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This is the Executive Connect Podcast - a show for the new generation of leaders. Join us as we discover unconventional leadership strategies not traditionally associated with executive roles. Our guests include upper-level C-Suite executives charting new ways to grow their organizations, successful entrepreneurs changing the way the world does business, and experts and thought leaders from fields outside of Corporate America that can bring new insights into leadership, prosperity, and personal growth - all while connecting on a human level. No one has all the answers - but by building a community of open-minded and engaged leaders we hope to give you the tools you need to help you find your own path to success.
Melissa Aarskaug (00:01.873)
Welcome to the executive connect podcast today. I'm going to talk about Social media and personal branding with Holly Medwig Holly is the CEO of monarch social media a digital strategist with a passion for social media and an expert on online marketing Holly I'm so excited to have you here with us today to talk all things media platforms and YouTube welcome today
Holly (00:30.49)
Thank you for having me.
Melissa Aarskaug (00:32.837)
Now I want to just jump right in as I normally do. Social media is rapidly, quickly and fastly changing. And it is a must have in my opinion these days professionally. So I want to talk a little bit about social media and personal branding. And what is the best way to do that on all the channels?
Holly (00:59.618)
all the channels, okay.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:00.551)
Well, pick any of the ones you wanna focus on, YouTube, TikTok, whatever you're comfortable talking about.
Holly (01:05.332)
Let's pick the big seven. I like to kind of approach social media from what we call an omni-channel perspective, which means having representation on
the main channels that people use. You're going to have a primary platform where most of your target demographic is spending time, but that doesn't mean that they're not on other platforms as well. So instead of just saying, we're only going to do Instagram, we're only going to do LinkedIn, it's looking at the platforms, how they function, how your audience interacts on those platforms, and forming strategy from there.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:45.361)
Yeah, it's so important. see some businesses don't even have social media or they don't have a website. And a lot of times I decide where I'm going by social media, online presence, reviews. And I think it's so important today, personal branding as well as
company branding. Can you share a little bit like as it relates to YouTube and personal branding, I'm starting to hear that's the buzz now people are pivoting off other channels and moving over to YouTube to showcase their expertise on any topic that they're most passionate about. Can you share some examples?
Holly (02:32.856)
Yeah, absolutely. So the beauty of a YouTube strategy lies in the SEO. Because Google owns YouTube, anything that you do on there, as long as you optimize, and that is the important piece to remember, optimize your content. As long as you optimize, it's going to help.
with the results on a Google search. So those two platforms really work well together in order to create and build and grow that presence. And that's really the name of the game in 2024 going into 2025 is making sure your entire presence is optimized and ranking for the right things.
Now in terms of personal branding on YouTube, one of the simplest places I can tell any professional to start is answer questions that your existing clients already ask because that is what potential clients are putting into Google or into YouTube. That's what they're typing in. So if you answer those questions in short and long form content, then there's a good chance that you're going to show up a lot higher.
Melissa Aarskaug (03:44.711)
That's a really good point. I read a lot more short form content now. And I think a lot of people like.
quick, you know, videos, quick reels, what's going on. And I feel like people are moving from like long form podcasts to more shorts and they have like shorter attention spans, which, which we see a lot in TikTok and other reels. and so what kind of, is your thoughts on short form, long form and you know, I love what you said though is like using both and you'll show up better.
with SEO. So is one better than the other or just do both?
Holly (04:28.782)
You need to do both. You need to, if we look at short form content and what it can do, it can capture attention. And I think the measurement now is the average social media user has a shorter attention span than that of a goldfish. A goldfish has about a seven second attention span. Social media users are at about three seconds. So the beauty of short form content when done well,
is it can hook attention and create interest to make somebody watch a longer video. And so as long as you're doing a good job with the optimization of that short form content, then they're going to go and find the rest of your content and watch it. And as soon as they start doing that, you're taking somebody from just a social media user into a community member and you're nurturing that lead for whatever product or service that you're selling.
Melissa Aarskaug (05:23.187)
So what are some like top tips if you want to capture somebody in that quick three seconds? What are like popular things that people are doing to capture attention?
Holly (05:35.056)
So I can give you hooks that every creator will, they'll give you their hacks and do this and do this, but let's just break it down to something that's going to work long term because all of those little hooks, those strategies change. And what it comes down to is user emotional sentiment. So as human beings, we're primed to always look for the danger, to be kind of aware of what risk is around us. The reason why clickbait,
works so well is because usually it's starting from a negative emotion, a problem, something you're worried about, something you're anxious about. And so when we as creators address that anxiety or that fear or that worry immediately, you're able to hook that to a person's attention a lot faster versus starting with something positive. So I'll give you an example.
If I'm talking to business owners who haven't invested in their digital presence, I'm going to say something like, if you're not on social media, you don't exist to your target demographic.
That's a hook, that's a negative emotion hook. Now I'm not saying let's be negative on the internet, but let's use psychographic data, which is the behavioral data of social media users, to really capture that attention. The simple way of saying this is using a negative hook.
Melissa Aarskaug (07:03.067)
Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess sometimes what ends up in my scroll is so random. like to your point, like I'll click it and like that's really random, but it's not really what the video is about. So it didn't that resonates with me. I've been guilty of clicking on some of that clickbait. I want to talk a little bit. There's so many, like you said, seven, seven platforms. How do you like manage, first of all, one, nevertheless seven and maintaining the
same person on each of the platforms. Like I know I personally have always used, until recently, LinkedIn as just professional. I only did it for professional. I didn't bring in that personal side of me.
And then vice versa on my Facebook and Instagram. It was all personal like my family my kids my trips all those kind of things and so what I'm Experiencing right now is a lot of the people I interact with professionally want to see the personal side of my life and so I want to get your perspective on that across all the social channels
Holly (08:16.079)
Yeah.
So because we live half of our lives now in the digital world and the other half in the natural world, I think that as social media users, we are lacking that human connection. So when we see somebody sitting in front of a camera from a very human perspective and share those insights of what makes them human, not what they do for work or what they're selling, but what makes them human, then it makes the viewer feel like they
actually have a connection with that person. It's not just something they're seeing on their screens. It's the reason why really polished agency style, know, TV commercial style content does nothing on social media anymore.
You know, you have somebody and they're, well, let's use grand influencers, for an example. There's a grandma influencer on TikTok with 14 million followers. And all she's doing is phone in front of her and talking to the camera. There is no studio. There is no film producer and none of that. It's just her and her smartphone.
That's it. And so because she's doing that, creates a personal connection. And that's why you're seeing, even on LinkedIn, professionals starting to shift towards that strategy. But then also that's why you're seeing those results when you post something personal, is because people are craving the authentic connection.
Melissa Aarskaug (09:45.649)
Yeah, I think I would agree. think, you know, it's amazing how many people react to like the very personable stuff. I've seen some posts just this week where there were thousands of, you know, comments and feedback for personal posts about somebody who had passed away and what happened. And, you know, it's, it's, it's empathetic and people want to see the real, the real stuff as well. So I really love.
seeing people in their personal and their professional lives on social and how they can juggle it. Anything I'm curious from like, I look a lot at just my, you know, following and stats, is there a way to really leverage your analytics to track your own personal branding and growth across the platforms?
Holly (10:37.954)
Yeah, I would say so, usually with some kind of conversion metric. So if you're using personal branding in your strategy, always try to drive towards something.
So if it is an engagement metric on social media, encourage the ones that are not vanity metrics. that means encourage the saves, which shows that somebody likes this enough that they're going to save it and come back to it. Encourage the shares. This is so valuable to me that I want to tell other people about it. Those two things are going to tell you whether or not your content is valuable. And then when you want to take it a step further, drive the conversion to something like a leap
name.
not necessarily your website to look at your products or services, but maybe you integrate a mailing list where you share insights on a monthly basis or you give something away for free. the reason you kind of want to look at those numbers is to measure awareness is great, but how valuable do people find this information? Do they find it valuable enough where they're going to save and share it? And then is it valuable enough where they want to hear more from
me. And that's very simple way of gauging is my professional branding working for me.
Melissa Aarskaug (11:56.529)
Right. Now, can you get, so let's say that you want to do like your own monthly mail or is there a tool that you recommend people use to put together their own monthly mailers?
Holly (12:03.216)
Yeah.
Holly (12:08.664)
Yeah, so a very user-friendly tool and one that I really like the ethics of. I'm sure you've had it before where you're paying for software and the more you do on it that price starts to creep up and creep up and creep up.
Flowdesk is a really good email software because it's user friendly, it's very beginner friendly, and it doesn't matter how many subscribers you have, the price remains the same. It's, I think, $38 a month, and so even if you have five subscribers or 5,000, it's going to be $38 a month across the board. If you compare that with other platforms, know, 50,000 subscribers could be costing you $500 a month.
Melissa Aarskaug (12:50.811)
And now do people just use that to mail it out or do you actually create the mailers and the monthly newsletters in that software?
Holly (13:00.912)
Yeah, you create them in that software. It's really, so when you get into email software, when we look at social media, it is the top of the marketing funnel. Email marketing is the middle. And the reason those two go so well together is because while the middle of the funnel is going to nurture that lead, top of the funnel is going to capture it and start to move them down.
The thing people don't realize about social media is you own nothing on those platforms. At any time the platforms could shut you down. You could have, and I'll speak from experience, in 2015 I want to say, I was working for a startup and right before one of their biggest conferences of the year, their Instagram account was at about 30,000 followers and it was shut down.
Melissa Aarskaug (13:49.949)
Mm.
Holly (13:50.774)
nothing that we could do to get it back. So you don't want to risk being able to not communicate with your community if you're building a loyal one and your loyal community is going to move down that funnel and give you their contact information so if that ever happens or let's say there's a new platform that comes out and you want them to follow you there then you always have that connection because you do own your mailing list.
Melissa Aarskaug (14:18.341)
So do you just mail the mailing list to your, you suggest that people have all their contacts click and follow through that mailing list or do you actually email all your followers through that software?
Holly (14:31.734)
If they've subscribed, so that's the important piece is we have to get somebody to opt in from a legal standpoint. So when they subscribe, then anybody subscribed to that mailing list is going to get the newsletter that we send out. You can take it a step further and segment. So if I wanted to speak only to social media professionals, then I would create that form to tag them saying they're a social media professional. And then I could segment and email
just to them. Or maybe, you know, it depends how much data you collect on your subscribers, but yeah, you do it through the platform and you can schedule these in advance. You can make it very custom to the person, but it is a really good tool. And then you can also look at click-through rates. So what's happening in that email? Are they clicking? Are they, you know, reading? Are they sharing this or deleting it right away?
Melissa Aarskaug (15:31.367)
That's great. think that's a really good point because I have seen people lose their Facebook accounts or they were hacked into and they don't use the email anymore that was attached to their profile. So, you know, it is important, like you said, to continue to move your followers and contacts through a story and making sure it's the same messaging across all platforms. Now, is there a tool where you could create a post and it could post to multiple platforms?
have one that you suggest.
Holly (16:04.088)
could suggest one, but I'm not going to suggest that strategy, and here's why. When it comes to making sure that people are seeing your content on social media, you need to be engaging on the platform.
Melissa Aarskaug (16:08.776)
Okay.
Holly (16:18.984)
So when we use auto schedulers, there's nobody doing the manual work to talk to your community or to engage with everybody who has recently interacted with your content or to work with the algorithms to show your content within a specific niche. half of the job of social media is the social media piece. And when we use schedulers, oftentimes we're not doing the work to go into that platform and do the social part of the job.
So I generally try to encourage people not to, like use a content calendar to schedule what's going out, but the actual posting of it, do it on the platforms themselves. They want you to do that, right? At the end of the day, the commodity on social media is user attention. So they want people in that platform for as long as possible, right? Because then they sell that attention to advertisers like me.
Melissa Aarskaug (17:14.481)
Yeah, that's a really good advice. know I've often thought about using a tool myself to manage all the platforms and social media has become my weekend activity, because it's engaging, you're right. It's a lot of work to keep up with it and create it and think through it.
Want to talk a little bit I can't talk AI or she I can't talk social media without talking AI it's become really popular on social media having your post being rewritten or You know confirming that you didn't copy from AI. So I want to talk a little bit about Your thoughts on how AI might impact and change social media Either for the good maybe both good and better good and bad, I guess
Holly (18:05.284)
It depends how you use it. So I've been using AI for a while now.
not just coming into it recently. And if you're good at prompt engineering and you understand how to work with natural language programs to like make sure you're getting the right output and then taking that output and humanizing the content, I'm absolutely fine with it. That being said, you do see a drop in analytics when you rely solely on AI to do your job. So it's not a solution. It's not going to replace a social media content
Melissa Aarskaug (18:34.173)
Mm.
Holly (18:40.314)
creator or a copywriter necessarily, but will it make that person five times faster at their job and better at their job? Absolutely. Absolutely. And so it's, you know, it's a tool. If we can think about it that way that, you know, AI is this generation's version of the calculator. Like, sure, you could do all the work manual in your head to add up those numbers, or you could use this tool that is still a machine. So it needs that human input, but
I think anybody not using it is kind of going to be left behind to be honest because they're not going be able to keep up with the speed of things.
Melissa Aarskaug (19:18.683)
Yeah, I agree. think, you know, it's amazing how much has changed with for me when I write posts, like I write, I handwrite all my own posts. And then, you know, I'm sometimes squirrely with my writing and I miss commas. And I, you know, I use it to clean up any of the grammatical errors with what I'm writing. Or I put in, you know, forget apostrophes, but it's amazing.
I see so much of this similar post. could tell it's been used, know, AI has been used a lot just because I can see similar words a lot that people are using.
Holly (20:00.505)
you're diving deep into things. Yeah. Nelving in. Everything's an oasis. Yeah, so one of my favorite prompts to use...
Melissa Aarskaug (20:02.515)
Yeah, yeah, delving in. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah.
Holly (20:13.24)
If you have, I mean there's multiple AI programs, I'm just gonna use the one that everybody is used to. I use it on my phone because social media managers, we have wrecked our hands. I'm telling you now, I'm gonna have problems when I'm older. So I'll actually voice record and I'll say, listen to the tone of my voice and I want you to reflect that in your writing. You're gonna act as my social media content creator and you're gonna write a post about how much I enjoy being on this podcast.
And that's it, 13 seconds of talking to it. And the output that it's going to give me is had an absolute blast being on your podcast. It was a great conversation. I really appreciated the chance to explore these topics with host name, right? I didn't give it the details. So you can work with it in very intelligently by telling it exactly what you want it to do. You know, listen to the way that I speak and copy my tone of voice.
Melissa Aarskaug (21:08.165)
Yep. And I'm assuming that was chat GPT. Yeah. Yeah. It's that's a really good advice to actually talk to it. Cause you're right. We're all like all day typing at work, typing at home, typing, typing. And so that's a really good, really good nugget, to share with our listeners in looking forward, next year and beyond. there any specific trends that people should watch for?
Holly (21:10.83)
Yeah.
Melissa Aarskaug (21:35.554)
as it pertains to social media and building their brand.
Holly (21:38.744)
Yeah, I'm really enjoying this part of my career. I've worked in social media for over 13 years now and my entire career I have had to battle.
the question of can you buy me followers? And I have fought the good fight as much as I can and said no. And now what we're seeing is the platforms going after the fake followers and cleaning them out. I laugh when I see people on threads saying, why is Instagram telling me that 70,000 of my followers are flagged for removal? And I'm going, because they're not real. So you're going to see a bunch of brands that have bought followers and celebrities, and it's a lot of people.
Melissa Aarskaug (22:13.843)
Mm.
Holly (22:18.978)
You're going to see them drop in followers. We've already been able to tell, like our team, so I have a team of six, we can tell when somebody has bought followers based on their engagement rate or when they haven't done the work to be social based on their engagement rate. This is just going to even the playing field and it's finally going to move, I think, in 2025. We're going to move away from the vanity metrics play and we're really going to start focusing on authentic community building connections.
Influencers are not holding as large of a market share as they did before. People are getting really annoyed with influencers because it's not real. You're going to see UGC creators, the micro influencers or content creators really take a huge piece of that pie and I think they should. And the most important thing is with brands and businesses, if you're not investing your time or money into your social media, then
Your competitors are going to they're gonna wipe you off the board simple as that like I To me it's always shocking when somebody says I don't have a website as a business and I'm That's And you don't exist online. So again going back to this idea we live Half of our time in the national world and half our time in the digital world if you don't have that website How do you exist and you know if you don't have that social media?
How are you telling people that you exist? So yeah, I think you're gonna see a lot of brands and businesses starting to invest. We're seeing it now. We're starting to get clients in industries that are, we call them the boring industries, but it's really necessary. Manufacturing, banking, all this sort of, you know, these traditionally non-social media friendly businesses go, we need you to do this for us. And we're going, yeah, you do. You really do. So.
Melissa Aarskaug (24:16.731)
Yeah, I agree. I use it to make a lot of decisions in my life on a lot of things I do or don't do. I wanted to ask, I meant to ask earlier and I forgot, but I want to ask you a little bit about, so social media is a lot of, it's a lot of work, right? Whatever platform you're using, engaging, writing, developing your own custom content takes time and thought.
So can you share like if somebody is new to social media and they're trying to grow their brand and they're trying to decide what platform They should work with or watch two platforms. How do you suggest they make those decisions?
Holly (24:56.238)
Yeah, you start by looking at your existing clients or if you don't have any clients yet, who do you want as clients? So if we look at existing clients, where are they spending most of their time? And even ask them, you have customers and you're thinking of getting into this, which social media platforms do you use the most? If it's B2C, you're probably gonna be on more of the meta TikTok based, so Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, maybe.
depending on the type of business. B2B, if you can hear my dog snoring, I apologize, she is laying right beside me. B2B, you're gonna be on LinkedIn, a new one that's really taking over a lot of the market share is alignable. That's a wonderful platform if you haven't been on there yet. So it's who do you wanna connect with and start there. If choose your primary platform and then keep on adding platforms to it as you get comfortable building.
The other thing is don't get hung up on comparing yourself to other businesses and brands. I don't have a thousand followers so therefore it's not working. No, you have to grow it. you know getting to that first thousand is the hardest part.
Melissa Aarskaug (26:12.325)
Yeah, and I know like a lot of times I've been hearing that people are using
to respond on social media. And it's interesting. So I've had it happen to me personally where I respond to the messages, let's say on a Saturday, and I respond to, I don't know, 20 of them on a Saturday. I've been kicked off my LinkedIn because they think I'm a bot responding to the messages too quick. And so I do know LinkedIn is starting to become really savvy with what's a bot, what tools are connected.
you know, scraped data or whatever, however they're doing it, but, it's, it'll be interesting next year to see how, you know, people, the real followers show up and the real engagement shows up. And so I'm anxious to see how that goes. any kind of enclosing any final thoughts or anything you want to share, that we may have missed about social media and building a personal brand.
Holly (27:15.652)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is when you're learning, go to the source directly to learn. A lot of the platforms offer courses for free and teach you how to use them. you know, don't go to university for social media by like, that's crazy. You're going to spend a small fortune learning something that'll be outdated by the time you graduate. These platforms change every day and the best source to learn about the platforms is directly from the platforms. They will always be the first to tell you about their features.
announcements and what is happening or how to do different things in those platforms. And then the second thing is to look for people that are succeeding on social media and really pay attention to what they're doing to succeed. Why is their content going viral?
you know, how do they respond to their community? But I think the biggest thing is there are no shortcuts in social media. There's never been shortcuts in social media. And, you know, as soon as somebody comes up with a shortcut or a fast way of doing things, the platforms are going to shut it down because everything comes back to the commodity of social media is user attention. So if you do something to take even your attention away from it, it's not going to work.
Melissa Aarskaug (28:33.009)
Yeah, that's great advice, Holly. I wanna thank you so much for sharing your time and your knowledge with us. I know I've sure learned some nuggets from you and thank you for being on and joining us today on the Executive Connect Podcast.
Holly (28:48.153)
Thanks for having me.