Likes & Dislikes

Every December I check multiple websites to help me brainstorm content ideas for the following year, like fun holidays related to my industry. Is there a particular website/source that you’ve found helpful to plan content? 

Likes: Finishing up my trial of Social Sprout and signing up for a subscription. Love this platform!Dislike: Why can my business page get Meta Verified and not the Facebook page? Going through the support chat was just a runaround with no solution yet.

My biggest dislike and what makes me feel most uncomfortable about working in social media. We’ve stopped using it as an organisation and I wonder how many other brands are moving away from active posting?

A BIG WIN!Carousels on X and IG are huge engagement drivers for us. We consistently see 100%+ engagement rates on this media type.

Me and AI have a very complicated relationship. I’m a one person social team, so when the tools first launched I was relying on them heavily. I championed for them, I fought back when people said the tools were scary, and I was looking forward to the future of my job being easier because of them.But now? I’m starting to get tired.I’m tired of every single platform shoving new (and most of the time un-necessary) AI tools in my face to do something I’ve never needed AI to do before.Want to write a LinkedIn post? REWRITE IT USING OUR NEW AI TOOL, IT’S GREAT YOU’LL LOVE IT! Want to look for a stock photo on Adobe? TOO BAD, HERE’S 4 PAGES OF AI GENERATED SMOOTH TEXTURE 6 FINGER HANDS! Want to ask a question about a product? HERE, TRY OUR AI CHATBOT THAT TOALLY KNOWS HOW TO HELP!The worst part of it all is that almost all of these tools feel rushed, have y’all noti

Likes: holiday content is fun to create & caption! loving the “color of the year” content that always comes around this time of year  Dislikes: goblins, ghouls, people’s knees (bonus points if you get the It’s Always Sunny reference) For real though, there is a lot of pressure to perform around the holidays. We invest a good bit of time and resources into our content creation, and it’s disheartening when sometimes things don’t perform. However, there’s always the opportunity to learn through looking at the numbers & making sure we change up the strategy when things don’t land. 

One random thing that’s been working is text on photos on IG carousels! Kind of similar to how you’d add text to a TikTok carousel photo. We’ve done more branded designs recently but I want to transition to a casual approach using IG story text and cropping for the grid 👀

Just analyzed our year over year performance with sprout and we are way up on engagements and on track for our impression KPIs!  

Likes: I love learning about AI tools and how they can help with day to day tasks. I use them often for writing captions, planning out blog posts, and general brainstorming. I can’t wait to learn more about AI tools that can help with video creation.Dislikes: The organic reach on Instagram and Facebook sucks. I post every day, but not a ton of people see my posts. And I know that Reels and Carousels perform better, but it’s not always feasible for every post to fall under those categories (not to mention, those are more time-consuming). I work at a nonprofit, so we just don’t have the budget to pay for ads all the time. Very frustrating.

One of the biggest struggles in my day-to-day as a social media professional is getting residents to click on links for more information. A lot of City projects or programs need more details than can fit in a social media post so we leave a link in the post. The number of comments we get asking things that are in the linked article is a lot. Even the number of questions we get asking things that are included in the posts. It’s really hard to get people to read nowadays. 

One of my challenges is that people are constantly asking questions about things that I have JUST posted about. They do not take the time to look for the answer they just seem to want everything spoon fed to them. I usually answer the question with the added component of showing them where they can find the answer themselves. A lot of my time is spent this way but that is the nature of customer service via social media I suppose.

What’s working for us is posting more carousels, especially with songs in Instagram (their now-looser music licensing is also a win!) After reading that those would show up on the reels tab, I gave it a try and have seen great results from it! Linkedin, while it doesn’t post in a carousel format, has also loved the multi-photo posts. A current challenge is that I’m still eagerly awaiting Trial Reels to be rolled out to me. I’m looking forward to playing around with some new audiences and getting to A/B test outside of our followers.

The ease of using AI cannot be ignored. It helps make posting quicker and easier. However, I do not like how I can scroll through a feed and immediately know which posts are AI generated. There is not enough variation in the tone or vocabulary of the responses generated. 

Great topic, @Jonathan Zuluaga. And increasingly relevant as AI become more pervasive throughout social media, so it’s important to reflect on how AI can be a positive or a negative force in social media.First the positives. As a tool in the hands of a social marketer, AI can automate processes like content management; greatly improve data analytics; and personalize content with algorithms. AI is not a do-everything technology or process. It’s a versatile tool that’s only as ethical, capable, or humanized, really, as the professional harnessing it.But on the flip side, AI can be misused and abused, so that it feels inauthentic and even unethical. Ensuring those lines aren’t crossed are even more important because it already feels overused in some ways, so many consumers are wary of AI. For example, many social media platforms (such as Facebook) are cluttered now with AI content and spread around like copypasta. It’s tough

AI used sparingly can be very helpful. Whether using a magic expand tool in Canva to get a photo in the correct dimensions or asking Grammarly to make your email more personal. Some tools can help make the job of a social media marketer easier. However, these tools are not ready to be relied on heavily. AI often completely misses the mark and comes across as completely inhuman. However, being able to use AI as a tool is great.

I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to AI and how it is influencing/shaping social media. On one hand, AI can be a great tool for inspiration. If you’re feeling stuck on how to express a thought for a social media post, AI tools can work to help (possibly - and I say that with utmost honesty here) spark further inspiration.On the other? Using AI on social media is a slippery slope. One day, it can help spark inspiration, as I just mentioned. The next day someone could use it every day to shape their social media campaigns and/or strategies instead of collaborating with team members or doing outside research (such as looking into audience insights, engagement and more) to make more informed decisions.

AI is such a tricky topic right now for me in the world of social. On one hand, I like the idea of AI being able to take the thoughts in my head and shape them into a more understandable message, and even get some A/B testing ideas for captions within ads. Some days when the creative juices are running low, AI has stepped up to the plate and helped me not to fall behind in the copywriting part of social management. One thing that I am having a hard time with is what is being categorized as AI. I was chatting with a photographer friend about AI who was talking about some of her professional photos getting flagged as AI in social platforms because of some of the tools that she uses in the editing process. I know @Sarah Davidson mentioned AI photography not looking realistic in a note on this topic and I so agree, but I need better clarification from Instagram and other platforms in their marking of AI, so we aren’t getting confused w

 What's one thing you love (or hate) about how AI is shaping social media today? Shoutout to @Jonathan Zuluaga for the prompt because this topic is still e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon 😅Content creation tools for AI are both love and hate for me. I love that for me, as a team of one, they enable me to be more efficient, to move faster, be better, and help me along on days when all the caffeine in the world simply can’t. Tools like Opus Clips are amazing for turning long-form webinars into digestible social media clips, features like the AI-assisted writing features in Sprout Social are great when I need 3-4 variations of a post for team members to share out, and tools like GPT are really powerful for generating ideas at scale and speedi

What I like most about artificial intelligence in social media is its future potential. Not so much where we are now but where we may be in a few years with augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics and other technologies coming together in ways we can only guess at in 2024.

Historically at Riskonnect, we have always had a monthly meeting where I run down the list of analytics for our Global Social Media program for the prior month, but at the last few meetings, there’s not much feedback/response.  I’m wondering if we should continue to do analytics this way. But I’m also nervous that moving it to a static report will mean that nobody actually reads them and we aren’t able to leverage takeaways in the same manner.  I definitely don’t want people to have to attend *one more meeting* if there’s a better way to collect feedback and share monthly analytics.  How do you share social media analytics in your organization?! I’m curious to hear. 

Instagram has been a part of Facebook for how many years?And I still have to give users the email address and password to be able to use app functions and maintain a list of phone numbers for 2-factor authentication. (We have over 40 Instagram accounts)If anyone has a better idea, let me know!  /vent session

“More choice, more options” seems like a great sort of an issue to have in terms of the growth of social media platform options. But for SMBs accessing and trying to maximize value and grow and engage their audience, there’s greater atomization in the users and challenges achieving metrics thresholds that used to be easier a few years ago. It requires the right tools, more time, more specialization for each platform and content type — which not every organization can invest in. Social media suites can help, but they’re not always always the right answer. What do folks recommend? Leveraging AI and automation, focusing on only one or two platforms or market verticals, some other option?

I’ve seen social media posts/campaigns for an event, a promotion, etc. that show amazing creativity, great engagement, communications and follow-through, etc. But maybe, because of my editing background, I occasionally see when a little copyediting can go a long way toward improving polish in spelling or punctuation or consistency. Reaching out to a copyeditor or using AI and automation grammar checkers to catch any issues in post drafts is an extra step that can make a huge difference.To err is human, to edit divine!

My company doesn’t want to deal with it, even to claim our business name. The reason? You can’t delete a Threads account without deleting your Instagram account. Personally, I don’t see that as a deal killer (just go inactive if it doesn’t work out, at least no one else can claim your business name!). Would love to hear if and how others are using Threads!