How to Make Social Media Work for You Part II

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today is part two of making social media a friend versus a foe in our lives. Last episode, we focused on doing exactly that in our personal and professional lives. And today on this episode, we will focus on working with social as founders and managers of businesses. Let's hop into it.

So, so far we've talked about four of my reflections on social media so that we can have it work for us versus against us. We need a toolkit for combating the shitty parts of social media, where it causes procrastination, it leads us to echo chambers, it exposes us to bullying and anger. We also need a greater sense of self than ever before because of social comparison, which has proliferated with social media. Social media has perfect memory, which on one hand is good for keeping out divisive and angry people. But on the other side, it can lead to self-censorship and the internet is the greatest creator of leverage around connection and knowledge.

Incentives

So my first reflection from the Facebook Files as it relates to owners and managers is honestly how perverse the incentives are for the owners of social media platforms. Let me explain what I mean. I just don't think that founders like Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel are incentivized to always be socially responsible with their businesses. Their job is to make money for their company and for their shareholders. And the way they do that is by getting more eyeballs spending more time on their platforms so that they have more surface area to make more money through advertising.

And what does that make me think about—let's just use the example of Mark Zuckerberg. Do I think he's a bad guy? No, I don't. Do. I think that his number one priority for the business is solving mental health issues on the platform? The answer is also no to that. At the end of the day. I just don't think Mark Zuckerberg is incentivized to do what's best for society. I think he's incentivized to do what's best for his shareholders, and as I've talked about in a past Founder's Journal episode, that we'll include in the show notes, you can basically predict any person’s or professional’s behaviors based on what their set of incentives are. 

 Source Fresh Ideas

The next reflection for us as founders, business owners, is actually how we play with algorithms on social media. The best way to think of new business ideas, new content ideas, and catch things on the rise before they've hit the masses is actually to avoid algorithms altogether. Algorithms are great, but also they can lead us into what I call sheep thinking. I read this great essay by David Perel, a friend, an essayist—he’s huge on Twitter—where he described a lunch he had with a friend, and he basically said how he had lunch with a friend who invests in artificial intelligence startups, and to his surprise, that friend doesn't use any algorithms in their personal life. They don't use Spotify Discover Weekly. They don't use Netflix suggestions, no Amazon recommendations. And David Perel’s main point from sharing the story was that if you want to find emerging and underrated ideas, you have to stop using algorithms.

And that makes sense, right? Algorithms on any of these platforms are taught to bring to the forefront posts that are having a high velocity of engagement of likes, of retweets, of replies. And so by the time you see a viral post, the masses have seen it. And so you want to find a business idea, content idea, any idea that's on the fringes of the internet. It is going to be hidden and obscure. It will not have gone viral yet. And so the question is, is how can we avoid algorithms so we can find new and interesting things before they've already passed the point of early adoption? I do three things to do that. 

First, I dive into what I call on-the-rise subreddits. It’s basically trending subreddits or sub-communities of Reddit, the platform, subredditstats.com is where I check them out. I also don't scroll through my Twitter feed. The way that I actually follow people on Twitter is only through scrolling through lists that I've hand-curated. And then when I decide what content I want to consume in life, I look at what is the content that people on my Twitter lists are referencing. So I look at the inputs of the people that I've curated and the final way that I avoid algorithms in my life is actually not a digital choice, but a physical choice. I have a few what I call “master curators” in my life that are consistent early adopters of products.And we all have these people in our lives. I have, you know, my few friends that tell me about a great essay writer before anyone else talks about them or my friends that told me about Allbirds before they became a mainstay for Silicon Valley. Having master curators is an amazing way to go around algorithms and find new things before they become big.

I want to talk about two more of my reflections based on the Facebook Files and how we can work with social media. But first, a quick break. 

Let's hop back in. So we've talked about how social platform founders like Mark Zuckerberg are not properly incentivized to do what's socially responsible, but instead to do what's best for their shareholders. We’ve talked about the best way to think of new business ideas or content ideas being actually avoiding algorithms versus using them.

Care About the Right Metrics

Now, I want to talk about how any business owner, not just social platform owners, but any owner of a business actually has to deal with a perverse set of incentives, how they're incentivized to create products and content that is best for performance on social media platforms, but that's not, what's necessarily best for making your customers happy and keeping them around. So how do you do the right thing for your business versus getting caught in the social media trap? The first thing is to set metrics that incentivize the right behaviors. If you’re a media business, focus on things like time on site or return visitors. Or if you're an email business with things like what Morning Brew does, you focus on open rates.

If you're an apparel business, you focus on average order value or repeat purchases. If you're a SaaS business, you focus on things like dollar retention. What you should also be doing on the point of dollar retention is focusing on retention as much as you focus on acquisition. If you are a business that creates a product based on what will drive engagement on social media, what you're basically saying is you only care about new customers. You care about acquiring new people from social media that see you marketing your product. But if, on the other hand, you are focusing on a product that's great and delights your existing customers, you're focusing on retention. And very simply, in business retention is always a better strategy than trying to convince new people to buy your product.

Learn from History

And the final thing I'll say about how do you incentivize yourself the right way to not just create for social media platforms is understanding the history of businesses that have done this. In 2018, Facebook made an algorithm change that literally led to the death of several media businesses that were creating content based on what Facebook was going to elevate on its platform, to get more impressions versus what consumers actually liked. And so when Facebook changed the algorithm to no longer have preferential treatment for these videos, literally media businesses’ revenue dropped by 50 to a 100 percent overnight. Understanding history so that we can build our businesses on strong foundations versus the shoddy foundation of growing audiences, rented audiences, on social platforms is a great reminder of what we should be focused on.

Make Sure Employees Have a Healthy Relationship to Social 

And the final way to make social media work for you as an owner or a founder, is to realize that it is your responsibility to create a healthy relationship between the employees of your company and the internet and social. At the end of the day, the internet creates a lot of pressure for employees at work, and it is our job to alleviate that pressure. Employees more than ever before, feel an obligation to build their brands on social media, whether it's on LinkedIn or Twitter, they feel an obligation to share company news, when your company posts from its account about hiring someone big or a big revenue milestone.

And the issue is, is that people in our companies, they don't necessarily want to do that, but if they are not given direction by leaders or the company itself, they will feel forced to do that. And that will end up hurting the perception that all of our employees have of our company. Also the internet never sleeps. It is open 24/7. And especially in this remote and post-COVID world where employee burnout is higher than ever, mental health issues are higher than ever before, so many employees don't know when or how they can turn off from work. And, you know, you have some employees that have a strong sense of self and have this kind of internal compass where they will set boundaries to turn off at a certain time of the day.

But for many employees they'll just keep working. They will keep working until their boss or their company tells them it's okay not to work. So what do you do as a manager or a founder of a company? You need to not only set guidelines on when people can turn off from work and let them know, while the Internet's open 24/7, you don't have to be open 24/7. You also need to lead by example. And that is it for my two part episode, reflecting on how we can work with social media versus against it, after spending time reading the most recent Facebook Files investigation that was published by Wall Street Journal. Now I'd love to hear from you, how have you, as an owner or a manager of a business, had to be really thoughtful and communicate to your team the way in which they can interact with social media and the internet?

And then if you're an employee and not a manager and owner, talk to me about any stress you felt based on the 24/7 nature of the internet or how you spend time on social media, outside of your job. Send me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with any thoughts or questions you have about these past two episodes. Now I want to quickly tease out an amazing initiative we're doing next week. Next week is the second miniseries that we are putting on at Founder’s Journal. And this time we're talking about how to build your team. We will be publishing six episodes, two on Monday, two on Wednesday, and two on Friday. And this will be a perfect set of episodes for managers who interview tons of candidates and for employees who are the interviewees, trying to get their next job or level up within their company. Stay tuned for the miniseries. But in the meantime, I want to give a shout out to the team that makes this show possible. Our show is produced and engineered by Dan Bauza. Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew’s director of audio. Holly Van Leuven is our fact checker and I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. 

And finally, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for Founder’s Journal on Apple Podcasts. It is the number one way to grow the show, so I'd love for you to help me and this community get to 750 reviews for the podcast. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.