253: 5 Social Media Strategies That Are Working Right Now

Ever felt caught in the social media whirlwind, yet can't deny its pull on your business's success? This week we're tackling the complex love-hate relationship with these digital platforms. From the latest strategies that are rocking the social media landscape in 2024 to embracing the burnout without letting it defeat us, this episode is your guide through the maze. Whether you're a social media pro or someone cautiously reevaluating its role in your marketing toolkit, I've got insights that promise to reshape how you engage with your audience online.


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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast, the show where we're all about helping you feel confident, both as a mom and a business owner. I'm your host, kendra Swalls, mom of two, former teacher and full-time photographer, and business coach. Each week we'll discuss the challenges, success and secrets that make you say I can do this, because you absolutely can. So pop in those earbuds, grab your favorite snack and let's dive in, because this girl means business. Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast. We have a really exciting episode for you today, but before we get into the episode, a couple of things I just want to kind of chit chat about. One is I'm going to pre-apologize for any ambient noise you hear in the background of today's episode. I am currently recording this with the windows in my office open for two reasons One, it's really nice out and two, we've just cleaned some of our carpets and I need them to dry, and so hopefully there won't be a whole lot of outside noise. I do live pretty close to a train I can currently hear it in the distance and so if you hear train noises or birds chirping, just know that it's because I have my windows open. Okay, today's topic is all about social media and the things that are working, so the trends that are working on social media in 2024. Now, to kind of pull the curtain back a little bit on this episode I have had this episode on my schedule of shows to record for about two and a half months now because I really originally was going to record this and put it out closer to the beginning of the year and then I kind of pushed it back and I sort of kept just kicking the can down the road because one I felt like I don't know that this is really what I wanted you to be focusing on when it came to your marketing. I felt like there were so many other things in business and marketing that I want people to focus on that.

Speaker 1: 2:12

By putting out an episode about social media, I was like I don't want to be the shiny thing, like I don't want to be the thing that distracts you from what's actually going to help you grow your business, and not that social media can't help you. I have just found and this brings me to point number two that for the last two months I have been in a very love-hate more on the hate side of my relationship with social media. I have been in major burnout mode. I have taken a step back from really even like posting on social media a whole lot, engaging on social media a whole lot, and I have done that for a couple of reasons, one, like I said, I've just been in this burnout mode where I just am frustrated with social media, and I know I'm not alone in this, because I see a lot of people feeling the same way. I've had conversations with people who feel the same way, and yet it seems to be the thing we all sort of fall back to when we feel like our business isn't growing. We're like, well, I just need to be on social media more, I need to be posting more, I need to be more visible. So on those notes I was like, well, if I'm having these feelings about social media and I know a lot of other people are having these same feelings, then what are some things I can test during this you know, low point with social media to see, like, do we really need to be focusing all this time and energy on social media? And so I've been diving into other things, which we'll talk about in future episodes in more detail, in future episodes in more detail.

Speaker 1: 3:51

But ultimately, I decided to put this episode out because, even though I'm feeling a certain way about social media at the moment, even though I am taking a step back, there are those of you out there who listen to this show, who are having success on social media, who are still really enjoying it, who have found your audience there, or those of you who are like I'm feeling a little bit of the frustration, but I'm not ready to just kind of like throw the towel in yet, and so, for those reasons, I felt like it was a good time to kind of put this episode out, talking about some of the trends, some of the things that we're kind of seeing in 2024 when it comes to social media and using social media as a valid marketing strategy. So I'm putting aside my own frustrations with social media to bring you this episode, and I do want to say one more thing before we jump into the five strategies is that if you find yourself like nodding along as I'm talking about my burnout and my frustration, you're not alone, like it's not just you and me. There's a lot of people like I have conversations on a regular basis with other business owners who are like oh, I just have to kind of do the social media thing, or I really don't want to do this, or I wish there was something else, or, you know, I know that I need to have a presence. That's why I'm doing it, but it always comes with kind of this like sigh of like I guess I better do this, like check it off my to-do list. And so you're not alone in feeling that way. I have even seen some very large social media accounts Like we're talking hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of followers, and they are having the same frustrations, they're having the same feelings of is this really working right now? Is this really worth my time and energy right now? And so you're not alone. However, it is a necessary evil to some degree.

Speaker 1: 5:43

I do believe that social media has a place in our marketing strategy toolbox. Now, how much of a place it holds is up to you, based on your personal experiences with social media and your personal feelings towards social media. However, I do feel like it is a decent tool. It is a somewhat necessary tool that we need to at least have some awareness of and some strategy behind so that we can be utilizing it to the best of our ability. So that is my goal with this episode is that those of us who are kind of like I know I need to at least have a presence on here. What are the things I need to be focusing on so that I'm not just spinning my wheels, so that I'm not just out here kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall? I'm hoping something sticks. I actually have a plan, a strategy behind the time I spend on these platforms. So hopefully this will give you that strategy and some of those ideas to get you a little bit more feeling like you're not stuck in these old ways when it comes to using social media, because that is a problem.

Speaker 1: 6:50

I do see A lot of people who have been using social media for a long time several years is. They're still trying to use the same strategies that worked three or four or five or six years ago. And social media evolves, just like every marketing platform and strategy evolves. We have to evolve with it, and so if we're not let me back up If we're going to use these platforms to help us grow our business, we have to know what the platform wants from us and we have to know what is working right now with the audience that is on that platform. So all of that to say that is the motivation and the idea behind today's episode, and diving into some of the you know five of the things that are currently working on social media right now. So let's go ahead and get into them All right.

Speaker 1: 7:40

Number one is less focus on trends and more of a focus on just high quality personal content. So for a long time, there was this heavy presence of these trending audios, these trending reels, even trending posts when it came to carousels and static images, and I still see some of this happening. But the audience that's on social media is getting really bored with scrolling through the feed and seeing the same thing over and over again or hearing the same song over and over again. I just saw this recently with Beyonce's Texas Hold'em song Y'all. I literally was on Instagram and I opened the Reels tab and I swear I kid you not for like five swipes it was the exact same song on every single Reel.

Speaker 1: 8:38

Now, the content was different on each Reel, but the audio was the exact same and it, like it, made me close out the app. I was like I can't do this. I can't listen to the song anymore. I can't just look at all the different ways people are putting this song on there, because the only reason they were doing it was because they were hoping that by using that song it would get them noticed and it just felt icky, like. It just felt like it was. You know what's that? Saying that a lot of kids use, like the pick me, pick me, girl. Like it felt like that. It was like, ooh, okay, so the popular kid in school wears this kind of shirt, so if I wear that kind of shirt and we all wear that kind of shirt and we all look the same, then they're going to like all of us equally. That's exactly how it felt with these audio trends. Is that it was like saying, if the cool kid is using the audio trend, and then I use the audio trend, I'm going to be cool as well. When really, we're just draining people of their excitement over coming to this platform and consuming content, because there's nothing that makes us different from each other and that is part of what people want when they come to these platforms is they want to say like, okay, show me what you got, but if everything they show you is the exact same, what's the reason for sticking around? And so now, in 2024, the audience is becoming more and more vocal, I guess, about saying things like I don't want to see the same thing every single time.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Another thing, which I'm going to be honest I jumped on this trend and I was like, as soon as I posted, I was like, oh, I'm one of those people, I'm a pick me person, so, but it was one of those things where it was like people were posting these carousels that would say, like, social media is not real. Here's five things that I, you know, have been happening behind the scenes, or five things I haven't really shared with you, and then they would share, like you know, five kind of real life things like struggles they were having, or things that you know they didn't talk about on social media but that were happening in their lives. And I loved the idea behind it. I loved the idea of like, let's normalize talking about the messy parts of our life. But again, for a while, like you would scroll through Instagram and you would see the same post, just with a different person's face on it, and it just started to be like, oh, I am just done with this, this thing, like, and I know, like, the Swifties are going to come for me when I say this, and I'm just going to preface this by saying I mean no, like disrespect to her. She's awesome, but that's how I feel sometimes about Taylor Swift songs is that the first time I hear them I'm like, oh, this is catchy, like this is genius lyric writing. It's so smart. I love like the message behind it. But then by the third or fourth time that I hear it, I'm like and I'm done, like, move on something new, give me something different. And so that's how social media has become. It's become this sort of white noise of everything looks and sounds the same.

Speaker 1: 11:46

And so in 2024, the trend that we want to kind of go towards is creating this high quality content that feels very unique. And the reason why those trends have worked so well, or the trends have been so easy to hop on board with, is because they're easy to make. You don't have to think for yourself. You just go, look at what this other person has done, or you grab the audio they've already used and you just put your own content to it. There's not a whole lot of creativity required, but what our social media audience is asking for is they're saying can you please put a little bit more time and effort into your content to give me something that feels authentic, something that feels different, something that makes me stop scrolling and go oh what's that? Because it doesn't look or sound like everybody else's.

Speaker 1: 12:52

So, yes, this trend, this you know kind of idea of less trends and more, I realized the irony of less trends is no trends but or less trend is a trend, but the idea behind. Can we put a little bit more effort into creating high quality content that resonates with our audience, even though it might not look or sound like everybody else's? That's okay. That's actually what we want. You want your content to be what stops them from scrolling and makes them go. Oh, this is different. I want to see what this has to say, or what this is about. And, yes, that's going to require more of your time and it's going to mean that you're probably going to maybe create less content overall because you're putting a little bit more effort into the content pieces you're creating. But that's okay. I would prefer that you create less content that is high quality, unique to you and your brand and your audience, than for you to just spout out 10 pieces of content a week that look like everybody else's, so that is kind of trend.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Number one is that we are moving away from actual trends and moving more towards this authentic, high quality, personalized content for you and your audience. All right, moving on to number two, which is collaborations, and I've talked about this a little bit before, and it's something that I have seen work really really well in pretty much every niche or industry out there, and collaborations are really powerful because not only are you building a relationship with another brand or another small business that can ultimately lead to a ton of things down the road, but you are getting access to their audience, essentially for free, and so collaborations can look like a lot of different things. When it comes to social media, the most common one that we see is literal collaborations, like you'll see one creator who has partnered with another creator to jointly produce some kind of piece of content, whether it is a reel or a carousel, or they do a live together, or you know they advertise that they are doing a workshop together that you can sign up for, and you kind of see that graphic where both their faces are on it and they're advertising whatever it is they want you to swipe through or watch or do, and that's the most common collaboration. And that one is probably the most basic one to do, because it's literally just you kind of create this piece of content in conjunction with each other, you share it to your both your pages or you. You know, you tag each other or you'd use the collaboration tool on Instagram and it gets your face in front of their audience and vice versa. So it's a win-win. Honestly, if you have people in your sphere that are like have a similar audience to you, and you can say, hey, let's do something together, let's create a piece of content together, it's easy. It doesn't require a lot of effort or work on either party's part. It doesn't require them to add in something to their marketing schedule that they already have. They're literally just saying, sure, create this carousel post, I'll stick my name on it, my face on it, I'll contribute to the content, and then we both share it out and we get to cross promote each other's audiences. So that's a common, easy way to collaborate.

Speaker 1: 17:30

Another one is to actually collaborate with a small business off of social media. You can advertise it on social media, but you really are creating the collaboration and the networking off of social media. So a perfect example of this is one of my members inside the Focus Photographer Lab. She is a family photographer and in our one-on-one coaching calls we had talked a lot about her working with other small businesses in her area. So how could she create these relationships, these collaborations that would ultimately lead to her getting in front of a new set of eyes, new, new set of audiences?

Speaker 1: 18:09

And so back in the fall, right before Christmas, she had met up with this owner of a local boutique and they had decided to do a little, um, like Christmas not really themed, because it was really just a white backdrop and it was photos of the kids but like a holiday event where families could come in. They get 10 minutes of a little mini photo shoot with their kids. They get to pick one of the images and they get a little ornament picture frame that the picture goes inside of and I can't remember the price point, but basically they paid one price, they got the one photo of the ornament and they could add on more photos that they wanted to. So it was driving people into the shop because they were coming in for their photos and then shopping and buying stuff, and then she was getting more people to recognize her name. She was getting to show off what she does, and if people who were coming in not for the purpose of getting the photo shoot but to actually shop, we're going to be like, ooh, who's this photographer y'all have here? So it was a great opportunity for both of them. It was a win-win for both of them and now they have future collaborations in the works. They're going to be doing a little mother's day type session. They're going to be. They've been talking about doing something later down the road again, and so collaborations like that can work offline as well as they can online.

Speaker 1: 19:33

So if you, you know, have an in-person option to your product or your service, then you know collaborate with someone to offer that in-person you know item or service, or work together to do a project of some kind. You can advertise it and market it on social media together jointly, but ultimately it happens offline. Two other ways you can do collaborations One is with giveaways. So I collaborated back in the fall with a couple of other small business owners in the photography space to do a giveaway. I talked about it, I kind of broke it down here on the podcast a couple months ago and it was a great experience. I feel like that everybody involved benefited from it. We were able to again get our names in front of other people's audiences who were similar to our audiences, and it ended up being a great experience all the way around. So that's another way you can collaborate.

Speaker 1: 20:30

The final way it takes a little bit more work but it has a pretty big payoff, and that is working with larger brands. So right now, a big influence in I mean larger brands. So right now, a big influence in I mean a big influence a big trend in social media is that companies, brands, larger brands are wanting to work with these like micro and nano influencers. So what that means is, if you have anywhere from a thousand to 10,000 followers and you have a pretty engaged group of followers, then these brands want to work with you, because what they have found is that if they have a Instagram account with 5,000 followers but the engagement rate is like 40 or 50%, that's huge and they're going to be able to have a bigger impact with a 40 to 50% engagement rate at 5,000 followers than they are with someone who has a thousand or, you know, 100,000 followers but only like a 1% engagement rate or less than 1% engagement rate, because the larger you're following gets, the less your engagement rate like it goes down. So if you are someone who is like leaning towards kind of the influencer style content, then this might be an opportunity for you to reach out or start building a connection with some of these other brands that you could potentially partner with and get paid to talk about their products or services on your Instagram and social media accounts. All right.

Speaker 1: 22:07

Number three is user-generated content, or what I'm calling social proof. Now, user-generated content is not anything new in 2024. A lot of influencers and brands have been using user generated content for a while. However, I do think that in 2024 and going forward, smaller brands need to be using the same idea behind user generated content for social proof. So let me kind of break this down.

Speaker 1: 22:40

User generated content is any content that is created about your brand by someone else. So if I have you know I have this podcast. So if I were to go on Instagram and I see that someone who listens to the podcast has created a post with their top five favorite podcasts they listened to and my podcast is listed as one of those five, that's technically user-generated content I could then share that to my feed or to my stories as social proof. It is showing that, as the owner of the business, as the creator of the content for my business, it's easy for me to come on here and say like, oh, this is so great, listen to the podcast, or buy my product or invest in my service or hire me for X, y or Z. It's easy for me to say that. And as an audience member, someone watching that content, it's easy for me to go. Well, yeah, of course you're going to say it's great, it's your product or service, it's your business.

Speaker 1: 23:43

Where user generated content comes in is now you are going to the actual user and they are creating content that says I use this product, or I've purchased the service, or I have worked with this person and here's my experience with it, or here is my review of it, or here is whatever it is. They're talking about it. We see this a ton with influencers. It's basically what influencer marketing is. These brands will hire these influencers to talk about their product. Like, let's say, it's a coffee brand and they hire an influencer to create content and she makes a video that is, you know, my morning routine and in that she talks about her favorite coffee that she has to have every morning to make her feel like she can go through the rest of her day is this black bean coffee, whatever the brand is. And so that is user-generated content. It is not the coffee brand coming out and saying, hey, you should add us to your morning routine because we're going to help you feel refreshed and excited to take on your day. It's the actual user saying I drink this coffee because it helps me, you know, feel alert and ready to tackle my tasks for the day.

Speaker 1: 24:54

So that is providing social proof. What that's doing is I'll go back to the example of the podcast proof what that's doing is I'll go back to the example of the podcast. If someone comes across my podcast on Instagram and they go and they see that everything is me sharing about this, these episodes, and listen to this and this is so great, and look how many downloads I've got and look how many you know, whatever all the accolades, that comes through a specific filter in our brains. As I can only take that with a grain of salt because it's coming from the person who created the content. It's coming from the person behind the brand. Now, if they came to my site or my page and they see a bunch of user generated content, with all these people talking about how much they love the podcast, with all these people talking about you know why this is on their top five list of podcasts they listen to or sharing their favorite episodes, or sharing a quote or a clip from an episode they've listened to. And now the person viewing my content sees it through a totally different filter. They're like oh wow, look how many people are talking about this podcast. I want to go listen to it because all these other people have told me that they enjoy it. It's not coming from the host of the podcast, it's coming from all these other people.

Speaker 1: 26:08

This is why having reviews and testimonials for your business is so important, because it is social proof that shows other people potential clients of yours that other people have already worked with you, other people have had a good experience with you, and it can also kind of show that you're in high demand, because all these other people are raving about what it is that you do. So that same idea that we utilize in reviews whether it's Google reviews, facebook reviews, wherever you're getting reviews at it applies to social media as well. We want to be sharing that social proof. So asking your audience to share about your brand, to share about your business on social media and then resharing that on your post on your feed, that is social proof and that is something we're going to see a lot of, I think, going forward, and we're going to see a lot of brands kind of asking for that because they recognize that that is the most powerful form of marketing is when other people can market your business for you. It speaks volumes about your brand, more so than you going on and talking about how great your brand is, and so, on that note, I am going to shamelessly plug.

Speaker 1: 27:22

My own request here is that I would love to have social proof. I would love to have user generated content for this podcast to share with my audience on social media. So if you're listening to this episode and you have found it helpful, or if you have a favorite episode from the past that you just really love, I would love for you to go and talk about it on your Instagram stories or post about it on your Instagram feed. Talk about why you like the podcast, or pull out a little clip or a phrase or a quote from this episode or a past episode and share it and then tag me and I will put you onto my Instagram account. I would love that. So this is me shamelessly plugging that I would love to share your user-generated content for this podcast. If you feel inclined to create that, that would be awesome, and I will say that if you're asking people to create user-generated content for your brand, it's helpful. If you're doing it for other brands as well. It's that give and take idea.

Speaker 1: 28:19

Okay, moving on, because we got two more to go through, we're gonna go through the last two fairly quickly. Number four is SEO on social media. I've talked a little bit about this in the past, but it is definitely something that we're leaning more into going in through 2024. The idea that you can add, you know, up to 30 hashtags on your post and that that's going to help categorize your content in these little buckets is not really how social media is working anymore, especially on places like Instagram and possibly TikTok. I don't use TikTok a whole lot, if ever, so I'm not 100% sure, but I do know for sure on Instagram that this is something that they are moving towards and they really have been moving towards for a while. In fact, there's a new update that's rolled out. Not everybody has it yet. So if you don't have it, don't feel like you're, you know, missing something here.

Speaker 1: 29:11

But when you go to post like a caption on Instagram, now for a lot of people they limit you to five hashtags only, and I know that other platforms have kind of done this as well. But the reason they're doing that is because hashtags don't have the power they used to have. The people aren't really engaging with hashtags the way that they used to anymore. The social media algorithms are sophisticated enough now that they can comb through your content, pull out the keywords and decipher kind of what audience to show your content to based on those keywords. So the reason this is important to know is because this means we need to be strategic in the wording and the captions we put with our content.

Speaker 1: 30:00

So if you're creating a reel and let's say, for example, that you are creating a reel and you are speaking to brides, you're a wedding planner, you own a dress shop, you're a wedding photographer, whatever you do something with weddings by calling out your audience in your content hey, brides, if you're planning your wedding for the fall of 2024, you know, and then insert your whatever your content pieces or, you know, adding it into the caption, like calling all brides or this one's for the, you know fall bride, whatever, like using those little keywords in a natural way is going to help tell social media who your content is for. So this is where I see a lot of creatives, especially making the same mistake they've been making for years on social media, and it drives me nuts is they want to throw up a really pretty picture of their product or their service or whatever it is they do, their art and then they just add in, like this flowery, pointless caption to it. So let's say that you're a photographer and you put up a picture of a beautiful family playing in a field somewhere at sunset and the caption you put is some cheesy quote about you know, enjoying the small things in life. Guys, that's not helping you in any way, shape or form. Ok, not only is it not interesting to your audience, but it's not telling the algorithm who this content is for. The algorithm is looking at your caption and going what the like who am I supposed to show this to? It's a quote about enjoying the small things in life, like what? So you want to think about it when you're creating your content and you're putting out these captions and even putting words in your reels, or the things you're saying in your reel, or the words you put on your, your graphics, your carousels all of that matters. The algorithm can scan all of those things. So, strategically using words that call out your audience are going to help you get your content in front of the right type of audience.

Speaker 1: 32:08

Now you can still use hashtags. Again, use them sparingly. But if you're going to use hashtags, they need to be hyper specific, so we no longer want to use very generic hashtags. So if you're putting up that post and it's the pretty family playing at sunset in a field and you have created this powerful caption where you're calling out your audience, you're sharing some value, you have a call to action and then you want to add some hashtags at the bottom, then get very specific with those hashtags. Let's say that that family is at Centennial Park in South Lake, texas, so then one of your hashtags could be Centennial Park, south Lake, or maybe it's. You know, you're posting a picture of a product you're selling and it's a really cute like little clear stadium bag. So then your hashtag could be hashtag clear stadium bags. Like. Be very specific. We don't want to use things like family or love or sunset or, you know, things like trends. We don't want to use those hashtags anymore. You're going to want them to be incredibly specific to your content and then use them very sparingly, because the real value is going to come from those keywords you're putting into your content themselves.

Speaker 1: 35:21

All right, last but not least, the number five strategy or trend that I see going into and running through 2024 and really just going forward is the use of AI tools. Now, this comes with kind of like a dual-sided, you know coin here, like two sides of the coin. One is that, yes, ai tools are everywhere and people are using them like crazy and it can be incredibly helpful, but the flip side of that is is that social media has to get smarter, and it's going to get smarter and it's going to be prioritizing authentic content versus AI generated content. So what I mean by that is, if you are creating all of your captions in chat GPT and you're not modifying them in any way, it's going to start to sound a little robotic in some ways. Even though chat GPT can be great for creating content and it can have like a really good voice behind it, it still does not have the human touch. And so sort of that balancing act we're having to do right now on social media and just in marketing in general is we have to find this like happy medium of I'm using AI tools, but I'm not going a hundred percent AI tools so that I'm not adding any personal touches to it.

Speaker 1: 36:45

So one of the most popular AI tools that I see being used on social media right now and I use it and I love it is keyword automation. So there's a program called Minichat. I've talked about it here multiple times in the podcast, I will link to it down in the show notes and what it does is it allows you to automatically communicate with people who comment a specific keyword on your content, and this can be done on Instagram primarily, but you can also do it on Facebook. I think you can do it on TikTok. I'm not sure. I've only used it for Instagram and maybe once or twice on Facebook, but the way that it works is you create content and you say comment below with the word summer and I will send you X, y or Z, whatever it is. I have one, for example, on my Instagram accounts where it's like comment the word pod, and I will send you a link to listen to the podcast or comment the word you know, shop and I will send you a link to my Etsy shop or my Shopify store or whatever.

Speaker 1: 37:53

But the benefit of using this is that, well, there's multiple benefits. One is that it creates instant engagement. So there's an account that it's a very large social media account that I help kind of manage as part of one of the like side jobs that I have is that I'm helping manage this account. It's a, you know, almost a million followers, and this person creates a lot of content using keyword automation. So I would say probably maybe over half, maybe close to two thirds of the content this person is putting out is keyword automations and when they put out a post with keyword automations, they will get thousands of comments, close to 5,000, 6,000, sometimes 8,000 comments on a single post. When they put out a piece of content that is not keyword automation and they're just asking people to comment their thoughts or, to you know, let them know their opinion on something, or do you like this, do you not like this, they get a couple hundred comments and that's it. So the engagement rate does has proven on multiple accounts to go higher when you're using these keyword automations, because what happens is it takes the work out of the comment.

Speaker 1: 39:07

So, if you have two pieces of content, you're using these keyword automations because what happens is it takes the work out of the comment. So if you have two pieces of content you're putting on social media, one of them is, let's say, you're running a special for summer for your product or service and you say, okay, I'm offering 20% off of, you know, my services through July 4th. If you book with me before July 4th, you can save 20%. You know, comment below or send me a DM to learn more. Okay, well, you're probably not going to get a ton of engagement on that. However, if you share a post that says, hey, I'm running a summer sale, it's 20% off of any product or services from now until July 4th, comment below with the word summer and I will send you a link to view all my pricing or all my service. You know service options. You're probably going to get a lot more people commenting summer because one, it doesn't require them to come up with a, you know, original thought. They literally just can type in a word and they get the information.

Speaker 1: 40:07

The other piece of that is. It takes a little bit of the fear, which sounds weird, but let me explain. It takes some of the fear out of it. So when someone goes onto social media and they come across a post and there's an open-ended question on that post and they're asking their audience to just randomly comment their thoughts, it's a little bit like kind of nerve wracking to go in there and say, like I'm going to share my personal thoughts on something in front of all of these people, like the people that follow them, everyone that sees this comment, or they're going to comment on my comments, like, am I going to, you know, end up canceled because of my thoughts or my opinions? It takes some of that fear out. There's also the fear of like. If I comment on this post about the discount or I send the DM, are they going to try to, like, you know, sales pitch me? Am I going to be guilted into buying something from them? So by using these keyword automations, it takes some of that pressure off of your audience and it makes it easier for them to engage with you and your content.

Speaker 1: 41:10

Now, some of the other AI tools that people are using, obviously for content creation. There's a lot of tools out there that will help you create captions, create graphics. Pretty much every platform out there right now that's related to social media has some AI functions or capabilities Canva you go into Canva and they have all kinds of AI features. They have AI generate images where you can type in you know, I want an image of a cat riding a unicorn eating chocolate cake and it will generate that image for you. You can tell it to then write a caption and it will create text to put on or not a caption, but it will create text to put on top of that graphic. There's so many features that can help you. So AI is definitely one of those trends that I see sticking around for a long time and there are lots of ways that you can jump on board of the AI trend without having to go full like everything's automated, everything's robotic. You can just kind of dip your toe in with things like the mini chat or using AI features that tools you're already using for your social media have available to you.

Speaker 1: 42:27

All right, so that is gonna wrap up our five social media trends that are working right now, and I know this episode ran a little bit longer than usual. I kind of got a little on my soapbox about a couple of these things. I'm gonna little bit down some rabbit holes, but that's okay. I hope you found it useful. As always, I would love for you to share your thoughts on this episode, share your favorite clips or quotes, or share it to your Instagram stories that you're listening. Just take a quick screenshot and share it to your stories.

Speaker 1: 42:57

Make sure you tag me at girlmeansbusiness and if you have any questions or want to learn more about any of the trends we've talked about in today's episode, you can always message me over on Instagram at girlmeansbusiness or shoot me a message at kendra at girlmeansbusinesscom. I hope you have a fabulous week and I will see you back here next week. Same time, same place. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to take a screenshot, share it to social media and don't forget to tag. Girl means business and, as always, we greatly appreciate any reviews you leave for this podcast. Thank you.