Adam Torres and Laney Goff discuss social media.
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Show Notes:
How can you use AI in social media to leverage AI without losing that essential personal touch?In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Laney Goff, EVP at Strella Social Media, explore Stella Social Media and their recently released report, Preparing Your Socials for 2025: Key Steps to Stay Ahead.
About Strella Social Media
Picture this: your brand breaking barriers, standing out from the crowd, cultivating more awareness, and building trust with your audience.
With Strella Social Media by your side, that vision can become a reality. Their team thrives on exploring uncharted territories and developing custom solutions that fit YOUR unique brand vision. We create cutting-edge strategies tailored to overcome the hurdles you face. With an unwavering commitment to innovation, theu stay on top of changes and ahead of the game, so you don’t have to.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Laney Goff, and she is Executive Vice President over at Strela Social Media.
Laney, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I’m so excited to chat. All right. So we got a lot to talk about today. So your company had a report that came out on preparing your socials for 2025 key steps to stay ahead. So who doesn’t want to do that? I know I do. So I’m excited to kick your brain about that.
But to get us started here, we’ll start with our, what we call our mission matters minute. So Laney at mission matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Laney. What mission matters to you? Well, I think what’s funny is that my main mission personally, and also with straw, I think kind of coincide.
And that’s really just letting people know that there’s a seat for everyone. You know, social media is really, really crowded. And at 1st glance, especially if you’re not really familiar. With any social media platform, you might think, oh, there’s too much competition. How can I stand out? There’s nothing special or unique about my business or my personal brand.
And I’m, I’m really big personally about letting people know how special they are unique. They are, and that they contribute a lot to. And all the people in their life and society in general, but also you can do that on social media. So I think it’s actually really fitting that I worked with strella and that we do our best to show brands that , they are unique.
And there are ways that you can stand out and get past the noise on social media. How did you originally get started in this business? Like, what made you want to get involved in marketing, social media and like, where’d that start for you? It’s actually a really funny and weird story.
I like funny and weird. Go for it. So well, , I graduated from Meredith college in 2010 with a communication degree and my goal when graduating, I had done a bunch of internships at a local radio station. I wanted to be a morning show host. Oh, my God. Hold on really quick. So do you have a podcast? Do you have a show?
Cause I don’t see that in my notes. So, well, we have a podcast with strata, but I, I have gone so many different routes to be honest, and if you did, I needed to make sure to plug it. That was I’ll continue please. Yeah. So I had done some internships and I was like, oh, yeah, this is the route I’m going to go.
And then I realized. That, you know, to get started, you’ve got to do the midnight shift and you make no money. And I was like, well, that’s not really interesting to me. So I ended up going into personal lines insurance for about 10 years. And I had two kids and it just got to be a lot. And so I decided, you know, I’m going to stay, I’m going to do the stay at home mom route.
And then I realized that wasn’t for me. And so I thought, okay, well I need something that’s. My own, you know, being a stay at home mom is just really difficult. So I started to teach online. I was teaching English to kids in China, and there was actually a lot of other teachers on Instagram at the time.
And so I had created my own Instagram account and I just started sharing, you know, what I was doing in the classroom to make it fun. And it kind of spiraled it grew significantly. And then I started. Like kind of transforming my teaching business into teaching teachers how to really, you know, get seen online.
And so that’s really where it started. And so I was doing a lot of consulting for online teachers and how to get more business from social media. And then, The COVID happened and TikTok started to be on the rise. And a lot of people at the time didn’t really see TikTok as an opportunity for businesses.
And I just knew that there was something there. So I dove really deep into it and I created many different TikTok accounts in different niches to experiment and to see what I could do with it. And I started to see a lot of success on all of those different accounts. Accounts that I had created. One was basically like single mom, what it’s like to be a single mom.
Cause at the time I was going through a divorce. And then I also started one on Bible journaling and they just blew up. And I decided, you know what, this there’s space here for businesses on Tik TOK and people don’t know it. And I need to find somebody who believes in it the way that I do. And so I jumped on.
Upwork and Rachel, the CEO of Strella had posted a job that morning looking for a TikTok specialist. And so I thought, well, here we go. I’ve never done this before. Let’s try it out. And interviewed and I was exactly what they needed. And so from there, we’ve really like incorporated for Strella’s clients TikTok as a social media channel.
And that’s really how I got into it. Wow. What a great story. And I love that , you built things yourself and not nothing against anybody else. I mean, there’s a, there’s something to be said about learning something and then teaching it. And some people are great teachers. So I don’t know, no disrespect to anybody, but I love that you happen to have had success and been through those trenches of building stuff yourself.
And, and that’s a, and when, when you do that, you can kind of even empathize with, cause nothing ever just grows. So I’m sure you had when, even on those early days, it didn’t just work. You had to, you had to keep figuring things out and there were ups and downs and like, what, what kept you strong and kind of like continuing to push forward?
Like, what kept you going? Yeah, I will say that like consistency is very hard, especially on social media. It’s like the number one thing that our clients come to us about is that they, they, they struggle to be consistent and that’s totally understandable, especially whenever you’re. Doing a platform like tick tock, where it’s mainly video content or YouTube is another great example where you feel like you have to be on all the time.
And so that part is very difficult. But for me, my drive really came from understanding that I wanted to see. Can any niche really make this happen? Like, that was a big driving force for me was I didn’t want to just do content about teaching. I didn’t want to just do social media consulting. Like, I really branched out and did different things that I was interested in to see, okay, is there space for all of these different types of niches?
And there was. And so, for me, it was exciting to see, okay, I’m This is proving to be true that literally you can be into anything and you can see success on social media. If you do it the right way. That’s awesome. So, let’s, let’s get into. And I think it’s, it’s inspiring for others that are looking to build accounts, whether it’s on tick tock, Instagram, wherever, wherever their niche happens to be.
So, let’s, dive into this report a little bit. So, preparing your socials for 2025 key steps to stay ahead. , what brought this report about? Like, , what was the impetus for this? Well, I think that, you know, one thing that we do really well at St. Strella is at, at the third quarter, we always review all of our client’s strategies.
And we say all the time, like obviously we do monthly dashboards where we look at reports, we look at the data and we analyze things to see what’s working, what’s not. But it’s really cool to look at it from the standpoint of the entire year. And so. We were doing that for our clients like we do every year.
And I thought, you know, there’s a lot of similarities happening here between. A lot of our clients and what we’re seeing to be trending and what’s been successful. And so I thought, I bet there are a lot of businesses out there who would like to know what are things looking like and how are they changing?
And that’s the big thing about social media is it changes constantly. So, if you’re not on top of it, and you’re not aware of what is successful and what’s kind of trending downward. Then you’re setting yourself up to fail, unfortunately, and that’s another big, big downside of the social media world and where people get hung up on.
And so when you went through this report, were there any key findings or things that maybe even kind of surprise surprise you or the staff at where you’re like, wow, this change or this. So there’s some some updates here. Like, we weren’t expecting, , like, go into the report a little bit. Like, was there anything that surprised you?
Yeah, the biggest thing that surprised me was that long form content is making a comeback. I think that with tiktok really like taking off in the past few years, that short form video content of a minute and a half or less has done really well. And Instagram reels has proven that too, but. Now, that tick tock tick tock has expanded its video links to up to 10 minutes and then you also have YouTube shorts, which is now expanded that to 3 minutes.
And so it’s just proving that people are actually there. Not that their attention spans are getting longer necessarily. But if you have the right hook, and you have the right execution of the video, then they are willing to be more invested and to watch the entire thing, whether it is 3 minutes or 10 minutes.
So that was really huge for me. And I think that. It’s always been true that it’s important to have not just the short form content, but long form content is so important to we call it rich content and those are going to be things like a YouTube channel where you’re doing this long form videos, a blog, a podcast, it’s very, very important to have that rich content.
And this just proves it that we’re still there, but we’re actually trending more towards the rich content than we used to. What about AI? Did you touch on that in the report at all? Yeah, definitely. I mean, AI is. It’s huge. I think there’s probably going to be some pretty big developments coming out in 2025.
I can’t say exactly what the details of that will be, but I think we come on, you just crystal ball. What’s going on? you’re my source. What’s up? No, I wish. Believe me. I wish I was making a lot of money right now. But, you know, I think, People are very aware of how important AI is to a sense and I think they’re also very aware that the human touch is lacking significantly on the front.
So, for us, we feel like, okay, there’s, there’s ways that you can leverage AI with social media and also maintain that personal touch. One of those being the, the data driven insights for humanness of it. So. AI is really, really powerful when it comes to analyzing large data sets and giving you insights about customer behavior.
That’s one of the things that we use AI with a lot. Whenever we get a new client, even existing clients, we, we do like to review that and understanding, you know, who is the target audience? What are their pain points? How do they like to consume content? That’s a big thing. You know, do they prefer video content or do they like to read it?
And so all of this is really great for. Kind of utilizing, but keeping that human touch of it, because you’re allowing to do the hard work of analyzing it. But then you have to actually execute on the data that it gives you. So that’s a big way that we use. The other thing is really content curation or, yeah, curation for sure, but also the creation of it.
So, AI obviously can automate a lot of processes for generating content ideas and things like that. But it is important to ensure like, The content still feels authentic and really tailored to the brand’s voice. So AI can generate the ideas, but that execution should still reflect the brand’s core values, the mission, and have that human touch.
And it’s the creativity and the emotion behind that messaging that is really what resonates with consumers. So it definitely has to be a balance. Yeah, I think this is going to be one of those things where I think it’s those that figure out how to implement it and how to use it in their processes and to enhance things like it’s going to be like, I can think about our company and even just like the promo for this show.
Some of the promo and things we’re able to do now. I think. It’s like you, we almost got to do an entire brand refresh, but with the same, amount of staff or in the past, like some of the things we maybe wanted to do, like even just something, let me give you something super simple that people may not, that have been on this marketing journey for a long time.
Like may resonate with even just captions. Like go back how many, like five years ago, do you remember trying to like get captions on a video five years ago and having to proofread it, the amount of proofreading and the amount of editing, it could take you an hour to do some captions on a small video.
Like that wasn’t even that long just because it was. Good, but you couldn’t put something out with a bunch of misspellings, right? Now it’s like, whoa, I asked my team the other day, I said, hold on, when did we implement this for this particular product or this or that? And they’re like, Oh, we’ve been doing it a while ago.
And I read it and I was like, Oh, what are we doing? And I read it and it was perfect. And I was like, how long did this take? Did anybody have to like edit this or proofread this particular piece of content? And they’re like, no, that’s the way that it was generated with our, with. What we’re doing. And I’m like, Holy smokes.
Cause it was some, there was some complicated words in that there was, it was pretty complicated. And I’m like, wow. Okay. Okay. I was like, okay. Okay. Captions. Okay. Technology. I’ll take it. Hey, machine learning, keep making it better for us marketers. Yeah. Well, and I think like a lot of people don’t realize too, that like programs that do that are so accessible nowadays too, like CapCut.
CapCut it’s just as fast, you know, it literally takes seconds for it to auto generate, and they’re so easy to edit that anybody can do it, so it’s nice. And that’s what used to annoy me, was that, like, something like a CapCut, which is public, and it’s okay, and it’s great, and it works great, but then you’d be looking at, like, some of the softwares, maybe the legacy softwares you have, or something like the Enterprise style stuff, because we’re as an agency, right?
And you’re like, wait a minute, how come this little new toy is, like, better than what we have? But you know what I mean? I’m like, oh, come on, but everybody like upscaling and scaling to make better content, but it’s just, it, to me, it’s a, it’s an amazing thing. Well, Laney, I just have to say, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today.
I do want to give you an opportunity to leave some info for, if, if, for our viewers to, if they’re able to get the report, if they want to follow up, learn more about Strella social media, like our follow social media for Strella, like, like how do people connect? Yeah, definitely. I think 1 of 2 steps.
Really? You could visit strella socialmedia. com. All of our socials are linked there. I highly suggest looking at those specifically instagram and tick tock. We’re really active on those platforms, and we really like to show the behind the scenes and who all is involved in our team because we’re fully remote.
We have about 15 people on the team, and we like to really involve everyone because we feel like, you know, every person on our team has. A specialty, like, I’m a tick tock expert. We’ve got video editors and graphic designers and Instagram experts. And so we like for prospective clients to really get to know each of us because somebody will have a hand in your account at any time.
And yeah, so you can go and check those out and just learn more about us and shoot us an email or a DM and we’re happy to help. Awesome. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll, we’ll put the links in the show notes so you can just click on it and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters we’re we’re a daily show each and every day.
We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So hit that subscribe or follow button. Again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Laney, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you so much, Adam.