Joel Goodman and JS Stansel explore the evolving landscape of social media, discussing the potential inflection points brought about by recent upheavals in platform dynamics. They delve into the implications of decentralization, the role of algorithms in shaping user experiences, and the shift towards more peer-to-peer communication. The discussion also touches on the uncertainty facing social media in 2025, the changing nature of content creation, and the fundamental principles that remain essential for effective social media management.

Episode 055 Transcript

Jon-Stephen Stansel: There are going to be people listening to this who don’t watch. I think you should leave and

Joel Goodman: have no idea what we’re talking about, but. But I know the ones that do, and we’ll appreciate it deeply, so.

2025 Social Media Outlook

From Bravery Media and Saturn 9 Media, this is Thought Feeder. My name is Joel Goodman. With me, as always and again, is the insurmountable Jon-Stephen Stansel.

Jon-Stephen Stansel:Love it.

Joel Goodman: JS, so good to see you. It’s been way too long.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: So good to be here. So good to talk and drop some truth here.

Joel Goodman: There’s a lot going on in the world.

And, you know, when we started this podcast years ago, there was a lot in the world. And I think around the time that we decided to widen this down, like Twitter was imploding and, uh, Twitter’s Twitter is what it is. But, uh, right now, as we’re talking, there is, uh, an old president, a new old president.

Whatever coming into office, there’s upheaval in the wide world of social media platforms. There’s new stuff, new platforms launching. There’s other platforms being threatened with government erasure from our, our internets. There’s censorship happening in America. There’s autocracies forming. As you sent me in text, “dogs and cats living together!”

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Total chaos. Social media is in a state of. Lux right now where pretty much anything can happen. I was telling you earlier before we started recording, like, I keep getting asked to be on panels. It’s that time of year. Everybody has their, like, predictions for the new year for social media.

What trends to follow? What networks are going to be big this year? And honestly, like, I don’t know. That’s my whole thing. Like, right now at this point, it’s very much who can say. Like. We’re recording here at 11:20 a. m. Central Standard Time on Thursday, the 16th. And by the time we’re done with this conversation, the situation on TikTok might be totally different.

We don’t know.

Mr. Beast could buy it. Elon Musk could buy it. I’m hoping neither of those happen and our government comes to its senses and gives it a reprieve, but you can’t count on that. It’s just anything can happen over the next few days. We’re all just kind of sitting here just like waiting to hear what’s next.

It’s very much anything can happen. I think the best course of action for social media managers right now are being asked about various up and coming networks. Give me a few days, give me like a week or two and ask me again.

Joel Goodman: Yeah, there’s so much instability in general. Like we’ve even just seen over the last six months movement here and there.

And I, you know, it may be a little bit echo chambery and whatever kind of circles you operate in online, but there’s been a lot of talk around people wanting to leave meta platforms, which are really the only thing that has stuck in there, like. Kind of traditional form, but just due to the fact that all of these tech billionaires are dumping money into saving their businesses and saving their own wealth is really what they’re doing.

Mark Zuckerberg coming out and basically just destroying DEI within his company with essentially just becoming, I just, I look at him and I think he’s jealous of Elon Musk and he’s just trying to like, It’s like Elon cosplay, but like, he’s trying really hard and it just doesn’t work.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Can we talk about the shirts? Zuck, go back to hoodies, man. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, what sort of midlife crisis you’re having, but come on, man.

Joel Goodman: I imagine when you have that much money, it just becomes boring. Unless you’re trying to take over the world, and that’s it.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Yeah, it’s meta platforms are right now the most stable platforms you can be on.

Joel Goodman: And that’s it’s stable, right?

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Asking where TikTok is going to go. And we can talk about tangential up and coming networks and places people are going, but. For the average user, Facebook and Instagram, no matter how much we hear like, “Oh, Gen Z is not going to be on Instagram anymore. No young person is on Facebook,” there’s still utility there. And that’s like kind of the best life boat for higher ed social media wise right now because our students parents are still mostly on Facebook.

Joel Goodman: So here’s a big question with that. So as I’ve been thinking about this for the last year, maybe a little bit longer, When it comes to Gen Alpha, is social media marketing actually a viable marketing channel for them?

I feel like it’s become an expected status quo that colleges and universities are going to be on the social platforms, but it stops there. And then you’re still, you know, I’m asking the schools not “are you staying on X because it’s a bad look and like, maybe it’s detrimental to your brand overall,” but, “are you staying there because you actually have prospective students on that channel?” And they’re still creating content that is voiced and supposedly targeted at that demographic when really they should be talking to alumni to maybe parents of those kids.

Actually, the whole thing with like billboards going up so that your board members can see them like talk to your board members on those channels because that’s where they’re at.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: I okay, I’m gonna politics aside. Unfortunately, as marketers, I hate to use the term moral flexibility a little bit. Like we still have to put like money on the table and feed our families and sort of that.

And Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whether you like the attitude of their leadership or no, there’s still viable marketing channels. Yeah. And as much as I would love to say, like, get off of them and find something a little more progressive. For most brands, that’s just not an option. And I don’t think that says anything negative about the brand.

It’s just the reality of the situation that we’re in. Granted, if your brand is very progressive and has true progressive values, you probably need to stick with that and get off. But most universities can say these days. So I think there’s still people to speak to on Twitter. It’s not your students. It’s not prospective students.

It is alumni. It is possible donors. It is the politicians and the state house that you want to let know what you’re doing. It is. It’s media who’s still largely using, they’re using blue sky and threads as well, but they’re still throwing out, casting out their nets on Twitter for leads on stories. So think about that when using Twitter, Facebook, yeah, you’re talking to parents, you’re talking to some older alums as far as reaching students goes and is gen alpha, gen Z, you know, the kids these days, they’re all over the place.

They don’t know what they want yet. They haven’t developed those channels yet. They’re, they’re chatting with each other on Roblox.

Joel Goodman: And that’s the thing, how often do those questions come up in college/university marketing meeting rooms and stuff like that? I think it just is defaulting to we’ve been on Instagram for the last 15 years.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: So we just fought that battle toget it recognized as a thing, and we’re still fighting that. So who can say where they’re going to go? And a lot of our, by and large, a lot of our prospective students really haven’t hit their social media stride yet. States are Passing laws left and right where, like, you can’t start a social account till you’re 18.

You’re talking to their parents as the influencer of what that prospective student is going to do. Isn’t our university great? Tell your kids, sort of thing. I don’t know where we’re going to see them go. I do think we’re going to see the rise of more peer to peer where, yeah, they’re on, they’ve got their own discord and that’s where they’re talking to each other.

And that’s probably a space where universities can’t go.

Joel Goodman: Is honestly what I’m thinking about personally, because I’m like, I’d like as an individual, like I don’t necessarily have to keep my Instagram live, except as I think about it, there isn’t an alternative, really. I personally never got active on TikTok because it just didn’t happen.

And I’ve gone over to blue sky, which I really like because it feels like 2007 on Twitter. So it’s all nostalgia all the time. But looking at it, if I were to like dump My Instagram, what do I do? Go to like group text messages where we ask friends to send us pictures of the food they’re eating and, and their dogs?

I don’t know. It feels like the only other option if social media is even a thing. And I think, I think that’s, what’s been rolling around in my head is like. How do we grapple with like how social media is shifting and what it’s going to shift into, right? Because social media was defined in the early-aughts and mid-aughts and then refined in the early-tens, mid-tens.

And now that we’re in 2025, what’s getting figured out here? Like, it’s got to shift into something else, but our mode of thinking is still stuck oftentimes in that point in history that we started using. Social media, right? I think it comes

Jon-Stephen Stansel: down to thinking about how people are using it. Also getting over the hump of, “everything has to rest on one of our university owned platforms.”

We have to start looking at content creators and partnering with them because there are content creators on your campus. There is some kids somewhere on your campus who’s driving a Tesla that he paid for, which cringe Tesla, but he paid for with money he made as a content creator, or she made as a content creator, but she’s probably not driving a Tesla.

Joel Goodman: I seriously doubt it.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Something a lot cooler.

Joel Goodman: Maybe a Rivian or something.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: We need to find those people on campus that have those followers and have that trust with your university community to help spread your message. And that’s a scary thought for higher ed. Oh yeah. That’s a really scary thought. But if you want to reach younger people, you’re going to have to start thinking of more creative ways to do it.

Joel Goodman: This honestly is a cost saving measure in a lot of ways too, because institutions, especially so like 2025 is going to be the peak of high school graduates for the next 18 years or something like that, which means that prospective student pool is only going to diminish over the next few years, which means that plus the legislation that is no doubt going to come from the new administration coming into power that we have.

Seen over the last several years in many of the red states, it’s just gonna make things hard for colleges and universities. They’re going to have less money to do the things that they need to do, and they’re gonna have to get smart and efficient with what they’re spending. And if you don’t have to spend money on a full-time video editor, video producer or content person, and you can be strategic about partnering with student content creators that you have already. That seems like extremely cost effective and a lot more powerful because if we’re honest, our brands are not as cool as…

Jon-Stephen Stansel: We’re not as cool as we think we are! And it’s okay. Your school doesn’t have to be cool. That’s fine. Be what you are. It’s just going to be real difficult. I think social listening is going to be more difficult, but it’s going to be more important. As cringy as it sounds to do, you’re going to have to create some like aliases and jump into like some private spaces and like do a little undercover research.

But yeah, that that’s going to be a big thing as well. With the spread of misinformation, now that fact checkers don’t apparently matter anymore, especially for crisis calm, you’re gonna have to really be on the ball. When that hits and being able to squash misinformation, it’s going to create a lot of challenges.

For higher ed, and especially because there’s going to be more regulation around higher ed and social media. There’s a lot of people living in red states who’ve tick tock has already been banned for them. Like this tick tock ban is not an issue for them because it happened a couple of years ago. So I think universities are basically being asked to do their jobs.

All of their jobs, with one hand tied behind their back, and that’s the wallet hand too.

Joel Goodman: Okay, let’s talk about the TikTok transition, because we’ve got three days as of this recording before they’re supposed to shut down, and as you said, there might be a last ditch swoop in effort. I know Donald Trump’s asked the Supreme Court to stay a couple more days so that he can find someone to buy it or whatever, which I don’t like that idea either. All this stems from purported national security, blah, blah, blah. That’s the stuff that they’re saying.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Show it to us. Show us the evidence! Okay. I understand the concern, but if it does pose a legitimate national security risk, we need to know what it is.

Otherwise, you’re just making an authoritarian move on the free market.

Joel Goodman: And well, and, and to that point, if we know that let’s say China is just harvesting all of our data and using it for nefarious purposes to destroy America and democracy, which I think other people are doing anyway, like the calls coming from inside the house, Joel.

Yeah, but we need to know that so that we’re not jumping to a new Chinese owned platform. Yeah, let’s be giving them willingly and obviously.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Okay, which referring to RedNote or as the literal translation from its Chinese name is Little Red Book, which I don’t know if Gen Z and Gen Alpha understand that’s actually from Mao Zedong’s book, like The Tenets of Communist China.

Which, I can’t see that staying, like, if the U. S. government is going to ban TikTok for scary Chinese influence, which, whatever, does not, it’s another thing. But not going to let people go over to a place called Little Red Book, really.

Joel Goodman: I don’t know, though. Are they just going to get into the, maybe, like, I, maybe that’s what, maybe that’s what the, the Doge office is going to do, like, they’re going to put in place structures to just hunt down social media platforms that the government doesn’t like and shut them down.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Which is funny, because. That’s what they do in China. You can’t get on Facebook in China. You can’t get on TikTok in China, even though it’s Chinese owned. You can’t get on Instagram in China. So anyhow, it’s… I’ll say this about what’s going on with RedNote right now, my wife’s from China.

You know, she she deleted TikTok a while back just because she was spending too much time there and then got on red little red book. And so that’s been something that’s been in our house for a while. Oh, I saw this on little red book today. And she’s filled me in on what the Chinese social landscape what’s trending over there and what whatnot, all the cute nicknames for the celebrities.

I love that Timothee Chalamet is called Sweet T. They call him Sweet T. And that. I don’t think that is going to be a long term solution. I don’t think it is a platform that is built with non Asian brands in mind. So from a brand standpoint, it’s not that great. What I love about what’s happening right now does give me hope for the future though.

I’m not sure this honeymoon period is going to last very long. Is seeing young Americans interacting with young Chinese citizens and discovering like, Oh wow, China’s more advanced than America in a lot of ways. Yeah. The Chinese young people saying, Oh, there’s a lot about these Americans that we like in science.

It almost, this nice, It’s a feeling of communities and cultures interacting and learning more about each other in the wider world. It gives me early era Twitter vibes of, remember when like revolutions were happening on Twitter and we thought, okay, this is what’s going to bring down authoritarian regimes rather than prop them up.

Joel Goodman: It did that for a little while!

Jon-Stephen Stansel: A little bit, a little bit. And we’ll see what comes with that. If universities are wanting to capitalize on this, I think it’s a great time. To be like, Hey, we have international programs. Let’s grab some of our Chinese students and have them explain Red Note online and how they’re interacting with each other.

Why stop there? Our Japanese students use a app called Line. Let’s show you that. And social media around the world that’s not just the ones you know. I think that would be awesome. I’d love to see a university do something there. But as far as creating their own channels, I just, I don’t see it being a long term solution for them.

But RedNote is not a one-for-one TikTok replacement. It’s much more than TikTok. Like a lot of Chinese social apps try to be these everything apps where it’s like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and PayPal or Cash App and all that all just rolled into one. And I know Musk wants to turn Twitter into something like that.

And I’m never sure if one of these super apps are going to take off here. But like I said, I think if you’re a social media manager and you’re listening to this, I think the biggest concern you need to have right now is your supervisor. With all best intentions, it’s going to pop into your office and be like, Oh, I saw this thing about red note.

Are we doing anything with that? And your answer just needs to be, I got on it. I explored it. We’re going to wait and see because it’s just, you’ve got too much other stuff going on anyway. And again, we’ve, we have this conversation ad nauseum. You don’t need to start new things all the time. So wait and see what happens with Tik TOK, what happens, what platforms might replace it.

I think it’s a good time to start looking at YouTube Shorts. It’s a time to make sure your Instagram is in order, which I know is not cool as it once was, but it’s still, these things still have functions. I love this quotation from, I hate to give praise to Mark Zuckerberg, but a long time ago in an interview, somebody asked him like, aren’t you worried about when Facebook isn’t cool anymore?

And his response was something like, At one time, electricity was cool and then it stopped being cool. And it’s just electricity. It’s just the thing you have and the thing you need. And I feel like social media is hitting that point where it’s not cool or hip anymore. It’s just, Hey, it’s like electricity.

Joel Goodman: And like I was alluding to earlier, I think this might be a little bit of an inflection point. I mean, I hope it is because like with the upheaval with platforms being significantly changed, or at least like the expectations that we’ve had of platforms being significantly changed with platforms being removed with new things coming up with this backlash to the extreme political split that’s happened within a lot of these platforms with specifically like a lot of the people that moved over to blue sky are.

People that just got sick of the far right echo chamber and don’t want to talk about crypto and see neo nazi content and racist content, you know, all that kind of stuff, and want some power to curate their feeds a little bit more. I hope that these changes are indicative of a shift that’s going to bring in whatever the next innovations on top of how we curate our content.

Connect with other people digitally are because that’s really where that’s where social media started. I mean, coming out of like forums and the really early pre my space pseudo platforms that made us think differently about how we could connect with people online. This feels like the most unstable points in that whole concept since, you know, in 20 years.

And so what does that mean? Hopefully that means people are thinking about brand new stuff. And like, I saw, I get excited about, I saw yesterday, I sent this to you and you were, you had the exact same comment I did, but BlueSky is built on this new protocol, sort of new protocol on a federated protocol, similar to what Threads is using and what Mastodon is built on top of, but it means that no one person or at least they’re trying to make it so that no one company owns the whole thing.

You have a bunch of companies that are kind of owning certain platforms built on top of this protocol, but that means anyone could go and do something else with it. So someone’s finally building a sort of Instagram thing on top of the protocol that BlueSky is built on with the worst name ever: Flashes.

Come on. It’s just garbage. It’s a bad name.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: There are so many things wrong with that one. Everyone like, Flashes? Just screams unsolicited not safe for work content and then makes me yeah, Dan flashes All the patterns. It’s got all the patterns.

Joel Goodman: All of them.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: “I want that shirt so bad.” (quoting I think you should leave)

Joel Goodman: I think it’s going to be, like, I don’t think that’s going to be good, but the fact that people are starting to build on top of these protocols gives me a little bit of hope that at least there’s people thinking about what the next thing is.

I just don’t want direct copies of stuff

Jon-Stephen Stansel: I agree, but I’m gonna say this as someone who is not I am a social media person. I am NOT a web developer I am NOT a techie by any means I not sure how much the average person cares about decentralization of platforms.

Joel Goodman: No of course not.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: I don’t think they can, I don’t think one, I don’t think they understand it.

I don’t think they understand the benefit of it. There were all sorts of thoughts about being able to just take your profile from platform to platform and you have the same followers and everything and that would be great, but it’s been explained well enough and sold. to the average person to make them care.

They just want to be able to get the things that they’ve been getting. We, we’ve trained them to understand what the algorithm is. It used to be like 10 years ago when I started working in social media, I’d explain the algorithm to people and they’re like, really? And now they’re like, it’s not even the algorithm.

It’s my algorithm. I got to work on my algorithm. So I get that content I want. We know what that is. And I think that’s one thing like people are going to miss about TikTok. I’ve lost my algorithm. I’m not getting What I want, it just, I think that’s the biggest concern for folks.

Joel Goodman: And I think that’s the point.

The truth is that all of these platforms have to be built by a web developer. You’re not going to go build a social media platform because you’re not a programmer. And, I think my point is less let’s get people interested in the underpinnings of all these networks, but more that the stability of how we.

Interact with people online is way less assured when two people own all the platforms, you know?

Jon-Stephen Stansel: I mean, that’s like the argument making something like Twitter a public utility, like crisis communication is broken on social media, but you look at what’s been happening with the fires in LA or. Trying to get real time information to people is just next to impossible on social media now.

The algorithms have gone so wonky and then there’s so much misinformation that you can’t get that reliable stuff and you might see it, the reliable thing, like two weeks from now. And it’s, it’s become very difficult where I do think it has a use case as a public utility. But also, I don’t want the government controlling these apps either, so it’s a bigger problem than we can fix for sure.

But I feel like we kind of danced around this a little bit. We’re on the cusp of a sea change in how social media works.

Joel Goodman: We have to be.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: And we don’t know, we don’t know where it’s going to go. Yeah. We do know a few things. We know that people are posting less in general. And going over to more peer to peer networks or using the peer to peer features like it’s the age of the lurker now, right?

You don’t want comments on your Instagram posts. You want shares. You want something That to post something so good that somebody sees and goes, I’ve got to share it directly with my friend. Right? Yeah. That’s how your information is getting spread now.

Joel Goodman: But I mean, similar to the youths that were way, you know, like way ahead of me on this, like most of my interaction on Instagram is through DMS, like it’s, or it’s sending a direct message to someone through their story.

It’s not grid. It’s not posting comments on photos. It’s not, I don’t care about my comments being seen by everyone because that doesn’t give me anything. Right? It’s that peer to peer. It’s that one to one communication or like one to a small group of people. Even worse. Like I see myself using WhatsApp more with friends that are abroad because I can just have a conversation about almost anything in there and it’s not cluttered up by whatever else, like, it’s interesting to me how my own personal usage has changed, you know, to your point, blue sky.

I like it because I’m an old. And I’m OG social media. And I stopped at Instagram. Basically. I didn’t even spend that much time on vines when it was, when it came out and I was that market, I was that demographic, but I don’t, to your point, I don’t see that becoming generally used because I don’t know that I don’t know that text based posting like that is going to have a resurgence.

There has to be some innovation on top of it. And I think that’s the same with, I mean, I think that’s the same with Tik Tok. It was an innovation on top of snap. Right. And it, these things change.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Yeah. It’s sort of, uh, what’s old is new again. Sure. Roach where we’re, we’re getting, you know, we always used to say social media is not a broadcast medium and now it’s becoming a broadcast medium.

Joel Goodman: And it’s been one for a while.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: But here, here I’m gonna harp on this again and again, I’ve harped on this before. This is where more individualized communication is going to be important. And for your higher ed. You can’t just have one social media manager. This has to be a team effort jumping into those comments when a student asks a question and not even the comments on pages that you own, checking into Reddit and what seeing what students are saying and asking about your university, getting on TikTok, if it sticks around or whatever places in those videos that happen on your campus.

And. getting into the comment threads there. I think about less of what goes into the feed and what goes into the comments is going to be of paramount importance. And that’s going to be a tough responsibility to put on the shoulders of one person. Because one, not only that, not only the time constraint of that, it’s the, the knowledge constraint of that, because your social media manager is not going to be able to answer every question about admissions issues. They just can’t know the same thing as like an admissions. But that admissions person isn’t going to have the knowledge to be able to find that question to answer it. So it’s going to, you’re going to have a team effort.

You’re going to have to start cross training some people. And yeah, it’s, we’re just going to have to rethink a lot of the ways we’re using social.

Joel Goodman: Going back to what we talked about earlier with using like content creators and influencers, whatever that means these days that are on your campus, would you recommend institutions putting more time into what you were just saying into the finding the response, the listening and monitoring and responding then into the actual content?

Creating of content. Like I feel like there’s diminishing returns there, right? Because as we said, you’re not as cool as you think you are. You’re not going to get the reach that someone else does. At what point does that scale kind of tip where it makes less sense to be creating content and more sense to be participating in the conversation?

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Well, I mean, look how well your content’s performing. And again, we can’t make these universal pronouncements because every university is going to be different. Every. University population, student population is going to be a little different. Like way back when I was at Texas State University, I was on Twitter campus, right?

And then just a couple years later, nothing changed. Texas State was still a Twitter campus. I was working at UCA and not a single student’s on Twitter. It’s not, this is more geographical than anything sometimes. Take a look, hard look at how your content that you’re creating is performing, whether or not it’s your kind of old school stodgy Girl studies under tree, typical university content, or something a little bit more far out there.

If you’re not getting results, maybe instead of focusing so much on crafting content, you can go back to the old, like, school starts in two days, sort of, you know, like informational posts, which people need. We talk a lot about wanting to be entertainment and engaging with our audiences, but there’s also, hey, when does school start, is important to put up there.

But. continue that sort of content, but then focus on really developing a personality and voice, engaging students where they are on social media in those comment sections, not crafting content constantly.

Joel Goodman: So 2025, a year of uncertainty, at least going into it. Like every year, a year of uncertainty. What are you keeping an eye on?

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Oh my, everything. It’s just one of those things where we can talk about till we’re blown in the face, we just don’t know yet. The coin has been tossed and we are waiting for it to land right now. What I’m seeing outside of higher ed, With my clients and in the entertainment industry is a lot of, okay, we know things are changing, but we’re going to kind of stay the course until we have a better idea of what’s happening.

And I think that’s the smartest move. We know some of the old stuff isn’t working. We, even in areas like entertainment, especially entertainment, like, There’s still a lot of like ticking boxes. Oh, we still have to do X, Y, and Z, whether or not. And maybe that’s hard to get away from. I’ve got an eye on what the youths are doing and how they are interacting with content and where they’re going.

Again, I see more and more peer to peer based things. I, I really feel like we are turning into from social media to parasocial media, where there’s still on like what we would refer to as traditional social media networks, but they are. Not posting. They’re maybe commenting on it and you’re getting some sort of interaction there, but by and large, your follower count doesn’t really matter anymore because It still matters.

The number matters. I’m sorry, like It doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

Joel Goodman: It’s, it’s interesting because it’s, it’s like, there’s less, it’s, you know, social media was supposed to like be this great democratizing force and content creation and publishing, and it was for a good amount of time, I guess, similar to blogs, right?

And like, now, it does seem like there is the separation between the creator side. And that consumer side, and you have a lot less crossover, like every once in a while, someone comes over and [interrupts]

Jon-Stephen Stansel: The bar to content production is higher.

Joel Goodman: Yeah.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: You know, I mean, yeah, anybody can make a video, but to make it look good and to be seen on, on these platforms, you have to have some skill in front of a camera and to be able to do something, it’s

Joel Goodman: like when I went to college and thought I was going to be a music major and play guitar, and then I found out that most everyone at, at the time My college was a really good guitar player and I wasn’t ever gonna be that good.

And so I was like, well that’s, I’m just gonna change, change my mind. Where there was a time when no one was doing that. ’cause no one had figured it out. Right. Like it’s, it’s uh, it’s like late capitalism, but late social media.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Well, I think of the earliest prompts of social media.

Like what, you know, you log into Facebook, it’s “what are you doing?” Twitter, “what’s happening?” And you would just kind of stream a conscious, just put down anything. And now I think people aren’t doing that. They’re not doing that for a few reasons. I think one, you have a generation of students who were told, you know, Be careful.

You are going to get fired. You will never get a job if you post something that gets you into trouble on social media. So they’re already cautious about it. Two, social media has become harder to create content for because, yeah, not everybody can make a video that is entertaining and that people want to see.

Joel Goodman: The purpose and value has changed. The value proposition has changed entirely. Because I think about Twitter, you know, I joined Twitter in 2007 and it was, It’d been around for, I don’t even think it had been public or at least for a full year yet. But I was trained to update AOL instant messenger away messages and set my away status.

And so it made sense to just transition that to like, Oh, a web platform where everyone can see that.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: I mean, that’s what Twitter was like. That was the whole point of it. That was the Genesis behind its creation was like, You know, doing fun stuff on your away message.

Joel Goodman: And so all of that is all of that changed when it became professionalized and formalized.

And now that that value propositions changed, like no one goes on social media to just. Host that I’m eating lunch. You have to have a really nice photo of your lunch and you’ve got to have a really good caption and the right hashtags and like

Jon-Stephen Stansel: all of that. So I think people are, it’s the barrier to entry is higher to create.

And to like, why am I posting to nobody if not getting in the interaction? Like, right. Why would I post my lunch if nobody wants it?

Joel Goodman: And that didn’t used to matter and it does now. And that’s, so the I’ll have to think about what that What that next phase of social media is that I was thinking about with that in mind because I’m like Now I don’t even know.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: From an entertainment standpoint, and I think this applies to universities There are very vibrant smaller communities out there that you can find and tap into. There are communities on your campus, there are communities in your, your city that people are going to be talking about, and these are conversations that are relevant to you, and they are very active.

Um, but we have to readjust our expectations. But, again, you never know, like, where that payoff is. I’ll give you an example on one of the television shows I work on, Invincible for Prime Video. After Season 1 ended, we announced Seasons 2 and 3 have been greenlit. We’re coming back. And right after we posted that, somebody just said, question source because they didn’t think we were the actual official account.

So I just replied us and that response got a ton of interactions, but the magic really happened six months later when the season two is still in production. And one of our fans takes a screen cap of that interaction and post it and says, this still makes me laugh. And his post got more engagement. Than our original announcement that the season had been renewed.

So you don’t know where those those interactions are happening. And like, it wasn’t the primary post that got that out there. It was that secondary reply.

Joel Goodman: And at a time when you would want it, because like everyone had forgotten about and like keeps it back in the public memory.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Exactly. It kept it in that that cycle.

So. Some of these things are unpredictable and we have to just be aware of it. We have to be on it to find those opportunities and a good social media manager can spot them, but we can’t guarantee virality, right? Right. We have to re, reconfigure what our definition of success on social media looks like, because there’s still tons of value in it.

It’s just a different value proposition than what you were getting a couple years ago.

Joel Goodman: Different value proposition and it’s reassessing the places where you can get that value. It’s not, it’s not generalized value. It’s become a lot more specific. It’s not just post to every single platform and it’s going to produce well, it’s post where your people are at.

Which, I mean, that’s always been what we’ve said about marketing in general in higher ed, is go where your people are, you know?

Jon-Stephen Stansel: I’ll say this, and I’m going to plug for myself here in like a year, I’m currently working on a book about social media marketing. I’ve got a publisher and I’m cranking things out, it’s torture writing, but it’s going to happen, and my book is going to be called The Ten Principles of Effective Social Media Management, and the challenge in writing this book is book is that how do you write things about social media that won’t be out of date in even two weeks from now?

And the book I’m writing is platform agnostic. It is fundamental principles that I think are never changing in social media. For example, you need to be focused on your audience. Your social media needs to be accessible. That’s never going away. The tools we use to make things accessible might change, but it still needs to be made that way.

You have to be entertaining, and that’s not going to end. So there are like fundamental things that that will never change about social media, no matter how much social media changes, if that makes sense. Yeah. And we have glom onto those things and refocus them towards like this new era of social media.

We can talk about flashy trends and new, uh, platforms and everything, but at the end of the day, the same underlying principles will always make for good social media marketing.

Joel Goodman: Look for John-Stephen’s book coming out, hopefully later this year. Check out Saturn 9 Media too, which is, I don’t know, JS, do you want to work with higher ed?

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Well, yeah, I’d love to, to work with any higher ed folks out there and lend those higher ed social media people a hand. And if you’re a higher ed supervisor listening to me and just, You can save yourself a lot of money by just listening to your social media manager. So feel free. You reach out, you can find me.

I’m all over. I am on LinkedIn. I am on blue sky. I am on threads. I’m not really on the red note just yet. I’m still, I’m like, I never post to Twitter anymore. Cause I just do not want to give Musk any of my time, effort or content, but I still check into there pretty regularly just because I feel like I have to in my job.

Joel Goodman: Amazing. Thanks for listening to this special episode. We might be back. We might not. Who knows? But we appreciate you listening anyway.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: We might just come back every few years and just talk about the current state of, of things.

Joel Goodman: There we go. Great to see you, JS. Thanks for a good conversation.

Jon-Stephen Stansel: Good to talk to you as always. Now I got to get to Dan Flashes before the sale ends.