Thank you mary beth kaplan🪶, Margaret Williams, MS, ACC, Songletter, Monica Von, Xave, and many others for tuning into my live stream, and thank you for putting up with my technical challenges!
We covered a lot here, so here’s a quick run down.
1. Stop cosplaying as a social media manager. You spend 5 hours a day on Instagram, you’re not building an audience… you’re doing an unpaid job. Social media managers get salaries! If you’re doing it part-time and expecting full-time results, that math doesn’t work, and the 5 hours you’re giving to the platforms could go toward the actual skill you’re trying to develop.
2. The follower number you’re counting on is already gone. Every day someone logs into Instagram for the last time, which means some meaningful percentage of your followers have stopped showing up. You can’t convert someone who isn’t even there anymore! yet another reason to stop trying to build your follower count and focus on getting the right people onto your email list.
3. The conversion math is brutal, so think smaller. Maybe 5% of followers see a post, and 1% of those might click. Then maaaaybe 1-2% of those might subscribe. Run those numbers on your actual follower count and it gets depressing. The fix probably isn’t posting more, it’s getting into real conversations with a smaller number of people.
4. Your own subscribers don’t know everything you do. Even people who’ve been on your list for years may not know about everything you do. This isn’t a failure of communication, it’s just how attention works. Fans of major bands miss tour dates and album drops all the time. The answer is to keep talking about your stuff. Then talk about it more.
5. “Show up additive, participatory, and aware.” This came from a Substack post by Dakota Ray Lowe (director of brand and social at Nordstrom).
Love this idea: don’t show up to extract something, show up to add something. This applies to Substack Notes, to live streams, to the coffee shop. It’s all about connection first, and the subscriber might follow (maybe).
