The Trials and Tribulations of Social Media
Being part of the generation that grew up alongside social media I thought I knew all I needed to know about it. After all I was basically born with the knowledge to tweet and share pictures, right? But after joining a career in social media and digital marketing I was shocked to find this wasn’t true. “There’s more to Facebook than funny photos of dogs and videos of people falling over!?” I was shocked.
When taking on the (very scary) role of handling Gym Cube’s social channels I felt like I had to tread carefully. Am I going to offend our followers? Is a photo with mild swearing ok? I must have spell checked my tweets ten times, at least. As my boss said, ‘Treat the social media as if it’s your baby’ and I truly felt like a new mother and honestly, I’ve never handled children very well…
Anyway, I started to dig deeper into the sides of Facebook and Twitter I had never experimented with before. I did know how to use analytics but I didn’t really need to use it to monitor the success of my selfie filled Facebook page. When using analytics I started to see the numbers rising and falling which made my stomach feel fluttery and it allowed me to see what content was popular and what I should avoid. Apparently cats doing yoga pull in more likes than a shared blog post about why you should eat kale… Am I shocked? Not at all. But I was starting to get the hang of things and it felt really good. For all these people knew, I was just a person behind the screen, but for me it was a lot more than that; I was actually doing well in a career that I love. Customers started to ask me questions and being able to give them the answers felt great. Although, sometimes I did have to check with the personal trainers because what do I really know about yoga? 1. Cats look cute doing yoga, 2. Nothing else. But anyway, helping people felt amazing. But not all feedback was positive.
Sometimes I received angry messages from customers struggling with our products, some people just didn’t like my posts and their comments made that extremely clear - which after spending weeks on end creating content and scheduling, left me disheartened. I wanted everyone to love my posts and I wanted to be able to help everyone; what was I doing wrong? I couldn’t please everyone after all but I certainly tried my best. Two bad comments out of 16,800 followers isn’t too bad I suppose but it had the power to make me question every post I made or will make in the future. I used days like this as a lesson. Three months into my job I am still learning and I will continue to learn throughout.
The good thing and bad thing about social media is that everyone has an opinion and they like to share them, also there’s something new to learn every single day. Social media is about testing; you have to try posts out and see what reception you get and if it’s negative learn from it and don’t make the mistake again. I feel very lucky to have a job where I get to connect with people all over the world, I can make them laugh with funny videos and photos, I can help them with their problems and I am able to do something I love every day. This makes the not so positive days worthwhile. But if there is one thing I can say I’ve learned in my apprenticeship so far: animals pull in a lot of likes and I mean, A LOT of likes.
