities while we have yet to replace them with new overseas opportunities.

The US job market fluctuates while the human resource department can hardly keep up with employee retention efforts.

What has changed? Everything. We have had plenty of time to understand how mental health is a priority and shifting to better work environments is everything.

The Kindness Economy explores the new values driving businesses and the fundamental role they must play in our lives. Mary Portas believes in best practices that inspire business leaders as they explore this exciting new value system. Think People, Planet, Profit – in that order.

Why purpose is the key to resilience.

LINKS TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MARY PORTAS:

Mary Portas | On style

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-kindness-economy/id1463034553

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Kindness-Economy-Podcast/B08JJN95G4?qid=1660420843&sr=1-2&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_2&pf_rd_p=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf_rd_r=Q061138SXPGQHHZN3PNN

Books you need to read:

Work Like a Woman : A Manifesto For Change

Rebuild : How to thrive in the new Kindness Economy

Why Hire SGG: How I got into Social Media

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 22:12:18 GMT

How I got into Social Media.

There was a time I was in the beauty industry in Los Angeles. I loved it! As a formal MAC makeup artist I then switched over to skincare. I worked at a gorgeous spa where celebrities were a daily occurrence and it was incredible.

At the time I was helping to develop this company's website journey for new potential clients and the driving factors were publications like People magazine, US and Entertainment Tonight. Social media in the late- 2000s wasn't yet a thing. Up until this one day in 2007.

We had a celebrity client that arrived late to his facial appointment (like almost an hour late) and we could not take him in as we were fully booked that day.

He got irate and then took to Twitter where he blasted how unprofessional we were. It was now out there and panic ensued inside our corporate office.

Later that day in our boardroom the then vice president of sales was yelling at his assistant to "take it down". He thought we can call or somehow remove a tweet. He was that kind of guy...

I then explained how the mechanism of Twitter worked and said "There is no way you can erase a tweet from our end or our request. But we can appeal to Mr. Celebrity by inviting him in for a new experience."

I used to work retail and was fairly good with working with disgruntled customer from a luxury retail perspective. I can get someone to agree with me at the end or laugh with me at the end of our interaction. I was good.

I contacted the clients management and re-arranged another visit with timings that suited him and blocking out time after so if he was late we can accomodate him. I met with him at the end and asked if he might take down his previous tweet. He did. Mr. Celebrity also added a new tweet: "I love (company name)" simple easy and finally done with the drama.

When this was all resolved the VP of sales pointed at me and said "You are now our new social media person."

That was it. I fell in love with the role and came up with my first strategy by showcasing our aestheticians demonstrating the features and benefits of the products. So simple but effective.

It was an exciting time. I help lead the first campaign with SEO on our website to capture the keyword anti-aging that beat Estée Lauders ranking! Social media was more of the same by showcasing those same keywords in our written content. Social merging was making sense and the start of my online marketing career was happening.

It's a crazy story I know. What I learned out of it and reputation management was priceless!

Here are my top tips to help recover your brand's reputation using social media:

Own up to the mistake. Don't ever double down on your mistake.
Create reparations for the client. Even if you are not in the wrong it's a better PR move to amend the situation and at a later time you can quietly drop them as a client.
Use reflective listening techniques when engaging with an irate customer. An example is "I hear you. You don't feel it's fair not to give you a refund because this garment is not fitting you correctly. I hear you." You may have to do this back and forth but if you keep saying "I hear you." and give them a exchange offer or refund you can quickly move on with your day instead of taking on the negative energy.
Boundaries should be clear before any completed transaction. Make sure policies are clear before you trade. Also list on your website or anywhere else for social proof just in case you need to respond to a Google review.

There will be learnings and who knows you might have a new budding career.

Taking Back Your Business from Patriarchy Standard Practices

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 07:52:38 GMT

There are so many patriacal standards that are designed to self-doubt your methods in your business. I love the article that Kate Northrup wrote regarding how to smash the patriarchy with your business, and I added some other tips based on experience.

While reading, notice what services support patriarchal practices like public speaking methods/ coaching, business seminars or fear-based marketing. Once you are aware, you see it everywhere.

It's an age-old system that we all can’t help but perpetuate to one degree or another, no matter how much we are aware of it; taking the time to dismantle the system so that we can all experience true liberation is absolutely all of our responsibilities. So let's take a look at how we can smash the patriarch and inspire others to do the same.

Before we can truly dismantle the system, we all need to look at the four patriarchal myths that we perpetuate unknowingly and question things, especially regarding our businesses.

Myth 1: There’s not enough to go around.

Within your business, how do you perpetuate the idea that there isn’t enough for everyone and that you have to fight other people to get what you deserve? How can you let go of this idea? How do you think this way of thinking affects you, how you run your business, and what you offer your clients?

Myth 2: You have to be perfect to show up for your business

Perfectionism and feeling ‘good enough before you show up for your business is a massive thing that can hold you back for absolutely no reason. What are you waiting for before you start? Is it an internal or external form of approval? What do you think you have to be more, or less of, to be ‘ready’ to show up? How can you switch this around and see how you can achieve everything you want to in work right now whilst doing it a little imperfectly? Showing up imperfectly is one of the ways that we can let go and release the patriarchy in our businesses.

Myth 3: Bigger is better.

Who says that you have to have the biggest business in the world? This isn’t an excuse to not aim high, but try to take the pressure of growing your business for the sake of growing it and work on how you can truly align your business with your goals and measure your business’ success with how you feel, your sense of purpose and happiness.

Myth 4: Your body is an impediment to your success.

How can you look to work with your body instead of against it when it comes to working for your business? Can you take a moment and stop feeling guilty for taking rest if your body needs it? Can you reject the idea that you have to put productivity before health, that your self-worth is based on how well your career or business is going? How can you do the most meaningful work to yourself whilst living in the body that you have right now?

Journalling is an incredible way to work through thoughts and ideas, and I’d encourage you to dig a little deeper into these and discover how you can smash the patriarchy for yourself and for your business. Also, I have to say it. SEX. Healthy regular sexual activity for women helps clear their minds and produce the healthy hormone oxytocin. It will help you in your creative process when building your business.

Performance Gap

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:38:25 GMT

When it comes to social media and exposure for your brand, is there a performance gap? Let's dig in a little deeper. Let's start with these basic four:

Are you everywhere? Is that Instagram post also on LinkedIn?
Are you using SEO social merging methods?
Are you consistent? Do you show up at least 2-3x per week?
Are you engaging in educated social media help for more than four months?

Are you everywhere? Are you using social merging methods?

I mentioned LinkedIn. LinkedIn is incredible. It's the only social media platform where the audience actively wants to connect and do business. It's more transparent, and this is the perfect space to repetitiously talk about your 'Why'. Why are you doing what you do = what do you want to be known for?

Now here's where it gets interesting. If done correctly, you can practice social merging. Social merging is a technique where you mention a blog article, product or service and provide the link to "find out more".

This mechanic is called backlinking or social merging. The mechanism will alert the search engine bots to recognize the relevance of your keywords and relevance to unique views brought to your website.

What this means for the small business owner is the grade for relevance will be heightened to your brand's website and will help you grow in organic placement. You will be easier to find when you grow organically and land in the first place of a search site like Google.

Are you consistent?

Real talk here. The Instagram monsters want you to post 1-3 times per day! It is outrageous to continue thinking of and creating content like it's your full-time job. No business should be focusing on social media with their in-house team. It's too much!

However, with saying that social media consistency and visibility are oh so important. We recommend at least 3x per week. Videos are often looked at longer, so we absolutely recommend that. People in front of the image or product/ service explanation videos perform highly.

Are you engaging in educated social media help for more than four months?

I start off by saying educated social media help. Social Global Grind, the social media agency, has been a social media management practitioner since 2009. To give your a benchmark in time, Facebook is 18 years old. It's been a while!

Social Global Grind is led by Gen Xer Francesca Alexander and has been in the social media marketing industry since 2006. Our contributor content creative team comprises Gen Z, and Millenials, as age diversity is the key to creative success.

Now, this is key! Professional social media management does not come from a younger person that you know and "knows how social media works". Instead, consider a professional strategy approach that has proven results.

Finally, consider working with a social media agency for a minimum of six months. This will establish a baseline and realistically gauge if you can do this yourself consistently. One of our biggest heartbreaks is clients thinking they can do it on their own only to engage us later again with a lapse of social media engagement.

Consistency will help you grow and bring strong brand awareness along the way.

Final Tips!

Lastly, ask your team what you want to achieve with social media. Who is best suited to continue the conversation and represent your brand? Are your social media accounts current and belong to the business owner?

These are the best places to start and will help you set up a strategy. We are here for you if you have any questions about the process or getting started. Click below to access a free consulting session. Go forward and get social!

How to use LinkedIn data to inform your social media strategy

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 04:51:59 GMT

Once you’ve started putting your LinkedIn strategy into practice, you’ll be able to gather a bit more data to inform smarter content decisions and your wider strategy moving forwards. To do this, there are a few data points that you should track to measure success:

Follower demographics

Using the follower section of LinkedIn analytics can help you track whether you are reaching your target audience or not. Sorting your followers by key criteria, which for you could include filters like job function, location, and seniority, and comparing your performance against your original goals will be a good indication of where you are getting with your strategy.

When to post on LinkedIn

You’ll know that knowing the best time to post on social media is a great insight, but it also varies by platform, industry and audience type. For LinkedIn, as it is a professional network, engagement is highest during the workweek with the highest engagement around midday, dropping outside of work hours. . Especially in New Zealand, where work-life balance is stronger than in countries like the States, engagement drops significantly on the weekend. Experiment with different times to see what works for your unique online presence and tweak your social schedule once you have more data. Tools like Later will use AI to help us suggest the best times to post on social media but it does need data to go off first.

Awareness data

If a key part of your business being on social media is awareness raising, look at your impression and reach data. These metrics will help determine whether or not you’re building enough brand recognition to make an impact with your key audiences, whether they are potential hires or investors.

If you’re a little lost in the data and need help translating to optimise your LinkedIn social strategy, reach out to Francesca at the link below to arrange a call.

Supporting Wellness Practitioners

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 23:34:40 GMT

We’re going to be talking about more ways we can support wellness practitioners in this blog.

Seeking out new wellness practitioners has definitely been part of my wellness journey - I have an amazing chiropractor. All these types of wellness practitioners have been amazing for me and I’ve been making it my mission to support them in social media because ultimately, we need them!

The rub is, that they are busy with so many different elements of the business, so how can they get their head around social media and show us treatment and how they do things as well as running a business? I really hope that in helping wellness practitioners we can hire them more to help our own wellness journeys.

Hashtags & Volume of Looking

On Ep 54 we talked about how you could get yourself out there and we spoke about hashtags and which ones are good to use. We want to know what you envision about how you can get people back to you following the past couple of years disruption. There are different types of what I call ‘Volume of Looking’ so there’s someone who is searching for a service in their area - a high volume of looking. The second one has been thinking about it and is in the research stage. The third one, which I love, is the one that didn’t even know they needed something till they saw it. Now for me, doing what I do, I really see them as very high priority - the human algorithm is not very predictable, someone who didn’t know they needed it might bite first ahead of someone who is. It all really comes down to content, how engaging and compelling it is. If its really compelling then that’s the place where hopefully all of us will go and be able to produce content that is compelling.

Where to produce compelling content on Social Media Platforms

What I want to talk about is where we can produce compelling content, and what I want to talk about first is TikTok. TikTok is killing it with a lot of chiropractors that are on there - if you search for them on there, you’ll be able to see the top vetted chiros and what they are doing on there and how attainable it is. To produce content every week its good to start off small and it is easy to fit into the practice of it and then you build up slowly and three months in when you have a great story to share so if you’ve just done a certain treatment, you’ll be able to jump right onto TikTok and share that story because of how natural it now feels.

I would say try to do this in your down-time at night so its not as stressful. Look up key words that you think your potential patient would type in to search. Not all platforms are ruled by the same algorithm which is why searching really helps - make a note of what the platform is autofilling so you can see alternative hashtags to use if what you are aiming for is really oversaturated.

How to grow relationships on TikTok

If you tell people to follow you, follow them back and they’ll show up in the friend feed and grow those relationships. They’ve just rolled out something where you can repost or share a TikTok on your own channel.

Advertisements on TikTok

These aren’t static or just well produced video, what they suggest to do is to promote a post. If you have a solid engaging story about what you do, then you can boost it as a post.

Cross-platform Engagement

TikTok has so much growth potential, it is a really exciting platform. If you still need to show up on LinkedIn and Instagram for your business, you can download your videos and share, but it is great to keep the TikTok watermark on it so people can see you’re on TikTok and really relevant.

The more that you put yourself out there in front of the camera, the more your potential patients feel like they know you already and are more likely to reach out with you. This allows you to start building the relationship sooner rather than later. These are my top tips for how you can start to use TikTok for your wellness practitioner business but if you want to reach out to arrange a call via the link below or send me an email on francesca@socialglobalgrind.com.

The Hero Story of The Wellness Practioner

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 23:38:33 GMT

For entrepreneurs, there is no one more valuable than a wellness practitioner. From chiropractors to herbalists, I have seen them all! As an entrepreneur, I have been seeking balance and good health from the beginning. Stress has been the core root cause of why I seek a wellness practitioner to help me get through to the next healthy step. Not to mention numerous various spa experiences. However, there is one thing that is common with all these types of very busy people. They lack the time or the storytelling effort on social media.

I don't blame them. The recent ask from Meta is that we do at least five stories, three reels, two daily posts and 3-5 hashtags per post. This is insane and geared to benefit them (to outdo TikTok) instead of actually helping you or your business.

Meta has proven not to be on the side of the small business owner. I can benchmark this to May 2018, when Facebook no longer put business feeds into your newsfeed. You would have to pay to play with ads to be seen. From then on, we have seen the decline of ad resources, numerous gatekeeping tactics and no live support. It's a mess and not anything I recommend my clients to waste their time with.

One of the Social Collab techniques we use at our agency is producing one piece of content; then, you schedule it out for all social media platforms that make sense for your business. My top 3 platforms for wellness practitioners are TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn. Here's why.

TikTok has been the platform for rapid brand awareness recognition. If. If you want to grow fast, this is the place. Although you cannot isolate regionally, you will still gain followers that will help benefit your SEO (your findability when looking for your service on Google) which is very strategic. You want to index as a practice as soon as possible. TikTok will also help you with producing engaging content. Have a look! You will be pleasantly surprised at how members of your industry are killing it on TikTok.

Instagram also has that Google index factor we cannot ignore. Optimise each post by explaining what you do in the captions. This will ping the proper mechanics and get you known for your services. Also, keep the hashtags light and relevant. 3-5 hashtags will keep you relevant. Super simple wins here despite all the post requests to "hack" the algorithm. If you are consistent, that is always the winning path.

Finally, LinkedIn, with its welcoming of a B2B new business relationship. You can feature your 'Why' story to a captive audience with a focus group open to potential buyers. Showcasing your thought leadership here is also the place to grow your new potential audience's trust quickly. We have tested TikTok videos on LinkedIn, and they always do well.

Show who you are in your videos, why you do what you do, answer questions on LIVE videos and finally, be you. If you mess up, you become endearing to the audience. On the other hand, if you are perfect, the audience does not feel as connected to you as when you show your authentic self.

Know that you are the hero in our story of healing. We need to hear and see more of you! So take it slow at the beginning and build your way through it. Just ask yourself one thing. What do you want to be known for?

How to Hack the Instagram Reels Algorithm in 2022

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 23:22:40 GMT

How to ‘Hack’ the Instagram Reels Algorithm

Knowing how to ‘hack’ the Instagram Reels algorithm is a massive advantage for anyone looking to grow on Instagram. Why is this important? Because the results are real.

In one of our previous blogs, we’ve seen how Olivia Noceda, a content creator, has gained over 60k followers in 6 months after shaking things up and moving to a Reels-only strategy. Later, the scheduling app saw a 500%+ increase in engagement rate after embracing Reels in its social media strategy.

How does the Reels algorithm work, and how can you ‘hack’ it?

Like the home feed posts, the algorithm for reels prioritises videos based on what viewers think will be most likely to engage with.

According to Instagram, the key things they use for this are:

Who: Who’s posts are you currently interacting with? If you always like or comment on someone’s posts, they are more likely to show up on your feed.
What: What kind of content do you engage with? If you love coffee shops, then the algorithm will keep serving you coffee shops related content.
When: This one is a little trickier - Laurise McMillian explains, "This focuses on when a post has been posted to decide if it's relevant to you." Another thing it takes into account with this is how often you go on the app.
It also takes into consideration how often you scroll on the app — so it will pick and choose what to prioritize.

Original content is their focus, and they’ve been clear that they will deprioritise content that is visibly recycled from other apps (i.e. contains logos or watermarks) or is low-quality.

According to Instagram, brands, businesses, and creators should create Reels that:

Are fun and entertaining - bring in surprises, make your audience laugh, and keep them engaged.
Inspire people
Use creative tools i.e. filters, camera effects or text
Use vertical video
Use the Instagram music library’s music and/or original audio
Are experimental - be original, shake things up, be yourself

Things to avoid?

Blurry and low res videos
Recycling videos from other apps - login or watermarks are a clear giveaway.
Videos with borders
Text covering most of the image

Not sure where to start or need a social media audit. Click the calendly pop up below to book a free social media audit with Francesca. Spaces are limited, so book now.

5 WAYS TO DISTINGUISH YOUR PERSONAL BRAND ONLINE

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 21:40:45 GMT

5 WAYS TO DISTINGUISH YOUR PERSONAL BRAND ONLINE

Everyone these days is cultivating a personal brand, businesses are no longer hidden behind CEOs and founders you know nothing about and whilst many people embrace this, others struggle to establish their personal brand online. Small business owners are all known for something by their customers, and a few of them are seen as distinguished experts in their field.

Why do you need to distinguish your personal brand? Simply put, it helps people understand what you can do for them.

You might not see where you currently stand in the market, but everyone and their businesses play a vital role and can share their unique talents, skills and experiences that are valuable to the wider market; sometimes, it is just a matter of distinguishing yourself to establish your presence amongst the noise.

FIVE WAYS TO DISTINGUISH YOURSELF ONLINE:

Share your personal experience in business consistently and clearly.
Choose something that you have a strong opinion about that is related to your business or field, talk about it with conviction and be able to articulate it well.
Identify your values and skills, talk about them often and why they are important to you.
Work to shift your communities perspective about a topic - educate them on something they know little about and make you their go-to person on the subject.
Use storytelling to create a compelling narrative based on your personal experience, viewpoint, talents and traits.

WHAT TO DO NEXT:

Now that we’ve outlined the tools to establish your personal brand online, you can start putting it into practice. Whilst we wouldn’t encourage you to be extreme and have this be all you ever talk about, consistency matters, and there are ways to weave this type of content into your social media strategy in a way that feels authentic.

Get creative with the channels you use and work out how you can distinguish yourself to different audiences based on their current interactions with you - podcast listeners might have a better idea of your expertise through the way you talk, but social media followers might not have such an in-depth awareness of you yet. Look to build in a consistent message in the right way for each of your channels and audiences and before you know it, your personal brand will be strong and easily identifiable online.

If you are struggling with establishing your personal brand online and would like some help, reach out to Francesca to arrange a call.

Keeping Motivated In Winter: New Zealand Edition

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 21:31:04 GMT

Keeping Motivated In Winter: New Zealand Edition.

So the weather is rubbish, its cold and wet and you cannot wait for summer, motivation is at an all time low after the past couple of years with constant lockdowns and level changes. BUT, now may just be the perfect time to get organised especially where your business is concerned so that when the warmer days come, you can get back out there and enjoy it instead of being stuck in the day to day.

Here are our top tips on staying motivated in the winter:

Prioritise light & Exercise

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is mostly triggered by lack of sunshine. With fewer hours of sunlight in winter, it is more difficult to stay positive and productive over winter.

Get outside as much as possible to soak up the limited sunlight on offer and make sure your team knows that if there is a break in the rain, to take a break and get outside - encourage walking meetings in better weather and dialling in instead of being on video. If you want an extra boost, try a light that works as an artificial sun.

Exercise in winter doesn’t have to be intense, try something new like yoga or pilates to help move your body and shake things up when you are feeling stagnant.

Create Plans and Goals for Summer

It is always great to plan ahead, and by planning for the next 3-6 months you’ll have plenty of time to make those goals a reality. Break it down into 90 day stretches and plan your content around your content pillars and events/sales during this time. At the end of the 90 days, make sure you have time in to reflect on the results of your focused effort and what you need to do for the final 90 day push. Using tools like Asana will really help with planning out - Francesca loves an Asana board especially for longer term strategic planning. Remember to share your plans and goals with the team, and also see what their goals are and how you can help work on them.

Plan Content Ahead of Time

When summer is finally here, you won’t want to be stuck inside scheduling content. We schedule all our client’s content 2 weeks in advance or more when it comes to Summer Holidays & Christmas - this absolutely takes all the pressure off and lets us all enjoy our time off.

Take a look at our other blogs for more tips on being organised and working with your VA as they have loads of tips and tricks for using tools like Asana and Later to create and schedule content.

If you’d like to speak to us about how we can support you and your business so you can enjoy your summer, arrange a call below.

Micromanagement = Stomach Issues

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 23:47:34 GMT

How Stress And Micromanagement Effects Our Employees.

Many years ago, I had several friends that worked at a Los Angeles based emergency room, and they were all talking about how Monday mornings were the worst since they had an influx of incoming patients with severe stomach pain. It seemed that they also expressed a stressful workplace environment. Abdominal pain or severe abdominal pain on a Monday morning before work says something.

I have had my own business since 2009, and before that, I could tell you how many bad work relationships I had with management. The micromanagement of a creative employee never works. I know that even after these two sentences some of you may be experiencing slight discomfort in your stomach reading this. Why? You might be recalling work experiences that were quite traumatic.

Women of colour are more susceptible to this type of scrutiny in their career more than any other counterpart. Usually, we have to prove ourselves and have to outdo the performance levels of other co-workers to be considered equal, and even then, this may not be the final measurement. It used to be you stayed at a company, and over time you could "prove yourself" and reach your mid-management potential.

The younger generation is now leaving companies sooner than later (millennials five or so years and Gen Z is leaving sooner than that) if companies do not promote or acknowledge their work. After our collective lockdowns from Covid, new language has been developed around bad work experiences like "toxic work environment" or even "PTSD" from bad work dynamics. The younger and much braver generations have had enough and have even filmed themselves resigning on TikTok. The great resignation is upon us.

Not only are we experiencing this mass exodus to toxic-type jobs we are also seeing a slow, disconnected approach to hiring, and with the looming recession, we are all afraid to go forward.

Collectively we do not believe in each other. Lack of trust and respect for employers is at an all-time high, and with good reason. The pyramid structure in the hierarchy does not include the basic need of employees. Seen for many years as widgets, these resistant humans are no longer taking this poor treatment and as a business owner, I am here for it. Treating people in your company poorly will not be sustainable for your business.

The perfect case study for this is the deflation of Elon Musk's businesses. Where going hard 24 7 and stressful management expectations, unrealistic KPIs, and other stressors of constantly being threatened to be laid off are taking a toll, and it shows.

I have worked at various creative agencies that focus on KPIs rather than the creative process. It never works out. People need breathing space to create and actually need more of an inverted pyramid process and value the employee first. When we value employees first, your entire business changes. It's less about focusing on the lack of creativity but rather focusing on the abundance of ideas and techniques.

A great example of this is Taika Waititi Screenwriter's Lecture, where he shares that his process is a bit lazy but comes together in time. Jennifer Saunders explains that she needs a full day of shopping, lunch, champaign and inspiration from magazines to fuel her creative process.

Instead of KPIs we should be looking at each individual employee and be really radical by asking "So tell me about your process on a good day?" The daring to ask, "Tell me your process on a bad day, and how can I help?" Being human should be your KPI.

As an owner of a social media creative energy, here are the takeaways that my colleagues have taught me over the years.

Everyone is a colleague because a hierarchical structure does not work. There is no collaboration with hierarchy.
A mental day off is the same as calling out sick and should be respected.
When work quality declines, this is the time to have a one-on-one listen, not a KPI review.
The body is always first. A walk or time off in the afternoon will always benefit the final product delivery.
Your colleague may not be used to asking for support. This is the time for a private meeting over coffee or lunch. Tell them many ways on how you two can come up with your own language in reaching out for support.

As we navigate into a new frontier where everything is uncertain what are the ways you can show a healthy and thriving work environment. This is your responsibility, and mental health should always be number one. And lastly, f*ck the hierarchy if you want to become a truly collective high vibing environment.

New Strategic Overview Points to Major Changes Coming to Your Facebook Feed

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 22:57:27 GMT

Your Facebook Feed Is Changing Again - Heres A Look At Why.

The Meta-owned platform is once again looking to switch up its approach in line with constantly changing media consumption behaviour.

The Verge obtained an internal overview from FB App chief Tom Alison, Meta is looking to to prioritise incorporating AI-recommended content into Facebook feeds based on popularity and overall engagement over your personal connections; this is similar to how TikTok sources feed content from outside your personal network. Facebook is also working to streamline content sharing by reversing their move to take messenger outside of the app 2 years ago - these messaging tools are now coming back into the main user interface.

In their own words Meta explained:

“The Home experience will balance both connected content and unconnected content. We’re working to clean up top-of-feed and make it just as easy to see Stories from friends as it is to discover new content in Reels. We’re also exploring a Community Panel to give direct access to the communities you care about most. Finally, we’re testing a product to give you predictable access to your connected Feed, with the ability to sort in chronological order and filter by Groups, Pages, and Friends. Internally we call this “Mr. T” and I’m excited about the progress the team is making.”

Meta provided its own overview of how they see the updated Facebook feed working:

“The main tab will become a mix of Stories and Reels at the top, followed by posts its discovery engine recommends from across both Facebook and Instagram. It’ll be a more visual, video-heavy experience with clearer prompts to direct message friends a post. To make messaging even more prominent, Facebook is working on placing a user’s Messenger inbox at the top right of the app, undoing the infamous decision to separate the two apps eight years ago.”

This is another major strategy shift of Meta that has been completely influenced by TikTok, which is not showing signs of slowing down. Meta is trying hard to keep up and is moving hard to reflect TikTok’s proven strategy of focussing on an AI-fueled content recommendations based on your interests, instead of what your friends are sharing.

Alison discusses the the proposed shift: “Historically, Facebook has taken an entity-centric approach to discovery. We help you connect with the friends, groups, and pages you care about most, then updates from those connections are ranked in Feed. Unconnected content in Feed was surfaced via reshares from the friends, groups, and pages you follow, but unconnected recommendations weren’t historically a core part of the Feed experience. However we did invest heavily in unconnected content discovery on adjacent surfaces, i.e. through search queries or recommendations-first products like Watch, News, and Marketplace.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noting in its Q1 earnings call that:

“While we're experiencing an increase in short-form video, we're also seeing a major shift in feeds from being almost exclusively curated by your social graph or follow graph to now having more of your feed recommended by AI, even if the content wasn't posted by a friend or someone you follow. Social content from friends and people and businesses you follow will continue being a lot of the most valuable, engaging and differentiated content for our services, but now also being able to accurately recommend content from the whole universe that you don't follow directly unlocks a large amount of interesting and useful videos and posts that you might have otherwise missed.”

They are following TikTok’s lead in bringing more content to the surface that is better for the creators (who get more views) and for users (who get more access to more interesting content outside of their network) but, it is a major shift in their long-standing key point of differentiation - that is has the biggest user base of any social platform and is historically the largest connection tool for social networks.

TikTok has diluted Facebook’s strength by focussing on effectively systemising users interests without them having to follow certain communities, people or groups. Facebook is now changing and they may risk losing their key point of connectivity but they have to in order to keep up. As a response to the success of TikTok, Meta’s fastest growing content form is Reels. Reels make up more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram and video makes up 50% of the total time that people spend on FB.

Alison discusses how Facebook will utilise this:

“Today’s genre of public short-form video opens up new ways for people to create and discover content. While Facebook’s discovery engine is designed to support many different formats (text, photos, video, and eventually Metaverse experiences), our biggest gap today is around short-form video and that’s why we’re focused on integrating Reels in Home, Watch, In-Feed Recommendations, and Groups.”

What does this mean for your businesses social media? Reels. Reels and more content from people you’re not connected to in the app. This is a great opportunity to make your content as SEO optimised as possible so that it gets in front of new audiences that are interested in your content.

If you want to have an informal chat about how you can adapt your own strategy to reflect the changes that Meta is bringing in, reach out and arrange a call with Francesca.

The Relationship between Goals and Social Media

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 21:56:54 GMT

The Relationship between Goals and Social Media.

In the age of social media, brands can’t hide anything from their customers.

Your audiences can learn everything they need about your business from other consumers. As such, companies can’t just “talk the talk” anymore. Whether it’s coming through with new product features or providing excellent customer care, you need to ensure you’re delivering on your promise.

Organizations that are effective at maintaining customer relationships in the social media landscape are often those with brand authenticity.

Social Media Business Objective

Social Media business objectives are the specific and measurable results companies hope to maintain as their organisation grows.

Goals are linked to the social media campaign intention, and experiments with the different posts will gain value over time.

Therefore, we can track performance in every part of our campaign to ensure they’re moving in the right direction.

Brand Advocacy

A brand advocate is someone who elevates your brand through word-of-mouth marketing. The conversation starter is your social media campaign, and your engagement rate will prove it.

Brand advocates leave positive reviews about your product. They also refer new customers and create content on your behalf. Brand advocates even contribute valuable insights to your user personas.

Now that 92% of customers seek social recommendations before buying, advocates are a powerful part of your marketing strategy.

Who are Your Brand Advocates?

A brand advocate is anyone who supports your company’s growth.

This includes:

Customers: Customers are not affiliated with your company. This makes their support more genuine and influential to future clients.
Employees: Employee advocates know everything about your business. Their inside knowledge and relatable nature make them a powerful tool in advocacy.
Business partners: Charities, organizations and other companies affiliated with your brand also influence purchasing decisions.

Content Curation

Content curation is the act of finding and sharing excellent, relevant content to your online followers.

With content curation, companies deliver a wide variety of content to their customers, keeping them engaged with well-organized and meaningful material.

In today’s fast-paced and competitive marketplace, content curation is becoming increasingly popular as a way of keeping up with growing customer demands for information and entertainment.

The Benefits of Content Curation:

Efficient and cost-effective brand building. Curating content costs less than creating it.
Thought leadership potential: The right content demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of your industry, increasing your credibility as an industry leader.
Maintain conversations with your audience: The more content you share, the easier it is to keep your customers engaged.
Unlock networking opportunities: Sharing other people’s content helps you to build relationships with those people. Curation is a great way to connect with influencers and future partners.
Show your selflessness: Curation demonstrates to your audience that you’re not just interested in talking about yourself.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is when a brand monitors the actions consumers take toward completing a business goal. These actions can include signing up for a newsletter, downloading a content offer or adding an item to a cart. Conversion tracking is a way to determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, design change and other marketing components as consumers move toward conversion.

What Should Conversion Goals Be Tracked?

Conversion tracking tools like Google Analytics require account managers to define measurable goals for conversion. Goals are typically connected to specific pages, events, products, and services.

Examples of conversion goals:

Direct people to a physical store location
Increase site visitors
Contact a business via call or message
Add item to cart
Make a purchase
Sign-up for a newsletter
Download content offer
Play a video

Which Key Performance Indicators Do I Track?

There are a variety of key performance indicators related to conversions themselves and other metrics that suggest the effectiveness of conversion efforts.

Examples of KPIs for conversion:

Number of conversions
Conversion rate
Cost per conversion/acquisition
Bounce rate
Pages per visit
Hits on the destination page
Events (played videos, download content)
Session duration

How do I calculate the conversion rate?

To calculate the conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by your desired metric (clicks, ad impressions, sessions on-site, etc.).

You can also track KPIs for consumers who are close to meeting a conversion goal and then take steps to ensure the completion of your goal. For example, suppose a customer adds an item to a shopping cart but abandons the cart. In that case, you can use a retargeting campaign via Google AdWords to display ads for the abandoned items and increase the chance of a conversion.

How Do You Find Social Media ROI?

Essentially, social commerce allows businesses to engage users where they already are and turn their social media engagement directly into sales.

Meta Adds More Reels Creation Options in Instagram and Facebook

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 01:02:44 GMT

Remixing Reels on Instagram - What does this mean for your social media strategy?

We’ve spoken a lot this year about how Meta is slightly panicked about the popularity of TikTok and they are completely focused on how they can remain relevant to consumers if they can’t currently be ahead of the curve. Leaning into the short form video trend, Meta has added a couple of new ways to create video content; firstly, they have added ways for users to remix content into Instagram Reels - think of the TikTok reaction videos/ duets, as well as adding being able to create Reels from your existing videos inside the Creator Studio.

What is Remixing in Reels?

Currently, some IG users are being offered a Remix for Photos option for when they are posting static images; this enables users to be able to use your feed content within their own clips - users can download and reuse your content for anything they want, which could be good for some people, but for other creators might not be so good - luckily you can switch off this option.

Why have they introduced Remixing Reels to Instagram?

Users can now remix any video they want in the app, which will give way more points of inspiration and content creation with users responding to other content or doing their own take on it in the app instead of going elsewhere - Reels are gaining popularity and makeup 20% of all time spent on the platform.

How can Brands use Remix for Reels?

For any brand or business, it is always great to see how you can jump on new features and trends; for this one, you could invite remixes for people's thoughts on new products or services, announcements and events - users will be able to respond quickly by using your reel clips in their own video. We will have to see how it goes but this way of getting your community or audience to interact with your content could be a great way to boost your engagement.

How to create Reels in Creator Studio:

This one is a little more straightforward - users can now create reels in the creator studio by remixing their current videos into shorter clips. This will likely encourage users to stay within the app and convert more people into creating Reels which is ultimately where they want to go.

Meta have given a strategic overview recently which has really highlighted how much focus it is putting on making Reels a priority on Facebook due to the amount of time spent consuming short-form video content. Tom Alison, Facebook’s App Chief, said:

“Today’s genre of (the) public short-form video opens up new ways for people to create and discover content. While Facebook’s discovery engine is designed to support many different formats (text, photos, video, and eventually Metaverse experiences), our biggest gap today is around short-form video, and we’re focused on integrating Reels in Home, Watch, In Feed Recommendations, and Groups.”

What do Reels mean for businesses?

More reels, everywhere. Reels are being integrated in every consumer touchpoint as part of facebook’s strategy to remain relevant and move with the consumer trends. This trend in consuming short-form video content is here to stay so the quicker you start integrating it into your social media strategy, the better.

If you’re feeling a little lost and that you could do with some help on how you can start creating Reels, arrange a call with Francesca now. Click the calendly link on the right.

Visibility Work & Repurpose Your Social Content

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 21:02:35 GMT

One of my favourite topics I would like to ignore. Visibility. If you have trouble appearing in front of the camera as I do, this podcast is for you. I used to say often I was the girl behind the camera. From former LA make-up artist to social media agency owner, I have always had a problem with appearing and creating my own videos.

I thought wouldn't it be a great idea to repurpose my content with one caveat and produce new videos with me explaining the content. I thought, what better way to feed two birds with one scone. Is it that easy? This podcast discusses the struggles with visibility and how to leverage that into repurposing your past social media content.

One of the reasons why I want to talk about this and especially why it's important in New Zealand is that we are finally finding that the social media trends are starting to really catch up, which is incredibly exciting, but small businesses just need a little more encouragement to use correctly. One of the benefits of lockdown is that there were so many new users in New Zealand going online and learning how to use social media to do everything from calling friends to shopping on Instagram.

Our clients often have trouble with what to post on Instagram; they’ve got one product or service that they’ve already posted about, and what do they do now? One of the great ways to keep serving this content to your audience is repurposing content. We’re going to go behind the scenes to show you how we do this on Asana - this is free and super easy to navigate. If you like what you see or want to learn more, go to our website and click the Learn to Use: Social Media Systems that Work and are Shareable blog to find out more.

Okay, so if we are on the Asana board, if we just click back, you will see what we've done; in particular, we classify our tasks by weeks so that we know which each week we're going to be talking about each and we create a tile, we'll also slide images into the area if we are creating images for social media. So that's like the really basic easy stuff, and here in the published area, we've created another little deck where we actually have every single social media piece that we've ever produced because we recently were noticing we haven't put any up a lot of social media, we're taking care of our clients but not ourselves. So I would say about the last year, or so, we've started to build up our own content and do it consistently; we have tracked it here and classified them by each month. We can scroll through and see the things that we've talked about and the topics, and we can actually go in here and repurpose content.

Key points for repurposing content on Asana

Duplicate tasks
Change deadlines & titles
Delete old images/files
Reassign to a new date in the content calendar
Look at different forms of content that you are missing from your published board ie. blogs, podcasts, and reels.

How to be visible on social media

Getting that curated look and feel for your Instagram account is really important, but we also know what is vastly important is you in front of the camera.

Do it every day - push yourself like you would if you were going to the gym daily.
Don’t feel the pressure to look perfect
Don’t worry about what other people think or what they’re going to say, be yourself.
Give it a go - it is absolutely fine to mess up or have to start again
Look at other people’s social media who you admire for inspiration
Follow other authentic business owners who show up for their business
Practice makes perfect - the more you show up, the better and easier it will get, the more you’ll enjoy it, and the results it brings.

I hope to see you on the next podcast and go to my social media - you can reach me on any of my social media networks and just let me know what you think. I would love to have a conversation with you and find out what you thought about this episode until then, I will see you on the next podcast!

The Benefits of having a Routine for your Business

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 21:16:27 GMT

As someone who has had a little bit of a lack of routine over the last few years with lockdowns and WFH, one of the key things that always gets me back on track is creating a new routine.

It’s hard sometimes if you’re a creative person and running a business because you have tonnes of ideas and would rather focus on the creative side than the process. I get it! It’s so easy to do and we’ve all been there, but it's good to remember that an idea is only good if it’s actioned. The same with business goals, you could have loads of amazing ideas for where you want to take your social media strategy, but without process and planning, you won’t get there. Don’t worry, there is a tonne of things we have learnt along the way at Social Global Grind that has helped us establish routine whilst still letting the creativity fly! We like to get as excited as our clients about their social media campaigns and won’t let you feel like you’ve taken on too much or are moving too slowly; we know to trust in the process and help guide you along the way.

Routines can be anything from your personal life and what tea you drink first thing in the morning to what you do first when you open your laptop in the morning.

As a business owner, you can get really busy - especially as your business grows and if you have a team to manage - so don’t forget that your routine might need to be refreshed over time and whenever your business grows substantially. A big part of what we do at Social Global Grind is working with your Virtual Assistants or Social Media team to help delegate and build trust in them to deliver tasks by giving them the training and the tools to do so.

Establishing a routine can help you prioritise your own tasks and this is sometimes something you have to be ruthless about if it is just you. Here are some tips to help you establish your routine:

List and prioritise things that will help take your business forward and note down the deadlines - using tools like Asana will help you do this and will be visible to the rest of the team so they know where you’re at without having to ask.
At the end of the day, go through your list and just confirm everything that you’ve done in your mind. It’s great to be able to mentally tick things off and you’ll feel really productive, ending the day on a high. It’s funny how often tasks are dropped that we thought were essential, but in reality, could’ve been delegated. Move these tasks to another team member if possible, or add them to your list for the next day.
If there are tasks that you keep skipping over or missing, ask yourself, do you really need to do them?
Think about your perfect day and write it down. What kinds of things make you feel good? How can you bring these into your work routine? If it is going for a walk, or meeting a friend for coffee, schedule these into your work day and prioritise them. It’s amazing how much your mind clears after exercise or catching up with a friend, and you can come back to your work refreshed and ready to act.
Look at your setup and see how you can optimise your space. It could be having a giant water bottle that you try and get through throughout the day, a standing desk or having fresh flowers on your desk. Having a welcoming environment to do your work will make you more enthused about doing it, especially after a weekend.
Plan things outside of your business hours, and if you have to work late, build it into your routine so that you’ll have time to yourself the next morning to reset. Communicate this with the team and set the expectation of a solid work-life balance. Then actually do it yourself. Set the team challenges to make a new meal, try a new exercise or listen to a new podcast and feedback to the team and see how trying new things impacts your work.
Review your routine often, see what works for you and the team, and make adjustments. Remember, it is what works for you that matters the most, listen to your body and hopefully, the results will show in your business.

If you’d like some help trying to establish a routine with your business's social media presence, we would love to help you get on track and discover a new way of working with your team. Reach out to Francesca via the link below to arrange a call.

Visibility Resistance

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:23:25 GMT

For a long time, I used to say, "I'm the girl behind the camera, not in front of the camera." For the most part, it was true. Before I worked in social media, I was a well trained and certified MAC makeup artist. I used the camera to check the client's makeup to see how it reads on film, which was the end. After that, I put the camera down and walked away.

My earliest type of content was exploring street fashion and putting thought behind the image, and then I would start writing. Then, finally, I conveyed my message with models as the images, and I was done.

Then we saw the first wave of influencers on YouTube in the mid-2000s. The wave of the first generation of self-proclaimed makeup artists ignored technique and sometimes safety, demonstrating how to apply makeup. The influencers were comfortable in front of the camera, and it didn't matter if they were using cosmetics in the wrong way. The first wave of influencers was highly visible, highly sought after by brands and successful.

So what made me cringe and never want to go down this path? I would have to go in front of the camera. There was absolutely no f*cking way I would put myself out there. Criticism was not what I needed when I started my social media career. I was a producer, not a creator. Period.

What I didn't know at the time was I was actually stopping my business growth. That corporate mediocrity standard of "always be professional" kept me from being authentic in front of the camera. I can easily be authentic when writing but freeze while being in front of a camera.

Recently on Glennon Doyle's podcast, We Can Do Hard Things when spoke with Bozoma Saint John regarding being visible. Bozoma explained how she showed up to a speaking engagement dressed beautifully but not like her male counterparts. She missed the uniform of button-down blue shirts with jeans. How dare she! Then Glennon made a remarkable observation.

Glennon Doyle stated that using the phrase "be professional" was a white male corporate phrase for conformity. Absolutely.

If I genuinely believe we need more women's voices, particularly women of colour, we need to show up as we are. So with that said, I will be committing to more visibility. More on camera, more on social media. I wish the same for you.

Let me know what you think and DM me on my social media platforms:

https://www.instagram.com/francescahustles/

https://www.tiktok.com/@francescahustles

See you around on social media!

Instagram SEO: 5 Ways to Increase Your Discoverability

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 02:12:51 GMT

SEO on Instagram… 5 ways to make your brand more discoverable

What is SEO and how is it used on Instagram?

SEO on Instagram is pretty much like SEO on google, or any other place on the internet. It is about optimising your content so that it appears in as many places as possible - whether that is on homepage, search results or suggested content / reel feeds.

It’s important to make your content as discoverable as possible so that more eyes land on it and you have more opportunities to engage with your audience.

Being able to do SEO well will completely transform your visibility on Instagram and will show a massive difference in your business’ engagement. Here are 5 tips on how to do it:

1: Write Descriptive Captions With Keywords

Previously, you could only search in Instagram Explore through hashtags, location tags, user/profile names. But now, you can search using keywords. This means that if you write descriptive and relevant captions, using topical keywords, you could get more visibility when people search.

2: Use Keywords in Your Profile Name

A good way to optimise your Instagram profile is to include a keyword you’re hoping to rank highly for in your name or username as both of these are searchable on the platform. Ie. For Costa Coffee, both the name and username contain the keyword “Coffee”

3: Include up to 30 Relevant Hashtags

As long as the hashtags are relevant, using up to 30 targeted ones on posts and stories is still one of the most consistent ways to be discovered by new audiences. If someone were to then search for that hashtag, your post would appear on that search page.

4: Add Descriptive Alt Text to Your Posts

Alt text is a feature that allows you to include custom alternative text for a deeper description of your images which is often used to improve accessibility to its users, but is also very relevant for SEO purposes.

5: Be Consistent With Your Niche

This one is a little more simple, but absolutely key when trying to improve SEO on Instagram. The more you follow these best practices around implementing specific keywords and hashtags, and increasing descriptive Alt text, the more the algorithm will learn what your account is about. You need consistency to help teach Instagram who you are and what your business offers, and once it has learnt this, it will make your profile and posts more visible to relevant audiences as they use the platform.

SEO can be a bit to get your head around, especially if you wear many hats in your business and social media is new to you. If you’d like a chat to see how SEO can help your business, click the button below to book a discovery call. Fr

ancesca

Ep 61 Self Advocacy with Shelby Barlow

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 22:07:02 GMT

Ep 61 Self Advocacy with Shelby Barlow

You know how at the beginning of a podcast you hear someone say how excited they are about their guest? This is probably one of the most exciting guests I’ve had and I’m going to tell you why. So a while ago I was watching Shelby Barlow on TikTok, I see her as a Gen Z-er, and what has been really exciting for me to see is for Gen-Z’s to take action on TikTok and to speak their truth in ways that have never been done before, especially in business. There is so much we can learn from Gen-Z in terms of what they see and how they see business going forwards; we need to adapt quickly because we’re seeing this mass exodus in the job market where people are just not tolerating toxic environments and Shelby has been nice enough to talk to us about toxic environments in tech, her experience and in one company Pinterest in particular which was really surprising but then not really, because we’ve all sort of known that toxicity is running rapid, nouns actually dealing with, racism on a corporate level, on a corporate scale what do we do within management, how do we protect people within a company and make sure they’re not being harmed.

What I liked about Shelby in particular, my biggest takeaway from her interview was that she used the phrase ‘Harmful Racism’. Harmful Racist types of actions were put upon her, and I thought that that was such an astute way of encapsulating what racism is. Racism also really attacks your nervous system, you don’t have a long turnaround time and that bully/mob mentality, because you have to go to work the next day, your body is under attack and you are being harmed. This was a very candid look at what this looked like, the harm that was caused, and how it was not dealt with from her perspective and I love listening to her unfold what was really a common workplace trauma.

In the latest Podcast episode Self Advocacy with Shelby Barlow, we hear the effects of how racism plays a negative role in a work environment. What can happen when a company does not take this on as a learning opportunity to correct harmful-racist treatment within their organization and how Shelby Barlow shares her story of self-advocacy while working at Pinterest.

What Happens When You Only Share Reels on Instagram?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 21:20:50 GMT

What happens when you only share Reels on Instagram?

If you use Instagram, you might’ve noticed that your static image post engagement is down, but when you’re posting Reels, they are getting loads more. You might even have been part of the test for full-screen video content appearing on the home feed. All signs have been pointing to a video-first platform for a while, and now Instagram has announced this new approach, some people have asked, what happens if you move to a Reels-only strategy?

Later spoke to Olivia Noceda, a content creator who has been exclusively posting Reels to her account for the last 6 months, and they came up with some interesting findings.

What happens if you only post Reels on Instagram for 6 months?

Like a lot of content creators, Olivia had noticed that her account had become a little stagnant; “I was spending so much time planning and curating my static photo content only to get zero engagement,” she discussed. “It was so discouraging.”

For her, the solution was clear. “I thought, I can either complain and sit in this stuck feeling or I can move with where Instagram is headed.”

Suddenly, she pivoted almost entirely to a Reels-only strategy and included daily Instagram stories. The result? After 6 months of doing this, Olivia had grown her account by 60k followers!

“It’s so nice to welcome people into my community who found me because of my Reels,” Olivia shared. “I’m connecting with so many like-minded people who have the same interests as me.” The reaction and engagement from her communities have been unlike anything she’s seen before on the platform. "I can't explain it, but the engagement on my Reels feels so much richer than anything else I've posted on Instagram. It's on another level of connection with my audience."

Key Learnings for a Reels-Only Instagram Strategy

Olivia has spent the last 6 months focused on a Reels-only Instagram strategy and has a lot of learnings, here are her top 6 takeaways:

#1: Don’t focus on going viral!

“When your focus is solely on going viral, you lose the authenticity behind your content,” she explains. “Plus, audiences are smart — they can suss out when it’s forced or someone is posting just to post.”

If your only focus is going viral, you could be setting yourself up to fail.

“You can spend three minutes on a Reel and get 100K views and spend three hours on another and get 250 views. The algorithm can feel so incredibly random.”

Think about how you can grow your community and how can you add value?

“I don't need a billion DMs or a billion Reels views. I want an intimate group of people that are really interested in what I'm talking about and who are happy to be there,” she adds.

“If doing those two things creates a viral video, then great. If not, that’s okay. I’ll try again next time.”

#2: Content Pillars Are Key

“When you use content pillars, you’re signalling to Instagram what your niche is. Then, both the algorithm and your audience know what to expect from you.” For instance, Olivia’s main ones are recipes, health and wellness, aesthetic b-roll, mini vlogs, and quotes.

“My content pillars keep me grounded. They come in handy when I don’t feel inspired or if I don’t know what type of content to create. I’ll look at my content buckets and know I can always create something within those topics.”

Repurposing content is a great tool for content creation.

“Since I’m posting so many Reels, there’s no way I can film and re-shoot new content every single day. And I’m sure many other business owners feel the same.”

Go through your camera roll, waaaay back, and see if there is anything you can repurpose! It’s way easier than starting from scratch.

#3: Trending Music is Everything

Think of your Reels with an audio-first lens.

“The very first thing I’ll do before anything else is scroll through Instagram to see what’s trending. Once I find something, I’ll ask myself: how can I make this audio work for me? How can I use this song?”

“When I find the trending sound I want to use, I'll screen record a video using the sound, upload the clip into InShot , extract the audio from the screen recordings, and then put it over the video so I can edit in the app.

Then, I'll delete that sound in InShot, upload the video to Instagram, and add the actual sound to Instagram.”

#4: Stick to it!

Nothing is learnt overnight and for Olivia, it took her several months of consistent posting to get into it.

“You learn from every single post you make. I look back and think, how on earth did I post that? And others I’ll look back and feel proud of the Reel, but the views don’t necessarily reflect the time spent.”

A key thing to remember? “If you’re just starting out and you’re feeling defeated, remember you’re comparing someone’s middle to your beginning.”

#5: 6-12 Seconds Is the Sweet Spot

Olivia has found that people love short and simple when it comes to videos.

“I’ve found that 6 -12 seconds is the sweet spot,” Olivia shares.

“There is so much you can do in a short amount of time. If your product is a candle, put your candle on your desk under pretty sunlight, pop some music over top, and boom, you’ve got yourself a Reel,” she adds.

“You don’t have to create an Oscar-worthy movie on Reels.”

#6: Accessible content should come first.

It doesn’t matter what kind of content you’re creating, on-screen text is an absolute necessity for accessibility and inclusivity.

“If there’s any sort of speaking in your Reels, you should use captions. Use Instagram’s automatic captions or write them. Who cares if that part of the video looks aesthetic or not. Don't worry about aesthetics, be worried about creating accessible content!”

“98% of the time I include a CTA on the Reel itself. I can’t rely on people pressing and reading the caption, so I do my best to put it out there in the easiest way possible.”

I think we can all agree that video-first is coming so we need to get on board with our own strategies. It's great to hear from content creators like Olivia who have been through the change and have seen positive results from it, these tips can certainly be applied to any business's strategy. Her number one takeaway for content creators of any kind? Stay true to your brand. You’ve already established yourself with your community and your brand will be the thing that ties you together over the change.

“Stay true to yourself and your brand while trying out a new format. Trust me, you’ll see the pay off”

“You don’t have to change your entire strategy like I did. Start off by creating and adding one Reel per week into the mix.”

If you aren’t sure how to change your Instagram strategy to be more video-focussed, click the link below to arrange a call with Francesca to learn more.

Bring me to your next social media agency interview

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 22:39:43 GMT

What is the most popular social media in New Zealand?

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur and you are thinking about incorporating a social media campaign into your business then this blog is for you.

I wanted to start off by saying good on you! Social media is something that can quickly raise awareness and bring your business to the front a bit sooner than traditional advertising or word of mouth advertising. Social media is very similar to word of mouth - we visualise what the concept, service or product is and we quickly translate that to a trusted or a possible purchase.

How do we do this?

This episode is titled “Take me on your next social media meeting” for a reason. There are a tonne of different ideas and personalities with different social media agencies, but let’s look at a data and SEO driven perspective. A couple of the things that we do at SGG is educate both the internal team and clients on how to push forward and deliver a campaign that is how you want it to be with regards to branding and message but also so it is an SEO heavy campaign. We do this through our Social Collab method; a process we use to build the SEO presence of your product or service.

There are so many intricate parts to running a business, how could you possibly know everything about social media which is a beast in itself? This is why we’ve created Social Collab to help business owners to run social media and optimise as much as possible. One of the main things we work to do with our clients is SEO.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation. Aside from google, Pinterest is often used as a search engine, and this is absolutely how people have started to use social media. If you think about in the Pandemic when everyone was baking Banana bread, everyone was going to Pinterest to find recipes. The smart companies that would be selling the ingredients for this product and knowing that Banana bread was a trending keyword, would be able to capitalise on this and create posts and ads to sell through this.

What services do social media agencies provide?

This is a question often asked by small businesses or people who haven’t worked with social media agencies before. It completely depends on the business need and the brief for the individual campaign but overall, a social media agency will work with their client to develop and run their social media for their business. This could involve anything from strategy, content creation, design, messaging, customer journey research, copywriting to SEO etc but will be defined by the client’s scope and budget.

How to work with social media agencies:

Be open minded to platforms - any industry that is really corporate can be on TikTok if it is an education piece. An example of this is Lawyers educating on the Depp/Heard trial
Know your campaign goals - and set your expectation. Nobody can promise the sun and the moon and there is a lot of trial and error.
The key question to ask is “What steps will they do to make my brand more discoverable?” If they only focus on ads, especially in New Zealand, this isn’t a good indicator of actual results. You need to get them to describe engagement and their processes.
Know how willing are you and your staff are to get in front of the camera and how much guidance you need for content creation. Your agency will be able to provide a lot of information on how you can create content with the level of participation you are comfortable with.
Getting a dedicated assistant for your social media campaigns is one of the best things you can do. Be realistic about the type of resource you can have available
Ask about what types of accounts they have worked on and what types of businesses. What size of business and industry have they worked with before? Its great to know that their style and process covers your brand - this will absolutely be influenced by their client’s brand guidelines, but can be a good indication of the type of work they do.
Does the agency or business manager have a good instagram account? Are they engaging with their audience?
Keep Looking! Don’t just go with the first person that you meet with, take a look around and get to know different social media agencies styles and what kind of process will work best with you!

I want to just put out there that if you have questions, that we work with a lot of businesses all over the world and we’re working on a scale where we can meet with and work with businesses virtually in any timezone. If you want a chat, click the button below to have a discovery call to see how we can help you and your business.

Instagram Rolls Out Full-screen Home Feed With More Suggested Reels

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 01:59:24 GMT

Announced this week, Instagram is trialling a full-screen home feed prioritising suggested video content.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen your feed transform but I’ve seen the changes to Instagram that they’re trialling and…I hate it.

Very similar to TikTok’s format, posts in the main feed will now take up all of the screens (pushing captions to a swipe up overlay). They are also introducing more suggested content into users' main feeds, in particular increasing Instagram reels.

This is my absolute favourite comment on the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri’s announcement of the tall video/photo trial:

“Is Mark forcing you to make these changes bro? Blink twice if you’re in danger” @ thebkh

I feel like all of us are in danger. Which yes, might be a little dramatic, but it’s how I feel. As a business owner, it is clear to me what direction they’re heading in, but I can absolutely be a little reluctant in wanting to make those changes as I personally love photos and what I can do with messaging on static images.

Yes, you can still post static images and these will be available to see regularly on the following and favourites lists, but the home feed will be mostly videos. This shift in prioritising video content reflects the research that Later did by analysing “over 81M Instagram feed posts (excluding Reels) from 2020 to 2022” with “ the average engagement rate for images has decreased by 38% — from 3.57% to 2.23%.” However, they gave a glimmer of hope stating that “accounts that have embraced Reels since their launch … have seen an increase in reach and engagement overall.”

Despite my initial hesitation to the announcement, we all know that Instagram constantly changes and we need to adapt to thrive so here are a couple of initial thoughts on content moving forwards:

Captions are probably better placed on the video rather than below as these are now shielded and involve a swipe to read past the first line.
Creators and businesses are going to have to be more creative in how they post content that is now video-first and use different apps/programmes to help.
Carousels are still available but it is yet to be seen how much engagement these will now get.
Review the current engagement on your account and see what is pulling in the most - this will likely be reels as they’re being prioritised.
Take a look at your most popular photo content and see how you could create this type of content in video format.

In the past, I might’ve worried that I don’t have time to create a tonne of video content and that it will mess with my feed’s aesthetic, but because Mosseri has been hinting at this for some time, we’ve looked into ways to make things more streamlined and tools that we can use to create great video content from existing pieces.

If you’d like to speak to us to find out about how we can help you integrate video into your social media strategy, click below to book your free strategy call to find out how we can support you and your business. Francesca@s

Social Collab, Can your VA's Work Together?

Mon, 30 May 2022 22:32:51 GMT

In today’s blog we’re going to go over what is a great way to communicate and collaborate with your virtual assistants even when you’re not there.

One of the things that was really interesting for me to let go of some of the tasks that I don’t have to be in, aside from working out the focuses of the months and selling/promotions etc being outlined. Even just brainstorming those kinds of ideas with the team, once you get that kind of flow in the team, everyone really starts to understand what you want to attract, how you are going to do it; you can really look at the customer journey for example and what you want the customer wants to do next. If you’re using something like Linkedin which is a great platform to use in the business community, you can see how the engagement flows through.

How to communicate with virtual assistants:

Sometimes you’ll have an idea late at night and you don’t want to disturb your team, so one of the things that I do is record video messages and share my screen to talk it through.
If I’m on the go and I want to leave some feedback I’ll leave a voice recording because it comes across so much better than text.
Sometimes text comes across as a bit combative or accusatory, but if you show your face and let the team hear your voice that changes things completely for the better.
Communicating in this way will stop the team from overly apologising and feeling like they’ve messed up or done something wrong when they haven’t, its just that communication wasn’t completely there on the brief.

One of the things that I am currently communicating to our team and to clients is the changes in Instagram and in order to make things as clear as possible for everyone, I use Asana for the business.

Tips for how to have a clear Asana team board:

Categorise the columns by day/week/month that the content will be worked on and what you want to achieve ie Pinterest post goals/ Mailchimp / instagram posts
Keep the discussions about content/strategy in the team dashboard
For client boards, categorise what/when are you posting in each column
I’ll preload the “idea topics” to team boards so that it is clear what our focuses are
Record video updates for the team at the start of the week ( Loom.com is a great option) you can also use Asana’s Vimeo integration as well. We’ll go over team updates, client updates, key focuses and go into granular detail
Add team members to relevant boards and tasks, utilise the comment section for team members to take a look.

What if you’re so busy that you yourself cannot do the assignments for the week or the following week? We like to work on content 2 weeks in advance if not more. What you can do is to set aside an hour upfront to decide on topics and content for the next month in a video format if you can’t meet with your team so then its all gone through for the week and they can get on with delivering it.

I would love to have conversation with you 1:1 about how you can work with your virtual team. Reach out to continue the conversation or book a call with the button below.

TikTok Takes on YouTube With New 10 Minute Video Length

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 30 May 2022 01:07:48 GMT

TikTok competes with YouTube - New 10 minute videos

TikTok, known for its short snappy clips is now taking on YouTube and increasing its video length to 10 minutes. This is a massive change from what we all know and love, but why have they done this?

Why have TikTok increased the length of videos?

Speaking to TechCrunch, TikTok divulged their hopes that the new length with"unleash even more creative possibilities for our creators around the world." This is the largest increase in video limits by far, initially only 15 seconds, over the last few years we’ve seen video limits increase to 1, then 3 and now ten minutes.

Given the popularity of short form videos, on the app but also on competing platforms like Instagram with Reels, its interesting that they’ve gone for such a dramatic increase. But a big point to make is that for a platform like this, short form videos are hard to monetise; either through advertising or in-app purchases, it doesn’t come anywhere near to the potential of YouTube advertising. Some say this is what led to the downfall in 2017 of Vine.

Nowadays, when looking at platform technology and the life cycle of content creators in this creator economy, without monetisation, there is very little content.

Many people when hearing the news might think, why would I want to watch a 10 minute video on TikTok? And its fair to ask this question when audiences are going to search, discover and consume content on YouTube and TikTok very differently, but in the short term, the channel won’t change immediately in light of this.

Where is the future of TikTok heading with 10min videos?

TikTok users are served recommended content whilst YouTube operates more like Google with users actively searching out specific content - they’re more likely to watch a longer video if they have actively searched for it.

However, TikTok has frequently changed and pivoted its platform and agenda in order to stay relevant and cutting edge. Its quite likely that longer-form video content could pop up on the app based on recommendations in a different tab. If the changes integrate well and work for both the user and content creator then this will allow creators to monetise long form videos across multiple channels and for brands to be even more savvy when it comes to marketing and ad spend.

Soon we’ll be able to see how the competition heats up.

If you want to have a chat about your brands use of social media and how you can include videos in your brand strategy, click the button below for a chat!

Elon Musk - is he still buying Twitter?

Sun, 29 May 2022 23:04:29 GMT

Elon Musk is the name on everybody’s lips right now in social media. Last week, he announced that he’d reverse Donald Trump’s Twitter ban if his offer to buy the channel goes through.

He said the ban was “a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme" whilst at a Financial Times conference. The reason why Donald Trump got banned by the platform? After his supporters stormed the US Capitol on the 6th Jan 2021, Twitter said that Trump had incited violence and broken its rules, and that removing him was because of “the risk of further incitement of violence” - a move that Facebook and Youtube followed.

Free speech on Twitter

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said. Elon Musk has said that Donald Trump lost the right to free speech on the platform and that even with the ban, he still had a voice. Whilst I agree with free speech, if somebody is in a position of power and uses social platforms to incite violence, then this needs to be called out and acted upon. We are constantly hearing in the media about bullying, hate and violence being spread through social platforms far faster than they have been in the past, yet what are the likes of Twitter and Facebook doing about it? Elon Musk and Twitter co-founder and former chief executive Jack Dorsey also shares the belief that Twitter shouldn’t have permanent bans because they “undermine trust”. I believe that whilst trust is important, there should also be trust from the users of the platform that they are given a safe space to use the platform way from violent calls to action from those abusing their power and spreading misinformation.

What is next for Elon Musk and Twitter?

In early April Elon Musk revealed he had become the largest individual shareholder of Twitter and since then he has become increasingly critical of the company in regards to its ethos - “Twitter needs to be much more even-handed. It currently has a strong left bias because it's based in San Francisco”. Despite having an offer of $44 Billion accepted, things are going a little south but he’s clear to some extent on his plans.

At a TED talk when he announced his bid to buy Twitter, he said that he wants to make Twitter’s algorithm and code open source. This would mean that absolutely anybody would be able to access the code and integrate on it. Whilst social media users are shouting out for more transparency when it comes to platform’s algorithms, there are also security issues that would come into play. When discussing this, he stated “The top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. They’re making the product much worse.” To try and combat this, he proposed “authenticating all humans” and whilst at a glance, this seems like a logical solution, it brings up another issue that the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote about, saying “Pseudonymity and anonymity are essential to protecting users who may have opinions, identities or interests that do not align with those in power. For example, policies that require real names on Facebook have been used to push out Native Americans; people using traditional Irish, Indonesian and Scottish names; Catholic clergy; transgender people; drag queens; and sex workers. Political dissidents may be in grave danger if those in power are able to discover their true identities.”

Is Elon Musk still buying Twitter?

Elon Musk has assessed the spam bots situation as he sees it and is putting the deal on hold. His reasoning? “How do advertisers know what they are getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.” Advertisers on the other hand are not concerned as they do take bots into account and have done for years. Despite this, his statement about putting the deal on hold caused Twitter stock to drop by 25%. We then have to ask the question, can you really put a deal like this on hold? According to Twitter’s top lawyer, he has a contractual obligation to go through with the deal and can’t just drop out because of 5% of users being bots. We shall have to see what he does next but I imagine it will go on for some time before we see any change for users, but the topic of free speech will remain a headline.

How to Schedule Pinterest Pins in 2022

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 25 May 2022 21:48:59 GMT

How to Schedule Pinterest Pins with LATER

Today we’re going to look at one of the tools that we use for scheduling posts and pins on social media - LATER. The great news? You can start using it for free!

Why Scheduling on Pinterest is important

The main reasons why we’re talking about scheduling Pinterest posts of any kind are pretty simple but they are definitely worth mentioning. Here are the top 3 reasons why using LATER will help you master your content strategy:

Saves Time

You’ve already got a lot going on with your business and you shouldn’t have to keep dropping in and out of important tasks to post content consistently. Scheduling posts will save a tonne of time

Consistently Drives Traffic to Your Website

Regularly sharing content is one of the most effective ways to grow your channel - when you schedule posts it’ll help you gain more consistency across your posts which will all generate traffic to your site

Helps Keep Your Content Calendar Organised

Organisation is everything! You’ll be able to quickly see what content pillars you are focussing on more and which ones you’re neglecting. You’ll be able to find out quickly which ones are driving the most traffic to your website and tweak your content to do more of that style. By using LATER you’ll be able to spot any gaps or opportunities months out and will be able to utilise social media events or national days/holidays to engage in your audience with.

How to Schedule Pins on Pinterest

You can either schedule pins directly on Pinterest, or you could use a scheduling tool like LATER. We’d recommend to use a tool like LATER as you’ll be able to schedule all of your posts across all social media channels your business is using. A couple of notes on scheduling directly with Pinterest is that you can only do it two weeks in advance which is no good for long term scheduling, and that you can only post pins on iOS or desktop - Android users can’t do this yet.

Step 1: Connect Your Business Profile

NB: Only business profiles can schedule video pins atm

Step 2: Select an Image / Video to Schedule

Open the LATER web app and select the Pinterest icon in the content calendar to schedule to this platform.

Pick the image / video you’d like to post from the Media Library on the left, then drag and drop it into the content calendar.

TIP: If you’re scheduling posts and want to post over multiple channels, select multiple icons to schedule posts for multiple profiles at the same time.

Step 3: Optimise Your Pinterest Content

Then for each post you are creating, select your board, add a title and write the description based on your content pillars.

Step 4: Edit Your Image / Video

If you want to add additional design elements to your pin, tap “Edit Image” or “Edit Video”.

If your image/video isn’t the optimum size for this channel, you can use LATERs crop tool by clicking either “Update Image” or “Update Video.”

Step 5: Choose when to Schedule Your Content

Choose the time and date you want your post to be published.

Now click “Save” - Your post is now scheduled and will be published automatically without fiddly notifications required.

NB: If you are posting a video pin then these are subject to approval by Pinterest and the review process can take between 24 and 48 hours.

If you’ve got any questions about scheduling posts on Pinterest or want to know about how we can help you with your content strategy, reach out to Francesca@socialglobalgrind.com or click the button below to book a discovery call. Francesca@socialglobalgrFrancesca@socialglobalgrind.co

Like Bethenny Frankel C-Suite White Women Get It Wrong

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 24 May 2022 00:42:31 GMT

When I saw this post, something in me triggered, and I realized that this happens globally and regularly. Unfortunately, when we hear from the experience of a white woman perspective, we don’t hear an acknowledgement of the broad spectrum conversation.

Bethenny Frankel’s post, she said, “most people don’t work hard.” when it concerns your career, I paused. Is this really a valid point of view?

When it comes to deconstructing the race experience, it happens to be more complicated, especially for women of colour. This is because we inherently work harder; we are usually more educated, have better critical thinking, have astute business acumen, and have endless amounts of ambition.

One of the benefits of consistently being told no or don’t have the opportunities like our white counterparts we develop a higher sense of critical thinking. Think of always having the ‘start up’ mentality. But instead of failing at a business, you lose the ability to pay rent or provide food for your family. The stakes are higher.

Perhaps this is why Bethenny Frankel’s statement was so triggering. Frankel’s success was based on being seen. While on Real Housewives of New York, we connected with a woman that wanted simple dreams and grew empathy for the single woman that wanted to have it all. How many women of colours like myself related to her and her ambition?

The toxicity is not recognizing that your white experience does not account for all experiences. What is problematic with white leadership is avoiding the inclusion conversation and hearing about those experiences that change the narrative of the ladder of success.

While I was the director of digital marketing in a meeting, I was asked to grab tea and coffee for the board members in the next room. We won’t get into the details of who was in that room because you already know. The experiences are vastly different and most likely have more hidden nuances regarding the layers of the expectations of women of colour.

The certainty and aggressiveness of Frankel’s delivery when giving that “How do you become successful” advice that we often ask for of CEOs struck a cord.

As CEOs, CMOs holding C-Suite positions take the time. So take the time to see the whole experience. If you are caught up with your story while easily being seen and respected, is this not the definition of privilege?

Social Collab is Here!

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 24 May 2022 00:36:31 GMT

Way back when I first got into sales and online businesses things were really different, we didn’t have a lot of social media and things certainly weren’t as easy to set up as they are now. One of the things I did because I love teaching was to set up my own educational programme and coaching for businesses owners where I would mentor them, really get to know them, their challenges and aspirations. Things have changed a lot since then but the main aspects of how to communicate with your audience and clients have remained the same and I’ve had a lot of learnings over my career from being a MAC makeup artist in LA to working in agencies and client-side in New Zealand; all of the learnings I’ve had I’ve applied to my new coaching launching soon…Social Collab.

Last year I got thinking about how to build more collaboration into how we do social media and how we can help our clients reach their goals – one option could be a larger coaching programme in the future, but this year what I am really excited about focussing on is that individual touch with small businesses, and creating a space where we can gather more people in the social collab community where we find people that are willing to go on their journey with us, and create a programme where you won’t get left behind; we do weekly check-ins and a bit of business coaching to help bring you on the journey.

Mindset

Our most successful clients are those who are ready to let go of their idea of what social media is and are willing to experiment. This is how we can learn what works for your brand, collaborate for some great results, and convert “polite viewers” into paying customers. Our mindset matters just as much as yours does and this is absolutely not the kind of take your money and run programme, we are invested in you and your company and we want to work with you to achieve the best results. Our individual coaching calls (maybe introducing group coaching calls in the future) will enable us to take you on a step-by-step process where we can make sure that all our members are engaged and on the right track. Our clients who believe in the power of Attraction, that reciprocity piece of what you put out there comes back to you, their social media is an absolute daily practice of what the power of attraction is and they get incredible results.

What we want social collab to be like is like two friends talking about your business and then everything flowing from there with minimal effort from you. We want to really dive deep into the foundations of your business, create a solid strategy to implement and see some great results. We will have different payment options that will be available on the site as well but reach out if you have any questions. We’re really excited to see how we can help you get there and have that consistency with your content. So, welcome to Social Collab, I’m excited about it and I hope to see you soon.

If you’d like to make an appointment to book a discovery call with Francesca click the button below:

Sneak-peak

We also are very excited to introduce website support so we can actually help you with that as well and I’m going to talk more about that in a different blog but for now, we’re really excited to bring a new partner to this.

How to grow your VA or Assistant

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 24 May 2022 00:31:14 GMT

How to grow your Virtual Assistant

This is a thing that a lot of people need to connect with when creating social media, whether that is yourself, your assistant or VA. The reason that you want to have a connected workflow is so you can really connect with your audience through your content and you want this workflow to be seamless and not have to be a cog in the system – its incredible to let go and have the trust that your content will fall into place.

Top tips for working with your Virtual Assistant

Work out what your aesthetic is, what you like and if there are any brands that you aspire to be like. Share examples of what you love with your VA to explain what inspires you.
Drag and drop any images into Asana or even create a Pinterest board to make it easier.
If you have a website you want it to be cohesive – your website branding and colours should match your social media.
Set themes for the week on the Asana board and create columns for content pillars on it (you can see this on the visual podcast version) ie Female entrepreneurs who live in the US.
Stories – spend more time on the story-element as an organisation. Use these as much as possible and let yourself and your business shine.
The more video we are putting out (between 3 and 5) a week, there better the engagement we get.
The more you use keywords on blogs, posts, videos etc, the higher you will rank with SEO and this will transform your business.

How to make sure you and your Virtual Assistant are on the same page.

You know sometimes in production content is not quite right. Why does this happen? In a nutshell, its you! One of the great things to do with Asana is to create quick videos when you’re reviewing some of the content your virtual assistant is making, where you can reply and talk to them directly which is super helpful especially when working with VAs abroad.

Heres a couple of tips to propel your social media presence:

Put in your expectations and parameters of what you’re working on.
Make sure that everything comes from you, you’re leading the team and are clear on your expectations and direction.
Share with the team your vision and direct the creative when it comes to your brand and your business.
When it comes to people who are used to doing this 4-5 years ago, you’re going to be out of date. You need to review modern brands and instagram is a great visual place to review brands. You want to look like you get it and you get your clients. The more work you give to your VAs, the better it is in terms of the creative process because you’re getting the buy-in.
Your expectations need to be realistic. We like to have content ready for our clients 2 weeks in advance, it is a slow burn and you need to take a realistic amount of time to pull content together and create it in your team so give them time, regular reviews and feedback.
Take a look at Canva and Canva Pro if you are completely new to social media and want a sure-fire way to get a decent modern design for your social media that incorporates your brand colours, fonts, and overall style.

I would love to have conversation with you 1:1 about this. We are currently doing a lot of brand research and want to help small businesses grow.

Reach out to continue the conversation.

What the Beauty Industry Taught Me

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 24 May 2022 00:24:00 GMT

The beauty industry taught me a lot about developing trust and gaining a client.

I used to say my formal marketing training came from Nordstrom’s MAC cosmetics counter in the early 2000s. We were all trained to get that potential client in a demonstration chair and apply the product.

On social media, you will often see the application of the product. Something magical happens. It becomes intimate, you have the viewer’s full attention, and they will likely buy the product you demonstrate.

A video demonstration is a way a small beauty business will survive this environment.

Talking about your features and benefits on video is far more potent than even a few years ago.

TikTok or TikTok type of videos is the immediate future to success. Even Instagram recognises this as they quickly added reels to their platform.

TikTok type videos can expand your reach by replicating the same post throughout social media platforms.

The Surprise Hero

LinkedIn is the easily adaptable platform that welcomes TikTok type videos.

We like LinkedIn because there is a captive audience wanting to exchange business ideas. There is not another platform out there that has the same type of business mindset. Therefore in this ‘shark tank’ environment, it is welcome to pitch your product unapologetically.

There are ways to captivate your audience in a very tailored way. We should continue the conversation.

I’m here to help. Click the button below to book a FREE strategy call.

Take Me On Your Next Social Media Meeting

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 24 May 2022 00:10:59 GMT

There are so many common misconceptions about what social media can do for small businesses like needing Facebook likes or running ads. It’s important to know what moves your campaign and be open to the process.

Knowing what works beforehand can help guide your social media provider into the right campaign.

Campaign Goals

Setting achievable campaign goals is a start. Know one can promise a viral post or campaign but you can work out what you would like to achieve for your brand.

If you want visibility to ask your provider what are the ways they plan to make your brand more discoverable ? This is by far the #1 goal any small business should strive for and yes it’s achievable.

Also how willing are you and your staff able to get in front of a phone camera and share your brand story?

Common Misconceptions About Social Media

Here’s what you need to know:

Facebook is rarely relevant. Getting likes on your business page, and putting a lot of effort into your business page or ad placements can be a waste of time or money.
TikTok strives to push out your content organically and you don’t have to dance on a video to do it.
Your Instagram feed doesn’t have to be pretty to achieve your business or sales goals.
Getting a dedicated assistant can help in training or assisting with your social media.
When interviewing a provider ask about what type of accounts they worked on. Specifically how many businesses have they worked with?

Let’s stop there. It’s important to see and feel through the responses above so you can see if there is a connection or fit with the campaign.

Do you have a few more questions let’s chat. Click the button below to book a call.

Instagram or TikTok?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 18 May 2022 23:17:16 GMT

We have seen incrementally how Instagram has been taking on TikTok like features over the last 2 years and now is flooding our feed to feature videos only. Which begs to ask the question why are we on Instagram when they are clearly failing? In fact the whole Metaverse has been declining in so many aspect one would have to ask is this an ROI (return on investment) worthy network?

Here is what we know about TikTok

Is TikTok outperforming Instagram?

TikTok hit 1.5 billion downloads, and is still outperforming Instagram.

Research shows that TikTok has an edge over Instagram’s Reels.

As for a big brand perspective let's look at Justin Bieber's performance results on TikTok versus Instagram.

Justin Bieber posted the same dance challenge on both platforms. On Reels he gained roughly 4.8M likes, translating to a 3% engagement rate. On TikTok he received 9.5M likes for a 49% engagement rate.

If we just compared data on various levels we can clearly see that TikTok is in for the win.

What about adverts?

Facebook, Instagram (Meta) has proven it self to be clunky with numerous glitches and has proven to be percarous. With the added frustration of absolutely no customer support Meta has proven to be a dodgy "cross your fingers" investment.

The safer choice for social media adverts are stable platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has changed in the way we see it as a new and trusted version comparison to Facebook while Pinterest has been the secret weapon with building SEO (search engine optimisation). Both important platforms that are amazing for social business development.

How do I show up on TikTok as a business?

The big relief is that you do not have to dance on TikTok. In fact if you see any of the NZ/ AUS morning shows dancing to TikTok trends it has been proven to be a bit cringe. Which brings me back to my core advice to businesses. Show up as you would in front of a potential client. Authentically.

Ideas of how to show up on TikTok Include:

Explainer videos. Think of how CNN and BBC present on social media. Still imagery with words as an overlay.
One on One's. Talk to your audience from an expert in your field perspective.
Share and demonstrate. Products or services should show feature and benefits to your service.

As you can tell I think TikTok is the best use of your time. But before your assign this to the junior in your office book a free session with me.

Why? Because brand reputation matters. Even if the younger colleague or family member knows how to use TikTok it doesn't mean they should. Your brand is worth taking seriously. You wouldn't hire a intern to file your GST it should be the same with your brand.

Social Media development is business development

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 18 May 2022 23:12:27 GMT

I have always taken the interest in our business community here in New Zealand. There is a great opportunity to reach thousands of new leads by creating compelling content.

Think of it like this. A radio ad repeatedly playing over and over again during prime driving hours gives you a good reach and establishes brand awareness. The upbeat rhythm and maybe even 'sing songy'

and the brand impression is set. Since the total population is 30 % auditory in learning this method is a great choice in advertisement.

Now hears the rub, research has found that 65 % of the general population are visual learners, meaning they need to see information in order to retain it. A consistent social media presence is golden.

Now think of the huge opportunity here. SEO (search engine optimisation) works hand in hand with social media. You will get easily found when people are typing your category on social media or Google. Yes, it is that easy.

Now for the sake of not going into too much overwhelming detail, I will stop here. But with saying that I do want to continue the conversation. You can either hit reply or better yet click here and book a consultation.

How is your social media campaign?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 18 May 2022 23:04:54 GMT

Why is this important to check-in? From anything from chain-supply issues to understanding what the rest of the year promotion cycle should look like it's important to recalibrate your business goals.

In New Zealand it seems that goal setting planning is a bit adversarial. When it comes to marketing cycles it is reliant that we clearly see and map out where we are going. If all else fails then plan seasonally.

The basics of any successful campaign is reliability and relateabilty. Take Briscoe's as a sort of a case study. The message has always been "bigger better deal" every weekend and that the Briscoe's lady wears a wig. We all know that the beloved spokesperson Tammy Wells has luminous grey hair in real life. It all has an inauthenticity about it. Not good for social media and the engagement shows.

With all that said mapping out your brands intention is key to achieve robust content.

Are you unsure how to start? Not to worry I'm here for you. Our brand intention is to help our New Zealand business community to achieve brand visibility and we are here to help. Reply to this email and remember we are always here to support you.

Explainer Videos on TikTok

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 18 May 2022 21:36:26 GMT

Explainer Videos on TikTok

If you regularly use social media then your feed will likely be filled with explainer videos and usually contain people dancing and wiggling their fingers at captions. Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and convince you to start awkwardly dancing or lip-syncing! In this blog, I’m going to talk about how you can make an explainer video and the vital components to make it work for your brand.

Why should I create an explainer video on TikTok?

Explainer videos offer a human and/or emotional connection to your audience. People want to buy from people and getting in front of the camera will help with this.
They help build credibility and trust. Whether that is credibility in your product or trust in your expertise of services.
Great for demonstrating a product or answering FAQs on your service in a quick and fun way.

One of the things that you need to watch out for is that all of the videos don’t look the same if you are looking to batch create ie. having a change in music, clothes, location so that your posts are not identical.

Steps for creating explainer videos on TikTok.

Step One

Choose your video length

How long do you think your audience will remain engaged for? What kind of explainer video are you doing? Most videos fall within the 15sec mark on TikTok so you might want to look at that to begin with.

Step Two

Write your script

Before you start writing, ask yourself these questions to inform what you’ll create:

- Who is it for?

- What are their pain points?

- How will you help them solve it?

- What should they do next?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a good sense of purpose and will help with sticking to your content goal.

Step 3

Record and edit your VoiceOver

Now your script is ready, it’s time to record your VoiceOver narrative. Heres a couple of tips on how to get the most out of this:

Pick a quiet place to record
Practice reading your script and don’t worry if you mess up, that’s what editing is for!
Invest in a decent mic! The sound quality will be way better than if you’re using your phone or laptop mic.
Don’t talk too closely to the mic - about 6 inches is ideal for sound quality
Do a level check before recording - use your recording software to do a level check and adjust it to about 5 decibels to get the most out of your audio.
Read from the screen instead of paper. It’ll remove any paper rustling in the background and will allow you to edit your script if it doesn’t flow naturally when you read it.

Step 4

Edit your VoiceOver

You can use editing software on programs like Invideo.

Remember to remove bloopers, long pauses that aren’t for dramatic effect, sneezes, ums/erms/ahs if you use a lot of those and get in a muddle! Listen carefully for background noise as well to edit out.

Step 5

Record or design your content.

You can do this using your phone, or programs like Canva and Lumen5 if it isn’t live. If this is an unboxing video for your product, make sure you’re recording in great lighting and from an angle that shows off what you are doing - investing in a tripod and phone light will work wonders for this. If you’re using Lumen5, take your script and paste it into the story to help create scenes in no time! Take a look at what you like from other brands on TikTok and what catches your eye.

Step 6

Putting it all together

Now you’ve got your VoiceOver and content, its time to put it together. You can do this with InVideo, Canva or directly in TikTok.

Step 7

Add Music

One of the main things to remember when adding music to TikTok is that the audio file has the correct license ie. ones that are in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license. Youtube has an Audio Library has a load of music that is free to use and InVideo has an inbuilt audio library that has thousands of royalty free tracks you can use.

Step 8

Publish and Track Results

Once you’ve done a final review, you are now okay to schedule and publish your video to TikTok! Don’t forget to take a look at the results from all your posts to see what you should stop/start doing.

When you get into the swing of creating this type of content it does become easier, but we totally understand that for busy business owners who are already wearing all the hats, TikTok can be a little overwhelming. If you’d like a chat about what sort of content you can create for your business or where to start with recording videos, reach out to see how we can help get you excited about what TikTok could do for your business!

Why does Instagram look like TikTok?

francesca@socialglobalgrind.com (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 18 May 2022 21:26:54 GMT

According to TechCrunch, Instagram is experimenting with full-screen vertical home feeds. Upon opening the Instagram app, users immediately see vertical content meant to “bring video more front and center.”

What does this mean for our clients? We are now only producing videos for our client's social media.

But what if you are not one of our clients? How could you do this yourself? Here are our favourite resources to help you create videos for social media.

Canva

We absolutely love Canva and happily invested in the pro model. It gives you more features and it's really easy to use. Canva is so good we no longer use any of our mobile apps to create content.

Canva is great to drop in still images to create videos. They have a ton of videos on YouTube to teach you how to use Canva as well.

Luman5

Luman5 is what we use to pull imagery and text from written blogs on your website. You can add and drop-in keywords as well that will help you become easily found on Google. It's a win-win! You already created the content and you can easily create videos.

As for learning Luman5, they have a library to help you learn how to use all the mechanics step by step.

If Social media has proven anything it is unpredictable. Since Instagram is all over the place and in my opinion unstable I would suggest the following platforms to consider:

LinkedIn
TikTok
Pinterest

More to come in the upcoming weeks and new strategy ideas .

BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL

Instagram Hashtags: Everything You Need To Know in 2022

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:11:00 GMT

2022’s Instagram Hashtags Update

Despite many updates and returning features that Instagram has brought in already in 2022, one thing that remains solid is that using hashtags is still one of the most effective ways to get more visibility and engagement on your posts.

Later has looked into how hashtags work on Instagram and the best way to use them, so we’ve put together a quick guide with the most significant bits for any small business.

How do hashtags actually work?

We know that everyone throws around hashtags as a term, but what does it mean, and how do they work IRL? Hashtags are used to label and categorise your content; Instagram then takes these hashtags and serves the posts to users it believes your content will be revenant. This could be simply using hashtags to channel the search results on the explore page or as complicated as being a reference for the algorithm and what Instagram suggests to users it believes will be highly interested in.

Are hashtags still relevant in 2022?

Hashtags have been around for a while now, and many features of Instagram are now long gone, so are they still effective? The short answer is yes. Instagram is slowly pivoting towards semantic keyword search. This will open up a whole new debate on the possibilities of making your content as discoverable as possible – potentially letting copy in your captions or video topics be searchable too. But for now, hashtags are still crucial in a strong content strategy.

How many hashtags should you use?

Okay, so this one is a little more complex; we previously wrote a blog post on Instagram’s recommendation of using 3-5 hashtags per post, but Later’s research on 18M+ Instagram feed posts showed that using more hashtags gave better results. “Reach rate increases by 11% (from 24% to 35%) as the number of hashtags grows from one to 30.”

To get more personalised, Instagram will need to accurately categorise the content, which it needs hashtags to be able to do. Their theory is that using fewer hashtags will mean more accurate self-categorisation – for instance, if you have to cut down, you’re more likely to get right to the point instead of including miscellaneous popular hashtags. So, use as many hashtags as you like, but you might want to give using 3-to 5 particular hashtags ago to see what it does for your engagement.

How to find the best hashtags for your social media strategy

So now you know that you can add 20-30 hashtags to your posts to increase your reach and engagement, but that is harder to build a list than just 3-5. Here are three tactics to use to develop your hashtags:

#1: Use Later’s Hashtag Suggestion Tool and save captions/first comments

#2: Research posts on Instagram Explore Page

#3: Review Hashtag’s Post Volume Using Instagram’s Tag Search Tool on the explore page

Where to use hashtags on Instagram.

Instagram has confirmed that it is effective to use hashtags in both your post caption and the comments section, so you can choose where you want to post them depending on how “clean” you’d like your posts to be. One key thing is timing; you should always add hashtags in the comment section as soon as your correspondence is published, as this makes a real difference.

Using Later to save time on your hashtag strategy

Later has a free saved captions tool that you can use to curate a list of 20-30 hashtags that align with your content pillars that you can add to each post or schedule the first comment too. These are easily adapted and edited for relevant content pillars.

Once you’ve built a solid foundation, you can analyse the results and set up some new tests on others. Later’s hashtag analytics tool will let you track things like which hashtags are driving the most likes, saves, comments and overall reach on your posts.

If you’d like a little help researching and implementing your social media hashtag strategy for your business, reach out to Francesca@socialglobalgrind.com , or book a discovery call below.

Instagram is bringing back Chronological Views to your home feed!

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 08:21:48 GMT

One of the main features that made Instagram great upset many people when removing it. Still, now, Instagram is finally bringing back the much-requested chronological feed and introducing Favourites.

Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, commented on the latest updates to the app:

“We want you to be able to shape Instagram into the best possible experience, and giving you ways to quickly see what you’re most interested in is an important step in that direction.”

Okay, so what does this mean for your feed?

There will now be three view options for your feed:

Home (main-feed): The current default feed (ranked and personalised content). This one won’t change for now.
Following: The chronological feed (I’m doing a happy dance that this is being brought back!) Yay, no more confusion about missing sales or events because you’re being shown something from DAYS ago.
Favourites: A second chronological feed with content from a list of 50 accounts that you can choose. (If you’ve favourited an account, their posts will show up higher in your home feed).

Mosseri said, “It’s going to continue to be ranked. It’s going to continue to be personalized. We believe in personalization.” This could mean that more suggested content, like Reels, could continue to be added to your feeds. They are increasingly focused on personalisation. The feedback on the chronological feeds has been listened to, but taking personalisation one step further with the favourites could help keep people engaged on the app.

What can we expect in the future from Instagram?

This is a massive choice for Instagram to reintroduce a key feature of a previous version; they will be competing directly with TikTok and fighting to claw back Gen-Z users, and these updates will create more opportunities to deliver recommended content through the main feed – very closely to TikTok’s For You Page, without losing users who want a chronological view.

What should small businesses do?

Video content is increasingly popular, and businesses should look to social media strategies that include Instagram reels and TikTok videos to discuss their offering/products and showcase their brand personality. Embracing these areas could really help develop your channel’s engagement by utilising the suggested and for your pages.

Add @socialglobalgrind to your favourite feed to make sure you don’t miss any of our critical updates and tips:

To find these new feeds, click on the Instagram logo in the top left corner of the home page. If you don’t have them yet — wait for the update in your region.

Back to Basics with Asana

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:30:03 GMT

In this blog, we discover how to use Asana to make social media consistent and easy.

Asana is a free tool that you can use for your business and it’s absolutely what we use for your clients in our agency side of socialglobalgrind.com.

I’m really excited about this one, kind of nerdy-excited because it’s doing what I love. I’ve been teaching online for quite a while now, I’d taken a pause in 2014 then I started teaching on a university level here in New Zealand with social media and marketing, and then went client-side and had a series of directorships in different companies, startups, bigger global companies and even in the film industry doing social media, so this is everything I know that has been very successful.

I’m very excited so in this blog we’re going to go over how I use Asana from an agency perspective and as a small business owner. These tips will help you organise a campaign and asana; the first things we do with a new client is we go over goals and we go over particular content pillars that will support those goals.

GOALS

We will look at those goals and then we’ll strategize and introduce different concepts to the client and really introduce what collaboration feels like. This includes getting their perspective and also, depending on the company, if they have a frontline sales team, we will get their perspective as well because usually they are the goldmine. The frontliners are the goldmine to any company when it comes to marketing so definitely involve them to see what’s going on and then we really start to see what the strategy should evolve into.

We start our board for clients using asana and we use the board method not the list method so visually they can see where we’re at in the progress of the campaign. There are tons of different programmes to use like trello, monday etc but Asana is something I keep on coming back to, I think I’ve been using for 10 years because it’s so reliable; yes the pro version is amazing but the free version is also great and I always start all my clients on a free version and depending on their needs, we can upgrade it accordingly.

BOARD METHOD

We create new board in the projects section and basically there is a little column on the left hand side, where you can create all the different projects within your business:

Social media calendar
Production (this is for the internal teams that we use at the agency)
Content Pillars
Image library
Comms (where we store all of the incoming emails from a client)
Published

SETTING THE TONE WITH IMAGERY

On the board method you’re able to view all the social media that you’re going to create and you can start pulling images and creating an image bank that you can use as inspiration and to influence the tone of the campaign. It is really important for brands that the tone is set in advance to imagery being created and here’s some ways to help the creative team:

Share examples of competitors brands
Insert inspiration from brands you do like and want to emulate
Include key brand guidance on colours, fonts, imagery

We share all of this information with our internal team on the agency side and we also relay all the client goals and then we start the production phase.

PRODUCTION

This is where production typically gets a little tricky especially with multiple stakeholders, but this is also why asana is so great as a tool:

It sets clear timelines
Clear communication
Timestamps everything! (Super useful for clarifying feedback and order of production)
Avoids multiple revisions as feedback is done in one go
Keeps everyone (agency and client) accountable

CAMPAIGN ANALYTICS

After about 3 months we can really dive into the analytics of a campaign, and using Asana will really help you go back to those content pillars and review how they are working against the content you’ve posted. One of the things that will help you focus on a campaign is consistency and the positive results this will bring. Asana can help you with that as you can assign owners for tasks, send automated emails chasing due dates etc. We like to produce work two weeks in advance so that if a client is off sick or another project takes precedence at that time, we can continue with scheduling posts so that there is no impact on the campaign.

PRODUCED CONTENT

At the end of month I will go ahead and move all of the previously posted content down to the produced content library so that our clients can reflect on the content and review it in line with their goals and analytics.

If you are a small business owner that needs a system that delivers an easy campaign consistently, speak to francesca@socialglobalgrind.com to learn more about how we work with Asana.

What Wellness Practitioners need to know about online marketing

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 08:35:26 GMT

When it comes to your practice getting your social media sorted can be quite daunting. Creating a pathway to show your process, treatments and products should be your journey on social media.

We often get our first interactions with your business on social media.

Here are the top 3 tips to show up on social media:

Get on TikTok and Instagram Reels. We should be able to see you in your process. Chiro’s are sharing their process while they perform their treatment.
Feature and benefits: Talk about how the features of your treatments and the beneficial outcomes from your client/ patient.
Do your hashtag research. Hashtags vary on each platform in terms of the top used hashtags. It’s worth taking the time to do the research. Look at the examples below.

For the hashtag of #physicaltherapy we have found the following the top-ranking results below:

Instagram: #physicaltherapy at 3.9 m versus #physicaltherapystudent at 77.7k

LinkedIn top two: #physicaltherapy followed by #physicaltherapylife

TikTok Ranks: #physicaltherapy is top-ranking while #physicaltherapytiktok is second.

For content you can use the ‘what’ research to include in your copy like:

“What’s physical therapy” or “physical therapy what to expect.”

Pinterest features the phrase “physical therapy student” first and “physical therapy” phrase ranks second. Pinterest also features the top users using the phrase. It’s a great opportunity to reverse engineer their content.

Want more insights? Hop on the Podcast Ep 54 What Wellness Practitioners Need to Know About Social Media

How To Optimize On Linkedin

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 08:39:11 GMT

How to Optimise on LinkedIn

Before I get started with the main topic, I want you to download Asana – it’s a free tool for your business and is absolutely what we use for our paid social media clients. On an upcoming podcast, I’ll go through step-by-step how to use it, and it could be absolutely game-changing for your business.

Why LinkedIn is important for your business

Why it’s essential to have a strong message on LinkedIn is because everyone from your industry, colleagues, competitors, potential clients and partnerships are all on LinkedIn, so floating about and hoping something that you’ve randomly posted sticks is not the way to go about it; you need to be thinking strategically with your messaging. What we have seen a little now is a rise in people jumping off of Facebook and onto LinkedIn, and you might notice that some of the LinkedIn posts that you see actually resembles a lot of what you would see on Facebook; sometimes, this kind of post lands and it’s really cool but LinkedIn is primarily a place for Thought Leadership and business-related conversation, but we can see that changing.

The Social Justice Movement on Social Media

The change we are seeing on social media with the social justice movement is being brought over onto LinkedIn from individuals and businesses moving over from Facebook, and overall, this change is for the better, especially when we are looking at social justice. People getting into and engaging more with education pieces. One of my pillars is social justice in the workplace, and LinkedIn is a great social media tool to become and demonstrate thought leadership on your content pillars which builds into your more comprehensive strategy instead of just flicking and sticking content and it not landing.

Why engage with thought leadership on LinkedIn?

As a business, you need to decide what is important to you and what topics you want to discuss and engage on the broader conversation – LinkedIn is a social platform, so your direct contacts and broader will be able to see what makes up your business/brand. Your team, colleagues and even board members should be part of the strategy for what belief system you adhere to, what your “why” is and what kind of change or impact on society should be.

How to Demonstrate Features & Benefits on LinkedIn

If you are a service or a product business, you will want to consider one of the pillars being on features and benefits – this is the feature of this particular service or product and the help of the service or product. For instance, if you have a skincare product, the features will be key ingredients, and the benefits are the impact on your skin. It’s all about how you can add a texturised palpable sort of feel to a product when you’re demonstrating it. Service-led industries are killing it on linked in because we can really connect with the feelings the feature/benefit part of it a bit quicker than we can with products.

SEO-centric

As a social media agency, we totally get that sometimes working with social media cowboys, there is a loss of control over social media – that isn’t how we work. We work as a true partnership so you can get on with running your business, and we can do what we do best. We pride ourselves in doing education with our clients, and a big topic we educate on is SEO.

As an SEO centric social media agency, we make sure that your business registers and is indexed on Google so that it is search engine optimised, and we work with you to educate you on social media and why certain things are important so that you can make informed decisions on going forward with your social media strategy.

The other upside to working with us is that if you are a small business with a team, we can build up your SEO and presence in a way that you can continue to be consistent across all of your content pillars and have the momentum to post constantly and consistently for 6-12 months to register, especially in New Zealand,

Landing with an audience

In order to really resonate on social media with an audience, you need to produce compelling and – real content, and one of the best ways to do this is to get in front of the camera every once in a while. Despite any hesitancy you might have, if you speak from the heart, you’re honest about what you’re going, your intentions are great, and you know it’s in alignment with what your message is, you’ll be absolutely fine. Don’t spend loads of time changing your image or worrying about how you look, of course, make sure that you’re well-groomed and lighting is always helpful when you’re representing your company but don’t overthink it; I actually make loads of goofy faces when recording, but I try not to look directly at my face, just focusing on the spot next to the camera and it all works out!

How to Overcome Tall Poppy Syndrome

One great thing you can do is to record content when you are out and about, especially when it is a service-based business, and I think it’s crucial for people to put videos out there consistently and to shake things up. If you’re going to go on a walk down to Kohi Beach Cafe and grab a cup of Allpress coffee, show that experience while you’re talking about a topical piece that is beneficial to your business if it’s a service or if you’re a product-based business talk about the week that you’ve had, talk about some of the successes you had especially if you’re a kiwi where there’s a bit of a tall poppy situation happening still (this almost comes up in every conversation I have with a business associate or colleague). Suppose I want to get myself out of thinking this way. In that case, one of the things I do is to think about needing to make a video about a particular topic because it is going to benefit the business in the long run if we keep talking about our services and what we have to offer; you don’t have to be the best salesperson, but if you are properly alive and sparkly when you’re talking about something then it will do amazing things.

Finding Keywords

I will give you two links that will help you find keywords because sometimes you can be in your industry for 1520 years. Your set of keywords in your head will not match the nasty algorithm that’s on Google, and it won’t match the algorithm on any other social media platform, and I think that’s something that we just need a little bit of help with sometimes. Using the right keywords can elevate what you’re doing and get your voice out there. Getting your service out there will amplify your social media presence. I want you just to kill it on social media and make sure that your brand stands out!

ADD LINKS!

Bonus Checklist

I want you to go to the link that’s in the description field and download the PDF that we have made for you – it’s a critical checklist for how to optimise on social media that you can check off all of the tiny elements that you need to do to really boost your presence and make sure that you have good strong clarity in your message.

LinkedIn is an underutilised resource in New Zealand, and we should absolutely be using it! So I’m here to help you; if you have any questions, just DM me on any social platform @ francescahustles , you can also email me Francesca@socialglobalgrind.com , and I hope to see you or hear from you soon.

Now that we are done with our New Year’s Resolutions, can we talk?

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 08:59:10 GMT

Every year most of us plan what we want to do in our business, creating dream boards and goals and as soon as Feb/ March roles around the exhaustion sets in.

A combination of no real-time off to recharge or the business is humming there is no real reason to look at your social media.

A consistent campaign in the background will help you with the new client discovery funnel on social media.

This is what we can expect with social media marketing in 2022:

– Video marketing is the now and will be more prominent on all social platforms.

– Explainer educational videos will help stop people from scrolling.

– Brand storytelling or explaining you’re why is a clever way to engage your audience.

– TikTok type videos reign supreme and are easily able to post on other social media channels.

Getting all the pieces together like the marketing strategy, the images for social, scheduling is tough!

In this blog, we are going to take you through our process of how we set up our clients success.

Get ready to plan, prepare and execute.

How Often Should I Post on Instagram – for Small Businesses Starting Out

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:03:47 GMT

There are a lot of factors that go into how many times you should post on Instagram. It can be challenging to keep up with the ever-changing algorithm, so we’ve put together a few guidelines to help you stay on top of your social media marketing game. Follow these rules, and your account will be sure to grow!

What’s the difference between Reach and Engagement?

Before we dive into the results of the study, it is important to understand a couple of terms and how they relate to your campaign success. The two terms that we’ll be focussing on here are reach and engagement rates.

Reach Rate is the number of unique accounts reached per post/number of followers.
Engagement Rate are (comments/likes/shares) per post / number of followers.

If you want your campaign to focus on brand exposure and growth potential, look at your reach rate. If you are more interested in measuring audience impact and community value, take a closer look at your engagement rate.

If you run a small business and are just starting out on social media, it is likely that you have less than 1K followers at the moment. We know that not every post you do will be seen by your audience, but with this study recently conducted, these guidelines should be able to help you increase reach and engagement over time.

How often should I post?

Based on the study, the more frequently you post on Instagram per week, the greater your overall reach will be. In line with this, if an account post more frequently, this typically equates to more engagement.

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach however, as the reach and engagement rates change depending on how many followers an account has, it will be very different for an account with >205k followers compared to <1k. For smaller followings (<1k), posting 14 times per week delivers the highest reach and engagement rates per post.

How follower numbers and posting frequency impacts post-performance

The study has uncovered some really interesting trends that you can use to your advantage. For accounts with <1k followers, the more posts you share on your feed per week the better. And it’s not just that, reach AND engagement rates per post improve as the frequency at which you post also increases, with the average engagement rate moving from 3.1% to 4.9% when increasing from 1 post to 20.

To put that in context for your small businesses account, if you have 500 followers, the engagement rate will grow from 15 to 500 just by increasing from 1 post per week to 20, which if you’re new to the game, is definitely something you should take advantage of. One of the reasons why this happens is because smaller accounts don’t have a large following as their main source of engagement – they’re more likely to rely on new audiences to engage with their posts via hashtags – and their reach rate grows with each additional post shared.

So, how often should I be posting on Instagram?

Luckily for you, if your business has <1k followers, it doesn’t matter if you are more focused on engagement or reach, the results are still the same. To achieve the best reach and engagement rates, you should be posting 14 times per week. Consistency is key but the reach and engagement rates you could get from your audiences by sticking to this rule could do wonders for your small business.

What Social Media Channels Should I Be On?

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 09:06:59 GMT

What Social Media Channels Should I Be On?

If you are new to running a business or are just starting out, you’ll be sure to wonder what social media channels you should be using – this is a great question and we’ve put together some more that will help form your social media approach.

These key questions will help shape what your business’s social media will look like:

Do you have any channels set up already?

If you do, either personal or business, have a think about how you’re using it and if it is actually serving you. It could be that you initially set up a Facebook page for your business but aren’t actively engaging with it and it has run out of steam; if this is the case, have a think to see if it is worth reviving or if you need to delete and start afresh – definitely take note of any followers and try to get them to move over to your new social media platform ahead of the change.

Where are your customers?

Look at your ideal customer and their habits, what social media are they using? Will they be likely to engage with your business on this type of social media? By taking a pragmatic approach to this you can engage in the conversation where your customers are looking to be engaged with.

What message do you want to get across? What format will help this?

Some social media like LinkedIn will be better for more professional types of communication that help to build authority, whereas, for product-based businesses, you could engage more with video-formatted content like reels on Instagram or TikTok to help reach your customers.

What do you enjoy using?

If you are running your social media you have to think about what you enjoy. It is a reflection of your business and should align with the values you’ve chosen to represent it. If you are currently using Facebook but actually don’t use it in your personal life, but use Instagram constantly, then perhaps it is a sign that you would be better served using social media that you enjoy and works for you.

You don’t want social media to be taking up all of your time, you already have a business to run! There isn’t a clear answer to what social media you should be using, but by reflecting on what you enjoy using and more importantly, your audience and the type of social media that they actively engage in, as long as you can commit to having a consistent presence on whatever channel you use, you’ll be sure to succeed!

What You Need To Know As A Business Owner

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:09:38 GMT

As a small business owner, you might regularly ask yourself how to use social media for small businesses but not really get the answers or guidance you need. We’ve put together the basics for what you need to know about social media for a business owner.

1. Start small – You might think that you need to launch on every social platform going but in reality, your target audience won’t be on all of them. Take a look at the habits of your ideal customer and if they are only active on LinkedIn, don’t put all your energy into Pinterest. If your audience is spread over multiple platforms, look to create content that can be repurposed over all of them and remember, this doesn’t have to be done all at once. Start small with one or two platforms and grow from there.

2. Define your content pillars – Take the time to create a strategy for your content and make sure when you’re scheduling posts that your content pillars are all covered. Regularly assess whether your messaging has changed – this might be due to new products, courses, or a change in direction with services offered.

3. Be authentic – People want to buy from people and being authentic is a great way to connect with your audience, gain trust, and put you front of mind when it comes to making a sale.

4. Engage with your community – If you aren’t talking to your audience about things they are interested in, then they aren’t likely to stick around. Engage with the wider conversation on social media about your area of expertise and become a voice of authority.

5. Time-rich – As a business owner you’ll have to wear many hats and social media is a new skill to learn on top of everything else. There are many ways to be time-rich, it could be using tools like later to schedule posts, training your assistant to help create content, or hiring a social media agency to help with strategy and launch your business on different channels.

6. Consistency matters – One of the most important things about social media as a business owner is creating consistent content that your audience can connect with. On Instagram, if you have less than 1k followers then to get the best reach and engagement you need to be posting 14 times a week. Whilst you don’t have to do this many posts, you do need to schedule regularly so your audience has something to come back to and engage in.

Ep 50 HWH: New IG Feature & Strategy

2139159 (Francesca Alexander) — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 08:17:27 GMT

Instagram notoriously changes things up and a few months ago they said to reduce down to 8-15 hashtags but recently I saw in my feed about the new number of hashtags which is way less.

I’m going to share with you how we are going to reposition our strategy at Social Global Grind. The recommendation from Instagram creators’ accounts was to choose between 3-5 hashtags that resonate with your audience and focus on your niche.

Now, hashtags are very similar to keywords and every platform has its own form of this, but for this blog, I’ll focus on Instagram.

The strategy:

If you’re a small business and want to be able to be easily found on google let’s take a look at the approach. If you have a coffee shop in Auckland and more specifically Mission Bay, you will want to include location-specific hashtags that are relevant to your niche ie #coffeeshopmissionbay. You’ll also want to be tagging things your customers might talk about ie #coffeecatchup or certain coffee vendors #allpress – in New Zealand each region has specific coffee vendors that are popular so tailor to this kind of niche. You can also do a search for hashtags on Instagram to see if the area has an active hashtag or following.

Once you have these 5 hashtags, set them aside – you won’t be using them on every post, you’ll create new ones for more specific posts ie with your products, promotions etc. The other thing you need to do is to put the hashtags in the caption of the post. Instagram has now said it works better with hashtags in the caption which is a change from algorithms in the past. One way to experiment is to search for something you think that consumers are looking for to find you ie #coffeeshopmissionbay.

The Message:

It is about really landing the message. If we switch to looking at other industries we find that we sometimes tend to talk to other people within the industry ie focussing on sales in real estate, as opposed to talking directly to the consumer.

If we continue with the real estate industry, listing before Christmas before the property shortage is a great strategy because Christmas for us is summer; this is the time families start to shift and think about the following year.

An example message could be “Real estate experts in Mission Bay, list now before Christmas, get in touch.” What you want is to break this down into multiple posts ie. focus on the experts, get interviews, reels, videos with the team, then pull another story from this focussing on listing now before Christmas – what are the advantages and benefits of listing now? This way you can have niche posts covering the same message but in different ways and introduce specific hashtags.

Its also great to have a hashtag specifically for your business as over time you’ll get traction and a following based on the search. New Zealand as a country is still getting used to delivering a product or service through social media when compared to Australia, the UK and the US so it’ll take some time for consumers to learn.

We’d love to hear from you if you have any questions about your account or if you’re not sure if you’re doing it right.

Email us at mail@socialglobalgrind.com

Should I use 30 Instagram hashtags? Bite-Size Edition

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 08:03:59 GMT

When marketers and small businesses found out a few years ago, we could list up to 30 hashtags for the Instagram posts, we threw every hashtag in one post that we could think of.

What was revealed recently that is quite interesting on the Instagram creators released yet another recommendation that appeals to the algorithm and now recommends scaling back on the number of hashtags we use on our posts.

It used to be up to 30 hashtags.

Then it was 8-12 hashtags.

Now it’s even less!

What the !

Doing between 3-5 hashtags per post will define your niche and make you known faster for what you offer.

Are Hashtags Important on Instagram?

Hashtags are the way we become searchable on Instagram and Google searches. Each social media platform are going forward with their version of a search engine feature.

How do I know what hashtag to use?

Keep it simple, keep it relevant:

Add your unique company name as a hashtag
Identify what you do or offer
Use a hashtag that represents the topic you are posting about
Well known hashtags work
Make it memorable or humorous.
Less wordy wins

You can also see what your competitor uses as their hashtags to help you identify within the industry.

And finally…

Don’t use hashtags that are too popular.

If you use popular hashtags, the Instagram algorithm will identify you and your post as spammy.

Here’s what to avoid:

Was this article helpful, or do you still have questions? Please email us at info@socialglobalgrind.com

What To Expect From A Social Media Agency

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 07:58:05 GMT

If you’re at the point in your business journey when you’re thinking about taking off one of the many hats you’re wearing and hiring a social media agency to help manage your accounts, there are a few things that you should expect to gain from a partnership:

Expertise

This one is a given, but it really is important if you are handing over the reins to your business social media accounts that the agency really is an expert in social media and not

Strategy

Key to any major business decision, your social media agency should be able to go in, develop the brief, and come back to you with a strategy that can be applied to all channels within the timeframe and budget you are working with.

An understanding of your business

Social media agencies have a lot of different clients but with one thing in common – the business owners behind them and their needs. A good social media agency will take the time to extract key details and features of your business that matter to you, as well as put in the time to research the wider field.

Creativity

Sometimes you can feel like you are stuck in a rut and are just posting for the sake of it without any spark of creativity. A good social media agency will be able to reignite the spark in your social media accounts and challenge you to get outside your comfort zone and take your brand to a new level.

Time-saving techniques

Nobody likes being inefficient, especially if you are consistently posting on multiple channels. Social media agencies are incredible at taking a chaotic approach and streamlining.

Accountability

There is nothing better than having someone else to make you accountable to committing to your social media. As a partner, social media agencies will be able to keep you accountable and moving forwards with your strategy as it develops and help you pivot if things change unexpectedly.

Consistency

One of our favourites! Social media agencies truly understand the importance of consistency when it comes to posts and can help with anything from consistent scheduled posts to consistent tone/images/messages being used.

If you are ready to hand over the reins or want to learn more about how we could help at Social Global Grind, reach out to us to discuss how we can partner with you and your business.

Press — Social Global Grind

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